| Number 124 | September 7, 2001 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, I have refrained from reporting on health care for a few weeks, although the subject continues to be foremost in my mind, and also in the daily newspapers. We're starting to see headlines now (at least in Minnesota) saying things like, "A Bold Experiment Fizzles," and "Health Care System Failing." I have collected numerous health-related articles that have appeared in the local press over the past few months, and I am just about finished reading an excellent book on the nature of our corporate health care system in the United States. I plan to put some of these news items in a larger context, in the next Nygaard Notes. Allow me to apologize to all of the faithful readers who have written, and sent donations, in the past month or so. I have fallen far behind in my correspondence and my thank-yous, and I am sorry for that. I really try to be conscientious in letting people know how unbelievably important your support is to me, and I have been unable to keep up like I should lately. And when I say "support" I mean both the financial support and also the moral support that your letters and comments give to the Nygaard Notes project. In an attempt to catch up, I will take the next week off from publishing, and devote my time to the clerical aspects of the Notes. So, issue Number 125 will not come your way until September 21. I am well aware that I very recently took about 3 months off, back in May-June-July, and I hate to take another week off so soon. But, demands on my time coming from other directions make it necessary at this point. I'll be back in a couple of weeks. Until the 21st, Nygaard |
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Elsewhere in this issue of the Notes, I tell the story of the protest that apparently caused General Mills to leave elementary school teachers alone. One group that may well have been behind some of the noise that GM was hearing is a group called "Commercial Alert," based in Portland, Oregon. If you visit their website at http://www.commercialalert.org/ you will see the amazing array of examples of commercialization upon which they are keeping a watchful eye. CA's mission is to "keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy." They have big sections on their site devoted to "Culture," "Education," "Government," and "Economy." This is good stuff. On their home page Commercial Alert asks visitors to contribute to their organization to "help launch a backlash against the commercial culture that spans the political spectrum." I encourage you to visit their website and offer whatever support you can. |
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Sometimes headlines can be misleading. Sometimes they go beyond misleading, all the way to false. This is pretty important, as many people form their impression of the day's news based on nothing but headlines. (Or watching TV news, which is essentially the same thing.) It's not uncommon to see a headline that is contradicted by the contents of the story itself, which you find out by reading the actual words below the headline. That is, the story itself. And, every now and then you get a story that reports one "angle" on a story in the headline and the lead paragraph, then proceeds to prove itself wrong later in the story. In other words, it leads you to believe one thing, then tells you why what you were led to believe is wrong. (This isn't as rare as you might think.) The following example is a good illustration of the phenomenon. Wider is Narrower On the front page of the Business Section in the September 2nd Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) appeared the headline "Income Gap Narrows in Minnesota." The lead paragraph echoed the headline, as it should, saying "The poor remain with us, but the disparity between haves and have-nots in Minnesota has narrowed during the past 20 years, according to a study released today." This appeared to be one of those stories that just didn't "feel" right to me, since the people I tend to hang out with—service workers, freelancers, temporary workers, and the weekly-paycheck crowd—don't have the impression that we are catching up to the CEOs of the state. My usual strategy when a story doesn't "feel" right is to go and do a little research on it and, if the facts are different than the news would have us believe, report the real facts to my readers. In this case, I only had to read the article itself. In paragraph 14 I found the following: "In 1979, Minnesota's high wage was 2.4 times greater than the low wage, and by 1989 it was 2.7 times higher -- and increase of 10.4 percent. However, in 2000, the high wage was 2.6 times the low wage, since low wages grew faster than high wages." This was a direct, and accurate, quote from the report in question, entitled "The State of Working Minnesota 2001," released on Labor Day by the Minnesota Budget Project. As you can see, the report tells us that, in direct contradiction to the headline and lead paragraph of the story in the paper, the income gap in Minnesota has actually increased in the past 20 years (more precisely, 21 years). While the gap decreased (ever-so-slightly) between 1989 and 2000, it is still wider than it was 20 years ago. I don't know why the reporter chose to lead his story with an obvious falsehood, nor do I know why the several editors who looked at it failed to catch the error. The poor headline writer was only doing her/his job of reflecting the angle reported in the lead. So, I won't say any more about that, other than to point out my belief that an increase in the gap between rich and poor at the very apex of the "longest economic expansion in U.S. history" (these figures are from 2000, before the current contraction had started) should be pretty big news. It should also be so well known that it would be readily noticed if it were misreported, as in this case. In the next Nygaard Notes, I'll do my own report on "The State of Working Minnesota 2001." |
