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The miners were also employees of a "free-market capitalist" corporation which is undergoing an (state-run!) audit and is likely going into bankruptcy. The miners were rescued by a government-sponsored intervention, supervised by Codelco, the state's copper company, and by gifts from foreign governments. What's more, the rescue seems to have convinced Chile that Codelco should remain state-run and not be privatized.

Likewise, the expertise of Nasa-the American government agency?-is credited with keeping the miners healthy.

The free-market capitalist company who ran the mine, Empresa Minera San Esteban, was an out-of-control, anti-union, government-regulation defying safety nightmare who allowed its workers to become trapped as par for the course of its worker mistreatment.

Many of the mines in Chile are actually owned by foreign entities.

So, the entire rescue was overseen and funded by the government. The president of Chile-a rightish billionaire, by the way, who now plans to raise taxes for foreign companies operating in Chile-has fired leaders who ran the government's mining regulatory agency.

He also demanded a halt to mining in Chile (shades of the much-criticized U.S. government intervention after the Gulf Oil Spill!).

In short there has been no greater misreading of the actual politics of a situation ever.

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THE PRICE
NYT: "$800 Botox procedure" ... "the treatment is about $100"
WSJ: "At babyGap and GapKids, prices for skinny jeans range from $19.50 to $39.50."
OUTRAGE EDGE: At least your $39.50 skinny jeans can be handed down to other kids. The botulism? Not so much.

THE WAY LIFE IS DIFFERENT FOR KIDS
NYT: "'A lot of teenagers tease each other about things that as adults we may not consider as important,' Dr. Lam said, adding that he has performed cosmetic surgery on teenagers, including nose jobs and an operation to create creases in the eyelids of minors of Asian descent."
WSJ: "For skinny jeans, 'we talked for a long time about how much stretch, what should that feel like?' [Michelle DeMartini, senior vice president of Old Navy kids and baby design and merchandising] says. 'Adults might want to forgo comfort for fashion, but children will not.' "
OUTRAGE EDGE: The Times is victorious here by a mile, if only because of the way the doctor's statement can serve of a searing reminder of how horrible adolescence can be, thus allowing you to get mad at society all over again!

THE EXPERT OPINION
NYT: "Even the celebrity blogger Perez Hilton was apoplectic, pronouncing what Ms. Pempengco had done, 'SICK!!!'"
WSJ: "'I have pretty normal-sized kids,' says Nora Leibowitz, of Portland, who does not wear the style. 'That means they're not skinny in any way.' Ms. Leibowitz, a senior policy analyst for the state specializing in federal health reform, says comfort is her main goal in dressing her 5-year-old daughter and 1-year-old twins.
OUTRAGE EDGE: The Journal, because shut up Perez.

THE 'OH, HONEY' MOMENT
NYT: "Some teenagers mistakenly think that Botox can prevent wrinkles."
WSJ: "Children's clothing fills an important spot in the life cycle of some trends: After reaching young women, fads often swing downward to tots, and then back up to their parents. That's because many moms are more willing to be fashion-forward with their young children than with themselves, Ms. DeMartini says."
OUTRAGE EDGE: Yeesh. Call this a draw. Also, can everyone grow up? Thanks.

THE POTENTIALLY MITIGATING CULTURAL FACTOR
NYT: "At the heart of Ms. Pempengco's 'Botox apocalypse,' as one headline from the Philippines dubbed it, is 'a collision of cultural norms,' said Dr. Richard G. Glogau, a clinical professor of dermatology at the University of California at San Francisco. Reshaping the lower face with Botox is 'not an uncommon goal if you happen to live in Southeast Asia or China,' he said."
WSJ: "'People tend to put their kids first,' says Mark Breitbard, executive vice president of GapKids and babyGap. 'They'll pass on something for themselves to make sure their kids are still looked after.' "
OUTRAGE EDGE: Are you being culturally insensitive by sneering at this Botox-for-teens thing? That uncertainty will sure put a damper on your outrage!

THE KICKER
NYT: "'A 16-year-old in New York getting a rhinoplasty, it's a birthday present,' said Dr. Glogau, a paid researcher for the makers of Botox and Dysport. 'If you told teenagers in Southeast Asia that, they'd probably be aghast. It would never occur to them.' "
WSJ: "In the pipeline: Jeggings for babies."
OUTRAGE EDGE: WE MUST STOP THE JEGGING CRAZE BEFORE IT BECOMES INESCAPABLE. Uh, I mean, the WSJ!

THE WINNER
The WSJ came on strong at the end there, but this one has to go to the Times. Sorry, Journal. Next time, maybe you should try and find a target that's a little bit more injectable!

[Pic via]

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The once-exclusive preserves of custom foppery-known as ateliers, in the fashion industry's preferred Old World argot-are shuddering to a virtual standstill in the global recession. And what's worse, Hass notes, is that as couture's traditional American and European client base plummets, an army of New Money arrivistes are moving into the resulting vacuum. Behold the brutal social revolution: "The blue-blood ladies who lunched and hosted benefits" are no longer the principal engines of couture demand, Hass writes; that privilege now falls to "new-world billionaires-from the Middle East and Russia."

