Consumer Nation?

...Angell is the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine...

...Only then would producers be required to print on their packages the true ingredients of products and their net weights and to provide information about ingredients such as peanut or sesame oil that could activate fatal allergic reactions in some consumers...

...But can "consumer society" also accurately describe the American polity...

...Only industry members continued to have meaningful access to the FCC, to the exclusion of consumers' concerns for quality, educational, or public interest programming.' At the same time, the public's interest in access to political information took a backseat to the media corporations' "free speech" rights, when the courts ruled that the FCC could not require radio and television stations—increasingly controlled by a dwindling handful of megacorporate managers—to permit rebuttals to editorials and programs that promoted particular political, social, or religious causes...

...Only then were manufacturers required to inform consumers with some precision just what it was that they would soon put in their house or in their mouth...

...or even as a producer's invention...

...William Letwin, Congress and the Sherman Antitrust Law, 1887-1890 (University of Chicago Press, 1956...

...He is the author of America Transformed: Sixty Years of Revolutionary Change, 1941-2001 (Cambridge University Press, 2006...

...1. See, Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic (2003...

...In 1977, Congress defeated a measure to require used-car dealers to reveal to customers what might be wrong with the heaps they were hawking...

...As Olivier Zunz observed in Making America Corporate 18701920 (University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 36, "The fight against bigness was part of a larger goal of maintaining the heterogeneous character of society...

...If there are many who would complain, the media—which are dependent on producers' ads—are not likely to give them much time or space...

...5. Reprinted in his Memoirs (Macmillan, 1952), p. 140...

...The country had long been gravitating toward a revenue system that relied heavily on sales and excise taxes, and most particularly on user fees (tuition, tolls, licenses, permits, admission fees for museums, public gardens, and zoos, as well as parking fees at hiking trailheads, park picnic sites, and metro stations), all burdens imposed directly on consumers...

...Another argues how consumers "shaped" American politics even from the very beginning of the nation in the eighteenth century...

...It is unconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service to be drowned in advertising...

...To characterize the United States as "a consumer society" at any time in its history misdirects attention from its most important and persistent trait...

...Only through the participation by the many in the responsibilities and determinations of business," wrote Justice Louis Brandeis in Liggett v. Lee, an early-twentiethcentury antitrust case, "can Americans secure the moral and intellectual development essential to the maintenance of liberty" The nation's political history simply does not support the notion of America as "a consumer society" For only about the previously mentioned five years or so at the end of the third quarter of the twentieth century were federal and some state laws and regulations passed to protect consumers against flawed and dangerous products...

...Whether the economy is fueled by Americans' avid shopping for consumer goods or by industry's consumption of capital goods, the focus of the economy and of public policy in America has remained on production...

...How quaint...

...Nor were efforts successful to require producers and distributors of many fresh food products to specify the country or state of origin...

...I think not...

...Locatecell.com is only one corporation that legally mines and then sells such information to any business or government agency that cares to pay for it...

...And can there be more frustrating moments in a working day than fighting with an electronic "pay station" in parking garages and lots that employ no attendants at all ("cost savings") and where the often balky machine must produce an entry ticket...

...And although consumers must have responded as consumers to reports of contaminated meats, what pushed the legislation through was the pressure from Swift, Armour, Cudahy, and other big packers...

...By 1975, government policies had reverted to their almost exclusive emphasis on producers' concerns...

...How well are consumer interests served when the law allows pushers of products to intrude at will upon our telephones, Internet, and fax machines...

...With the advent of George W. Bush's presidency, the reactionary drift became a landslide...

...Except for that brief window, American politics has turned almost exclusively on the competition for government favor among rival claims for the rewards of production...

...To say nothing of the fifteen or twenty minutes of both film and product advertising forced on moviegoers before the film they have paid for appears on the screen...

...Consumers' access to information that could affect their health was blocked because of producers' higher interests...

...and probably most consumers are also producers...

...Not so...

...For businesses and employers, that meant tax exemptions, depletion allowances, infrastructure development, legal and police restraints on la58 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 bor agitation and unions, protective tariffs to insure profits, direct subsidies to selected industries, assistance in promoting exports, tort reform, and various other profit-generating incentives...

...competing sectors of an industry...

...The ruling produced an immediate surge in the price of tobacco company securities...

...They needed the government's imprimatur to overcome the foreign embargoes against their export business that followed from the turnofthe-century scandals about spoilage, contamination, and adulteration—a problem created mostly by small packers who needed to cut corners to survive in competition with the biggies...

...and then later process the parking slip to permit exiting...

...Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics (2005...

...4. See, Marcia Angell, The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It...

...62 n DISSENT / Spring 2008...

...The same was true of the Federal Drug Administration, where honest-to-goodness pharmaceutical companies needed to overcome the popularity (among consumers) of the snake-oil hucksters and Lydia Pinkham's highly successful patent medicine...

...Or to pop ads onto television screens, more or less continuously, during an ongoing drama, sitcom, or sports program...

