Archive for April, 2008
Monday, April 28th, 2008
The Bonfire of the Literacies
American political leaders, being deeply indoctrinated actual or aspiring millionaires/billionaires, have long equated capitalism and democracy. In reality, capitalism places very strong limits on democracy. Basic economic policy, the allocation of government spending, transportation policy, global governance, serious restriction of wealth and income polarization (income floors and salary caps for everybody!) — all these things and more are very emphatically “off the table” in capitalist democracy, simply and consistently verboten to voting.
Yet that’s only half the story. Consider, meanwhile, what the normal operation of the system does to the very roots of egalitarian self-governance.
Read the rest of this entry »
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
American Symmetry
Today’s New York Times contains a piece reporting that:
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
In other words, our rate of jailing is generally equal to our rate of hogging and squandering the Earth’s natural resources.
The Times’ explanation of this shocking, disgusting, embarrassing, massively wasteful and evil incarceration rate is utterly stupid, of course: all speculation about culture, and zero consideration whatsoever about our equally shocking, disgusting, embarrassing, massively wasteful and evil levels of class inequality.
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
Who Says Capitalism Can’t Solve the Big Problems?
The “free market” will solve all our problems. Such is the faith of the age.
And behold, so it is! As reported on starbucksgossip.com:
Splash sticks — plastic plugs for sip holes with tops in the shape of the Starbucks siren — should be at all Starbucks stores by the end of the week. The blogger at Visions and Revisions Blog writes:
‘All I have to say is WOW. Another excellent use of our natural resources. Instead of encouraging people to stop driving around with their goddam coffee, or (still more unthinkable) sitting in the cafe to drink it, we’re creating a whole new line of useless plastic toys that we’ll find littered in the street along with the already-too-prevalent cups, sleeves, and lids.’
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
Behind the Green Veil: Notes from Stan Cox
Stan Cox has an excellent report on greenwashing today. It looks to be drawn from his important new book.
One of the sections of Cox’s report deals with the Body Shop, the highly-touted cosmetics corporation run by the recently-passed Anita Roddick. Supposedly a proof of the viability of green capitalism, the Body Shop turns out to have been rather less than such. As Cox explains:
For more than 30 years, The Body Shop and its CEO, self-styled anti-capitalist capitalist Anita Roddick, avidly cultivated a corporate image as pioneers of high business ethics. But The Body Shop has been dismissed by critics as no more than a world leader in pale-green consumerism.
A 1994 expose by John Entine [6] charged the company with exploiting workers, franchisees, and indigenous peoples who supply ingredients; using artificial and sometimes harmful chemicals in products labeled as “all natural”; selling bacteria-contaminated products; flushing toxic chemicals into sewage systems; and promoting overconsumption of costly but Wal-Mart-quality products.
Others have blasted the company’s much-publicized relationships with indigenous peoples who supply some of their ingredients. An anthropologist who worked for more than thirty years among Brazil’s Kayapo people charged in 1995 that The Body Shop purchased much smaller quantities of products like brazil-nut oil than the Kayapo wanted to sell, and forbade them to sell to other companies. The company did that, he charged, because the real purpose of the project was to acquire not oil but rather the exclusive right to heartwarming photographs of the Kayapo that would appeal to the tastes of “Western ecoliberals.”
Cox quotes Entine’s conclusion:
Ethical or not, The Body Shop can’t be considered an environmental leader, wrote Entine on the occasion of Roddick’s death last year: “She sold cosmetics made mostly with water, colorings, fragrances and preservatives made from petrochemicals. Body Shop packages beauty notions in plastic bottles, an anathema to serious environmentalists, and ships them around the world in carbon-belching trucks and planes. From an environmental perspective, its business model is a train wreck.
This is a fine conclusion, but notice again the punch-pulling tendency of even the best critics of big business marketing. Notice how the concept of “cosmetics” escapes analysis here, despite the fact that cosmetic-wearing is a human behavior that has been immensely shaped and expanded by corporate marketing itself. How green is it to buy and wear make-up? Not very. Nevertheless, it is a very lucrative thing for corporate investors.
For those interested in this topic, I would refer you back to an item I discussed in my own book, The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life. There, I reported on what I learned after studying Cover Girl cosmetics marketing documents archived at the Smithsonian Institution.
One thing I learned there was that wearing make-up was still not a common, everyday practice among teenage girls well into the 1950s. In that climate, marketing consultants to the Noxzema Chemical Company (long since absorbed by Procter & Gamble) hit on the idea of putting Noxzema’s astringent ingredients into make-up and pitching it to teen girls as a way of extending Noxzema’s product line by giving teen girls an quasi-medical anti-acne excuse to ask for and use cosmetics. By the 1980s, when teen girls took cosmetics to be a preface to every day of their lives, Cover Girl, the resulting new make-up brand, had it marketers crowing about how “today’s consumer — she may use up to 11 products to get the natural look.”
