Marketers are targeting kids at disturbingly young ages, compromising the nation’s health, creativity and democracy. An interview with Susan Linn.

Everything has changed, and changed gradually on such a scale that we are paying an enormous price — in kids’ physical, mental and emotional health, and in the health of our families and our democracy.

From 1992 to 1997, the amount of money spent on marketing to children doubled, from $6.2 to $12.7 billion. Today they are spending over $15 billion. Children influence purchases totaling over $600 billion a year. Children spend almost 40 hours a week outside of school consuming media, most of which is commercially driven. The average child sees about 40,000 commercials each on television alone. 65 percent of children 8-18 have a television in their bedroom.

Earlier this year 11 companies agreed to voluntarily scale back their marketing to children in an effort to slow down the rise in obesity.

Susan Linn, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, weighs in on this effort and what’s at stake. Linn is the Associate Director of the Media Center at Judge Baker Children’s Center and a co-founder of the coalition Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. An award winning ventriloquist, Dr. Linn created video based classroom materials Different and the Same: Helping Children Identify and Prevent Prejudice (with the producers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood). In the face of our media-saturated commercialized culture, she encourages make-believe play. She is the author of Consuming Kids.

Continue reading “Born to Shop: How Marketers Brainwash Babies”

Labor economist Robert Reich argues Americans are split between wanting low prices and opposing the corporate behaviors that make them possible.

Feeling schizophrenic, yet?

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich believes we are all suffering from this split agenda — as consumers we want low prices, while as citizens we may oppose corporate behaviors that make them possible. And he believes — at least on a national scale — our citizen selves are losing.

Shoppers are elbowing citizens out of the public arena. The last three decades have seen the emergence of a supercharged capitalism fueled by open markets and cutthroat competitiveness. According to Reich, “supercapitalism” is overwhelming government with lobbyists and money, while citizens are dazzled by the promise of previously unimaginable riches and consumer choices.

In his new book, Supercapitalism, Reich tackles the big question: Can democracy survive in this environment?

Professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, Reich served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He is co-founding editor of the American Prospect, and his weekly commentaries on public radio’s “Marketplace” are heard by nearly 5 million people. He is the author of eleven books, including The Work of Nations, The Future of Success and his latest, Supercapitalism.

Continue reading “Consumer-Driven Culture Is Killing Our Democracy”

Closer to home, as Westen points out, the Republicans led by Karl Rove consistently beat the Democrats at playing to the electorate’s emotions. All logic points to Republican losses in ’08. But logic doesn’t vote — and logic doesn’t win elections. Will the Democrats once more snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, or can they finally learn the crucial lesson that hearts lead minds? Drew Westen weighs in.

Drew Westen received his B.A. at Harvard, an M.A. in social and political thought at the University of Sussex (England) and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Michigan. For several years he was chief psychologist at Cambridge Hospital and associate professor at Harvard Medical School. He is a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered and teaches at Emory University.

Continue reading “Emotion Trumps Logic in the Voting Booth”

Speakers this year include author, Alice Walker, inventor and entrepreneur; Jay Harmon, community arts pioneer; Judy Baca, environmental justice leader; Van Jones, Whole Earth Catalog founder; Stewart Brand; and Native American activist Winbona LaDuke.

In addition to founding and co-directing Bioneers, Kenny Ausubel is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, and social entrepreneur specializing in health and the environment. He co-founded Seeds of Change, a biodiversity organic seed company. He authored the books Seeds of Change, Restoring the Earth and When Healing Becomes a Crime; edited the first two titles in the Bioneers book series Ecological Medicine and Nature’s Operating Instructions; and was a key advisor for the Leonardo DiCaprio documentary The 11th Hour.

Continue reading “Bioneers: Groundbreaking Ways to Repair the Earth”

The United States is the only country in the developed world that does not guarantee access to medical care as a right of citizenship. As outrageous as that fact is, why is it so? What does it mean in the lives of individual Americans and their families? And what can we do about it?

Like Michael Moore’s critically and commercially successful documentary, SiCKO, Jonathan Cohn’s new book, SICK probes the larger problems by focusing on the stories of individuals — most of them working members of the middle class — who are cruelly let down by our failing system.

Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor at The New Republic, where he has been since 1997. Prior to that, Jonathan worked for six years at The American Prospect, where he remains a contributing editor. A senior fellow at Demos, Cohn has also written for many other publications, and is the author of SICK: The Untold Story Of America’s Health Care Crisis — And The People Who Pay The Price.

Continue reading “How Do We Cure a Sick Health Care System?”