The smiling asshole in the above picture is Richard B. Berman, a professional business propagandist who heads his for profit advertising firm, Berman and Company, as well as the “nonprofit” Employment Policies Institute, which as been engaged in a recent full throttle campaign to derail passage of a minimum wage increase in Congress.
As I’ve said before, conservative propagandists are masters at naming advocacy think tanks and legislation the opposite of what they are, and giving them harmless or even noble sounding names that do not reflect their true intentions. The so-called nonprofit Employment Policies Institute is a legal entity with no employees to speak of, that shares the same address as Mr. Berman’s advertising firm. The Employment Policies Institute accepts donations from groups like the restaurant industry, who openly lobby to not raise the minimum wage, and who have who a special, legal, sub-minimum wage that they can apply to their tipped employees to allow them to pay their employees even less. Mr. Berman, acting as the director of this “nonprofit” entity with no employees, then pays his for profit advertising firm for it’s services, which involve industry massaged and funded “research” and the advertisement of their “findings.” Not surprisingly, the Employment Policies Institute has concluded that raising the minimum wage will hurt employment. And, like magic, “poof!” the nonprofit “donations” turn into profit from the hands of the director of the “institute” into the hands of the same man, the owner of Berman and Company.
The EPI has recently taken out ads in newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times (the source of the information in this blog), including an attack ad against the left leaning Economic Policy Institute for it’s recent letter to the White House and Congress that had over 600 signatures from legitimate economists, including 7 Nobel laureates, all urging that the minimum wage be raised to $10.10 an hour by 2016. Here is the letter: ( http://www.epi.org/minimum-wage-statement/ ) There is an abundance of studies in recent years on the effects of raising the minimum wage, in part thanks to individual states that have raised it on their own, providing real world evidence. And the majority of economic studies say that raising the minimum wage is good for the workers and the economy. The Employment Policies Institute then took out a full page ad in The New York Times that singled out 8 of the economists out of the 600, using quotes taken out of context to basically use the typical battle cry of the filthy rich to quell us peasants from wanting better wage and benefits by portraying them as socialist, Marxists, communists, etc. Those eight economists that were singled out wrote a response to The Times. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/opinion/economists-hit-back-in-the-minimum-wage-wars.html?action=click&contentCollection=Asia%20Pacific®ion=Footer&module=Recommendation&src=recg&pgtype=article )
Mr. Berman’s ad agency also placed a large photograph of Representative Nancy Pellosi, a Democrat advocate for raising the minimum wage, in the Metro Station in Washington that read: “Teens Who Can’t Find a Job Should Blame Her.”
I think we should all post giant pictures of the smiling asshole above, Richard B. Berman, with a caption that reads: “Tired of Your Shit Pay? Thank this Asshole and Others Like Him.”
The full article about this worth reading. It gives you a more clear view of how the sophisticated propaganda system in this country works for the rich and powerful. My opinions on raising the minimum wage are well documented in past blogs, so I won’t rehash them all here. But this story is a little gem showing the corruption of our political system, a system that produces two business chosen candidates to chose from for President every four years, with this last election offering the multi-millionaire, offshore hidden wealth, tax evading dirt bag, Mitt Romney, who proudly, with a smile and a straight face, said, “Corporations are people too, my friend.” He was the other “choice” given voters in contrast to the supposedly liberal tyrant, President Obama. This story displays the ingenuity of the American capitalist system, where a nonprofit group can take in millions of dollars in donations from wealthy heads of industry, for the purpose of bribing our politicians into serving their needs instead of the rest of the people in the country, the other 99.99 percent – and, in turn, make the head of that nonprofit group (and only employee) rich, through the “nonprofit donations” to pay for the propaganda that is then cited and echoed again and again in the pathetic mainstream media’s talking heads, and of course through the megaphones of the right wing ass-wipes at Fox Propaganda News Outlets and others. Here is the full article to copy and paste into your browser:
( http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/10/us/politics/fight-over-minimum-wage-illustrates-web-of-industry-ties.html )