Hype Is Our History

Last night, I was half-listening to Campbell Brown wonder out loud about the stimulus package President Obama is trying to get through Congress, and what America had to do to fix its economic crisis when she said, "we'll be right back after this."

The commercials that followed were a glitzy lineup of hype for stuff I really didn't need to have. A nation full of people with no money to buy stuff we don't really need in the first place is one of the reasons for this economic crisis. Our economy, it seems, only has one speed – full bore – anything less and it begins to sputter, like the engine on a drag racer when you try to let it idle.

We live in the land of hype.

Everybody is a salesman these days, including Brown, who had just done the CNN News Anchor Baton Switch, where the person coming up next gets a cameo appearance ten minutes before the end of the hour to hype their time slot.

Hype. That's what we are - a nation that talks its way around facts, ignores data that doesn't support our conclusions, and pledges allegiance to form over function. The fiction of American moral purity is a hype job unto itself. The trip that put us on the European map was a hype job.

How else could you convince broke people to emigrate from England to a land with no infrastructure whatsoever? How else could a loosely organized group of men with an inadequate supply of firearms convince the masses to fight for American independence?

Hype is our history.

It made me think about a friend of mine I talked to over the weekend who is a budding entrepreneur. He and a partner have put together a new technology. They've formed a company. They’ve gotten interest from venture capitalists, and rounded up actual cash money from investors to get the product built.

I was in the middle of something else when he called, but once we got going, my old instincts kicked in. I wasn’t sure if he remembered that I used to help engineer financing for no-name internet companies back in the 90's, after spending a couple of years as a stockbroker at a third tier firm.

I started hitting him with questions, but the more I probed, the longer his ecommerce buzzwords got to be. So I asked him a question about the revenues. After some hemming and hawing, he finally gave me a straight answer. I did the math, ex-stockbroker style, like I needed to ask him to pay for a trade before he hung up the phone. He grudgingly agreed, the same way my old clients used to do, that the total I had come up with was right.

To him, the number sounded a lot smaller than the hype that led up to it.

In my mind I was ten years younger by then, back to duking it out with slick guys who would fly in from New York or Florida to make presentations to me and my ex-stockbroker buddy in his cubbyhole of an office, with a list of questions designed to flush the B.S. out of the Powerpoint slides we were often subjected to watching.

So I asked my friend another question - "so what are your gross margins?" - a fairly standard question real investors want to know. He backpedaled. He browbeat me. He belittled the question.

"One of my biggest clients, back when I was a broker, told me that he always read an offering prospectus from back to front," I said, exasperated at the evasiveness. "Do you know why he started at the back? Because that's where the numbers are."

My friend is on the right track - he was just talking to the wrong guy.

Conventional morality would have us believe that hype is evil, that hype is wrong, that hype is so un-American, even though our history suggests otherwise. The reality is, the numbers don't sell deals by themselves. Its the hype that goes along with them that makes those numbers sizzle, the right words delivered with enough gusto that turn the black and white framework of financial projections into full color visions of a profitable future.

Back before my ex-stockbroker buddy could afford a lot of attorney time, I assembled the offering prospectus on behalf of the companies we were raising money for. The SEC doesn't really require that much in the way of documentation other than the financials, but investors do. So we gave these companies the full treatment, describing their products and services in the kind of lingo and detail that you would see on a hundred million dollar offering.

By avoiding the facts and ignoring the data that didn't support our conclusions, we were able to convince people who knew better to at least take our calls, where the real hype job commenced.

I thought about all these things last night as I watched Campbell Brown, with no trace of irony, come back after the commercial break for things we don’t need, those commercials that pays her salary, to resume her admonishment of the American populace for failing to use its money wisely.

Ha!

The gross margins that our economy depends on don't come from the stuff we have to have - they come from the non-essential items that we have convinced ourselves are now necessities. The stuff you aren't buying right now, because you haven't gotten a raise lately, or because your hours have been cut, or your salary has been "adjusted", or the job you used to have doesn't exist anymore is the stuff that puts the pep in our economy's step.