And "for this very monied class, it's less about the luxuriousness of wearing exquisite handmade-to-order creations," she proceeds to sniff, "and more about conspicuous consumption and making museums out of their closets." Meanwhile, the once-stalwart US doyennes of dosh who might have continued stoking couture demand in the West just opt for high-end ready-to-wear fare. "Couture isn't necessary, even to promote a brand," comes the chilling testimony of onetime couture prince Oscar De La Renta. "Customers are smart. They know a $10,000 wedding dress will look the same as a $1 million wedding dress. Maybe it will not be finished the same way inside, but who will know?"

Here in consensual reality, most readers will instantly recognize Hass' heavy-breathing alarmism as the very definition of a distinction without a difference-as though the Western "blue-blood ladies" of yore possessed fortunes that were magically quarantined from the resource plunder and crony capitalist intrigue that make up contemporary cash empires in Russia and the Middle East. Nevertheless, Hass labors heroically to puff up this shift in market demand as a Meaningful Sea Change of the first order-indeed, as the death of an art form. And certainly her sources are puffing along in chorus; the handful of design houses that keep a couture line going expend nearly as much collective effort on rhetorical pretense as they do on hand-stitched frills. Here, for instance, is onetime Bergdorf Goodman director-turned "luxury consultant" Robert Burke, marveling at the purity of the couture-purchasing heart, even as the new generation of swarthy philistines throngs to the ateliers: "You can't underestimate the undying dedication of a small group of people to an underlying art. Couture is more than a transaction for the people who make it and buy it; it's a piece of history."

Amazingly enough, the undyingly dedicated members of the global disaccumulation set share this same Homeric self-regard. "If I didn't put it up there with painting or sculpture, I don't know if I'd be able to do it," confides the Monaco-based couture gadabout Leona Kornej. (One wonders, by the way, how this sort of credulous quote-stringing might have played out if some hapless editor dispatched Hass to get to the bottom of "this whole Scientology craze.")

There are of course countless other problems with this kind of doe-eyed trend spotting. Just for starters, it makes no sense to bewail the new Russian and Middle Eastern couture hordes as an alien vanguard of "conspicuous consumption," when the man who coined that term, Thorstein Veblen, devoted an entire chapter in his Theory of the Leisure Class to explaining how couture-style fashion is intrinsically an exercise in conspicuous consumption, regardless of the ethnicity of its partisans. "Elegant dress serves its purpose of elegance not only in that it is expensive, but also because it is the insignia of leisure," the irascible, jargon-happy economist wrote. "It not only shows that the wearer is able to consume a relatively large value, but it also argues at the same time that he consumes without producing."

This goes double, he continued, for the frantic effort to produce elegance in female attire, since the frenzied tides of changing fashion stoke a perverse demand for ever more pointless and unappealing forms of novelty. By Veblen's account, the fashion system is a uniquely tortured effort to mimic the appearance of useful innovation beneath a broader mandate of "conspicuous waste" and "futile expenditure" that is "inherently ugly."

As Veblen theorizes it, the end result is less a scheme of improvement than, well, a pyramid scheme:

We find that in all innovations in dress, at the same time that the requirement of conspicuous waste prevents the purposefulness of these innovations from becoming anything more than a somewhat transparent pretence.... The ostensible usefulness of the fashionable details of dress, however, is always so transparent a make-believe, and their substantial futility presently forces itself so baldly upon our attention as to become unbearable, and then we must take refuge in a new style. But the new style must conform to the requirement of reputable wastefulness and futility. Its futility presently becomes as odious as that of its predecessor; and the only remedy which the law of waste allows is to seek relief in some new construction, equally futile and equally untenable. Hence the essential ugliness and the unceasing change of fashionable attire.

Jargon aside, it's hard to imagine a better summing-up of the recursive race to the aesthetic bottom that is so fastidiously swathed beneath the elaborate draperies of the atelier world. (Though do not get us started on Thomas Carlyle.) Once you've digested the real Veblen stuff, Hass's admiring descriptions of the actual content of the couture world takes on a strikingly different cast-as in her opening vignette, which asks its reader to savor the alleged disjunction between a vulgar scenemaking Russian actress and the refined display of "John Galliano's floor-sweeping dresses inspired by 19th-century riding costumes" that she's checking out in Paris's couture-week Dior show. In lieu of the piece's organizing fable of conspicuous-consumption declension, Hass might well have opted for Oscar Wilde's terser description of the horsey fox hunt: "the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable."