...The Food and Drugs and the Meat Inspection Acts of the Progressive Era might seem to be exceptions...

...Early in the decade, the government permitted the railroad companies to cut passenger service, thereby making it more difficult for people to travel and helping to clog the highways with automobiles...

...2. The literature on antitrust is voluminous, but on congressional intent regarding protecting competitors, see, for example, Hans Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy: Origination of an American Tradition (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1955...

...When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, about the meatpacking industry, his focus was on working conditions—the conditions under which the producers labored...

...These were producers' triumphs, not consumer victories, however much consumers may have benefited as the result of the contest for advantage among CONSUMER NATION...

...For farmers it also meant (different) tariff walls, special access to foreign workers during harvest season, government protection against the spread of agricultural pests and disease, subsidies for crop-improvement research, as well as direct subsidies to boost commodity prices and, indeed, to pad the incomes of certain farmers and agribusinesses...

...or onto a computer screen, sometimes freezing a word-processing session...

...BUT THE BRIEF enthusiasm for consumer interests soon dissipated...

...What about the Sherman Anti-Trust Act...

...Congress and the American people continued to make clear their overwhelming preference for producer interests over consumer interests...

...But the elements of the idea include the importance of consumer goods for recreation, for creature comforts, for self-esteem, for social standing, for the country's prosperity, and in general for Americans' access to affluence...

...Can one rent a DVD anymore without having to endure multiple ads for other films before being permitted to see the film rented...

...In 2005, for example, the agriculture department prohibited cattle ranchers from testing their own animals for Creutzfeldt-Jakob (mad cow) 60 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 disease, because such testing might give consumers information that could injure the industry...

...Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (1985) ; Lawrence Glickman, ed., Consumer Society in American History (1999...

...It would be much more accurate to speak of "consumerism" as a producer's target...

...Try the Medical Information Bureau...

...The Wall Street Journal remarked, "For most companies a finding from a federal judge that they were racketeers would be a stinging blow," but "their efforts to hide the risks of smoking are well known," and so there was no reason to expect that their already tarnished image would suffer any further...

...Of course, "All producers are also consumers...

...Consumer interests were deliberately excluded from policymaking, whether in the shaping of energy policy, conserving open space, wetlands, and wilderness areas, controlling climatechanging and toxic industrial and vehicular emissions, or restraining monopoly power among producer firms, especially in the media, energy, and financial sectors...

...If America has become truly "a consumer society," its politics and policies hardly reflect it...

...How are consumer interests served when personal telephone records are legally available for a price and for sale at a profit...

...Why...

...4 In 2006, government agencies withheld information for several days about an E. coli outbreak traceable to domestic spinach on the grounds that such information might "panic" consumers and injure producers...

...But it is the capacity in which people conceive of themselves that drives policy...

...In August 2006, a federal judge ruled that the cigarette companies charged with violating racketeering laws had systematically deceived the public for five decades about the dangers of tobacco...

...But who's complaining...

...could only order a change in the industry's future behavior...

...The state of Illinois lost a criminal case against the company because it was determined that the government's "risk/benefit" formula, designed to encourage "economic efficiency," protected producers from liability when the cost of minimizing the risks to human safety exceeded the anticipated social benefits...

...The same applies to the records kept by department stores, brokerage houses, banks, and insurance companies whose "privacy" notices explain how their clientele have in fact no privacy rights whatever...

...Consumers are themselves to blame, seeing themselves first as producers rather than consumers...

...Consumers of cell-phone DISSENT / Spring 2008 s 6 1 CONSUMER NATION...

...or stand anxiously by one of the four or five toilets provided onboard to serve four hundred passengers and try to imagine how lucky you are to live in "a consumer society...

...A producerfriendly appellate court earlier had also ruled that the government could not seek to recover from the industry the public's costs in treating Americans whose health suffered from the fraud perpetrated over the decades by the companies...

...The companies' executives knew all that time that the products that they aggressively sold to the public had toxic and potentially fatal ingredients, while they publicly lied (at one time, under oath before a congressional committee) about the safety of their products...

...Even today, many states require passenger trains to yield the right of way to freight trains, further discouraging rail travel by greatly lengthening intercity trips...

...There may be nothing wrong with the use of hormones or with gene-engineering for foods, but one might believe that consumers should have the right to know about them...

...The FDA refused to require pharmaceutical companies to make public the outcome of their own tests on their old and new products, although some of those secret tests turned up dangerous side effects...

...to stop the "trusts" from "denying the rights of the common man in business," as one congressman put it in 1900...

...More than eighty years ago, that old radical Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce when radio was new, declared...

...antitrust policy originated primarily in an effort to protect competitors rather than consumers...

...food marketers to properly label goods that contained ingredients that had undergone hormone or gene-altering treatment...

...For labor, it meant support for improving wages and working conditions, social insurance, immigration restrictions, protective tariffs to ensure jobs, and collective bargaining rights...

...RICHARD M. ABRAMS is a professor of the Graduate School in the Department of History at the University of California-Berkeley...