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As I was riding my bike through the sunny streets of Minneapolis last week, I noticed a small car driving by that was entirely covered with advertising for a General Mills cereal known as "Reese's Puffs." I had no idea that it was driven by a grade-school teacher working part-time as a salesman. Or, as they are apparently now known, a "freelance brand manager." General Mills is a "local" corporation—that is, their headquarters are located in a Minneapolis suburb. So I pay a little attention to what they are up to. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, the Nygaard Notes "Quote" of the Week (QOTW) came from the Business Section of the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) of August 21, reporting on a General Mills program called "Box Tops for Education." That's the program in which elementary school kids collect box tops from Trix, Kix, and Reese's Puffs, among others, which their school can then redeem to buy such things as books, pencils, and notebooks. The newspaper pointed out that "The growth of the General Mills program reflects a desire by companies to address Americans' concerns about education and at the same time nurture brand loyalty among consumers." I thought this quotation illustrated rather nicely the extent to which our society has elected to forego public funding of basic needs in favor of private funding. This "marketization" of public resources like education can be seen in innumerable ways, but of particular interest this week is the point where advertising—a.k.a. the nurturing of "brand loyalty"—converges with corporate philanthropy. (In this case, it's not even "philanthropy," but merely "a desire...to address Americans' concerns about education.") The above quotation makes clear that the two often go hand-in-hand, and I was going to leave it at that. But then I saw the Reese's Puffs car go by. Teachers as Rolling Billboards When I opened the Star Trib of August 31st, there was a story on the front page of the Business Section entitled "General Mills Ad Campaign Turns Sour After Protest; Teacher's Cars Had Ads for Reese's Puffs Cereal." It seems that General Mills had to "abruptly cancel" a campaign that paid Minneapolis elementary school teachers to drive cars that advertised Reese's Puffs. Reese's Puffs is a breakfast food that is aimed at kids—elementary school kids, we can infer—that the Star Trib describes as "a sweetened cereal." (I went over the neighborhood grocery store and yes, indeed, it is a "sweetened" cereal, listing in its ingredient list no fewer than 6 different sugars. Among those listed were "sugar," molasses, fructose, corn syrup, dextrose, and something else. This is a common trick in the food business, by the way, to avoid listing "sugar" as the first ingredient. But I digress...) "Since early August, 10 Minneapolis teachers have been driving the cars around town, earning a $250 monthly stipend for their efforts as ‘freelance brand managers,'" says reporter Jon Tevlin of the Star Trib. (That makes me think, naturally, of the classic Arthur Miller play, "Death of a Freelance Brand Manager.") The advertising agency that orchestrated the campaign for GM "requested a list of Minneapolis teachers and began calling them to offer the deal." Nevertheless, General Mills spokesman Greg Zimprich decided that the best public relations strategy in this case was to deny that the choice of these particular recipients of the calls had anything to do with the fact that they were grade-school teachers. According to the Star Trib, "Zimprich said the teachers were hired ‘because teachers are around in summer and not working,' not because of their status as role models to children and access to schools." Sure, Greg. The headline implies that there was some sort of organized protest of the Reese's cars campaign, but the article doesn't give any details. See the Website of the Week for a group that may well have had something to do with it. In any case, somehow the company apparently got the message that this idea of hiring public servants to peddle breakfast candy to the kiddies might be going a bit too far, so they "abruptly canceled" the program. "Positive for Education" One David Rodbourne, executive director of someplace called the "Center for Ethical Business Cultures" at a local university, was quoted as saying that "corporations have increasingly been trading donations for access to kids via schools districts," but that this Reese's thing "appears to be going in a little different direction," as it raises "the ethical question of whether it's appropriate for teachers to act as marketing agents." The fact that this ethics expert considers this to be a "question" says volumes about the degree to which commercialization has become accepted behavior in all realms of life in the United States, circa 2001. Of particular interest to me was the comment by Rodbourne that "General Mills has done a lot of things positive for education." One of his examples of their commendable efforts was the "Box Tops for Education" program which I attempted to ridicule two weeks ago. Allow me to put two and two together on this subject: Why are schoolkids being forced to collect box tops so their school can afford basic school supplies? Partly it's because corporate interests in the state of Minnesota—and General Mills is one of the biggest—insist on ever-lower taxes that are forcing cuts in school spending. Then, when General Mills comes up with a marketing idea that replaces some of the money lost to the schools by the lack of tax revenue while it "nurtures brand loyalty among consumers," some ethics professor sees this as "positive for education." Right-o, Professor! These two stories illustrate one thing more clearly than anything else: there is a lack of adequate funding that is making both the supposed beneficiaries of public education—the kids—and those adults most directly involved in providing that education—the teachers—increasingly easy prey for the corporate interests that see children as nothing more than potential customers. Even more importantly, as the commercial culture assumes an ever more dominant position in our society, citizens are becoming increasingly loyal to the unique and heartless "brand" of economics known as wild-west capitalism that is all around us. In this brand of economics—where individualism is the philosophy and the dollar is the corporate logo—we should prepare ourselves for ever-more-creative attempts by corporate interests to instill their particular form of "brand loyalty" in us all. |