Daniel Lubetzky

With a name like that – The Center for Consumer Freedom – you can be sure this DC spin group has an industry-group agenda.  The agenda in this case is to convince consumers that a product that does not exist in nature is the same as one that does – trying to say High Fructose Corn Syrup is the same as honey.  The problem is your body has a difficult time breaking up the artificially created sugars from HFCS, a problem that is contributing to obesity and diabetes. 

This is their press release:

WASHINGTON – The Center for Consumer Freedom has launched a $1 million advertising campaign designed to respond to inaccuracies about high-fructose corn syrup. The campaign will involve a television commercial and three full-page newspaper advertisements. It will emphasize that H.F.C.S. is nutritionally the same as other sweeteners such as table sugar and honey.

The TV commercial will air on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN and CNBC and will run for three weeks. It will feature actors dressed as an ear of corn, a sugar cube and a honey bear standing in a police line-up. A victim in the commercial will be unable to tell which sweetener was responsible for his weight gain. The print advertisements will run in USA Today, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Crain’s Chicago Business.

"People have been spoon-fed misinformation about high-fructose corn syrup," said Rick Berman, executive director of the Center for Consumer Freedom, a nonprofit coalition supported by restaurants, food companies and consumers. "We thought it was time someone explained, in no uncertain terms, that high-fructose corn syrup has the exact same number of calories as table sugar and is handled the same way by the body. Any non-agenda-driven nutrition expert will tell you the same."

In fact this group is part of a Corn Industry response to consumer rejection.  A lot of evidence from scientists has come in that HFCS is not good for our health.  Empty calories are empty calories, and sugar as well as HFCS make you fat with no nutritional benefit, but it is worse when unscrupulous advertisers and companies try to deceive consumers.

Big challenge – and need to address and fix it [at KIND and PeaceWorks we are working on several initiatives to make fruits & veggies more convenient without detracting from minimally processed, attractive natural wholesome essence]

Kids Eat Few Fruits, Veggies

WSJ Associated Press

Fewer than 10% of U.S. high-school students are eating the combined recommended daily amount of fruits and vegetables, a finding that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called "poor" in a report.

The report, based on 2007 data, found that 13% of U.S. high-school students get at least three servings of vegetables a day and just 32% get two servings of fruit. Fewer than one in 10 get enough of both combined.

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Ha’aretz did a long deep piece about Robi Damelin’s journey, from losing her son to a terrorist attack, to becoming a leader of Parents Circle, a forum of bereaved family members on the Palestinian or Israeli side who have lost a loved one to the conflict and channeled the pain from that loss to push for an end to the conflict.  The piece is worth reading.

I just finished watching Happy-Go-Lucky, directed by Mike Leigh.  Initially I was jarred by the ebullience of the lead character, played with Golden-Globe-winning excellence by Sally Hawkins.  But I stuck through it and discovered a well-executed character study of a woman with an eternally sunny personality (and her impact on others, including an irascible driving instructor solidly played by Eddie Marsan). 

If you think about it, it is pretty rare that we delve into understanding "excessively" positive people, compared to studies of darkness.  Yet the introspection pays off, and really delves nicely and naturally into her philosophy of life, human nature, and social conditioning.

Why do some of us live our lives wanting to be liked by everyone? Is it insecurity (from lack of affection, or from just biological need to be liked)?  Is it a Karmik outlook of life (treat others with warmth and it will come back to you)? Is it our genes? Or our family history or ethnic culture (living in the shadow of the Holocaust)?  Or our upbringing and parental models? Religious teaching? Is it guided by altruism, self-interest, or just being oneself?

And is it a "good" way to live our lives? Can we make this a better world by making others smile? (and doing unexpected acts of kindness for them – or KINDINGS – as KIND is encouraging with KINDED?).  And what drives some people to care so much about others and about making this world better, while others are less so motivated?

Do we yield better people if guided by social awareness and concern or by internal values?

One of my best friends never cares what anyone else thinks about him – and it doesn’t make him any less ethical or upstanding, quite the opposite in his case. He has a solid core of values, does what he feels is right, and doesn’t wonder how society will receive it.  He also doesn’t lose sleep.  But maybe he is a rare case? Certainly there are many examples of people who also do not care about what others may think and who are not role models for society.

Others like me are always wondering how their behavior and actions will be judged by others, very self-aware, introspective, and insecure.  In some ways this insecurity and self-consciousness can be a positive trait that makes us strive to be better and improve.  But it can also increase occasions of grief and worry, and more dangerously for people in positions of power or responsibility (say a politician leading a nation), it can cause them to bend to political/social pressure and potentially reach a wrong but ephemerally popular decision.  And just like in the other strand, there are also examples of self-aware people who may obsess about how others will see them but just put up fake mirrors and end up harming the world no less (think Bernard Madoff).

