Friday, June 27th, 2008
Worth > 1,000 Words
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
Let Them Eat Marketing!
Breakfast cereal is a classic corporate capitalist product. Nutritionally speaking, it’s a loaf of bread — at best. Financially speaking, it’s a mega-processed, highly manipulable and marketable product that shoves bread aside, so that corporate investors can greatly expand the “gross margins” they make on people’s breakfasts.
Exactly how they achieve that latter end is carefully concealed from the public, of course.
The latest case is quite telling, as it’s apparently becoming a widely-emulated maneuver as the US economy spins down into recession or depression.
This is the “Right Size, Right Price” marketing scheme being conducted by the General Mills foodstuff oligopoly.
Presented to shoppers as having something to do with not over-buying and over-eating, the real point of the campaign was pure capitalism — to charge more money for less stuff.
Last year, Forbes Market Scan reported:
Wall Street fretted General Mills’ strategy of packing less cereal into smaller boxes would irritate customers, but the breakfast club apparently hasn’t noticed the shrinking packaging.
BMO Capital Markets analyst Kenneth Zaslow said a survey of 72 supermarkets indicated that the General Mills’ “Right Size, Right Price” initiative is off to a better-than-expected start. Zaslow upgraded the company to “outperform,” from “market perform,” on Monday.
General Mills announced in June it would sell its cereals in smaller boxes but at similar prices. The move allows the company to charge more per-ounce as ingredient prices rise. General Mills cereals include Cheerios, Wheaties, and Total.
Now comes words from Advertising Age that the good start has gotten even better:
General Mills reported impressive fourth-quarter and full-year earnings this morning, citing increased marketing spending and the company’s “right size, right price” initiative. Net sales and net earnings for the full year were up double digits.
Fourth-quarter marketing spending grew 20% over the year-earlier period, up 13% for the full fiscal year. General Mills credited its higher marketing outlay for its impressive third quarter, reported in March, saying at the time that spending during the period grew 13% over the year-earlier quarter.
For the fiscal year ended May 25, General Mills’ net sales were up 10 % to $13.7 billion. Net earnings jumped 13% to $1.3 billion.
So, as General Mills shareholders laugh their way to the bank, what are cereal eaters getting in these tough times? More of the same:
“We believe our opportunities to generate continuing growth and increasing returns are excellent,” General Mills CEO Ken Powell said during a conference with analysts. In a research note, UBS analyst David Palmer praised the company’s “solid performance in every division” and “solid earnings” in spite of restructuring charges and steep marketing increases.
“We believe that strong brand support is a key driver of net sales growth overall,” said Ian Friendly, chief operating officer of U.S. retail at General Mills. He added that Big G cereal sales grew faster than the ready-to-eat cereal market as a whole, led by Cheerios, which as a whole grew 8% in sales over the previous year. While Cheerios sales were up 7% for the year, Honey Nut Cheerios sales grew 12% and MultiGrain Cheerios jumped 14%.
Mr. Friendly said a successful ad campaign for MultiGrain Cheerios in Canada highlighting its weight-management potential inspired the company to put similar spots on air in the U.S. in January. The commercials boosted sales, Mr. Friendly said, and a bigger push is in the works for fiscal 2009.
More lies, less food, higher prices.
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
The Addicts Speak…
As I will explain in my forthcoming book, Automobiles Über Alles: Capitalism and Transportation in the United States, no topic is more forbidden to public utterance than corporate capitalists’ intractable collective addiction to selling cars. Despite the increasingly obvious suicidal insanity of permitting this addiction to continue, even its mere existence still cannot be mentioned in public.
If you doubt this, check out the latest dog-and-pony show conducted in the U.S. Congress: the June 23, 2008 House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing called “Energy Speculation: Is Greater Regulation Necessary to Stop Price Manipulation? – Part II.”
What did the two wings of the Business Party have to say in this bit of theater?
The R wing, mostly unabashed about its service to the overclass (major exception: its “social conservative” marketing operations targeting scared white commoners), admits “America [exactly what part of "America" we don't say, of course] is addicted to oil” while seeking to lay hands on more of the substance of choice: “We” need to drill more and prod “our” allies, like the gang-rape-victim-jailing Saudi “royal” family, to pump us more of the good stuff.
Then we’ll be OK, we’ll be OK, we’ll be OK…
See?
More interesting and, as always, much less honest is the D faction of the Business Party. What is its way of avoiding the Carmageddon issue on behalf of the choosing class?
