Corporatocracy

In his column in the NY Times today, Mark Bittman writes again about the pathetic attempt we are making to address the problem of childhood obesity. (17% of children are obese with many others moving in that direction).

Corporate food and media giants joined together to resist even the voluntary, non-binding guidelines proposed by an interagency working group of the FTC, CDC, FDA and Dept of Agriculture.

Bittman tells some of the history of advertising speech and its relationship to the First Amendment.

He says the Supreme Court only recognized the First Amendment's protection of commercial speech in the 1970s, and that it came to the issue from the perspective of the consumers' right to unfettered information. Now, of course, we approach the matter from the perspective of the corporation's personhood and its First Amendment right to free speech, with the Citizens United decision as the paramount example.

Since 1980, the court has apparently applied another construct to test commercial speech. It is something called The Central Hudson Test, and one of its requirements is that commercial speech, to be protected, cannot be misleading. Bittman cites the authors of an article in the journal "Health Affairs" who point to research on cognitive development to argue that all advertising aimed at children under the age of 12, because of their level of cognitive development, is inherently misleading. Bittman points out parenthetically that this also applies to a lot of us adults, but that's another matter.

Did you know:
9 states already allow advertising on school buses, and 11 more, plus the Dist. of Columbia, are considering it this year.

Maine is the only state with a law prohibiting the marketing of junk food in schools...although a recent report says that 85% of the schools are non-compliant.

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 Wikipedia:
 Corporatocracy is an imprecise pejorative term describing a situation in which corporate bodies interact with sovereign power in an unhealthy alignment between business and political power.

Corporatocracy is viewed as anti-democratic or opposed to democracy or used to describe situations in which democracy has been manipulated negatively, sometimes resulting in a passive citizenry and subservient media.

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While I like the above definitions, clearly the biggest media are no more subservient than any other large corporations.  One of the principal opponents of the voluntary, non-binding guidelines mentioned above, according to Bittman, was Viacom. They hired a well-known constitutional scholar to make their case against the guidelines. In other words, they are subservient only in their reporting, not in their efforts to manipulate government policy.