Salon.com > Corporate America

I was a political astroturfer

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 10:00:00 +0000

“There’s a movement building, and it’s spreading like wildfire,” announced Rafe Lieber of Citizens for Access to the Arts at a rally on the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall early in January. With politicians, celebrities, a brass band and a screaming crowd, any passerby would conclude that some popular uprising was in the works.

Speaker after speaker, including City Council members and even Brooklyn-native actress Rosie Perez, gave impassioned speeches about the importance of providing access to art to young people, leading the crowds in chants of, “We’re not gonna stop!” “Fuel our dreams!” "We're coming for you!" and, most frequently, “Save Ovation!”

The participants were decrying the decision of Time Warner Cable to deny the arts network Ovation TV to poor and minority viewers. Cheering along with them, I suddenly heard a cell phone ring. The woman behind me, a fellow protester, answered, saying, “Can you call me back? I’m at work.”

While I had considered the rally more of a quick buck than work, her statement wasn’t technically wrong. Like me, many of the rally’s participants had arrived via the same November Craigslist ad for “TV Press Rally Extras.” A week before the rally, we received an email from Warren Cohn, an employee of the power lawyers David Schwartz and Bradley Gerstman’s lobbying firm Gotham Government Relations. In part, it read:

Sheryl Sandberg’s trickle-down feminism

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 16:09:00 +0000

I’ve got a piece out in the Washington Post, a commentary on Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s corporate feminism, on the eve of her book "Lean In." I’ve been following Sandberg as one of the more visible “women in tech” since she joined Facebook, just one month after I began writing for Gawker’s then-San Francisco-based tech blog Valleywag.

Sandberg, along with Marissa Mayer, has served as a stand-in for a “woman in tech,” and now more broadly, as a “powerful woman.” These are roles that, back when their names were known to relatively few people outside the Valley and those who obsess about it, Sandberg and Mayer have played, and I’d argue, both played to and played against, like any woman handed a role that could elevate her as much as rein her in. Mayer says she isn’t a feminist; Sandberg says she is. In playing these roles, they also make for appealing stories of “what it all means” for the media.

Michelle Rhee: Wrong again

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 16:45:00 +0000

Most who are reading these words will probably agree that our country is facing a democracy crisis, thanks, in part, to the dominance of money in our political process. Many who read these words will also probably insist that our country is facing an education crisis (though many try to deny the actual cause of that crisis).

Getting past the denial stage and acknowledging both of these problems is certainly a step toward one day fixing them. However, there's another more subtle and self-reinforcing form of denial that makes getting to those solutions more difficult. That denial -- or perhaps cognitive dissonance -- evinces itself in an American psyche that tends to perceive the democracy and education emergencies as separate and distinct.

Facebook’s K Street friends deliver windfall

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:22:00 +0000

The news that Facebook made more than $1 billion in profit and yet will nonetheless get a $429 million tax refund comes at about as teachable a political moment as possible. With the president using his State of the Union address to demand what he called "comprehensive tax reform," headlines about Mark Zuckerberg's behemoth force us to ponder what that phrase really refers to - and whether it refers to something far more sinister than meets the eye.

That's a possibility worth pondering, after all, since only a year ago the president defined "comprehensive tax reform" as specifically ending the alleged situation whereby "companies that choose to stay in America get hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world." When juxtaposed next to the deeper meaning of the Facebook situation, such platitudes look less like earnest objectives than misleading lobbyist-sculpted talking points designed to further reduce corporate taxes in what is already one of the lowest-tax (and, thus, most deficit-plagued) countries in the industrialized world.

Is “Enlightened” quietly the best show on TV?

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:48:00 +0000

The second season of "Enlightened" started recently, and if you haven’t yet discovered this show, it’s a real pleasure to fast-watch the first-season episodes and get up to speed. As a “comedy of alienation,” according to show writer Mike White, "Enlightened"is remarkably good, an insightful satire of the symbiotic relationship between the New Age self-actualization movement and the worker hell of corporate America.

The basic premise of "Enlightened" is an inspired one. A 40-something woman named Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern) has a sobbing, shrieking breakdown at her workplace, Abaddon Industries. The first shot of the pilot episode is of Amy’s tear- and mascara-streaked face, clownishly distorted by anguish. Betrayed by the married executive she’s been sleeping with and facing a demotion from the Health and Beauty Department to Cleaning Supplies, Amy stages a hysterical confrontation in the sleek corporate hallways. She chases her betrayer to the elevators and pries the elevator doors open with superhuman strength, wailing, “Health and Beauty was mine, Damon! Health and Beauty was mine.…”

Is the metrosexual finally dead?

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 20:38:00 +0000

There was a death announced last week, and whether it was untimely or not, or even genuine, can remain a topic for the cyber garrulous.

The passing was of the metrosexual.

