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Don’t Buy It: The Trouble with Talking Nonsense About the Economy
Chat with Anat Shenker-Osorio about her new book, hosted by spocko.
After everything that’s happened, how is it possible that conservatives still win debates about the economy? Time and again the right wins over voters by claiming that their solutions are only common sense, even as their tired policies of budgetary sacrifice and corporate plunder both create and prolong economic disaster. Why does the electorate keep buying what they’re selling? According to political communications expert Anat Shenker-Osorio, it’s all about language — and not just theirs, but ours.
In Don’t Buy It Shenker-Osorio diagnoses our economic discourse as stricken with faulty messages, deceptive personification, and, worst of all, a barely coherent concept of what the economy actually is. Opening up the business section of most newspapers or flipping on cable news unleashes an onslaught of economic doomsaying that treats the economy as an ungovernable force of nature. Alternately, by calling the economy unhealthy or recovering as we so often do, we unconsciously give it the status of a living being. No wonder Americans become willing to submit to any indignity required to keep the economy happy. Tread lightly, we can’t risk irritating the economy!
Cutting through conservative myth-making, messaging muddles, and destructive misinformation, Shenker-Osorio suggests a new way to win the most important arguments of our day. The left doesn’t have to self-destruct every time matters economic come to the fore — there are metaphors and frames that can win, and Shenker-Osorio shows what they are and how to use them.
Don’t Buy It is a vital handbook for seizing victory in the economic debate. In the end, it convincingly shows that radically altering our politics and policies for the better is a matter of first changing the conversation — literally.
Anat Shenker-Osorio is a strategic communications consultant based in Oakland, CA. She crafts messaging for issues from immigration to contraception and completed research on how people make sense of and come to judgments about the economy. Anat has worked with the ACLU, Ms Foundation, America’s Voice, Ford Foundation and dozens of others, presenting findings to members of Congress, and as a keynote speaker at Netroots Nation. (Perseus Books)
7 Comments
But, what are we going to do about our out-of-control crushing mountain of debt that is chasing us of the fiscal cliff?
They only win in the media Spocko Mitt has lost the lead in polls on who Americans think would be best for the economy.
We need the Fairness doctrine back Spocko as long as the MSM can lie they will. We now have a MSM that is more a propaganda arm of the 1% than an actual news media heck I’m thinking of finding comparisons to how Pravada reported the news on the economy and wars and writing some articles. I won’t be there for the book salon but will read later. If you can can you ask the author my questions.
What about the possibility of creating an economic solve the budget video game free online for students and teachers with Lefty ideas people could be given the Mitt Romney ideas on cutting the budget, the Obama ideas and Lefty ideas.
Currently NPR’s budget hero game does not mention any ideas from the Congressional Progressive Caucus the Black Caucus or Ron Paul’s ideas and they all have numbers.
Of course none of these ideas compare to our ideas like reducing military spending to twice what China ( who has the next biggest army spends).
Even Obamacare does not save as much money as National Healthcare and drug price controls would.
Spending on a Smart electricity Grid and Green power would save billions and put people back to work.
An FDR type jobs program would create tons of jobs. Military spending as we all know from 10+ years of war does not boost an economy because the labor produces no net benefit to society like a Hybrid car would.
I am just trying to think of ways to reach people without using the MSM.
We can default Argentina did that and their economy is doing better than ours even though the big international banks are denying them funding. It also helps they are re directing spending toward the poor.
The MSM is every bit as compliant as Pravda was, but the Soviet citizens didn’t believe Pravda. Their standard joke was that: “There is no Pravda in Izvestia, and there is no Izvestia in Pravda” or in English “There is no truth in News, and there is no news in Truth.” But this was said only to people who would not report you to the Central Committee.
There’s no good reason why we should ever have to default. Argentina had debt that was denominated in foreign currency. They could not pay it with their fiat so they took the hit with devaluation relative to other currencies and retained the ability to spend it in their own economy. Every dime of the US “debt” is denominated in USDs. When we pay interest on the debt we do so by crediting accounts with more dollars. We don’t really “borrow” our own money, we just sell bonds as a sort of quaint, antiquated custom when we spend. The bond market exists because of gov. spending and has no power whatsoever to dictate policy, contrary to what is often said in the financial press. The rating agencies sometimes make a big show of “downgrading our credit rating.” It is a total farce.