Ad hawk; how Paul Newman and McDonald's get the U.S. government to push their products abroad.

• Author: Turetsky, Doug

All in all, Paul Newman seems like a straight-up guy-the liberal causes, the lasting marriage, those sporty little cars. It's his salad dressing and spaghetti sauce that have got us wondering. Here's an entrepreneur who commands multimillion-dollar salaries for his films, and his gourmet goodies are on the dole. Over the past three years, Newman's Own has received more than $100,000 from the U.S. government to help it hawk its products overseas.

In the world of government-subsidized advertising, of course, $100,000 to Newman's Own is barely a crouton. Through a little-known U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) enterprise called the Market Promotion Program, some of the biggest private corporations in the country receive millions each year in public money to fund ads, billboards, and supermarket displays abroad.

If it seems odd to you that the U.S. government would subsidize wine tastings in Tokyo or radio campaigns in Turkey, it's even odder which companies it chooses to fund. Despite the rhetoric with which the program was founded, many of the beneficiaries of this government giveaway aren't companies squeezed out by the unfair trade practices of competitor nations or even struggling enterprises whose survival might depend on U.S. government largess. Rather, they're some of the most powerful and profitable multinational conglomerates around-companies that don't need anyone's help (let alone taxpayers') when it comes to peddling their wares.

Take McDonald's. In the past five years it has spent more on advertising than virtually any other U.S. company. It boasts 70 billion served worldwide; in Paris, Rome, and Tokyo, young people flock to the golden arches to be seen and to drink milkshakes. Yet in 1989, Mcnational conglomerate Castle and Cook, whose fruit farms in Costa Rica, Honduras, and the Philippines are often blamed for undercutting the U.S.'s own citrus farmers.

But perhaps the most disturbing beneficiaries of the Marketing Promotion Program are those industries that, instead of facing unfair trade practices abroad, are legendary for promoting them at home-like U.S. peanut farmers. For some 50 years, those farmers have enjoyed both lucrative government price supports and strict quotas on peanuts imports-the same kind of trade practices we label unfair when imposed by other nations. You actually need a license to join the elite group that comprises the nation's peanut farmers. These protections hit taxpayers twice-in the public treasury and in the private purse. (Bought an $8 jar of Skippy lately?) But to make the...