“If forty million people see a commercial for a car, then forty million people have a car commercial in their heads, all at the same time. This is bound to have more beneficial effect on the commodity system than if, at that moment, all those people were thinking separate thoughts which, in some cases, might not be about commodities at all.”

Jerold Irwin “Jerry” Mander (born May 1, 1936) is an American activist and author, best known for his 1977 book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. His most recent book, The Superferry Chronicles, is about efforts by Hawaiian activists to halt the operation of the Hawaii Superferry. Mander was born in the Bronx, New York City to Harry and Eva Mander. Mander’s parents were an immigrant Jewish couple who struggled to achieve success in America. The Mander family moved from the Bronx to a semi-rural area of Yonkers, New York, when Jerry was at an early age. Jerry grew up there, and says “I was a golf star throughout my youth and that was what I wanted to be, a professional golfer when I was very young.”

Mander earned a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, then an M.S. in International Economics from Columbia University’s Business School. After receiving his M.S., Mander worked in advertising for 15 years, including five as partner and president of Freeman, Mander & Gossage in San Francisco. Mander worked with the noted environmentalist, David Brower, managing the Sierra Club’s advertising campaigns to prevent the construction of dams in the Grand Canyon, to establish Redwood National Park, and to stop the U.S. Supersonic Transport (SST) project. In 1971 he founded the first non-profit advertising agency in the United States, Public Interest Communications.

Mander was the executive director of the International Forum on Globalization, which he founded in 1994, until 2009 and continues to serve on its staff as a Distinguished Fellow. He is also the program director for Megatechnology and Globalization at the Foundation for Deep Ecology.

In 2007 Jerry Mander appeared in the full-length documentary film, What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire. (From the Wikipedia entry)