Archive for September, 2008
Monday, September 29th, 2008
Photograph of the Week
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
It’s the Depression, Stupid!
In the market-totalitarian United States, where TV has long since severed the public’s neural paths from so many dimensions of vital reality, history repeats itself and, tragically and farcically, nobody even notices.
Take the onset of the hitherto credit-averted Great Depression we are now experiencing. The facts are stunningly simple: At just about the time the corporate capitalist overclass began taking back the small popular gains embodied in the New Deal and the anemic “War on Poverty” (it was more like a skirmish, if that), credit cards made the transition from upper-class convenience to a major way of making ends meet for the masses. Soon thereafter, huge sums of capital began to accumulate on Wall Street, looking for some profitable place to go next. What money didn’t chase itself in circles or become fourth homes and private jets went back into increasingly sketchy loans, very often and increasingly against what was quaintly called “home equity.”
Predictably, at the beginning of the “home equity” lending cycle, there was both a major flow of cash into previously squeezed middle-class hands, and a corresponding price boom in suburban housing. For a time, for many commoners, it felt like a bonanza that would never end.
But the basic fact was and is that loans have to be either repaid from earnings or repudiated, and, from the beginning, the whole credit expansion was a blatant substitute for expanding earning power in the middle and working classes. Why pay the rubes when you can loan them the money? And what better distraction from the fast-eroding ways to make wages and salaries than a new credit card in the mail, or, even better, a new “line of credit” secured by an assuredly wondrous future?
This game seems over now, rather obviously.
And what are we hearing from the overclass at this fork in the road? More massively amnesiac, self-serving magical thinking, of course: In fact, what we’re already in the process of getting as a purported “solution” to the economic crisis is neither more nor less than the practical implementation of the right wing’s pet theory of what causes Great Depressions.
Ever since their masters started disassembling the New Deal, the right-wing economists (whose ideology, with the indispensable help of the Democratic Party, has long since swallowed almost all the liberals) have contended that a mere failure to take decisive action to boost Wall Street in 1929 was what caused the GD of the entire 1930s. Now, they are getting their chance to put that immensely silly but now-dominant hypothesis into real action.
The other (real) explanation of the last Great Depression, of course, was that the 1920s stock bubble was a symptom not a cause of the disease, which was excessive wealth polarity. From the time of the first public deregulation of corporate mergers (the 1880s) to the Roaring Twenties, the investing class had taken all it could get while buying into its own claim that having more money at the top is always a good thing for society and the world. From 1929 to Hitler’s conquest of France, that delusion proved its accuracy in unusually clear ways.
Sound like a familiar pattern?
I predict the forthcoming “market rescue” will produce the same results as last time: Wall Street may be temporarily quasi-stabilized, but to no lasting effect. This will be because, despite overclass myopia, the disease is deeper and wider than Wall Street. It has to do with the normal workings of what Noam Chomsky calls the unmentionable five-letter word: c-l-a-s-s. When the rich player has taken all the chips, and when another round of IOUs no longer holds credibility, poker games must end. Likewise, when the overclass has flogged and hogged its way through its last viable lending scheme, its own self-seeking behavior confronts it (and all of us) at last.
All in all, I think the evidence strongly suggests that the 2010s will be a lot like the 1930s all over again, but with way bigger stakes and far less room for dawdling and error.
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
Update: People Use Monopolists’ Products
…including famous people.
Ergo, those products are justified. Or so the story goes, judging from the second wave of Microsoft’s campaign to alter the public perception of its over-priced, under-performing, important-only-because-they’ve-already-been-pushed software products.
It’s quite telling that Microsoft’s marketers have conducted massive marketing research operations to prepare this pathetic advertising push, and yet have found literally nothing new or creative to say. Their claim is “people use Windows.” That’s it.
Well, of course people use Windows. Take me, for instance. I teach college and work in a law office, which dually compels me to use both Windows and MS Office. Why? Is it because of the superiority and/or the cost-savings?
Not so much. I must use MS Office only because most of my students and clients use it, and because it is designed to be as incompatible as possible with other word processors (purportedly but falsely by always being “more advanced”). And, of course, there is no Linux-friendly version of MS Office, for the obvious reason, so using MS Office in turn compels me to use MS Windows, despite the cost, inefficiency, and gross security risks of doing so.
