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	The divide between the powerful and the rest of us is greater than ever by Philip Meyer, Dean Baker Nieman Foundation - Harvard University & agencies USA   Noted journalist Phil Meyer calls on reporters to follow the example of Barlett and Steele and see the patterns, the underlying structures that created and are perpetuating so much inequality.   “Class warfare,” expressed as an epithet, keeps coming up in the election campaign as though it were something novel and dangerous. In reality, it is older than the republic.   And for the past four decades, the upper class has been getting the upper hand. Has anybody noticed?   Two Pulitzer Prize winning reporters did, and they put a spotlight on the class war two decades ago with a series in the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1992, Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele compiled their reports into a best-selling book, America: What Went Wrong.   But their alarm went mostly unheeded, and today’s divide between the powerful and the rest of us is greater than ever. And here’s the thing: the gap continues to widen no matter which party we vote into office.   The purpose of democracy, in the eyes of our founders, was to maintain fairness in the inevitable class struggle. In designing our Constitution, they borrowed from both English and French traditions of limited and divided government to keep power in check. And they counted on the free flow of information to help.   Today, the problem is too much information. The digital age has increased the flow of facts, but they are too little understood and analyzed. A hunter-gatherer-kind of journalism is no longer enough. We are distracted from seeing the patterns made by the events, and we don’t notice the underlying structures that created the patterns.   Using paper trails to find patterns and shine a light on their causes is Barlett and Steele’s specialty. Now they have updated their previous work. Some of it has appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and they have received help from the Investigative Reporting Workshop of American University. (I am a former member of the Workshop’s advisory board.)   Their report is to be published by Public Affairs as “The Betrayal of the American Dream.” It revisits some of the same people whose situations gave the problem a human face in 1992. You can preview it by browsing the Workshop’s website.   The winners would like us to believe that the growing disparities are the result of uncontrollable forces in the world economy. Barlett and Steele have convincing evidence that they’re not. The gap is the result of deliberate efforts by both Republicans and Democrats to please the groups that finance their election campaigns.   Some examples:   • Tax policies over the decades have steadily shifted the burden from corporations and wealthy individuals to the middle class.   • Claiming support for free trade, our government encourages corporations to send jobs overseas and then bring the foreign-made products back with few or no tariff barriers. But free trade isn’t really free because the countries we buy from continue to place restrictions on our ability to sell to their people. This arrangement is good for corporate executives and shareholders, bad for American consumers and workers.   • Private pensions are shrinking or disappearing – except, of course, for those awarded to corporate executives.   • Costs of higher education are being passed increasingly to students who take on crippling debt to pay – and with fewer prospects than in the past of being able to find the good jobs that would make it worthwhile.   • Deregulation has taken important protection away from both workers and consumers, particularly in the fields of air travel, trucking, and finance. Barlett and Steele remind us that it was Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, who got that ball rolling with deregulation of aviation and trucking.   • The roads and bridges and dams that make up our national infrastructure, much of it built during the Great Depression in the 1930s, are falling apart. Rebuilding it would create jobs, but that’s not happening.   On that last item, the infrastructure, mostly it"s not happening but some of it is being rebuilt. The Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland was badly damaged in an earthquake. Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California at the time, and he went to the factory where the new bridge components were being made so that he could thank the workers personally. The factory was in China.   Bernard Bailyn, the Harvard historian, analyzed the founders’ view of power in his 1967 book “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.” They believed, he said, that “power, always and everywhere, had a pernicious, corrupting effect upon men.”   Pre-revolutionary political thought saw power as aggressive and expansive. The colonists believed that the desire for it was behind every political issue. That insight, said Bailyn, “serves to link the Revolutionary generation to our own in the most intimate way.”   We ought to pay attention.   * Philip Meyer, recently retired as the holder of the Knight chair of Journalism at the University of North Carolina. http://americawhatwentwrong.org/   US Poverty Rate Reaching 50-Year High   Economist Dean Baker: "The real tragedy is that this economic collapse was totally preventable before the fact and it could be quickly overcome even now with the right policies."   Poverty in the U.S. is on track to be at its highest level in 50 years, according to analysis collected by the Associated Press. Meanwhile, social safety nets are being pulled out.   The consensus of the more than dozen economists and think tanks the AP surveyed, both left- and right-leaning, was that the poverty level -- 15.1 percent in 2010 -- would reach as high as 15.7 percent for 2011. Even the 2010 figures represent a record breaking number. The Census Bureau states that "the number of people in poverty in 2010 (46.2 million) is the largest number in the 52 years for which poverty estimates have been published."   A mere tenth of a percent increase to 15.2 percent would make the poverty level match 1983"s rate, which was the highest since1965, AP reports.   Economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research http://www.cepr.net/ says that "a rise in the poverty rate is the entirely predictable result of a high unemployment rate and cutbacks in various forms of government support" and sees little chance of a change in course.   "The real tragedy is that this economic collapse was totally preventable before the fact and it could be quickly overcome even now with the right policies. However, in both cases there is not the political will. The interest groups that dominate U.S. politics are just fine with the current situation," Baker stated.   The safety net allowing some to scrape by are at risk, with unemployment insurance, food stamps and welfare getting cut. But Peter Edelman, director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy, tells the AP, "The issues aren"t just with public benefits. We have some deep problems in the economy."   Edelman, author of So Rich, So Poor: Why It"s So Hard to End Poverty in America, also highlighted the problem of low-wage jobs affecting poverty when he spoke to Bill Moyers in June.   "What I"m worried about is the longer term continuance of this plethora of low-wage jobs. "Of the inability of people at the bottom, and not just the poor, I"m talking about the whole lower half.   The way the median wage absolutely stagnated beginning 1973. The economy grew over the last 40 years basically doubled in size. And the entire lower half got none of that. The median wage went up 7 percent in 40 years. A fifth of a percent a year," Edelman said during his interview with Moyers.   http://billmoyers.com/segment/peter-eldelman-on-fighting-poverty/ Visit the related web page
