The question of why the American government has been so hesitant to push dictator Hosni Mubarak from power is typically answered in our media through the construct of "pragmatism." If Mubarak leaves, the talking point goes, there could be a new government in Egypt that could threaten "regional stability" with an Iranian-style revolution. This talking point is both bigoted and imperial: It assumes that all Muslims and revolutions are monolithically the same (despite Egypt being Sunni and Arab and Iran being Shiite and Persian), and it assumes that "regional stability" is automatically threatened if a nation exists in the Mideast that isn't under our thumb.
Nonetheless, the "pragmatism" talking point persists, and thus our government continues to deal with the dictator with kid gloves. But here's the thing: We're playing footsie with Mubarak not just because of the self-serving neoconservative construct of "pragmatism" -- but also because of cold, hard cash. Check this dispatch out from the Politico:
Two of the biggest lobbying firms representing the Egyptian government made more than $400,000 during the last six months of 2010 lobbying lawmakers, military officials and their staffs on behalf of the embattled government, according to newly filed disclosure reports. In the period ending just weeks before Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's dramatic announcement Tuesday, Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta's firm, the Podesta Group, brought in $279,000 and made about 30 contacts, largely with Senate staffers, according to the report.
It's boring saying again what I so often say (to the point of writing an entire 2006 book about it called Hostile Takeover), but it's worth repeating right now: Most issues that enter our political arena are influenced by our system of legalized corruption and bribery.
The Egyptian crisis, though far away and though about our own (supposed) democratic ideals, is no exception. Power brokers in both parties are making huge money backing a brutal dictatorship -- and the government officials those power brokers influence are consequently backing away from their own purported commitment to democracy. It's cause and effect in a simple political machine -- money goes in, behavior comes out. And as I argued in my book, money doesn't just buy legislative favors. It buys the very language and postures that confine our political debate within very narrow parameters -- in this case, it frames the Egyptian situation as a choice between "pragmatism" (i.e. backing the dictator) and potential terrorism (i.e. allowing Egyptians to democratically elect their own government). Indeed, look at how Toby Moffett, a Democratic congressman turned high-paid Mubarak lobbyist, put it:
"This is a very important strategic ally of the United States and it's about the country not flipping over into the hands of somebody who wants to make it anything other than a secular state," he said.
This "Stick with Mubarak or Get Terrorists" bumper sticker slogan is exactly the same thing you are hearing from so many high-profile American politicians these days as they attempt to pretend they support democracy, while cautioning against removing the despot. Those politicians are framing the debate in exactly the terms the lobbyists want them to. That artificial framing may be somewhat expensive to achieve, but it is quite effective. And while it's not complicated -- it is destructive.
Until he invited Dylan Ratigan on to muddy the waters, this segment on the Ed Show last night was a rare and extremely edifying look at the role that commodity speculation played in driving up food prices, and helping to spark the unrest that eventually toppled the regime in Tunisia, and appears to be on the verge of doing the same in Egypt. It's actually not that strong on the immediate specifics--its strength lies more in the fact that it tells the longer story--of how FDR set up a system that limited speculation, and how that system was taken apart, beginning in 1991, under the lead of Goldman Sachs. Take a look:
Instead of Dylan Ratigan's Ron Paul-style paranoia about quantitive easing, Ed's reporting would have been better supplemented by stressing how IMF neoliberal policies have helped contribute to this situation in at least three major ways. Starting around 1980, the IMF began conditioning loans on the adoption of "structural adjustment policies" (SAPs). Guiding principles involved in this strategy included:
(1) Cutting public subsidies for food, along with other basics, such as public education, thus making food prices more volatile.
(2) In addition to weakening farm sectors by reducing subsides, the IMF required weakening, if not complete abolition of protective tariffs, which had the effect of destroying most country's ability to feed themselves.
(3) The IMF's focus on loan repayment and "economic development" as the IMF defined it put a high priority on replacing food staples with cash crop production--crops which were, by their very nature, particularly vulnerable to price fluctuations, and thus to speculative manipulation.
Ironally, the reality is that countries like Tunisia and Egypt actually beat the bad odds of the IMF's neoliberal game in one particularly noteworthy way: Despite the incentive structure imposed by neoliberal policies, both countries managed to continue educating a significant fraction of their youth--educating them for jobs that the IMF's neoliberal prescriptions prevented those economies from ever creating in substantial numbers.
