Hoarded at http://www.scn.org/newspeak Celebrating cutting edge advances in the Doublethink of the '90s

Winner-Winner Solutions

Time Magazine surprised many by running an excellent series on "What Corporate Welfare Costs You" by Pulitzer prize-winning reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele. After depicting how typical households work two weeks a year to support $125 billion in subsidies and tax relief for "needy" corporations, editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine stepped in to assure readers that Time was not "anti-business." In fact, businesses would be derelict in their duties, he argued, "if they did not seek to avoid taxes and gain special subsidies" (try that argument, substituting "welfare mothers" for "corporations"). "Ending corporate welfare as we know it is essential," intoned Mr. Pearlstine, but "Rather than give corporations uneven and unfair exemptions, it may make more sense to simply do away with both corporate welfare and corporate taxation." This would create a "level playing field." Perfect. We solve the problem of partial corporate welfare by having ... total corporate welfare. Hello, is anybody home? (Time, 11/9/98)

Old Wine in New Winebags

The Environmental Protection Agency has modified a new brochure on pesticides due to be distributed nationwide in grocery stores this January. Thanks to help from food and pesticide industry lobbyists, they have made some notable improvements in their prose style. For example, the old version presented "Tips to Reduce Pesticides on Foods" which the new version amends to "Healthy Sensible Food Practices." The old version suggested consumers consider buying food labeled "certified organic" while the improved version suggests the grocer "may be able to provide you with information about the availability of food grown using fewer or no pesticides." And where the old version lists actual health problems caused by pesticides, like birth defects, cancer and nerve damage, the RSV simplifies it all as "health problems at certain levels of exposure." Much clearer, thanks to yet another example of successful cooperation. (NYT 12/29/98)

"Free at last, free at last..."

Status-conscious movie go-ers are now being offered new choices in theater complexes run by Cineplex Odeon, United Artists, and General Cinema in the cities of Chicago, Baltimore, and Milwaukee. For an additional $8 or so they don't have to mix with the unwashed masses. They can now go directly to private viewing rooms, receive valet parking, be personally escorted by a concierge, order drinks from a waiter and use a private bathroom. The Wall Street Journal describes this trend as "a way to express the affluence." But unlike luxury boxes at sports stadiums where seats can approach the thousand dollar range, the movie theaters have, says the Journal, "discovered affordable snobbery." It allows people of simple means to express their social superiority, if only for a few hours. The Journal, of course, was able to find a telling phrase to describe this trend, referring to it as "the democratization of status." Finally, we get "democracy" liberated from the baggage of "all men are created equal." (WSJ 12/11/98)

Upstairs, Downstairs in Public Education

Elite public schools across the nation are saying good-bye to auctions and cookie sales as a means to raise funds. Public schools like Brookline High School in Boston are simply raising $10 million permanent endowments from wealthy parents and alumni. This turn to large endowments comes, says the Wall Street Journal, "in reaction to broad trends in school finance that have hit affluent districts like Brookline especially hard over the last decade." But the means chosen by these "hard hit" schools to grow money has raised issues of fairness. Why should some public schools have piles of resources while others starve? "The equity issue, it's always going to come up," says Robert Markey, director of the Boston Latin School (a public school with a $13 million endowment). "That's why," he tells the Journal, "we don't talk about it." And certainly, not in front of the servants... (WSJ 12/17)

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