Such is the stuff of capitalist normalcy. And the real, behind-the-scenes reason for the extension of commodities was not any kind of concern for girls. It was concern for the Noxzema Chemical Company. “We need products to advertise, and you don’t have any for us” one Noxzema executive reported to his superiors. “Now, what you’ve got to do to help [the] company grow is to get some new products.”
The result was a “natural” example of big business marketing in action.
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
Greenwashing: The 95-5 Rule
Critics of big business marketing have long talked as if deception and abuse are the exceptions rather than the rule in the discipline of corporate sales-engineering. The truth, of course, is precisely the opposite, if you bother to study the corporate marketing process as a whole.
One interesting and important case of this unwitting excuse-making by critics is the continuing discussion of “greenwashing.” Most who discuss this problem continue to treat it as if it is somehow merely a cancer on the body of big business salesmanship. In reality, as any half-hour glance at television in the USA shows, “green” marketing claims are now the norm.
That’s simply logical. Marketers are constantly looking for new manipulation tactics, and race one another to invent and expand them.
What is the general quality of all the now-normal “green” marketing? For that, listen to a true exception — a publicly honest marketing practitioner. Quoted in this week’s Advertising Age is Steven Addis, CEO of branding consultantcy Addis Creson:
This month I’ve definitely seen a lot of companies that I never would have associated with green popping up. Companies are saying, ‘We need something to green ourselves up, so let’s sponsor Earth Day.’ It’s really now in this hype curve.
Addis says he has developed a general rule-of-thumb about the nature of the greenwashing problem. It’s worth quoting:
I call it the 95-5 rule. Five percent of somebody’s business is green, but 95% of their PR is green.
And another (click on “carbon neutral” button).
Friday, April 11th, 2008
“Pain” Reaches the Overclass
One way to understand the connection between corporate capitalism and social classes is to think of it in terms of the “last hired, first fired” problem faced by victims of racism. In reality, the racial version of the first/last process is part of a larger class patterning, in which the prior possession of money, education, and other assets places people in different places in the social line-up.
Corporate capitalism, of course, exists to enrich corporate shareholders. In practice, because the ownership of corporate shares and claims is so radically concentrated at the top, the normal operation of the system primarily* serves those who are already established, rich and mega-rich “major” investors.
But the inequality of wealth and income is not the whole story. There is also a huge inequality of timing that occurs: As big business performs its core function of further enriching the already rich, it also generates powerful differences in peoples’ first/last situations.
For the working class — those who have little or no accumulated wealth, and therefore have no choice but to seek paid work in order to survive — corporate capitalism ensures that the pain of bad economic times will hit first and hardest. Lay-offs, pay cuts, debt collectors, eviction notices, shrinking government programs, suffering schools — such is the stuff of recession for most people. In other words, the class of those who must find a job, any job, is always the first to suffer, and the last to “prosper.” (Note the parentheses.)
So how do things go at the top of the social pyramid, where major investors own a huge chunk of the nation’s income-generating assets and only work when they choose to do so? Well, check out this story from today’ s New York Times. In a story titled “In Rare Miss, G.E. Profits Fall Short,” the Times reports the tragic facts of recession at the top:
General Electric reported a 5.8 percent decline in first-quarter profit on Friday, falling far short of expectations and stunning investors who consider the company one of the nation’s most reliable earners….a company known for rarely missing its estimates,.
The company reported net income of $4.3 billion for the quarter, or 43 cents a share, down from $4.57 billion, or 44 cents a share, in the period a year earlier. Analysts had been expecting about 51 cents a share in net earnings, and the company had projected earnings of 50 to 53 cents a share.
As he fielded questions from disgruntled analysts on a conference call Friday morning, Mr. Immelt insisted that “the core business remains solid.” But he acknowledged that recent financial developments, including the collapse of Bear Stearns, took a severe toll. Earnings at the company’s financial services operation plummeted 19 percent for the quarter.
Mr. Immelt said he regretted the poor performance. “We hate missing our numbers,” he said.
Months and months after hiring has halted and the must-workers have lost jobs and homes at an accelrating pace, the overclass starts to receive (perhaps) a shade less property income from one of its Old Faithfuls.
In other words, the first to prosper are the last to “suffer.” (Note well the parentheses.)
*In his generally apologetic Pulitzer Prize-winning 1977 book, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Harvard business historian Alfred D. Chandler admitted that the super-rich “remain the primary beneficiaries” of corporate enterprise.