It was the enormous gap between youth's work capacity and the lack of suitable employment that created a chronic and widespread social problem that no neoliberal regime could possibly solve. This was the pervasive background settin g the stage for the acute problem of food price spikes. The latter was indeed the detonator. But the former was the bomb.
I am going to do a series of posts on this subject as there is a lot of ground to cover. I am going to quote Jessica Arons of The Center for American Progress first to just give you a taste of how far reaching and dangerous this bill is. Then we need to go back over history to see how we got to these terrible straits.
The number of HR #3 tells you a lot. This bill is very important to the Republican majority in the House, the Republican party. This bill unites all the elements of the right. There is no squabbling amongst them all on how important it is to restrict the rights of women to make decisions about their lives so they can be free and equal participants in our democracy. On that they all are singing on key.
What's more, H.R. 3 would redefine the concept of government funding far beyond the current common understanding. It does not simply prohibit the use of federal funds to directly pay for abortion. Instead, it would insert itself into every crevice of government activity and prohibit even private and nonfederal government funds from being spent on any activity related to the provision of abortion any time federal money is involved in funding or subsidizing other, nonabortion-related activities.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking would prohibit roads built with federal funds from passing by abortion clinics, drugs developed by the National Institutes of Health or approved by the Food and Drug Administration from being used at abortion clinics, or medical students with government loans from receiving abortion training-all because such uses could be viewed as "subsidizing" abortion with federal dollars.
Taken to its logical conclusion and of course, restraint is not what the radical right is noted for this bill theory could affect a large swathe of what we have always considered here in America to be private actions and private decisions.
They are not just doing this bill for show or to make a point. They will do what they need to do to make this bill pass. The House has a large Republican majority. Everyone one of them will vote for the bill, plus there are 10 anti choice Democratic sponsors. I have long said they will blitzkrieg this bill through the House. Then they will look for ways to scale the walls of the Democratically controlled Senate. Just like yesterday Mitch McConnell attached the repeal of the Affordable Care Act to the FAA authorization bill, there are many, many ways to bring this bill to the floor, even if the the Majority Leader would not on his own bring the bill to the floor.
Writing about Egypt & the worldwide neoliberal failure, I couldn't help but think about the devastating impact of neoliberal policies here at home, in particular regarding education. Jeff has written before about the Program for International Student Assessment and how its results have been misread and misrepresent, and his kind of detailed analysis is invaluable. But sometimes it helps to blunt, as well. In a recent email discussion my attention was drawn to an excellent blog post from mid-December, "PISA: It's Poverty Not Stupid" by Mel Riddle for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, which had some data analysis that made things blindingly clear--especially when I made a couple of charts.
First off, here's what happens when use data about free and reduced price meals as a proxy for poverty rates, and group schools accordingly:
Then here's what happens when you take that data and use it for international comparisons:
So, it turns that when you adjust for poverty rats, US schools pretty much kick ass. Whouda thunk it?
Finally, just look at poverty rates and PISA scores side-by-side:
"They are stealing our future" is a phrase I've heard repeatedly from the Egyptian protesters. It's the same accusation that America's low-income children could say with just as much justification.
On Sunday, Juan Cole wrote a very concise backgrounder to peaceful revolution going on in Egypt, "Egypt's Class Conflict". It's not only about class conflict, of course, but also about the shifts in political ideology and foundations of legitimacy from Nasser's time to today. As such, one of the most valuable things it does is to highlight the role played by failed neo-liberal policies--which are hardly unique to Egypt, of course. Last August, for example, in my diary "The neoliberal failure", I called attention to a five year old report from the Center on Economic Policy Research (CEPR) "Scorecard on Development: 25 Years of Diminished Progress" by Mark Weisbrot, Dean Baker and David Rosnick, a broad survey of results in over 100 developing countries. From its executive summary, here is what it found:
This paper looks at the available data on economic growth and various social indicators - including health outcomes and education - and compares the last 25 years (1980-2005)1 with the prior two decades (1960-1980). The paper finds that, contrary to popular belief, the past 25 years (1980-2005) have seen a sharply slower rate of economic growth and reduced progress on social indicators for the vast majority of low- and middle-income countries.