And why do my students and clients “prefer” Windows and Office? Overwhelmingly for the same reason I do: Because they know it’s the most widely used software out there and that it’s basically closed to use with other platforms, so one needs to own and use it if one wants to play nice with others/get or keep one’s job.
So, Microsoft is “popular” because it’s already widespread and not having it is a risk to one’s career.
Not exactly the stuff of true genius, is it?
As usual in big business marketing, the truth — that the private software industry is a bloated, monopolistic, increasingly outdated racket — is not only nowhere to be found in Microsoft’s pitiful charade, but the weakness of the whole thing shows just how thin and vulnerable its whole business is. Like corporate capitalism in general, Microsoft is a mile wide, but only an inch deep.
In reality, the fact that MS is not better than Apple is a superficial, distracting point. The deeper point, the one that MS fears the most, is that neither Microsoft nor Apple are now better than open-source products. Their software empires are now all emperor and no entrepreneur, despite the infamous Gatesian claim to the contrary. Hence, we get this desperate, expensive attempt to distract attention from the most basic facts. Meanwhile, the billions-for-nothing continue to roll in to already disgustingly over-stuffed pockets.
Open-sourcers and public industrialists unite! You have nothing to lose but your indoctrination!
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
More Fortune Through Flummery
Pretty decent article on the rich-country end of the corporate capitalist food fiasco in today’s edition of The New York Times. Titled “Superfood or Monster From the Deep?,” the piece reports on the emerging corporate rush to ratchet profits via heightened use of unproven nutritional claims tied to so-called “nutraceuticals.” In this effort:
many food companies are refocusing their research and development; instead of adding expensive ingredients like sun-dried tomatoes or honey-roasted almonds to existing products, the search is on for inexpensive “value-added” products that customers will pay extra for.
The idea is to prey on people’s ignorance and unexamined (and often corporate news-inculcated) assumptions. Everybody knows that, in the past, food additives have led to major advances in public health. Everybody respects science. Everybody is also exposed to a constant diet of “news” about supposed advances in both food processing and nutritional science. Hence, it’s easy to make new claims for food products that contain various powders and extracts that may or may not have any value in human welfare, but that definitely show extreme promise as facilitators of big business marketers’ usual efforts to use false promises and petty scare tactics to sell more stuff:
Since the 1970s, as nutrition research has progressed beyond “vitamins and minerals,” a variety of new compounds have been touted as the key to health: antioxidants (related to vitamins, these include lycopene, beta-carotene and other plant-based nutrients); long-chain fatty acids like omega-3s, plentiful in fish and some plants; and “probiotics,” the live bacteria in yogurt and fermented vegetables.
There is significant scientific agreement — the standard the Food and Drug Administration requires before foodmakers can place unqualified health claims on packaging — on the benefits of certain nutrients, including calcium, fiber, folate, soy protein, omega-3 fatty acids, lactic acid bacteria and a few others. In food, these have proved to help protect against specific diseases (calcium against osteoporosis, omega-3 fatty acids for heart disease), and many nutritionists believe that they are beneficial in supplement form.
However, recent studies on supplemental vitamin E, beta-carotene and folate (all of which fall into the broad category of “antioxidants”) surprised everyone by showing no benefits whatsoever for cardiovascular disease. “There is a great deal we don’t know about how the compounds in food are made available to the body,” Dr. Alice H. Lichtenstein said.
But whether the nutritional benefits of the original foods survive in additive form is still to be determined. “Whether a tomato is good for you, that’s one thing,” Dr. Kessler said. “Whether the lycopene in a tomato is good for you, that’s another. And then whether synthetic lycopene and microencapsulated lycopene are also good for you, that’s yet another thing.”
Of course, in the face of the corporate marketing imperative, such uncertainties can never matter. Any claim that can be made will be made, as the race for market share and cash flow dictates:
Tropicana offers an orange juice tailored for bone loss, another for acid reflux, and one for weight loss. Many factors are pushing this trend toward health-specific foods: the aging population, changes in labeling rules, the general trend toward micromarketing that makes consumers accept, and soon expect, 12 slightly different Tropicana orange juices on the shelf where one used to be enough for everyone.
