The corporate tap dance (Part 1)

Tommy Flanagan: Hello, my name is Tommy Flanagan, and I'm a member of Pathological Liars Anonymous. In fact.. I'm the president of the organization!

I didn't always lie. No, when I was a kid, I told the truth. But then one day, I got caught stealing money out of my mother's purse. I lied. I told her it was homework - that my teacher told me to do it. And she got fired! Yeah, that's what happened!

After that, lying was easy for me. I lied about my age and joined the army. I was thirteen at the time. Yeah.. I went to Vietnam, and I was injured catching a mortar shell in my teeth. And they made me a three-star general! And then I got a job in journalism, writing for the National Enquire.. er, Geographic! Yeah.. I was making twenty thousand a ye.. month! In fact, I won the Pulitzer Prize that year! Yeah, that's the ticket.

And then my cousin died - Joe Louis - and I took it hard. Maybe too hard - I tried to kill myself. Yeahh.. I did kill myself! Sure! I was medically dead for a week and a half! It was a woman that brought me out of it - Indira Gandhi! Yeah, right.. And she told me about Pathological Liars Anonymous.

Oh, you'd be surprised how many famous people belong. In fact.. at one of the meetings I met my wife - Morgan Fairchild! Yes, I'm a change man now, and all because of Pathological Liars Anonymous. Why, I - I even have my picture on the cover of Newsweek magazine. Yeah. Every day! Yeah.. that's the ticket! Yeah, you betcha! [Saturday Night Live, 1985]

Many of us remember this Jon Lovitz character, the one who couldn't stop lying and would ratchet up the lies to preposterous levels.

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I wrote last week about an interview Charlie Rose conducted on May 23 with Fred Smith, founder of Federal Express. In addition to the two men's enthusiasm for a Tom Friedman misquote, there was an exchange about our educational system that, for any sentient being living in the U.S. today, must have seemed pretty familiar.

The assertions were made (and I confess, I don't recall if these contentions were made by Smith or by Rose; by this time Charlie was in his feeding-the-answer mode) that we have a completely terrible primary and secondary educational system, but our colleges and universities are the envy of the world. We hear this sort of thing all the time, though rarely so starkly juxtaposed, so much that we rarely stop to question it.

How much sense does this make? Business leaders, politicians, media people, all tell us over and over that our high schools turn out woefully underprepared students (we need only refer to our old friend Randall Stephenson), a group of stumblebums characterized for their inability to do the work necessary to remain competitive in the 21st century. If only we taxpayers would pony up more money to "fix" the schools, we'd be OK, but we won't, so....

This concern happened to coincide with the rise in the capacity of companies to send jobs overseas, as shipping became cheaper and universal, and communications technology allowed information to move freely. Many of the jobs that previously had to be done in this country, especially in manufacturing, now could be done anywhere for a fraction of the cost.

And PR-conscious corporations had a problem: How do we move the jobs and garner the massive profits without appearing to be unconcerned about America? Easy, we embark on a massive campaign to convince Americans that their schools are so bad that the poor companies, thrust into a cut-throat marketplace, must look elsewhere for help (it was just a happy coincidence that Chinese workers would take 1-2% of the salary).

Now, I'm not naive, I know that our elementary and high schools could be better, a lot better. I'm as critical of them as anyone, I decry their emphasis on trivial matters (does a high school absolutely need a separate swimming and diving pool?) and inability to give a truly equal education to everyone. But this was true years ago when I was in school, I'm not convinced it's that much worse today. What I am convinced of is that the CEO who rails against school inadequacy is not doing so out of concern for future American competitiveness.

But now there's a problem. Executives are willing to offshore manufacturing, and they now can go further and move other specialized fields such as computer programming. All that needs to be done there is to convince the public that there aren't enough Americans to do those intricately technical jobs, and off they go. (It does require a certain amount of suppression of inconvenient facts when we start to move accounting and legal jobs, but we can just sweep that away.)

However, the executives still come from American colleges. How do they justify our own existence if they come from lousy schools? They can't. So there has to be the belief that American university education is the best in the world, the envy of the world. Somehow these captains of industry transcended their awful high schools, magic happened, and their colleges imbued them with the brilliance they now most surely possess. (Yeah, that's the ticket!)

That this makes little sense is logic that falters in the swell of enthusiasm for this idea. As long as no one asks the obvious questions, conventional wisdom remains intact.

More recently, another problem has arisen to challenge the corporate flacks. Business wants to hire foreign workers on the vast array of visas that we offer (I defer to Job Destruction Newsletter for details on H-1Bs, L-1s, OPTs). These workers tend to be graduates of American colleges; now, Big Biz has to explain why they prefer hiring these young people to the young people who are already citizens (and whose ancestors built the infrastructure that facilitates current-day profits).

Since terms like "indentured servitude" are unpopular, the challenge was on. But the answer was simple. Despite their graduation from the world-renowned American college system, American young people are lazy, committed more to YouTube and Facebook than to their jobs - they feel entitled and are not willing to work hard.

Of course, this is in contrast to the young people from other lands who came to study in our (tax-supported) schools and come out fired up to give their brains and lives to the glory of American capitalism. They work harder, work smarter, and are free from the distractions that plague pampered American kids. (Yeah, that's the ticket!)

And so, on goes the dance. Every "fact" raised by the executives and PR-ers just happens to coincide with their desire to make more money, to plow more corporate profits into vacation homes and airplanes. Anything that contradicts the narrative is countered by a buck-and-wing. Tomorrow I'll predict the next "truth" that will be presented to us as received wisdom.