The picture of Egypt that Cole paints--powerful enough in its own right--is thus but one example of many. And the failure being underscored by the unfolding revolution is likewise but one example among many.
As hundreds of thousands (then, now millions) had ignored government-called curfews, that was a clear sign the government had lost authority, Cole noted, then wrote:
Authority is rooted in legitimacy. Leaders are acknowledged because the people agree that there is some legitimate basis for their authority and power. In democratic countries, that legitimacy comes from the ballot box. In Egypt, it derived 1952-1970 from the leading role of the Egyptian military and security forces in freeing Egypt from Western hegemony. That struggle included grappling with Britain to gain control over the Suez Canal (originally built by the Egyptian government and opened in 1869, but bought for a song by the British in 1875 when sharp Western banking practices brought the indebted Egyptian government to the brink of bankruptcy). It also involved fending off aggressive Israeli attempts to occupy the Sinai Peninsula and to assert Israeli interests in the Suez Canal. Revolutionary Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (d. 1970) conducted extensive land reform, breaking up the huge Central America-style haciendas and creating a rural middle class. Leonard Binder argued in the late 1960s that that rural middle class was the backbone of the regime. Abdul Nasser's state-led industrialization also created a new class of urban contractors who benefited from the building works commissioned by the government.
This was the social democratic foundations of the modern Egyptian state's legitimacy. And just as the Democratic Party in America is living off of its social democratic past, so, too, the Egyptian regime, which has abandoned that past with even more abandon:
From 1970, Anwar El Sadat took Egyptian in a new direction, opening up the economy and openly siding with the new multi-millionaire contracting class. It in turn was eager for European and American investment. Tired of the fruitless Arab-Israeli wars, the Egyptian public was largely supportive of Sadat's 1978 peace deal with Israel, which ended the cycle of wars with that country and opened the way for the building up of the Egyptian tourist industy and Western investment in it, as well as American and European aid. Egypt was moving to the Right.
But whereas Abdel Nasser's socialist policies had led to a doubling of the average real wage in Egypt 1960-1970, from 1970 to 2000 there was no real development in the country. Part of the problem was demographic. If the population grows 3 percent a year and the economy grows 3 percent a year, the per capita increase is zero. Since about 1850, Egypt and most other Middle Eastern countries have been having a (mysterious) population boom. The ever-increasing population also increasingly crowded into the cities, which typically offer high wages than rural work does, even in the marginal economy (e.g. selling matches). Nearly half the country now lives in cities, and even many villages have become 'suburbs' of vast metropolises.
So the rural middle class, while still important, is no longer such a weighty support for the regime. A successful government would need to have the ever-increasing numbers of city people on its side. But there, the Neoliberal policies pressed on Hosni Mubarak by the US since 1981 were unhelpful. Egyptian cities suffer from high unemployment and relatively high inflation. The urban sector has thrown up a few multi-millionaires, but many laborers fell left behind. The enormous number of high school and college graduates produced by the system can seldom find employment suited to their skills, and many cannot get jobs at all. Urban Egypt has rich and poor but only a small "middle class." The state carefully tries to control labor unions, who could seldom act independently.
The state was thus increasingly seen to be a state for the few. Its old base in the rural middle classes was rapidly declining as young people moved to the cities. It was doing little for the urban working and middle classes. An ostentatious state business class emerged, deeply dependent on government contracts and state good will, and meeting in the fancy tourist hotels. But the masses of high school and college graduates reduced to driving taxis or selling rugs (if they could even get those gigs) were not benefiting from the on-paper growth rates of the past decade.
From the CEPR paper, here is how economic development has stagnated worldwide under neoliberal policies:
The developing world is full of Egypts, ready to explode.
Listening to Mubarak's speech, followed by Obama's yesterday, you might almost think we are coming close to a peaceful resolution in Egypt--and I sincerely hope that we are. But at the same time, there are ominous signs that something very different may be afoot, as explained by Rachel Maddow & her guest, Democracy Now! senior producer Sharif Abdel Kouddous, discussing signs that Mubarak is trying to cast the demonstrators as lawless thugs, even while he continues to release his own gangs of genuinely lawless thugs to try to cause havoc. These are not the actions of a man looking for reconciliation, much less a graceful and dignified exit. They are the actions of a cornered wild beast. They represent Mubarak's Sarah Palinification. Except that he actually makes her seem popular by comparison.
