You could see it coming.
There’s a growing PR counter-attack on French professor Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” which says the chasm between the one-percent and the rest of all is approaching the “glory days” of the French autocracy before the country’s Revolution.
The shelf-sagging 696-page treatise, the most popular book only read cover-to-cover by a handful, is currently No. 6 on Amazon’s Top 100 list.
The Financial Times’ Chris Giles kicked off the anti-Piketty salvo May 23, scoffing the “rock-star French economist” for simply getting his sums wrong.
Surprise, surprise, The FT, a leading proponent of austerity measures that have savaged Europe, “cleaned up and simplified” Piketty’s numbers and found that there’s “no tendency towards rising wealth inequality” on the Continent since 1970. It chided the author for cherry-picking data or dreaming up numbers whole cloth. Next case.
Forbes, the so-called “Capitalist Tool,” joined the fun today as contributor Scott Winship blogged that the book is “irresponsibly speculative, that his inequality estimates sometimes give the wrong impression, and that his policy preferences would prove harmful to the middle class and poor in the long run.”
For good measure, Winship slapped the FT for “blowing Piketty’s data out of proportion.” His fun has just begun, as Winship promises a “Part Two.”
Piketty dismissed the FT attack as “just ridiculous.”
He also has powerful allies, such as New York Times Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who predicted the Frenchman’s book “will be the most important economics book of the year, and maybe of the decade.” Krugman is Enemy No. 1 among the one-percent.
Mouthpiece of the one-percent, FT is following the classic PR tactic of planting a seed of doubt about an opponent.
Thinks SWIFT Boat Veterans for Truth slime-job on John Kerry, and the disgraceful campaign of the despicable Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss on Vietnam War hero Max Cleland, a triple amputee.
Any one doubtful of the dominance of the one-percent world, should simply take a walk down the streets of Manhattan, or better still look for a condo in the Emerald City.
Husch Blackwell Strategies has added FleishmanHillard alum Michael Slatin as a principal in its public affairs group.
Rory Cooper, a veteran Republican operative and policy specialist, has joined Teneo’s Washington office as senior managing director in its strategy & communications practice.
Brian Fallon, who served as national press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run, is signing on next month as Vice President’s Kamala Harris’ campaign communications director.
TikTok is nothing more than a Chinese propaganda tool that poses “a grave threat to America’s national security and, in particular, impressionable children and young adults,” say two Congressmen who want the platform registered as a foreign agent.
Public Strategies Washington has added Abbie Sorrendino, a former aide to now Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
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