This Week: Health Care, Health Care, and Tax Scams

"Quote" of the Week

Public Relations, Republican Strategy, and Health Care "Reform"

"Hurting the People Whom You're Trying to Help"

Greetings,

The first piece in this week's Notes, the one about PR and health care, is a textbook illustration of how professional propagandists manipulate the media and how media outlets "unwittingly" serve as conduits for the propaganda messages of the day. In this case it's messages about health care, but it happens all over the place.

The second piece this week is about social class and how it influences the news we get about the world. Is the recent increase in the federal minimum wage a good thing or a bad thing? One tends to see it differently depending on one's social class. This article exposes another, more subtle, way that the media serve as a conduit for propaganda.

The "Quote" of the Week, in turn, talks about how we can counter such propaganda, and how public opinion—despite how it is made to look on the evening news—is subject to principled and well-crafted appeals to reason and morality. This is a stark contrast to the propagandists' appeals to fear and rage. We're living in a hopeful time, if we seize the opportunities before us.

Hopefully yours,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

I really like the folks at War Times, the free antiwar newspaper that began in February of 2002 in response to the so-called Global War on Terror. The newspaper itself is gone, but War Times/Tiempo de Guerras continues in email and online form. I heartily recommend subscribing to their "Month in Review," and making a contribution to help these folks do their good work.

This week's "Quote of the Week" is a lengthy one, taken from their July 31 Month In Review, entitled "Shift Opinion, Build Clout, Change Policy." In the section headed "The Battle for Opinion," they say:

"On the level of battling for opinion, our side has several things going for us. First is the reality that U.S. invasions and wars in the Middle East did not succeed and are not succeeding, whether success is defined as ‘making us safer' or as bettering the lives of the people of the region. Neocons still sputter that in Iraq The-Mission-Was-Accomplished. But the majority doesn't believe it. And more people each week are coming to believe that ‘success' will not be achieved in Afghanistan either.

"This sentiment is ripe for expansion and consolidation. And for talking to ever-larger numbers of people about the connections between these failed wars and corporate lust for profits, the politics of oil and an economy based on fossil fuels, and more.

"The second thing is the shift in tone coming from the nation's highest office. Our critiques of Obama's policies are sharp in many instances. But in setting a tone of intellectual seriousness rather than pandering to people's worst instincts; in speaking of Arabs and Muslims with respect rather than racist fear-mongering; and in acknowledging many past injustices perpetrated by the U.S. (the 1953 coup in Iran, for instance), Obama is shifting the national conversation in ways that work immensely to the peace movement's advantage. This is precisely what makes the far right so furious, leading to their fuming denunciations of him as an America-hating false prophet and the rising threats of armed violence against him as an illegitimate usurper who must be ‘taken down.'

‘The far right understands the threat posed to imperial ideology by a changed discourse where other peoples in the world are viewed as partners rather than dehumanized adversaries. It is up to the peace movement to take that new discourse and run further with it, both in terms of ideas and, going where Obama does not (yet?) go, in terms of how they point to drastically changed U.S. policies."

Public Relations, Republican Strategy, and Health Care "Reform"

A 28-page memo called "The Language of Healthcare 2009" was presented to Congressional Republicans in April. Offering "detailed advice on how to attack the Democrats' health plan," the memo was prepared by Frank Luntz, whom the Columbia Journalism Review describes as a "GOP pollster and consultant par excellence, known for testing language on focus group participants to find which words resonate best with ordinary folks." This Republican strategy paper is a splendid look at the overt propaganda that is changing public opinion (for the worse) even as I type these words.

The Luntz paper is filled with things like "Words That Work" when talking to the public. Some "words that work," for example, are these scary ones: "Government run," "takeover" and Luntz's favorite, "government takeover."

