Hightower Lowdown
"Loyalty to country, always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it." -- Mark Twain
In This Issue
but it's not guys in black helicopters, it's GLOBAL CORPORATIONS
December's Lowdown
The many REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL after Election Day 2008
After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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Just fake it
The corporatizaton of sports marches on. Corporations have long sponsored competitions- from the "Anderson Consulting World Championship of Golf" to football's venerable "Weed Whacker Bowl." They also sponsor both college and pro teams, plaster their logos on stadiums and players alike, and they even own the teams outright—like Disney's Anaheim Mighty Ducks of the NHL, and its Aneheim Angels baseball team.
Now, it seems they've reached the last frontier: buying the fans.
At the Australian Open in January, there was a lot of talk about a few unusually enthusiastic tennis fans in the stands. Whenever Andre Agassi took the court these young men would put on Nike shirts and yell their lungs out When Mary Pierce played, they changed into blonde wigs and little yellow dresses.The other spectators and the cameras kept turning to these colorful fans... fun for all! But the real winner was the Nike Corporation: game, set and match.
The stunt was Nike's latest innovation in marketing: hiring fake fans.