Well, for starters, where would you guess, if the D Team really were an opposition party, the Chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce might come from? California? Seattle? Portland or Eugene, Oregon? Madison, Wisconsin? Or some other hotbed of ecology, right?
But from whence does the actually existing Energy Chair arise? Why, Detroit, of course!
And what does the Honorable Motor City representative have to say about why “America is addicted to oil”? It’s not really a problem of demand, of course:
The environmental community says the answer is to conserve energy, to change the way we live, work, and play.
Well, that’s:
a valid point.
But it isn’t any part of the business of Congress, since the structure of demand is just one of many:
long-term solutions that will likely take at least 10 years; they will do little to solve the immediate problem we face.
In reality, the urgent business of Congress, this fine D-bot Chair says, is not to raise the issue of why we’re addicts. No, it is to start by observing:
The Saudis note that oil supply-and-demand seem to be in balance and that there is no substantive basis for current prices.
Got that? “There is no substantive basis for current prices” of petroleum! We have no underlying problem!
So what is the trouble we face?
Even the Department of Energy’s own Energy Information Administration says that “the flow of investment money” has contributed to the spike in oil prices. Yet the Secretary of Energy dismisses speculation as a cause of spiking oil prices and the Treasury Secretary agrees, shrugging it off as a “tough period.” In short, real solutions from this Administration are harder to find than a $3 gallon of gas.
See? See? It’s just the dealers, man! They’re gouging us, man — totally harshing our buzz, man! We just need to get some new dealers, see! Help us rough up our dealers, OK, man?
Then we’ll be OK, we’ll be OK, we’ll be OK…
See?
Can you say “Carmageddon?”
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
A Thought for Cheap Gas Inhalers
We face a choice between radical transportation reform/urban reconstruction and Carmageddon.
For those who are tempted to inhale the smoke being blown about ignoring this choice and merely rallying ourselves to demand cheaper prices at the pump, here’s a thought:
It is far from clear that cheaper oil is even possible. Not all speculation is irrational. Even a nationalized energy industry would probably be buying and stockpiling oil now at high prices, based on the likelihood that future prices will be even higher, due to booming global demand and peaking supplies — neither of which even the most rational cheap gas organizers (like Ralph Nader) usually mention.
This is not the 1970s any more. The trouble is much deeper this time.
Saturday, June 21st, 2008
Let Them Own Ideology!
I’m usually against Bush-bashing. Sure, he’s a utter boob, an unadulterated moron who was always patently unqualified to hold any public office, and, yes, pretty clearly (it’s a very stiff contest) the worst President in US history. But little W also isn’t nearly as far away from either other Presidents or the current toiletful of “major” Democrats (the Great Black Non-Hope definitely included) as many liberals tell themselves.
And yet, a story in today’s New York Times does raise an important point about Bush’s central role in the present housing disaster now punishing the upper part of the US working class, a social stratum that is, like the US working class in general, disproportionately non-white.
Remember Bush’s “Ownership Society” agenda? Mainly, it was his plan to privatize/kill Social Security, back when that insane idea could be safely released from the closet of “entrepreneurial” wishes, that storehouse of takebacks and rip-offs that all “major” candibots stand ever-ready to fling open yet again.
But the “Ownership Society,” launched in 2002, also included this now quite remarkable (and, hence, rarely mentioned) element:
Guess what, happy campers? The whole thing has now crashed onto the heads of the very people alleged to have been its intended beneficiaries:
If you have an honest understanding of what the “access to housing” issue really is, you see that all this was not just predictable, but pre-ordained. That’s because “access to housing” is not at all a technical issue. It is about something simpler than pie: c-l-a-s-s, a.k.a. “access to money.” Those with stable, well-paying jobs enjoy lovely houses. Those with unstable, poor-paying, or no jobs are stuck in dumps, or in the streets.
Of course, just as the Civil Rights movement finished taking away their ability to trade openly in the older, plainer versions of racism and Social Darwinism, our overclass, scared to the bone by Martin Luther King’s growing efforts to raise the issue of social class in America, quickly turned to assholes like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who did his job by building new, supposedly more intellectual ways to blame the victims and excuse the masters. Moynihan’s legacy in this vital endeavor? The notion that it’s culture/attitudes, rather than jobs/cash, that leads people into poverty and attendant difficulties like bad “access to housing.”