And the protection of the public in the whole scam is receiving the usual priority — slim and none. Where any rules exist, they are straight out of the Keystone Kop handbook:
Fortified food is certainly one of the great triumphs of public-health policy. When vitamin-B-enriched flour was introduced in the 1940s, rates of pellagra plummeted. Iodine-fortified salt virtually wiped out goiter, and vitamin-D-enriched milk eliminated rickets in children. But some experts say that such carefully designed campaigns have little in common with the fortified products now turning up in supermarkets.
“Those decisions were based on rigorous public-health studies,” said Dr. Jeffrey Mechanick, a professor of endocrinology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. “But the science hasn’t been done on the new nutraceutical products, and the F.D.A.’s current labeling standards are inadequate.”
The agency does not have specific rules for the labeling of functional foods. “It all depends on what type of claim is being made,” said Michael Herndon, an agency spokesman. “An unqualified health claim like ‘calcium reduces your risk of osteoporosis,’ has to be proved in advance. A more general claim like ‘X keeps your heart healthy’ has to be provable by the manufacturer, but we would not require proof in advance.” As with conventional foods, functional foods must clearly state the presence of allergens, like milk or fish, in the ingredients list.
The Food and Drug Administration does not conduct nutritional research. Several other federal agencies do so, but functional foods are not evaluated by any specific office. “Nutraceutical products have characteristics of both food and drugs,” said David A. Kessler, a former commissioner of the F.D.A. “It’s easy for them to slip through the cracks, and the industry is always ahead of the agency.”
Monday, September 15th, 2008
HGTV: A Running Documentary on (Sponsored) American Narcissism
As the kids say, OMFG!
Spent an hour in my apartment exercise room watching HGTV on the idiot box above the gym machines. It would be impossible to make a better documentary on the profound mental illness of the quasi-privileged sector of the American population at this ripe moment in our imperial history. Every second and every image — the appalling commercials very distinctly included — transmitted by HGTV is both an encouragement and a reflection of the stunning narcissism, vapidity, and ultra-petty acquisitiveness that pervades our greatly flattered and over-counted middle class. If you want to diagnose the cultural train wreck that un-checked corporate capitalism has made in its #1 citadel, this truly is must-see-TV.
This amazing TV channel is also powerful evidence of the inflexibility of our money-first social order. Thanks to Peak Oil and imperial decline, the logic of “home ownership” is now radically different than what middle-classers have been taught for the past 60+ years. Will paying a mortgage on a suburban casita ever again be a smart economic move? Perhaps, but this rote “dream” is now very far from being the no-brainer it’s been.
Nevertheless, just as the car corporations continue to advertise their rolling boondoggles as if it were 1987, so do the realtors, financiers, and house-equippers evidently lack any ability to deal with a future in which long-denied ecological limits are coming home to roost. HGTV trundling its way along the same old road confirms the Ceauşescuan bankruptcy of our played-out overclass. Their well is running very dry indeed…
Sunday, September 14th, 2008
Insanity Calling
Friday was drop-day at my apartment complex for the junk-mail Trojan Horse known as Yellowbook. In this age of cell-phone memory, 411 services, and Google, and to say nothing of the continuing existence of the bell corporations’ ordinary directories, the enormous waste and bother of money-grubbing corporate schemes like Yellowbook offers yet another testament to the existence of market totalitarianism. In this society, we can’t and don’t question even the most blatantly destructive capitalists.
And, behind this ordinary little crime against nature and people and true economy, the Orwellian chutzpah of the Yellowbook corporation’s “responsibility” jive is, as usual, enough to make a cat laugh:
Yellowbook recognizes the importance of publishing environmentally friendly products. We reduce, re-use and recycle whenever we can, wherever we can. To that end, we are:
* Increasing the percent of waste product in our paper
* Partnering with paper suppliers with sustainable forests
* Printing directories with biodegradable inks and adhesives
* Reducing our carbon “footprint” with a more friendly printing process
* Controlling the size and weight of our directories
* Reducing our electricity use
