Under market totalitarianism, only unserious solutions to problems are eligible for consideration.
Consider the Clintonian tobacco settlement, which uses corporate tobacco money to hire corporate capitalist ad agencies to make advertisements nominally devoted to discouraging smoking, then purchases time to run those ads within commercial media.
The New York Times today headlines an interpretive piece, the main claim of which is this:
Yet even as vital signs weaken — plunging home sales, a bleak job market and, on Friday, confirmation that the quarterly rate of economic growth had slowed, to 1.6 percent — a sense has taken hold that government policy makers cannot deliver meaningful intervention. That is because nearly any proposed curative could risk adding to the national debt — a political nonstarter.
Translation: The overclass, as always, prefers Great Depression to a pro-labor shift in the distribution of power. This society remains entirely capable of employing all its able-bodied workers and thereby ending the present economic cliffwalk. What it lacks is a left coherent enough to demand what the elite won’t mention.
In the Age of Obama, a.k.a. the supply-side Reagan Revolution that was actually started by Carter, it keeps getting easier and easier to practice my SMBIVA pledge.
Here in Oregon, a state that has always been a net exporter of dollars to the Pentagon and has also never summoned the nerve to economically live up to its reputation as an “alt” place, we have a “race for Governor” happening this year.
It could not be more comical or less meaningful.
On one side stands an ex-NBA basketballer, Chris Dudley, Republican, whose supposed qualifications for the job are a Yale diploma and enough money and name-recognition to have purchased himself the primary.
Dudley, as clunky with words as he was with a free throw, presents himself in the TV ads through which this campaign, like all other major campaigns, takes place, as a competitor and an outsider, who will bring — wait for it — “new ideas” to Oregon. The “new ideas” in question?
I’ll get state spending under control, without raising taxes.
I’ll do everything in my power to help small businesses, instead of punishing them.
I’ll focus on jobs.
What else could one say to this hoary package of discredited claims, or to the spectacle of a proud Ivy Leaguer selling them as “new”? ROFLMFAO.
And what of the inevitable TweedleDem?
He, an ex-Governor who called the state “ungovernable” at the end of his last turn as Head Babysitter, and whose girlfriend is now under investigation for graft as a contractor who receives money from the public on the theory that what she does is “helping the state attract green jobs,” wants to “ask Oregonians for their help” in reversing the Great Depression III in the state. How?
When they feel they’re safely talking amongst themselves, big business marketers get honest. Take the case of a thought piece in the latest issue of Advertising Age by one Andy Gould, senior VP of an ad agency in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Gould’s complaint:
Too Many Campaigns Still Ignoring the Role of the Consumer
OK. So what is “the role of the consumer”? Perhaps being asked whether you think using old growth timber to make toilet paper softer is something our society should be tolerating?
Not quite. Turns out the role Gould, whose firm works on the Cottonelle account for Kimberly-Clark, has reserved for “the consumer” is rather less substantial:
As I look back at two of our most successful campaigns this year, all the agencies involved identified the role of the consumer very early on. For Cottonelle’s Roll Poll, we decided every piece of communication should be geared toward getting people to vote on which way they rolled their toilet paper (over or under). For the Pop-Tarts Flavor Tournament, we wanted to put 20 flavors head to head in a March-Madness-style bracket, and have teens influence the outcome of each matchup until we had named a champion. Determining these things at the beginning of the process (at the same time as the messaging piece) gave us the time to make the work more interactive, and allowed us to structure things so that what users did and said during the campaign actually impacted the creative work.
Giving consumers something to do is one of the musts of digital work, but even outside of the digital realm, I think many of us believe it’s the best way to connect with people today. Doesn’t work that actually requires something of the consumer stand a better chance of creating genuine impact
And some people still dare to suggest that capitalism and democracy are two different things!
If you are a student of corporate capitalism, I recommend occasionally summoning the will-power to watch some golf, tennis, or Triple Crown horse racing on television. There, you will find important evidence of how our overclass perceives and flatters itself.
Consider this ad, which is currently running during golf tournaments:
Here you see supply-side ideology as it operates at the personal level, complete with a white guy performing manual labor on a farm, no less!
Among the rules described by Herman and Chomsky is the one that says, to rise to a position of power in our market-totalitarian society, you either have to be a moron, or unfailingly pretend you are one.
Want proof? Consider the answer Christina Romer, the recently departed Chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, provided to Bloomberg Business Week when it asked why unemployment is “higher than expected”:
BBW: Why do you think that is?
Romer: My guess is the main reason has to do with…the fact that [the recession] was caused by a financial crisis. Since it was such an unusual event, firms may have reacted more forcefully than was usual out of a fear of the unknown. Also, firms that couldn’t get credit may have had to lay more people off than normally.
What an absolute crock. First of all, Romer, a supposed world-class scholar on this very topic, wants you to believe that the current Great Depression III is the cause, rather than the consequence, of the widening gulf between economic production and employment.
Worse, her proffered explanation is a meaningless cloud of farts covering an exceptionally simple and powerful fact: Between 1990 and 2008, U.S. businesses tripled their computer investment/labor spending ratio. Computers are used for administration and communication, but they are also the core means of automating production processes. So, the simple fact is that capitalists are continuing to be capitalists. Their system works, for them. Over time, it employs fewer and fewer people per unit of output.
Being too stupid to track (or too well-trained to mention) this elementary process is the kind of thing that gets you the Presidency and the American Economic Association and a seat in the White House.
Not only does this mean that foxes end up making the supposedly anti-fox-in-the-henhouse imagery, but the results are created with a careful eye to not upsetting the commercial media outlets in which they run.