Here's the transcript of how the following clip begins:
Translator: duties to protect and save the citizens in absolute dignity and honor, rights freedoms and dignity. i also call demand and controlled powers to immediately take the necessary procedures to continue to identify and arrest those who perpetrated the security mayhem and the chaos egypt has seen, looters, arsonists and those who intimidated the unsuspected citizens.
Maddow: Mr. Mubarak calling protesters a mob of criminals. That's what the media has been doing as well. It's to turn people away from the protests, thereby making them pine for the iron fist, As wielded by old Uncle Hosni. It's one thing to play for propaganda purposes. It's another thing altogether to ferment the violence yourself to blame it on the protesters.
Indeed:
This turn of events can hardly be considered surprosing. For over 30 years we've pretended that there's no contradiction--either in Egypt or anywhere else in the Arab world world--between our pretense of standing for democracy, modernity and civilization on the one hand, and the brute reality of our support for all manner of dictatorial regimes. We've pretended as well that there can be a stable peace in the region based on this sort of deeply hypocritical and oppressive arrangement, rather than on a fair and equitable regional peace treaty supported by the vast majority of the people in the region.
Sooner or later, the clever hopes expire, as Auden put it. That time has now come for us in the Middle East. And there is no sign that we are the least bit prepared for it. The Egyptian people may be facing a difficult test in the days and weeks ahead. But they've shown remarkable courage, steadfastness, solidarity and resolve. We, on the other hand, have a leadership class of vipers representing us.
It's not just Mubarak whose dark underbelly is starting to show.
[Update 9:24 AM EST]: Threatened confrintation from government thugs is growing increasingly more serious, according to Sharif Abdel Kouddous. From his Twitter feed at Democracy Now!:
sharifkouddous This is getting more and more heated. No real violence yet but things are very tense 38 minutes ago · reply 1 new tweet
sharifkouddous I am in Tahrir. Pro Mubarak protesters have been allowed to enter. The two crowds are facing off against each other. Much shouting and p ... 44 minutes ago · reply more than 1 new tweet
It comes down to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court being, in essence, a movement conservative Star Chamber.
In that piece, I quoted the EFF at the time saying of the FISC that it is "the most conservative and secretive federal court in the nation."
Unless or until Congress fixes this nonsense of letting the Chief Justice unilaterally pick the FISC at the very least we can all remember that everyone on it from this point on was personally picked by one of the most extremely conservative Justices since the dawn of political science measuring such things. Anyone picked by Roberts for such a job can be presumed to be a movement conservative activist.
If conservatives are looking to make America completely ungovernable, this sort of thing is a pretty good way to go about it. Pass even the most modestly liberal law and rest assured there's a crew of right wing ideologues with robes to strike it down and declare their rulings no-precendent freebies.
In my previous diary, "Still being overlooked: The GOP housing con", I quoted at length from a July 2007 post by historian Rick Perlstein, "The Foreclosing of America (Part 1)", in which he described some of the motivations and plans the Republicans had to boost home ownership in order to build a political majority. This was the thinking behind their actions that helped bring about the financial collapse.
But already when he was writing that post, the plan was coming apart at the seams. He wrote three more parts to his series, and the last one, "The Foreclosing of America (4): Vicious And Virtuous Circles" first recalled how Democrats handled the last such foreclosure crisis, which took place during the Great Depression. This Perlstein cited as a "virtuous circle", he then summarized what the Republicans had done to try to juice homeownership on the cheap--and the subsequent collapse (which the mainstream national media was still ignoring)--as well as what would come next, an example of a "vicious circle". And he concluded by explaining what Democrats could do instead--another "virtuous circle." Of course that's not happened. Democrats ignored the obvious strength of repeating their past success. But it didn't have to be. Here's how he explained it. First, the original virtuous circle, begun by FDR, which built the greatest middle class the world have ever seen:
America's last great foreclosure crisis, of course, was the Great Depression. 273,000 home mortgages were foreclosed in 1932, four times the normal rate, and the rate doubled again early in 1933. Writes Roosevelt biographer Jean Edward Smith, "House price plummeted, and the entire real estate market was threatened with collapse."
