Europe turns 100% communist and seizes private property/businesses valued at 100,000 euro or higher **
By Charles S. Kramer
On June 17, 2014, the European Union passed a unanimous resolution in which it accepted a Socialist/Communist Platform that called for all European countries to dissolve private ownership of property or businesses valued over 100,000 Euro, and each individual country ratified and agreed to that resolution within 48 hours. ***Be advised, however, that the truth of the foregoing statement may be different than what the statement says, ownership of property will not actually be affected, there has been no real change in European law, and there is a strong likelihood that your investigation will determine this to be a totally inaccurate and fictitious statement.
Confused? Then you obviously don’t work for the Federal Communications Commission or any of the state governments that run the states of our nation. Every day our nation’s radio stations and television stations are cluttered with commercials which loudly say one thing, only to have a small printed disclaimer, or a professional auctioneer speed talker, end the ad by saying nothing you’ve just heard is true and your results will be different. Somehow, we think that is not fraud. Somehow our courts rule this is not confusing or intended to mislead. In Europe, such shenanigans are not tolerated, which is why a recent study found that literally 74% of major network advertising from the United States would be illegal if run in Europe.
The American advertisement which should have been the last straw for our regulators, lawmakers, and jurists, and thus the motivating factor for the institution of wholesale change in our country, is a national ad. I’m not sure when it began airing elsewhere, but it hit the airwaves in my home town about three months ago. It is an advertisement for DirecTV. The ad is all about how a competing system’s DVR forces you to record all prime time television shows for all major networks, thus using up most of the DVR storage room, and preventing you from recording the shows you really want. That is the entire content of the advertisement—except of course for the small printed statement that appears in hard to read white lettering at the bottom of the screen on the last ten seconds of the ad that lettering notifies the viewer, if they can read it before it disappears from the screen, that the competing company doesn’t really hijack your DVR or prevent you from recording whatever you want because the autorecord feature of the competing system which is the entire focus of the advertisement can be easily turned off.
In short, the entire premise of the ad is based on an outright lie. The ad says you should choose DirecTV over the competitor for the simple reason that DirecTV allows you to record what you want, whereas the competitor does not—but then admits that the competing machine also allows you to choose what to record. SO, WHY IS THIS ALLOWED? I really have no good answer. The practice, although allowed by the FCC and several court cases, is actually in direct violation of the regulatory language and the elements of common law fraud. Yet, the practice persists.
Every day people shake their heads at the promises broken by politicians. We wonder how someone can say one thing while running for office, and then never follow through when elected. Every day parents look at each other and wonder where their kids learned to lie with impunity and lack of any sense that to do so is wrong, and wonder why their kids are like this.
The answer is simple. Our legal system not only allows our biggest companies to lie, it allows them to tell the world that to do so is okay. It is a part of our culture. It is a part of our fabric. It is our heritage, our legacy and unless we change it, our destiny. It is “good television,” apparently.
If we want to start to save the moral fabric of our nation, and to build a country where you can rely on what someone tells you more often than not, we must start by learning from our European brothers and start requiring our advertisers to tell the truth, and to avoid intentionally contradictory messages. It doesn’t sound like rocket science, but apparently it’s harder than it sounds.
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Charles Kramer is a principal of the St Louis based firm Riezman Berger; PC under analysis is a column of the Levison Group. Comments may be sent c/o this paper or direct to the Levison group at comments@levisongroup.com.
©2014 Under Analysis LC