It's hard, in any event, to see how we're supposed to be mortified that the high-fashion world might forsake such aristophilic excess in favor of the Hollywood-themed repurposing of Versace's lapsed couture brand that Hass describes with faintly concealed horror: "Black-clad members of the [Versace] staff led visitors, including Kanye West's companion, Amber Rose, around the dozen or so dramatically lit mannequins as waiters served cappuccino and petit fours. At a low table at the end of one room, representatives of a French cellphone company demonstrated a joint venture with Versace, $5,000-plus phones adorned with marble inlays in some of the fashion line's signature shades, including aqua and pink." Cellphones at least meet some minimal standards of utility, which is a good deal more than one can say for the high-waisted plum-shaded gunnysack we're urged to admire on a model apparently sporting spike-heeled Timberland work boots in an accompanying photo of "Valentino's Garden of Eden-inspired" spring-summer couture extravaganza. (Presumably because Adam and Eve would have preferred their unashamed nakedness to this sort of by-the-numbers mock fashion severity.)

In another of the piece's CEO testimonials, Fabrizio Malverdi, who heads up Givenchy Couture, pulls a long face for Hass over the precious dying breed of gullible Western couture patrons. "These kinds of people you can't reach except for the couture," he observes with a rueful shake of the head. "And once you lose the ateliers, you lose this. You can't get it back, you can't recapture it." We can only hope.

Chris Lehmann is probably wearing some horrid common dungarees right now.

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Subject: A note from Arthur and Janet about the Wall Street Journal launch

On the Record . . . From Arthur + Janet

Vol. 4 2010: A New Competitor Arrives

Some folks just have a different learning curve.

After 120 years of existence, The Wall Street Journal this morning has finally decided to cover New York north of Wall Street. In the spirit of journalistic camaraderie, we welcome the Journal's new local section. The New York Times has been the paper of record in New York for nearly 160 years, and we know just how difficult it can be for start-ups to develop a following.

While there will be much sound and fury to this new endeavor, we thought we would take this opportunity to remind everyone about our position of strength in the New York marketplace. We will include a series of numbers that, to borrow a phrase often misused, are "fair and balanced."

Let us start with our audience in The New York Times. As our straightforward and accurate ad campaign points out (and if you get a chance, take a look at our dynamite new commercial: http://nytimes.whsites.net/nyt_centercut/index.html):

o On weekdays, The Times newspaper reaches over 900,000 affluent adults in the New York market (2009, Scarborough NYR2, Weekday). The median household income for a reader of the Sunday New York Times is over $118,000 (Fall 2009, MRI). In fact, The New York Times in print delivers an outstanding household net worth of almost $800 billion in the New York DMA alone (2009 Mendelsohn Affluent Head of Household Survey, HHI, $100,000+).

o The weekday Times reaches 827,000 business professionals, 1,149,255 art enthusiasts and 1,734,360 women in the New York market.

o Our audience is the most influential; The New York Times weekday edition ranks Number One of 129 U.S. print, cable and broadcast media, reaching 61% of all U.S. opinion readers (Erdos & Morgan 2008-2009 U.S. Opinion Leaders Study).

Of course, The New York Times remains the definitive advertising vehicle in the New York marketplace for reaching a diverse audience:

o The New York Times has a 49% print share among the three national newspapers (Kantar Media, full year through December 2009; excludes in-house ads). The others happen to be The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

o Across key measures for advertising effectiveness, NYTimes.com scores above industry averages – readers remember New York Times ads and are more likely to consider buying products advertised on the site (Dynamic Logic Market Norms, Q4 2008).

o We dominate the luxury advertising market with lush, brand-appropriate retail and editorial environments like T: The New York Times Style Magazine and the Style, Travel, Dining and Home sections.

Advertisers know that Times readers are significant consumers of, well, everything:

o New York Times readers spend $3.2 billion on apparel and accessories; $698 million on jewelry; and $373 million on fragrance, cosmetics and skin care products (Mendelsohn Affluent Head of Household Survey, HHI $100,000+).

o Times readers, who attend live entertainment events, go on average to four Broadway plays a year (2008-2009 Broadway League Demographics Study and NYT Customer Insight Group, January 2010).

o And book advertisers constantly tell us that nothing raises awareness like a New York Times review. Our readers purchased almost 56 million books in 2008 (MRI Spring 2009).

We could go on and on with favorable reader and advertising comparisons. We could also talk forever about our award-winning, agenda-changing journalism and how we set the standard in New York in so many different areas, from art, health and real estate to fashion, entertainment and politics.

The Wall Street Journal already knows our readers and advertisers are very loyal to The New York Times and it will soon discover the intensity of that dedication, as The Times is a great newspaper, a great Web site and a great advertising vehicle.

So as our welcome gift to New York, we pass on a few helpful hints to our Journal colleagues: the Dodgers now play in Los Angeles, Soho is the acronym for South of Houston, Fashion Week has moved to Lincoln Center, Idlewild is now JFK and Cats is no longer playing on Broadway.

If you happen to know anyone who works for the Journal's new section and he or she wants any additional information about the greater New York region, tell them to check out NYTimes.com's always very helpful archive.

Arthur and Janet

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