George W. Bush, of course, has nothing to say about the conditions today that are moving us in that direction-that would bust his Ownership Society mojo. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on the other hand, enjoyed greater moral clarity. He immediately got through legislation establishing a Home Owners' Loan Corporation. One thing it did was provide federal money for repairs-something municipalities (remember the mayor of Shaker Heights sending out town workers to board up windows and whack down overgrown lawns) now have to do on their own. Those unfortunates who live in more cash-strapped municipalities have to watch their foreclosed neighbors' former properties rot, even as, simultaneously, the value of their own properties decline for the haunted houses in their midst.
That is why FDR said protecting homeowners from "inequitable enforced liquidation at a time of general distress is a proper concern of the government." The situation, now as then, cried out for collective action coordinated by government, because it is a collective problem-protecting home values: a virtuous circle, helping everyone.
The HOLC also refinanced mortgages, mandating unprecedentedly low interest rates, and also unprecedentedly long repayment schedules. That set into motion a policy cascade that soon far transcended merely the needs of those in financial hardship and spread to the entire middle class-indeed, helped build the middle class.
The Federal Housing Administration was established in 1934 to insure mortgages, mandated at favorable terms; in 1938 the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) was established to create a secondary market for mortgage-a radically different secondary market than the one created by Wall Street investment banks in the 1990s because it served both the interests of creditors (by freeing up liquidity for loans) and borrowers (because their creditors required less liquidity from them upfront in order to ensure a profit). Then, following World War II, the Veterans Administration offered even more favorable terms for the men who had just defeated fascism.
Previous to this decades-long process, the typical mortgage required a down payment of half the home's value and came due in 10 years; after, a mortgage involved a down payment of 10 percent, was financed at 4 percent spread out over 30 years-and mortgage payments were tax deductible. The homeownership rate was 40 percent before the war; by 1965, it was almost 65 percent. The salubrious housing policy environment had helped boost consumer spending; the upshot was the greatest sustained economic boom in the history of mankind, and the largest middle class the world has ever known.
The American Dream was largely an invention of enlightened government. A virtuous circle, helping everyone.
In contrast, Republicans under George Bush offered only a pittance of actual help:
Branding, in the advertising world, is imbuing a company or product with positive associations inside the consumer's mind. Marlboro, for example, has so successfully associated cowboys and the wild frontier with their product (cigarettes), that some of their ads don't even mention the name "Marlboro." They don't need to, because the product comes to mind automatically at the sight of the now-famous cowboy image.
In the late 1990s Rainforest Action Network (RAN) carried out some very effective negative branding campaigns, which many powerful people took notice of. RAN realized that a positive brand is one of the most important assets of a corporation. A tarnished brand can repel consumers and scare away investors, as Home Depot learned the hard way. RAN effectively painted Home Depot as a reckless destroyer of old growth forests and rainforests, until the company committed to discontinue using old growth forests for lumber. (A few other companies followed, like dominoes, just at the threat of a possible RAN campaign against their brand name.)
It was around then that I got to thinking about the brands of the social justice organizations I worked with. A brand is essentially the memories and associations that tend to come to mind in the popular imagination at the mention of your name. In this sense, individuals can even have "brands" (though we usually call this a reputation). What associations were coming to mind at the mention of different social change organizations? What about at the mention of broader labels such as activism, environmentalism, feminism, socialism, the peace movement, etc.? If a tarnished brand hurt a corporation's ability to move product or attract investors, perhaps our tarnished brands were part of the reason so many social change groups were having such a difficult time attracting more participants.
So, let's say you're a small business owner who makes very delicious sandwiches. However, despite the deliciousness of your sandwich, your business is in a remote part of town, your storefront display is abysmal, the aesthetic on the inside is kind of weird, and your waitstaff and clerks aren't very good at interacting with customers. Are you likely to sell a lot of sandwiches, just because you have a good product? And, to extend the metaphor, it turns out that your sandwiches are not delicious after all. You and a few of your friends like those sandwiches a whole lot, but it turns out to be an acquired taste. It's as if you sell broccoli sandwiches, which you know and believe to be good for everyone's health and well-being, but why doesn't anyone come to your store?!?? MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE EVERYONE BUT YOU IS BEING BRAINWASHED!?!! THEY'RE ALL SHEEPLE!!