We are a nation of major league spenders with minor league income. We know Starbucks is not about the coffee. We know the cost of designer jeans has no relationship to the utility value of the fabric covering our behinds. We know expensive foreign cars do not get us from Point A to Point B any quicker than a Ford or a Chevy. We know the latest cell phone does not increase the significance of the words we say into it.

We know all these things, but we do them anyway, in numbers so great that to do an about face now, to descend here in 2009 into a world of chaste consumption, of parsimonious penny pinching, where all of us have savings accounts full to bursting, and buy nothing before it wears out, or unless we really need it - that will be the end of America.

President Obama will be all over your TV later today with a hype job of his own, when he will avoid some of the more uncomfortable facts of his economic plan, blow right past the data that doesn't support his conclusions, and ask you to pledge allegiance to the idea of a stimulus package that includes the things he wants.

The plan is far from perfect. Some of the numbers are a lot bigger than the hype suggests. But the picture he will attempt to paint for us, with the right words and enough gusto, won't be the black and white, nuts and bolts version, but the full color one, the one where we get to keep our homes, and get our jobs back.


The real hype job on the stimulus package commences today.


So here's a thumb's up to the president, and my buddy - I hope they both get their deals sold.

America Is Finally Growing Up

Inaugurating Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States of America was like being in a civil rights march without an opposing force; like watching the Apollo moon landing without the need for a telescope; like the end of apartheid, with all of the tears of joy.

America is finally growing up. When we all can acknowledge our entire history, not just the attractive parts, when we all can accept completely the existence of perverse injustices that dominated our pasts - when the entire story of where we came from and how we got to here as a nation is recognized, fully and without restraint - the affirmations we cry out in celebration will ring truer, and the declarations we shout to the rooftops in commemoration shall carry more weight than they ever have before.

Indentured servitude, slavery, segregation, integration - Black America 5.0 is upon us, but even as it includes all of these things, it is bound by none of them. Collaboration is the last mile, the final steps in this journey to be equally accepted into all aspects of American life. Black America 5.0 will be tricky - there are going to be times, in fact, when you will wonder where you end and the rest of the world begins.

Change is good. But it is not quite as simple as flipping a switch in a dark room, instantly turning on the light. I don't know exactly what the steps are that we need to take to travel this final mile, or what order they need to be executed in, or how much the process will demand of us. But what I do know is two things: it will take the willingness and determination of the majority of this country to get there, and we already have all the tools we need right now to get started today.

Congratulations, America, on reaching a milestone for the ages.

Why We Stood In Line

[Sometimes I run across original research, original analysis, or hard-to-get information that is exactly the kind of stuff I live for - well thought out, well written, well researched commentary, the kind that your media experts get by the pound but think is too much for you to understand.

The post below has been slightly edited for the Brown Man Thinking Hard blog. Terje Anderson has given me permission to publish her comments and photos here.]

Over the last few days when looking at the photographs of people standing in line at early voting sites across the country, I've been reminded of so many pictures I've seen of election lines before - lines of voters from throughout the world, voters who have had to fight for the fundamental right to vote, voters for whom standing in line is perhaps the easiest part of everything they've had to do to bring about change.

First I thought of this famous picture of people in Soweto lined up to vote in South Africa's first post-apartheid election.




I thought of 1990, when the people of Burma shocked the military government by showing up en masse to overwhelmingly (80%) elect the opposition National League for Democracy party (NLD) and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. The military junta refused to accept the vote, and to this day the Nobel Peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest and the people of Burma, often led by Buddhist monks, continue their struggle for democracy.




I remember seeing pictures of women lining up to vote in parliamentary elections in Nepal earlier this year, elections that ushered in the first democratically elected sovereign government following the ouster of the monarchy:





Because I have many close family ties there, I especially remember Chile in 1988 when the right wing dictator Augusto Pinochet tried to arrange a window-dressing referendum that he expected to continue his term in power. His military junta was shocked when 56% of the voters were brave enough to vote "NO" - beginning the long democratization process that today has resulted in the election of Michele Bachelet, a Socialist woman, as President. During the campaign against Pinochet, the mothers of political activists who had been murdered or "disappeared" led the "NO" voices.



How about these voters in Sierra Leone, reclaiming their country after the ugly civil wars that tore the west African country to shreds?