What is interesting about Poppy, the lead character in Happy-Go-Lucky, is that she is eternally positive and deeply committed to making those around her happier, WITHOUT judging herself or taking herself too seriously.  She is forgiving – of others and of herself.  That is quite interesting. And not as easy to emulate. She seems genuinely interested in healing the world – and in her own way, she quite succeeds at times.

Beyond values and outside impact, as far as our individual journeys in life, it certainly must be the case that having a positive outlook must yield greater happiness and joy in life than seeing life through gray. 

In very deep ways, attitude is destiny.

Last night I listened to Anderson Cooper on CNN as he analyzed the Netanyahu speech at the UN.  He asked if Netanyahu had naively bitten Ahmadinejad’s bait, and he introduces an excerpt where Netanyahu appears to angrily overreach by attacking every member of the UN for allowing Ahmadinejad to speak, saying:

I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame?  Have you no decency?

My immediate reaction as I listened to this edited piece was, man, this is dumb.  Netanyahu should not attack all members of the UN.  After all, the body at the UN is designed for ALL nations – even those ruled by oppressive regimes – to have a forum to speak (as David Gergen explained, pointing to Netanyahu’s moral clarity but criticizing him for not recognizing this).  And how dare Netanyahu say he represents all the Jewish people? I don’t think he represents me – certainly not on how to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.

But something felt wrong.  I may disagree with him on many policy issues but Netanyahu is a smart man with strong diplomatic and public speaking skills.  Was this the real story?

So today I read the entire transcript of Netanyahu’s speech.  And I was shocked at how bad CNN/Anderson Cooper had framed the issue! I’ve written about how FOX over-does the spin in the right-wing direction.  But CNN and Cooper should be embarrassed about how they handled this.  And one of my favorite commentators and real statesmen – David Gergen (perhaps the only excellent one left among dozens of mini-opinionators) probably did not even listen to the speech in full, and certainly did not frame things clearly.  The other commentator (Reza Ezlan?) was way way off.

Here is a quote within context from Netanyahu’s speech:

Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium.  To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you.  You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honor to your countries.
But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame?  Have you no decency?  A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state. What a disgrace!  What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations!

Now, of course that in the age of twitter, you need to keep things brief.  But Cooper/CNN could have easily introduced the segment of Netanyahu by explaining that he criticized not the entire UN audience, but those who stayed to listen to Ahmadinejad.  Denying even monsters like Ahmadinejad the podium is not an option at the UN.  But every nation has a right to get up and walk out – to exercise its right not to be subjected to his vitriolic hate-mongering, and this was a valid position for Netanyahu to take.

With this post I do not mean to endorse all of Netanyahu’s foreign policy positions – quite the opposite, in some areas I feel he harms Israeli and Palestinian interests alike. But as a student of the media, following on my prior post about editorial spin, I am yet again alarmed at how dangerous unchecked news sources can be.  Indeed, a big part of why the Middle East and the world are in the shape they are is because partisan media feeds each audience what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear, and they don’t constructively engage audiences to better understand each other.

For students of oratory and for students of history, Netanyahu’s speech is actually constructed extremely well, and will probably become a historical piece that others will study for decades.  The transcript is provided below in full for those who want to examine it for themselves:

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To get a sense of how radically an editor of a newsletter can spin a story, take a look at the two different ways that an identical story is summarized by two different newsletters:

From OpinionSource, which is pretty mainstream, maybe slightly progressive but reliable reporting:

Israel’s Gaza Indication
By Jackson Diehl
Washington Post, 9/21/2009
Most of Washington’s predictions regarding the adverse outcome of Israel’s invasion of the Gaza strip (locally known as Operation Cast Lead) were correct. Yet Israeli leaders consider the attack a success. Why they do so bears consideration as Israel prepares to weigh Washington’s opinion regarding an attack on Iran. Israel points to Operation Cast Lead as bringing a respite from Gaza’s attacks on Israel, which had been nearly continuous since April 2001. Yet this view of victory does not take into account the loss of life, Palestinian suffering, and the subsequent offense to UN leaders. Nor does Israel recognize that Hamas is stronger since Operation Cast Lead. As Israeli leaders debate whether to launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, they may well decide, as with Gaza, that temporary respite trumps long-term repercussions.
Diehl is deputy editorial page editor of The Post. He is an editorial writer specializing in foreign affairs.
Link to full text in primary source.