According to Alexander Cockburn, here’s how Moynihan summarized this now quasi-official claim to Carl Ginsberg:
Bush’s “Ownership Society” was an ideological ruse squarely founded on this preposterous bi-partisan “culture of poverty” garbage. Instead of changing “access to money,” it proceeded instead by (in the words of today’s New York Times story) “encouraging lenders to finance more home purchases.”
Say, “ownership” fans, how’d that one turn out?
To the extent it was more than a straight hand-out to the housing-industrial complex, this vicious foolishness was founded not just on market fetsihism, but also on the Moynihanian belief that home ownership itself, even when financially suicidal, would do what “the market” cannot, will not, and (if the truth be told) is designed not to do: help those who need help, create decency and equality for all.
The inevitable results: A huge transfer of money from those now more-burdened-than-ever commoners presently being foreclosed upon into the hands of construction contractors and apparently criminal “mortgage lenders.”
Ownership society? Well, some folks did indeed get owned: the usual ones, in the usual way.
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
Why Won’t Ralph Nader Take on Capitalism?
Ralph Nader, for whom I proudly voted in both 1996 and 2000, has been trying to get people to protest Big Oil and Wall Street. Our problem, he would have us conclude, is the price of oil.
I’m sorry, but that’s demagogic, misleading balderdash. The price of oil is but a symptom of the real problem, which is the intractable addiction of our corporate capitalist overclass to peddling automobiles. Corporate capitalism means autos-über-alles, which means we will remain chained to increasingly expensive petroleum, the supply of which has recently passed its peak.
It saddens me to see Nader failing to live up to what is perhaps the greatest challenge of our times. Just when we need his help in trying to open U.S. transportation policy to democratic scrutiny and control, he chooses instead to imply that, if we’d just picket a few bad apples, everything would return to the cheap-gas good old days.
Of course, this failure has deep roots in Nader’s work. Take the case of Unsafe at Any Speed, the book that launched him to his well-deserved fame.
The book starts with Nader spotting a telling contradiction:
For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people….Unlike aviation, marine, or rail transportation, the highway system can inflict tremendous casualties and property damage without in the least affecting the viability of the system. Plane crashes, for example, jeopardize the attraction of flying for potential passengers and therefore strike at the heart of the air transport economy….The situation is different on the roads.
Something quite deep must keep cars from being scandalized, right?. After all, Nader observes, if one is objective about it, “[t]he automobile tragedy is one of the most serious of these man-made assaults on the human body.”
And at the outset of Unsafe, Nader seems poised to name and explain that deep something:
A great problem of contemporary life is how to control the power of economic interests which ignore the harmful effects of their applied science and technology.
What could “the power of economic interests” be other than corporate capitalism?
Yet, despite these bold opening statements, Unsafe at Any Speed never came close to connecting the required dots. After his introduction, Nader proceeded to present 298 pages of very detailed evidence that car-making corporations most definitely do not put human safety first in designing and selling their products. But, despite his own seeming recognition of the need to do so, nowhere in Unsafe does Nader relate the scandalous engineering decisions he documents to the ordinary business motives and imperatives of corporate investors. “Capitalism,” “class,” “investment,” “investors,” “profit,” “rich,” “wealthy” – none of these words appeared in the book’s index, and none were major conceptual elements of Nader’s renowned exposé.
Without a coherent explanation of corporate capitalism, however, Nader’s book, despite its shocking revelations, yielded a rather picayune understanding of both the depth of “the automobile tragedy” and the politics of its possible remedies.
Consider, for instance the way Nader finished this sentence:
“[T]he public has never been supplied the information nor offered the quality of competition to enable it to make effective demands through the marketplace and through government for…”
For…what? Nader did not call for a safe, non-polluting, and efficient transportation system. Instead, here’s all Nader put after that momentous “for”:
a safe, non-polluting and efficient automobile that can be produced economically.
Thus, the man who called autos-über-alles “one of the most serious of these man-made assaults on the human body” ended up limiting himself to asking for better cars!
But could any conceivable autos-über-alles system ever really be “safe, non-polluting, and efficient”? Are better cars or cheaper gas really enough to solve our mounting problems? Can anybody really understand “why the automobile has remained the only transportation vehicle to escape being called to meaningful public account” and why “America is addicted to oil” without understanding the capitalist interests and imperatives involved? I think not.
Ralph, with all due respect, it’s high time to move your thinking into the twenty-first century. We
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