	The power and pervasiveness of advertising by George Monbiot   We think we know who the enemies are: banks, big business, lobbyists, the politicians who exist to appease them. But somehow the sector which stitches this system of hypercapitalism together gets overlooked. That seems strange when you consider how pervasive it is. In fact you can probably see it right now. It is everywhere, yet we see without seeing, without understanding the role that it plays in our lives.   I am talking about the industry whose output frames this column and pays for it: advertising. For obvious reasons, it is seldom confronted by either the newspapers or the broadcasters.   The problem was laid out by Rory Sutherland when president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. Marketing, he argued, is either ineffectual or it "raises enormous ethical questions every day". With admirable if disturbing candour he concluded that "I would rather be thought of as evil than useless." A new report by the Public Interest Research Centre and WWF opens up the discussion he appears to invite. Think of Me as Evil? asks the ethical questions that most of the media ignore.   Advertising claims to enhance our choice, but it offers us little choice about whether we see and hear it, and ever less choice about whether we respond to it. Since Edward Bernays began to apply the findings of his uncle Sigmund Freud, advertisers have been developing sophisticated means of overcoming our defences. In public they insist that if we become informed consumers and school our children in media literacy we have nothing to fear from their attempts at persuasion. In private they employ neurobiologists to find ingenious methods of bypassing the conscious mind.   Pervasiveness and repetition act like a battering ram against our minds. The first time we see an advertisement, we are likely to be aware of what it"s telling us and what it is encouraging us to buy. From then on, we process it passively, absorbing its imagery and messages without contesting them, as we are no longer fully switched on. Brands and memes then become linked in ways our conscious minds fail to detect.   As a report by the progressive thinktank Compass explains, the messages used by advertisers are designed to trigger emotional rather than rational responses. The low-attention processing model developed by Robert Heath at the University of Bath shows how, in a crowded advertising market, passive and implicit learning become the key drivers of emotional attachment.   They are particularly powerful among children, as the prefrontal cortex – which helps us to interpret and analyse what we see – is not yet fully developed.   Advertising agencies build on this knowledge to minimise opportunities for the rational mind to intervene in choice. The research company TwoMinds, which has worked for Betfair, the drinks company Diageo, Mars, Nationwide and Waitrose, works to "uncover a layer of behavioural drivers that have previously remained elusive". New developments in neurobiology have allowed it to home in on "intuitive judgments" that "are made instantaneously and with little or no apparent conscious effort on the part of consumers – at point of purchase".   The power and pervasiveness of advertising helps to explain, I believe, the remarkable figure I stumbled across last week while reading the latest government spreadsheet on household spending. Households in the UK put an average of just £5.70 a week, or £296 a year, into savings and investments.   Academic research suggests a link between advertising and both consumer debt and the number of hours we work. People who watch a lot of advertisements appear to save less, spend more and use more of their time working to meet their rising material aspirations.   All three outcomes can have terrible impacts on family life. They also change the character of the nation. Burdened by debt, without savings, we are less free, less resilient, less able to stand up to those who bully us.   Invention is the mother of necessity. To keep their markets growing, companies must keep persuading us that we have unmet needs. In other words, they must encourage us to become dissatisfied with what we have. To be sexy, beautiful, happy, relaxed, we must buy their products. They shove us on to the hedonic treadmill, on which we must run ever faster to escape a growing sense of inadequacy.   The problem this causes was identified almost 300 years ago. In Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, the hero remarks: "It put me to reflecting, how little repining there would be among mankind, at any condition of life, if people would rather compare their condition with those that are worse, in order to be thankful, than be always comparing them with those which are better, to assist their murmurings and complainings."   Advertising encourages us to compare ourselves with those we perceive to be better off. It persuades us to trash our happiness and trash the biosphere to answer a craving it exists to perpetuate.   But perhaps the most important impact explored by Think of Me As Evil? is the one we discuss the least: the effect it has on our values. Our social identity is shaped by values which psychologists label as either extrinsic or intrinsic.   People with a strong set of intrinsic values place most weight on their relationships with family, friends and community. They have a sense of self-acceptance and a concern for other people and the environment.   People with largely extrinsic values are driven by a desire for status, wealth and power over others. They tend to be image-conscious, to have a strong desire to conform to social norms and to possess less concern for other people or the planet. They are also more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression and to report low levels of satisfaction with their lives.   We are not born with our values: they are embedded and normalised by the messages we receive from our social environment. Most advertising appeals to and reinforces extrinsic values. It doesn"t matter what the product is: by celebrating image, beauty, wealth, power and status, it helps create an environment that shifts our value system.   Some adverts appear to promote intrinsic values, associating their products with family life and strong communities. But they also create the impression that these values can be purchased, which demeans and undermines them.   Even love is commingled with material aspiration, and those worthy of this love mostly conform to a narrow conception of beauty, lending greater weight to the importance of image.   We"e hooked on a drug that is destroying society. As with all addictions, the first step is to admit to it. Visit the related web page
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