 

And now look at the way it’s redacted in the "Daily Alert" which is put out "for" the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organization BY the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a right-wing outfit managed by Dore Gold:

Israel’s Gaza Vindication – Jackson Diehl (Washington Post)

• When it was launched last December, Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip looked to most people in Washington to be risky, counterproductive and doomed to futility. But today, the three-week operation is generally regarded by the country’s military and political elite as a success.
• Between April 2001 and the end of 2008, 4,246 rockets and 4,180 mortar shells were fired into Israel from Gaza, killing 14 Israelis, wounding more than 400 and making life in southern Israel intolerable. During what was supposed to be a cease-fire during the last half of 2008, 362 rockets and shells landed. Since April there have been just over two dozen rocket and mortar strikes. No one has been seriously injured, and life in the Israeli town of Sderot and the area around it has returned almost to normal.
• Hamas remains in power and unmoved in its refusal to recognize Israel. It is still holding an Israeli soldier who was abducted in 2006. It is still smuggling material for weapons through tunnels under the Egyptian border and, if it chose to, could resume rocket attacks on Israel at any time.
• However, Israel has bought itself a stretch of relative peace with Hamas, just as its 2006 invasion of Lebanon has produced three years of quiet on that front. "They will never change their ideology of destroying Israel," a senior government official told me last week. "But you can deter them if they are convinced you are not afraid of fighting a war."
• As for the Goldstone report, the heat it briefly produced last week will quickly dissipate; the panel was discredited from the outset because of its appointment by the grotesquely politicized UN Human Rights Council.

You can draw a conclusion from the above:

• briefs and summaries are useful time-savers, but always view them with even more skepticism than their original sources, which you should also be wary of, as everything regrettably seems to have some spin and pure fair objectivity is hard to come by, or non-existent;

The above is not the most extreme example of spin.  I have noticed over time that the Daily Alert is  a partisan effort to scare people off with paranoia. It is very professionally written and redacted – far better than most newsletters put out by mainstream, center, center-left and far-left newsletters I get or review; but regrettably it is full of spin and not objective.  Too bad because it loses much of its legitimacy that way.

Btw, here is the original story the two sources above aimed to summarize:

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watch this till the end – all vocals, no instruments – it gets better and better (never mind the cheesy eery look of the performers):

thx to Tammy for sending this my way.

From Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs:

You have to, in your own life, get people to want to work with you and want to help you. The organizational chart, in my opinion, means very little. I need my bosses’ goodwill, but I need the goodwill of my subordinates even more. Because they can make it easy for me to get information. They’ll come to me and say: “Look at this. Do this.” Or they can give it to me begrudgingly, if they’re hostile.

Now why would they be hostile? Why would they be negative? Why would they be slow to give me information? Because they thought I wasn’t good for them. They thought I’d be bad for them.

Life is always about contracts that you make with people. Very few of them are written. Most of them are implicit, and most of them evolve out of a course of dealing and understanding. And if you are good for your people, they’ll be good to you, and help you and help propel you up in your career.

By the way, being good to them doesn’t mean you pay them more or you’re more liberal, or you let them get away with things. Most people, what they want is to be better. They want to work for a great organization. They want to feel good about themselves. They want to not so much get promoted, as be promotable. They want to evolve. And if you’re the kind of person that they think will help them do that, they’ll give you a loyalty that’s the most sincere kind of loyalty.

from NYTimes interview: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/business/13corner.html?sq=lessons%20learned%20at%20goldman&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=print

In three paragraphs, Peter Goodman [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/business/economy/13excerpt.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=big%20spenders&st=cse] plainly describes how an administrator ended in a homeless shelter:

Big Spenders? They Wish

By PETER S. GOODMAN

Millions of Americans have lost homes, jobs and savings to the financial crisis and recession. While greed and extravagance played roles, many lived beyond their means because their paychecks shrank. This article is adapted from “Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy,” by Peter S. Goodman, a reporter for The New York Times. The book, to be published Tuesday by Times Books, explores the origins of the crisis and suggests ways to reinvigorate the economy.

ONE afternoon in November 2006, a policeman spotted an expired license plate on Dorothy Thomas’s 10-year-old Toyota Corolla as she drove through San Jose, Calif. He ordered her to pull over.

Struggling under the weight of thousands of dollars in credit card bills, Ms. Thomas was perpetually short of cash. She had not bought a $10 auto registration sticker. The officer checked his database and recognized that she had already been ticketed once before for the same thing. He arranged to have her car towed away.

“I got down on my knees and begged that officer,” Ms. Thomas recalled.

As she watched her car being hauled off, she sensed that this was the beginning of a descent into a crisis from which she might not easily escape. Without money to pay the towing and storage fees, she could not extract her car from the lot, and the tab soon grew to $1,600. Without a car, she could not reach the hospital where she worked in the administrative offices, so she lost her $16-an-hour job. Without a paycheck, she could no longer pay the rent on her modest home. She moved to Oakland, where a friend lived in a beaten-down, rented house on a street they called Crack Avenue. By year’s end, Ms. Thomas, then 49, was occupying a bunk at a homeless shelter, searching in vain for a job in an economy plagued by unemployment.

Time Magazine wrote a very compelling piece about "The High Price of Cheap Food." It should be required reading, as should the movie Food Inc. and Michael Pollan’s books, which presumably inspired this article.

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