Another picture from Sierra Leone, where thousands of citizens were maimed by the armies that terrorised the country:





After another brutal civil war, the people of Liberia were willing to wait in long lines in 2005 to elect Africa's first female head of state:




In Guatemala, these peasants had already stood in line to vote for hours, only to find out that there was a problem with their registration. But instead of going home, they stood in yet another long line to sort out registration errors to finally be able to cast a vote. (Unfortunately, a possible glimpse of what many voters may face on election day in the US on November 4th.)




After the government of Ukraine stole the 2004 election, the people of the country rose up in the "Orange Revolution". Here are Ukrainian voters lining up in a rural village to vote in the second election (this one fair) that swept the government out of power.





Voters in East Timor in 1999, lining up to vote in the first election after years of living under a brutal Indonesian military occupation.





I'll never forget the images of these brave people in Harare, Zimbabwe (another country I have strong personal ties to) risking their lives to vote for the opposition under the eyes of Mugabe's police, soldiers and ZANU-PF thugs.




I think we were all inspired by the "Velvet Revolution" in Czechoslovakia, people were willing to risk their lives in a peaceful popular uprising that heralded the arrival of democracy throughout eastern Europe.




And despite facing grinding poverty, political violence, and a history of stolen elections and military coups, these voters in rural Haiti still were willing to line up to vote in 2006.





And let's not forget the courage it took Iraqis to come out and vote under the threat of political and sectarian violence. We can appreciate their bravery and commitment even while we object to the stupidity with which Bush/Cheney/Rumsfield went to war. (A hat tip in thanks to "VA Classical Liberal" for finding this photo - not 100% sure about public domain on this, but I'll chance it).





And lest we think these struggles only happen in other countries, let's never forget the battles for the right to vote that we've fought, and are still fighting, in America.

Immediately after the Civil War, former slaves (male) gained the right to vote, and the Reconstruction period saw large numbers of African-Americans elected to offices in the former Confederacy. These rights were soon lost in the face of the emergence of the Jim Crow period, the rise of the Klan, the Poll Tax, hoax "literacy tests" and and host of other attacks on the right to vote.



Women in America were denied the suffrage for the first century and a half of the our history, and only gained the vote after decades of ridicule and struggle.




A US law passed in 1870 prohibited Chinese immigrants from becoming United States citizens - making it impossible to vote - part of a series of racist laws designed to restrict Chinese immigration to the US. These provisions were later expanded to cover other Asian-Americans, and were not fully repealed until 1965.




The first peoples of the United States, the Native Americans, were subjected to massive campaigns of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and forced removal. Despite being the original Americans, Native people were denied US citizenship until the 1920s. Even after citizenship, many states denied American Indians the right to vote until the 1940s and 50s.




The fight for full voting rights for African-Americans in the United States was long and often violent.




The Selma to Montgomery marchers were marching for voting rights, and the violence at the Edmund Pettis bridge is what finally shamed LBJ and the United States Congress into enacting the Voting Rights Act.




Finally able to register, southern blacks flooded into county offices to enroll as voters.



Cesar Chavez led a march from Merced to Sacramento to fight for the dignity of Latino farm workers in California.



The spirit of Chavez continued in the massive marches for immigrant rights, raising the level of political awareness and activism in the Latino community.




In 1978, just a few months after using the power of the vote to elect the openly gay City Supervisor Harvey Milk, San Francisco residents marched by candlelight in sadness and anger after the murder of Milk and Mayor George Moscone.




In 2004 students and residents at Ohio's Kenyon College had to wait as long as 10 hours to vote, and voting only finished after 3 a.m.




Earlier this year, hundreds of students from the historically black Prairie View College in Texas had to march 7 miles to the county seat to protect their voting rights.



We didn't let long waits and lines keep us from living up to the legacy we've inherited. On Tuesday we made sure that the frustration and intimidation the right wing wanted to use to beat us was overwhelmed by our sheer numbers and determination.

So when I think about those long lines on Tuesday, I knew that we weren't standing in those lines alone - we were accompanied by the history of millions of people a whole lot braver and tougher than we ever needed to be to stand in line for those few hours.