I've written before about the GOP's politicization of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, most recently just yesterday in "As above, so below" where I touched on Darryl Issa's threatened investigation of the committee. I've talked before about some of the actual causes of the financial crises, all the way down to the failures of modern economic theory to have a sound foundation for understanding what they're getting themselves into. But I've paid far too little attention to something much more petty and mundane: The GOP's own role in actively creating the crisis, not just to support its get-rich-quick friends in the financial industry, but to build it's own political brand.
As is so often the case, Republican attempts to pin the blame on Democrats are a projection of their own guilty consciences. But in this case, it's such a doozy that most of us just can't seem to get our minds around it--even though no one less than historian Rick Perlstein put his finger on it all the way back in July 2007, as the bubble was already starting to burst, in "The Foreclosing of America (Part 1)". Here's what he had to say about the blatantly open political strategy the GOP had to use increased homeownership to build their ever-elusive "permanent Republican majority":
First, a demonstration of the sheer size of the political bet the Republicans placed on exhorting as many Americans as possible to own their own homes. Exhibit A: the March, 2005 special issue on the "Ownership Society" of the magazine of the American Enterprise Institute, one of the conservative movement's flagship think tanks. There are, American Enterprise lead author James Glassman wrote, three aims of Bush's dreamed-of Ownership Society: to "reform" Social Security, to "boost the economy by cutting taxes on dividends," and "to make home buying easier."
As we've said before, there's really no such thing as a conservative think tank. They only have propaganda and political strategy shops. Why did conservatives want every American to have, instead of a car in every garage and a chicken in every pot - or, say, health insurance for every child - a monthly mortgage bill in every mailbox? Reading American Enterprise, Not for reasons of national well-being. It was for the Republican's political well-being.
Here's Grover Norquist:
"Bush's vision also calls for efforts to increase home ownership. Here's a hint of what that could mean: in House Speaker Dennis Haster's Congressional district in Illinois, 75-80 percent of voters own their own homes. In Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi's district in San Francisco, the number is 35 percent.... A transition of great political importance is under way. Fifty years from now the move to an Ownership Society will be recognized as a change to America's political landscape as dramatic as the move from farms to factories."
"Bush wants more ownership because he wants to change the shape of America. He understands that people who own stocks and real estate--who possess wealth of their own--have a deeper commitment to their community, a more profound sense of family obligation and personal responsibility, a stronger identification with the national fortunes, and a personal interest in our capitalist economy. (They also have a greater propensity to vote Republican.)...
The only author to raise any sort of caveat - that home prices are skyrocketing out of control - is the neoconservative geographer Joel Kotkin. He blamed, you guessed it, liberals: "Environmental regulations and other growth-constraining factors have inflated housing prices."
As we'll see in the next post, that's absurd. But beyond that, it's rhapsodies all the way around - and especially homeownership's bounties for Republican electoral fortunes: "The places with the higehst levels of homeownership generally vote Republican.... "Our analysis shows that this connection between homeownership and voting Republican holds broadly at every level--from large regions all the way down to metro areas....more and more of the places offering new homes to young families following their dreams are in the heart of Red America." Not wanting to own your own home is revealed as downright European; Kotkin singles out Prague's homeownership rate at "about 12 percent." No Republicans there! He concludes by calling cities like Fresno, Orlando, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Atlanta "Our New Cities of Aspiration"--"the de facto headquarters of the American dream."
Needless to say, those "New Cities of Aspiration" became some of the most devastated places in America as the whole con unravelled. The GOP has far more to answer for than just ideological blindness in enabling this catastrophe. As Perlstein shows, there was a deliberate political plot. And it's on us if we don't do our damnedest to push this hidden history into the the spotlight as Republicans attempt once again to push all the blame onto Democrats, liberals and people of color.
STATE BLOGS
Branding, in the advertising world, is imbuing a company or product with positive associations inside the consumer's mind. Marlboro, for example, has so successfully associated cowboys and the wild frontier with their product (cigarettes), that some of their ads don't even mention the name "Marlboro." They don't need to, because the product comes to mind automatically at the sight of the now-famous cowboy image.
