Archive for May, 2008
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
United We Fail
One sign of the advanced illness of our democracy in the United States is not just the inordinate importance of “lobbying” (i.e. bribery), but the fact that the second most powerful lobby after business is the American Association of Retired Persons. No offense, but the elderly are both the most economically privileged age group, and people over 65 already have national health insurance (Medicare). Hence, the lobbying leadership of the AARP can’t help but be a generally harmful thing, whatever small achievements it may include for working class seniors.
Consider the AARP’s shockingly wrong-headed and ill-timed “Divided We Fail” advertising campaign. Coming at a moment when pressure for national single-payer health insurance could, with enough public pressure and genuine leadership, have a real effect on an incoming Democratic President and Democratically-dominated Congress, the AARP chooses instead to push for the preservation of “bipartisanship.”
When asked why she couldn’t possibly create single-payer health insurance if elected, the walking disease Hillary Clinton avows that “you have to include” the Republicans “in the process.” Why? If you are the President and have the votes, why not pass the needed legislation?
The real answer to why money-oriented “leaders” make such Orwellian statements is that, beneath their constant claims to the contrary, corporate shills like Clinton and the AARP are utterly hostile to universal health insurance. The only way to get that is single-payer, and the only way to get THAT is to flip the middle finger to its opponents.
The record is as clear as day: In Congress, “united” we fail. To stay “bipartisan” is to insist on the status quo of staggering unfairness, irrationality, and inhumanity in our medical system. To hell with the AARP for obscuring that blatant fact.
P.S. It’s also rather interesting to see that the Service Employees International Union is one of the “Divided We Fail” campaign’s major co-sponsors. This supposedly maverick AFL-CIO breakaway union is now, post “rebellion,” lobbying for bipartisanship! Orwell couldn’t make this shit up. Despite 50 years of worsening betrayals of labor, the shrinking AFL-CIO has been an increasingly subordinate wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party ever since the early Cold War purges of political unionists. Now, rightly complaining that the AFL-CIO is a dying parody of a union federation, the SEIU is stabbing boldly even farther to the right…
As MLK said, “this is a sick society.”
Monday, May 26th, 2008
The Problem Isn’t the Oil Companies…
Whenever corporate executives are summoned to testify on Capitol Hill, you can bet it’s for the wrong reason.
The recent testimony of Big Oil executives is a classic case-in-point. Marketed to the public as a stern interrogation of those mainly responsible for the nation’s rapidly deepening energy crisis, the whole thing was utterly faux, a true dog-and-pony show.
Here’s why:
Sunday, May 25th, 2008
Olbermann Nails It
Not that it excuses Barack Obama’s disgusting, cleverly disguised “vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics” (spotted and described by Adolph Reed, in his book Class Notes, way back in 1996), but Keith Olbermann absolutely gets it right about the walking disease known as Hillary Clinton:
Friday, May 23rd, 2008
How Sick are We Now?: Frere Loup on Crime & Jails
Over at Candide’s Notebooks, the sage Frere Loup recently posted this excellent, pithy debunking of the psychotic, criminal-itself reality of criminal punishment in the USA:
“Every time people talk prisons in the US, I do the numbers.
“80% of crime is White
80% of drug use is White
80% of the poverty in the US is White
“2/3 of the 2.3 million humans incarcerated in the penal system (jail, prison, parole) are Black and Brown. Didn’t used to be that way. Until we passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, 1964-65 which we instantly regretted, we had Jim Crow to ‘keep them in their place’ and America felt naked in the absence. So…being the innovative and creative people we are in matters of critical importance, we improvised.
“In 1965 there were 640000 humans in the penal system, e.g. jail, prison, and parole (count’em same way now). Whites were 87% of the population, Blacks 12%, Hispanic were part of the remaining 1%. Same 80% of Crime, Drugs, and Poverty for Whites back then. 2/3 of those ‘in the system’ in ’65 were White. What accounts for the difference:
“Selective Enforcement of the Law
Targeted Incarceration
Disproportionate Sentencing
“In 2008 Whites are 70% (2000 Census) and Blacks are still 12% of the population with 18% for everybody else. As a direct result of these ‘policies’, 1/3 of the ENTIRE Black male population in the US are ‘in the system’, they work for Fortune 500 corps for $0.77-$1.44/hr in jobs that used to be done by people getting living wages. But of course living wages DO NOT produce maximum short term profits, in fact nothing produces profits like slave labor, prison labor, child labor, and sweat shop labor. Prison is as close to “slave labor” as they can get outside the Marianna’s. Ask Trent Lott.
“And of course those Black & Brown people can’t vote. Ever. In most states.
“Not at all surprising for A nation that got away with genocide AND human slavery AND wants to pretend it is not a squalid, debased, AND degraded tribe of cannibals.
“Who’s face is Poverty?
Who’s face is Drugs?
Who’s face is Crime?
“And what is the REALITY on the ground? Don’t ask MSM, they’re selling the Kool-Aid and they want you terrified of EVERYBODY.
“We always make others pay for our sins. More economical.”
