Archive for February, 2008
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
“Chase What Matters”
If you want to see a pristine statement of corporate capitalism’s core cultural message, surf over to Chase’s credit card site, click “Watch TV Ads,” and look at “Real-Time Info Matters.”
Stunning, telling, pure, sick.
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
The Great Jail Experiment
The “Reagan Revolution” proposed giving corporate capitalism a fresh go at making the society work. This experiment, the inverse of the New Deal idea, has had a nice, clear run since 1980. Has it worked any better than the supposedly “failed” welfare state programs that, truth be told, never had anything like this kind of elite support?
Check out this graphic from today’s New York Times:
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
VEED #2: Bottled “Vitamin Water” For Dogs/Puddles for People
Advertising Age‘s February 25 issue reports that the Cott Corporation, “the world’s largest retailer brand soft drink provider,” has just begun marketing Fortifido, a bottled “vitamin water” for dogs!
One could comment on how the whole “vitamin water” marketing scam preys on people’s old-fashioned ignorance about vitamins and human (and now canine) health. One could also comment on the ecological disaster of ever-expanding plastic bottle production, as well as on its deep connections to the human race’s oncoming hydrocarbon supply crisis.
But the largest point is simply more Visual Evidence of Extreme Depravity.
Obviously, the idea of bottling water for dogs is not nearly enough to disturb the corporate capitalist conscience. Indeed, you can tell just how sensitive to human needs the renowned entrepreneurial soul really is by taking a gander at another photo from the self-same February 25 issue of Advertising Age:
What product is that woman using? Why, it’s the LifeStraw, of course! This winner of AdAge’s “Work of the Week” honor is:
the Vestergaard Frandsen Group’s mobile personal filtration system, otherwise known as LifeStraw. It is a powder-blue plastic tube—much thicker than an ordinary straw—containing filters that make water teeming with typhoid-, cholera- and diarrhea-causing microorganisms drinkable.
In other words, it is a specially filtered straw manufactured and sold at a profit by a Danish “humanitarian entreneurialism” corporation. It allows residents of the drought-plagued Third World, where daily household incomes are usually less than the price of a single bottle of “Fortifido,” to minimize the risk of drinking warm, fetid water from puddles.
If only Dr. Pangloss were here to witness this proof that capitalism really has put the best of all possible worlds beneath our very feet!
Drink it up, you lucky, lucky people!
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
Sunk Costs: The Broken Iron Horse, Dead and Gone
In Europe and Japan, where they have spent and do spend a fraction of what we Americans have spent and do spend on transportation, they have fantastically fast, safe, pleasurable-to-ride, energy-efficient, and generally ever-improving modern railroads. We, of course, have the intentionally starved, dilapidated national embarrassment of Amtrak, plus the fantastically expensive, wasteful, and locally and geopolitically dangerous autos-über-alles system to which the iron horse was long ago sacrificed here.
Of course, another major marker of our overclass’s extreme hostility to sane transportation priorities is the airports-and-airplanes shuffle that (kind of) fills the gaps left by our scandalous lack of modern inter-city railroads. Like the dictated-from-above cars-first arrangement it (kind of) helps to patch up, that system is not only multiply and generally inferior to the rail systems they have built in Europe and Japan, but, being based on the burning of petroleum, is also under extra-severe stress these days.
It was in this light that James Howard Kunstler’s “Daily Grunt” caught my eye today. Here’s what Kunstler reports:
Death of the Airline Industry
I knew I was in trouble when I checked in and the Northwest departure board behind the ticket desk said the 5:39PM to Minneapolis was “delayed.” That’s when you know you’re in for an evening of, at least, being lied to and fucked around. Up at the gate, they let it be known that the 5:39 would now leave at 6:08. That was cool. I had a two-hour layover in the Twin Cities for my connection to Duluth. As it happened, though, they didn’t board us until 6:00. We pushed back at 6:30, taxied out to the runway, and then sat there for another hour. About halfway through that wait, the pilot got on the PA and said they were “waiting for their numbers.” A half hour later he came back on the PA and said the plane was “over its weight limit” and we had to go back to the gate and drop some people off. Huh…? This was a small regional jet. There were 12 rows of two across, and there were a few empty seats. So, we get back to the gate and we sit there for another half hour while a technician comes on board with a clipboard and palavers with the flight crew. It’s now two hours past the original schduled departure time. So even if we left that instant, I’d miss my connection to Duluth and be stuck in the Minneapolis airport all night. As it happened, the pilot asked for 13 volunteers to get off the plane. (There was some grumbling about the obvious illogic of a plane designed with 48 seats being unable to carry 36 passengers… but let’s not even go there….) If they couldn’t get 13 volunteers, the pilot said, they’d cancel the whole flight (and then everybody would be fucked, I inferred). I got up with a bunch of other volunteers — thirteen, finally — and straggled off the plane. We hung around the gate for another hour and half waiting to get re-booked for tomorrow, and to get our gate-checked luggage back. The most amazing thing about the whole misadventure is how dim the Northwest employees acted. From the flight crew to the gate agent, nobody really seemed to know what was going on or know what they were doing. I actually don’t know if the plane ever did leave. It was still parked at the gate when I finally left the airport at 9:30. By the time I got home it was 10:00 PM. I have to get up at 3:30AM to make a 6:00AM flight tomorrow. (Sigh….)
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
Ideologues and Murder
This one is more about how the “major” politicians maintain the conditions for the marketing-driven American Nightmare (and its metastasis to other societies) than directly about big business marketing itself. But the connection between the larger methods (ideology and murder) and the smaller (deception and studied manipulation) is real, so this one is just too important to pass over without a post:
“Ideologues can’t stand free societies — that’s why they try to kill innocent people.” — George W. Bush, February 20, 2008
How true! Just think of all the recent proof: Vietnam, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, Chile, etc. — not to mention Iraq x2. And also not to mention the inconvenient little fact that, despite their own criminal, self-defeating methods, the Russians were actually right about Afghanistan, weren’t they?
Not uninterestingly, the 2.5 million people who have died in automobile collisions since the full and final imposition of auto-centric suburban sprawl on the United States shortly after WWII very much also prove the unwitting profundity of President Bush’s admission.
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
Advertising the American Nightmare
Advertising’s apologists always claim that advertising’s essence hasn’t really changed since the days before corporate capitalism was consolidated. Ads, they claim, remain mere conveyances of information. The newest, most heavily researched and expensively produced TV commercials are merely big, colorful versions of newspaper classifieds.
This, of course, is balderdash, in the extreme.
One interesting and important example of the deep differences between ads now and ads of yore is the blitzkrieg of advertising now flowing forth from the real estate business.
As yesterday’s New York Times reported,
Mortgage companies spent nearly $409 million on ads in the third quarter of last year, the most recent period with available data, higher than the industry’s ad spending during the peak of the housing boom.
[While] the Mortgage Bankers Association is predicting this will be a down year for the industry, and on Friday it said that the total value of mortgages produced would be down 16 percent from its level last year….the National Association of Realtors is running national television ads saying there has never been a better time to buy a home. Home values nearly double every 10 years, the commercial claims, showing a young couple walk up to their white colonial-style home.
This shows exactly what modern corporate advertising is: lavish fraud designed to pitch you products you very often do not need, attempts to get your behavior to comport with the requirements of investors’ bottom lines — whether it’s good for you or not.