The memo was leaked to the world—at least, the part of the world that cares about how propaganda works—by the political website Politico.com. The memo was more or less ignored by the mass media. All I could find about it was a small article published in May in the afore-mentioned Columbia Journalism Review, the audience for which is the journalism establishment itself. The CJR piece, revealingly entitled "What Journalists Can Learn from Frank Luntz; Wisdom from the Republican Wordsmith," included these words:

"In the last few weeks, the press has started to use the term ‘government run' to describe a public insurance option that would compete with coverage sold by private insurance companies. . . The phrase has become pejorative short hand for describing what a public plan is..." Noting that such shorthand amounts to propaganda—although the article never uses that word—CJR reminds its journalist readers that they have choices in the face of such propaganda: "Journalists should describe what a plan will and won't do," says CJR, "and curb the tendency to use shorthand that unwittingly passes along the Luntz-tested terminology."

I wondered, how is the media doing at "curbing the tendency" to use the "shorthand" that I call propaganda? So I poked around a little bit in the Lexis/Nexis media database, which archives articles from hundreds of news sources, including all of the agenda-setting newspapers, most of the major regional newspapers, and many more. I looked at article from the past three months—roughly since the Luntz memo was released—and here's what I found.

I searched articles that included the words "health care" and "reform" in the headline or lead paragraphs. I asked how many of those articles included some of Luntz's "words that work." Specifically, "Government run," "takeover," and "government takeover." I found 569 articles with the word "takeover," 438 articles with "government takeover," and a whopping 1,134 articles that "unwittingly passed along" the phrase "government run."

I don't know of a comparable list of "words that work" from non-Republican strategists so, for purposes of comparison I did the same Lexis search looking for some words that Nygaard Notes might use in writing about health care reform. Substituting my own "words that work" for Luntz's words, I found 41 occurrences of the word "compassion." The word "inequality" appeared 13 times, and that little-used word "solidarity" appeared but 6 times.

There are lots of other "words that work" in the Luntz memo, including these: "We need to stop looking at it from a global perspective and restore the humanity to healthcare. We need to focus more on people and less on the system." An approach using these words "plays into more favorable Republican territory," according to Luntz, because it "downplays the need for a comprehensive national healthcare plan."

Yes, I'm sure the privileged few do believe that the last thing we want is systemic change.

I said that the memo was ignored by the media, and that is true. But the point here is that the spreading of propaganda need not involve any intentional effort on the part of the media or our other disseminators of ideas (academics, clergy, family, etc). All that's needed is a race- and class-stratified, profit-driven corporate news system that promotes and retains people who, as the Columbia Journalism Review put it, have a "tendency to use shorthand that unwittingly passes along" the propaganda points of powerful actors in the society.

The result of this "unwitting" behavior—when combined with the efforts of others in the media who are undoubtedly acting intentionally—is what we are seeing right now: People who get angry enough when they hear this stuff that they start showing up all over the country and disrupting meetings about health care. Those people seem to be following the Luntz script fairly well.

If you'd like to check out the script, you can read the entire Luntz paper here:
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/frank-luntz-the-language-of-healthcare-20091.pdf (Not enough time to read the whole thing? The first seven pages are the best.)

For news and information about single payer that you're not getting in the corporate media, try Physicians for a National Health Plan at http://www.pnhp.org/news/

For more news, check out Single Payer Action at http://www.singlepayeraction.org/ They have a news section, and I recommend you also click on "Resources" to see a long list of activist groups at the state and national level that are working for real health reform. Go look, then join one of them or send them money. (After you make your Pledge to Nygaard Notes, of course!)

"Hurting the People Whom You're Trying to Help"

Effective July 24, 2009, the federal minimum wage increased to $7.25 per hour. At the new rate, the annual income of a full-time minimum-wage worker would be about $15,000. Monthly, that's about $1,200. The increase was covered fairly widely in the corporate media. Unfortunately, the coverage focused on what a bad idea it is to pay workers so much.

National Public Radio reporter David Greene summed up the "problem" like this: "some economists say that what happens when you raise the minimum wage is you can lose jobs in the economy. Jobs can be cut, and so fewer people are actually getting a paycheck."