Now, personally speaking, like Harry Belafonte, I am a Kingian — an American democratic socialist who is convinced that, as MLK said, “the entire structure of American life must be changed” and that we can and should and will only be able do so by finally acknowledging the centrality of racism in our society, and by rescuing and expanding the much-mentioned, but little-used good side of American principle, history, and culture.
So I wonder:
Frere Loup mentions the numbers from the mid-1960s, when Dr. King was already fretting about ”integrating into a burning house,” and that the United States was a deeply “sick society.”
Read the newspaper; watch American behavior for a few hours (especially among the comfortable segments); contemplate Frere Loup’s words; then ask yourself: How sick are we now?
Monday, May 19th, 2008
Empire of the Uninformed: Market Totalitarianism’s Real Basis
Under the dual assault of big business marketing and the pro-business psy-ops that have long passed for “politics” here, ordinary Americans are the most deeply, intensively propagandized people in human history.
The extremely long list of basic things we don’t know is mostly inscribed by the ever-expanding dominance of marketing-friendly televisual media and televisual mental habits over print media and print literacy skills.
But we also have our own very extensive “Black Book of Corporate Capitalism.” Unless we somehow overthrow our corporate overclass — which, despite the times, remains the richest and most powerful in human history — we will never get to see the full version of that book.
Nonetheless, if you keep your eyes peeled, every so often a page slips out.
One just has. For those disgusted by the huge gulf between reality and the continuing ability of the system’s overseers and mouthpieces to paint the United States as some exceptional angel of goodness, here’s the story:
AP IMPACT: At least 100,000 said executed by US’s Korean ally in 1950 summer of terror
CHARLES J. HANLEY and JAE-SOON CHANG
AP News May 18, 2008 12:17 EST
Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation’s U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.
With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial.
The mass executions — intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners — were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century. They were “the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War,” said historian Kim Dong-choon, a member of a 2-year-old government commission investigating the killings.
Hundreds of sets of remains have been uncovered so far, but researchers say they are only a tiny fraction of the deaths. The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million.
That estimate is based on projections from local surveys and is “very conservative,” said Kim. The true toll may be twice that or more, he told The Associated Press.
Through the postwar decades of South Korean right-wing dictatorships, victims’ fearful families kept silent about that blood-soaked summer. American military reports of the South Korean slaughter were stamped “secret” and filed away in Washington. Communist accounts were dismissed as lies.
Only since the 1990s, and South Korea’s democratization, has the truth begun to seep out.
In 2002, a typhoon’s fury uncovered one mass grave. Another was found by a television news team that broke into a sealed mine. Further corroboration comes from a trickle of declassified U.S. military documents, including U.S. Army photographs of a mass killing outside this central South Korean city.
Now Kim’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has added government authority to the work of scattered researchers, family members and journalists trying to peel away the long-running cover-up. The commissioners have the help of a handful of remorseful old men.
“Even now, I feel guilty that I pulled the trigger,” said Lee Joon-young, 83, one of the executioners in a secluded valley near Daejeon in early July 1950.
Saturday, May 17th, 2008
Dove Droppings: A Campaign of Real Fakery
For some time, the Unilever Corporation has been peddling its extensive line of unsustainably packaged, mostly ineffective and unnecessary “Dove” brand products under its “Campaign for Real Beauty” marketing strategy.
The basic idea is pure big business marketing Flipthink: Having been at the forefront of the hundred-year drive to push cosmetics and “aspirational” body and beauty images on women, why don’t we strike a pose as if we’re now really quite disgusted by and opposed to manipulating female self-perceptions? Hey, what a great way to sell whole new floods of crap to the Bubbettes! Genius!
Here’s what Unilever says on a webpage allegedly (when a corporation publicly admits whom it is targeting, you ought to smell a rat) targeted at 11-to-16 girls*:
Catch Unilever’s diagnosis of the culprits involved: “the media,” our “point in society,” and, of course, “we,” the mirror-gazers. No profit-seeking, media-sponsoring, mind-implanting corporations involved whatsoever!
But that’s merely the half of it. Turns out, genuine honesty and realism have had the exact same place in this “Campaign for Real Beauty” as they occupy in any other marketing mix — none.
In a story titled “Retouching Ruckus Leaves Dove Flailing,” this week’s issue of Advertising Age reports that Unilever has been caught with its hand on the very photo imaging software it claims to be denouncing and transcending.
Ad Age’s story on the exposure of Unilever’s fraud quotes Pascal Dangin, the “prominent” image re-toucher who clandestinely worked for Unilever. Laurel Collins, the author of a piece of puff reportage in the immensely over-rated The New Yorker magazine relays this fleeting exchange she had with Dangin:
I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”
So, even in a “real” marketing image, the really real must be carefully selected and re-touched, as always.
Once again, Robert L. Heilbroner: “How strong, deep, or sustaining can be the values of a civilization that generates a ceaseless flow of half-truths and careful deceptions?”
*My guess is that the whole “Campaign for Real Beauty” is actually targeted at middle-aged moms, with the idea being to build brand loyalty to Dove among both moms and daughters by preying upon the moms’ own fear of aging and their desire to mentor their daughters in a vaguely feminist way. “Dove is real!”