The word is that British journalist Mark Simpson coined “metrosexual” in 1994, that being the word because Mark “The ‘Daddy’ of the Metrosexual, the Retrosexual & Spawner of Sporno” Simpson tells us so. For a definition, I offer excerpts from the Urban Dictionary, with charming stylistic peculiarities intact:

A new name for something quite old. Men with taste & style who know about fashion, art, and culture have always existed. In past centuries, these kinds of men were in the uppercrust of society (more leisure time). … An American Metrosexual is like your average European male. In France or Italy, men can be manly and work on cars and know about art and fashion at the same time. They are cool with that and don’t need some special name for the less “masculine” side.

Corporate America knows who you vote for

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 21:23:00 +0000

If you're a registered voter and surf the web, one of sites you visit has almost certainly placed a tiny piece of data on your computer flagging your political preferences. That piece of data, called a cookie, marks you as a Democrat or Republican, when you last voted, and what contributions you've made. It also can include factors like your estimated income, what you do for a living, and what you've bought at the local mall.

Across the country, companies are using cookies to tailor the political ads you see online. One of the firms is CampaignGrid, which boasted in a recent slideshow, "Internet Users are No Longer Anonymous." The slideshow includes an image of the famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Next to it, CampaignGrid lists what it can now know about an Internet user: "Lives in Pennsylvania's 13th Congressional District, 19002 zip code, Registered primary voting Republican, High net worth household, Age 50-54, Teenagers in the home, Technology professional, Interested in politics, Shopping for a car, Planning a vacation in Puerto Rico."

Five ways corporate greed is bankrupting America

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 21:55:00 +0000

Conservatives believe that enriching individuals will eventually enrich society, and that government should not get in the way of the process. This is what happens as a result:

(1) The tax loss from one scheming businessman could have paid the salaries of 30,000 nurses

The lack of regulation in the financial industry allowed hedge fund manager John Paulson to conspire with Goldman Sachs in a plan to create packages of risky subprime mortgages and then short-sell (bet against) the sure-to-fail financial instruments. The ploy paid him $3.7 billion. Deregulation in the tax code allowed him to call his income "carried interest," which is taxed at a 15% rate. More deregulation allowed him to defer his profits indefinitely.

Gore Vidal told you so

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

This past summer, we lost Gore Vidal, one of our greatest intellectual treasures at a time when we needed him most: during the 2012 presidential election. In a forthcoming book of interviews — which date from 1988 to 2007 — that Nation contributing editor Jon Wiener conducted with the witty and acerbic writer, activist and fiercely loyal Democrat, Vidal holds forth on oil, the unholy matrimony of corporations and politicians, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and war and Wall Street. Even though he's speaking of the past, Vidal's insights and anecdotes are equally, if not more so, applicable today.

Vidal on gas and oil:

The only optimists are the gas and oil people, and they have every reason to be. It has always been the trick of our republic to get people to vote wholeheartedly against their interests. That’s very exciting when you can do it. [Laughter.] I remember when I was running for Congress in upstate New York, in Dutchess County, and there would be these farmers going around in old, old Model-T Fords and so on, with stickers — Vote for Rockefeller. Sometimes I would stop them, and we’d chat. I’d say, “Why do you like him?” because he was pretty poisonous even then. They said, “He’s so rich, he wouldn’t steal our money.”

How big business took over

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 20:21:00 +0000

It is one of those intriguing ironies of history that the immediate provocation for Lewis Powell’s political manifesto to Corporate America — his powerful private memorandum of 1971 — came not from a liberal Democrat in the White House, but from Republican Richard Nixon, the very president who was about to name Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court.

Powell’s intention was to spark a full-scale political rebellion by America’s corporate leaders — what one writer called “the Revolt of the Bosses” — to change the political and policy mainstream in Washington and to put the nation on a new track, a track more favorable to business. And he succeeded, probably far beyond his expectations.

In his memo, Powell never mentioned Nixon or his administration by name. But writing in 1971 on the heels of Nixon’s new regulatory initiatives and his new tax law that was hard on business and the wealthy, Powell warned the corporate community that anti-business sentiment in Washington had reached a dangerous new high, and it was threatening to “fatally weaken or destroy” America’s free enterprise system. Business was being victimized, he said, by government regulations, consumer activism, and politically powerful trade unions. The political influence of the business community had become so weak, Powell contended, that the business executive had become “truly the ‘forgotten man.’”

Corporate America’s newest union insult

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 14:51:00 +0000

Big Industrial Ag pretends to go organic. PC behemoths mimic Apple products. Barack Obama goes to the right of the Republicans on civil liberties. Mitt Romney suddenly portrays himself as a left-leaning moderate on immigration. It seems no matter the arena, the most cliched move in corporate and political combat is to co-opt an opponent’s message, expecting nobody to notice or care.

But as inured as we are to this banality, it’s still shocking to see corporate America transform the message of organized labor into a sales pitch for ... corporate America. Yes, according to the New York Times last month, that's what's happening, as new ads are “tapping into a sense of frustration among workers to sell products.”

One spot for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (read: the casinos) shows a woman climbing onto her desk to demand a vacation. Another for McDonald’s implores us to fight back against employers and “overthrow the working lunch.” Still another for a Coca-Cola subsidiary seizes on the stress of harsh working conditions to create buzz for a branded “Take the Year Off” contest.