Whenever one hears the phrase "some economists" it's good to be suspicious. There are a lot of economists, after all, and "some" of them are completely clueless. Greene does not cite anyone specifically, although later in the story he says that "there's an entirely different view from some other economists." Which ones? The clueless ones, or some other ones? He never says.

Many, many media outlets echoed this idea that raising the minimum wage is a bad idea. Here are a few sample headlines about the increase: "A Pay Increase At What Cost?" (Winston-Salem Journal) "Minimum Wage Hike Comes at ‘Bad Time' for Some Businesses" (Wyoming Tribune-Eagle) "Minimum Wage Hike May Prolong Hard Times" (Newark Star-Ledger) "Minimum Wage Boost Sounds Good, but It's Not, It Could Lead to Layoffs and Less Opportunity for Those Seeking Jobs" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch).

The NPR reporter went so far as to tell us that "businesses . . .just have no extra money hanging around right now and so if they're forced to pay out more in wages, they'll just cut hours or maybe even cut some of those low wage jobs." Host Robert Siegel underlined the point, reminding listeners that opponents of the increase say "you actually end up hurting the people whom you're trying to help" by increasing their wages.

The Washington Post headlined their article "Some Attack Timing of Minimum Wage Hike," which is true. "Some" do attack it. But the article itself included a statement from one economist that the increase "could not have come at a better time," from the point of view of stimulating the economy by putting a few more dollars into the hands of people who will spend it. Quite a headline, that one!

The normally reliable St. Petersburg Times headlined their story "Minimum Wage Hike Reignites Labor Debate," and reported that "Both camps are out in full force," with one "camp" saying that an increase is a good thing and the other "camp" saying what NPR says. The St. Pete paper concluded with a list of four sources, three of which thought it was a good thing. The fourth source, the "Employment Policies Institute," disagreed. Neither the Times nor any other news organization that cited the Employment Policies Institute bothered to note that the EPI is "one of several front groups created by Berman & Co., a Washington, DC public affairs firm owned by Rick Berman, who lobbies for the restaurant, hotel, alcoholic beverage and tobacco industries." That bit of info is from the invaluable propaganda research group SourceWatch (http://www.sourcewatch.org/)

Outside of industry propaganda from places like EPI, it's hard to find any support for the idea that increases in the minimum wage have ever harmed the recipients of those wages.

The other EPI, the Economic Policy Institute, put out a "Minimum Wage Issue Guide" on July 20th" that emphasized this point: "There is no evidence of job loss from previous minimum wage increases."

Researcher Bruce Nissen teamed up with H. Luke Shaefer of the University of Chicago in 2007 "to examine the actual impact of the new Florida minimum wage one year after it took effect." The result? "We were unable to find any negative impacts whatsoever." That is, no job loss, no companies leaving the state, no damage to the retail sector, no harm to minimum-wage workers. Nothing.

The Indiana Business Review of Fall 2008 published a study called "Minimum Wage Impacts on Employment: A Look at Indiana, Illinois, and Surrounding Midwestern States." They, too, found that "Empirical analysis strongly challenges the conventional wisdom that increasing the minimum wage hampers employment." The question of why such wrong-headed ideas are considered "wisdom," let alone conventional wisdom, is the question that should pop into our minds here.

The excellent scholar Holly Sklar offered some real wisdom when she reminded readers in a recent opinion piece that "It would take $9.92 today to match the buying power of the minimum wage at its peak in 1968." Sklar added, in a highly-relevant point that I couldn't find in any news story on the wage increase, that "The long-term fall in worker buying power is one reason we are in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression."

Is a minimum wage increase a good thing, or does it "hurt the people whom you're trying to help?" How one answers that question has a lot to do with class. To those who pay wages—that is, owners and corporate CEOs—higher wages are a negative. To those who are paid wages—that is, the overwhelming majority of the population—higher wages are a cause for celebration. There was no celebration in the newspapers, however (or on Public Radio) on July 24th, offering more evidence of the class bias of the corporate media.