...Pro-producer measures during the administration of George the Second would reach what many people once considered to be unimaginable levels...

...or to deny a passenger the right to switch to another airline without further charges when various troubles on the booked airline lead to many hours of delay, and sometimes cause cancellation too late for a passenger to find a reasonable alternative mode of travel—to say nothing of the costs of missing a connecting flight...

...It took a series of scandals to bring consumer interests to the attention of American politics...

...But in fact they are not...

...The nation's representatives followed that up by rejecting proposals to elevate a Consumer Protection Administration to cabinet level, alongside the producer-promoting departments of Agriculture, Labor, and Commerce...

...Read the fine print...

...services come last when producers see profit opportunities...

...There was no recall...

...Nor do the rules seem consumer-friendly that allow overbooked airlines to bump passengers waiting to board...

...also, Marcia Angell, "Your Dangerous Drugstore," New York Review of Books, 8 June 06...

...or wedge yourself into a fifteen-by-eighteen-inch seat, where your neighbor's backrest protrudes within a foot of your chest...

...Only then did public policy transfer back to producers, at least partially, the external costs of production that for more than a century the society at large had absorbed in the form of ailments and injuries arising from hazardous product ingredients, hazardous working conditions, and polluted soil, air, and water...

...Inevitably, there arose scandals of cover-ups once individual tragedies came to light...

...THEN THERE are the judicial decisions that make it impossible to impose significant penalties on producers even after they are found guilty of having lied over decades about the dangers of their products...

...For a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a surge of national legislation designed by and for consumer interests...

...But, the judge said, she did not have the authority to order significant financial remedies...

...BUT THE PRIORITY of producer over consumer interests should not require revelations from the media...

...A consumer victory...

...Producer lobbying—and that includes farmers, union workers, processors, and manufacturers— continued to frustrate the efforts of consumer groups and even foreign governments to require U.S...

...Enter an airport and sit, sometimes for hours, with a thousand other consumers of airline services in a stifling waiting room with a twelve-foot ceiling...

...Timothy Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2005...

...Still another argues that it was consumer interests that "fueled liberal politics" from at least the beginning of the twentieth century.' Not everyone agrees on what is meant by the term...

...Nor are personal medical records exempted from the profiteering work of data miners...

...Even national public radio and television stations, partly supported by consumer subscriptions, now present several minutes of ads each hour, necessitated by cuts in congressional support...

...Just to mention a few others: Richard Wightman Fox & T.J...

...Jackson, eds., The Culture of Consumption (1983...

...The thalidomide disaster of 19611962 called attention to the FDA's poor servicing of consumers' interest in safe pharmaceuticals...

...And if it is at all possible to infer that public policy reflects public desires, then we must deduce that for all the centrality of consumer goods for the maintenance of a prosperous economy, for bolstering self-respect, for satisfying recreational desires, and for making claims to social standing, Americans still think of themselves first and above all as producers rather than as consumers...

...3. See, Amy Lynn Toro, "Standing Up for Listeners' Rights: A History of Public Participation at the Federal Communications Commission" (University of California-Berkeley doctoral dissertation, 2000...

...In the 1980s, despite a decades-longdelayed court ruling that the Federal Communications Commission had to permit consumer interests to present their views to the commisDISSENT / Spring 2008 n 59 CONSUMER NATION...

...The work of Ralph Nader early in the sixties projected a spotlight on corporate arrogance by exposing the attempt by General Motors to cover up the flawed design of the company's subcompact, Corvair, which had a lamentable tendency to flip over when making sharp turns...

...Ford management memoranda revealed that the company had coldly calculated that to recall its Pinto model, because the gasoline tank was dangerously situated, would be more expensive than to pay off the many victims of incendiary crashes (at an officially estimated cost of $200,000 per human life...

...How consumer friendly are those gas stations (once called service stations) that require consumers to pump their own gas or else pay an outsize premium per gallon...

...sion at hearings on the distribution of radio and television frequencies, the FCC, with the tacit approval of Congress, persisted in giving its attention solely to producer groups...

...Contemplate the design of most airplanes and airports and explain how high consumer/user interests rank in the society's priorities...

...As the deregulation movement got under way, new transgressions against consumers gained little attention...

...2 According to prevailing theory, a competitive multitude among producers not only checked the concentration of power in the country but, equally important, served to build individual character upon which the success of a self-governing people vitally depended...

...Because an industry-friendly appellate court had ruled earlier that sanctions against the law violators must be "forward looking," meaning the courts could not impose substantial fines for past crimes but essentially CONSUMER NATION...

...It is obvious to anyone with eyes to see and bodies to be comforted...

...Consumers' interest in a balanced, authoritative presentation of information—the crucial ingredient of "rational choice" in a market-oriented polity—was the distinct loser...

...One prize-winning historian has described the country as "A Consumer's Republic," suggesting that consumers own the place...

...In 2003, Bush proposed eliminating or reducing to insignificance the income tax as the main source of government revenues, substituting instead a tax on consumption...