Archive for November, 2008
Friday, November 28th, 2008
American Culture: Jesus Would Never Stop Vomiting
Worker dies at Long Island Wal-Mart after being trampled in Black Friday stampede
For all the back-and-forth about “culture wars” in the USA, have you ever noticed that the one thing that never gets included is the war elephant in the room — the huge, lavishly and minutely administered impact of corporate capitalism, market totalitarianism, and runaway commercialism?
Any minimally self-aware or ethically concerned society would call itself to a screaming halt over this appalling, pointless, deeply sick brutality.
Alas, that’s not us…not by a long shot.
Thursday, November 27th, 2008
Thanksgiving: Behind the Marketing Campaign
Thanksgiving is a thoroughly fake holiday designed to spur mindless nationalism and religiosity. It was first pronounced in 1863, without a single word about Pilgrims or Plymouth Colony, in a syrupy, overwrought religiously-phrased proclamation by the great non-churcher, Abraham Lincoln.
The also great sociologist James W. Loewen explains the problem:
Thanksgiving is full of embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not introduce the Native Americans to the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed autumnal harvest celebrations for centuries. Our modern celebrations date back only to 1863; not until the 1890s did the Pilgrims get included in the tradition; no one even called them “Pilgrims” until the 1870s. Plymouth Rock achieved iconographic status only in the nineteenth century, when some enterprising residents of the town moved it down to the water so its significance as the “holy soil” the Pilgrims first touched might seem more plausible.
Of course, ever since the triumph of the corporate marketing revolution in the early post-WWII years, Thanksgiving has also been transmogrified into what all other holidays are: a marketing platform, a superb ideological and sentimentalist schtick for pushing more (and increasingly trivial, moronic, and/or scandalous) corporate capitalist commodities into our personal lives.
So, let’s lift a glass to reality, shall we? It ain’t quite what the marketers and nationalists would have us believe:
“IT WAS WITH GOD’S HELP…FOR HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE DONE IT?”
Settlement proceeded, not with God’s help but with the Indians’. The Pilgrims chose Plymouth because of its cleared fields, recently planted in corn, “and a brook of fresh water [that] flowed into the harbor,” in the words of TRIUMPH OF THE AMERICAN NATION. It was a lovely site for a town. Indeed, until the plague, it had been a town. Everywhere in the hemisphere, Europeans pitched camp right in the middle of native populations—Cuzco, Mexico City, Natchez, Chicago. Throughout New England, colonists appropriated Indian cornfields, which explains why so many town names—Marshfield, Springfield, Deerfield–end in “field”.
Inadvertent Indian assistance started on the Pilgrims’ second full day in Massachusetts. A colonist’s journal tells us:
We marched to the place we called Cornhill, where we had found the corn before. At another place we had seen before, we dug and found some more corn, two or three baskets full, and a bag of beans. ..In all we had about ten bushels, which will be enough for seed. It was with God’s help that we found this corn, for how else could we have done it, without meeting some Indians who might trouble us. …The next morning, we found a place like a grave. We decided to dig it up. We found first a mat, and under that a fine bow…We also found bowls , trays, dishes, and things like that. We took several of the prettiest things to carry away with us, and covered the body up again.
Dig the guilty knowledge even at the start, noted by Loewen: “A place ‘like a grave!’”
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P.S. If you’re interested in what an talentless, dishonest, uninformed lout Rush Limbaugh is, read his pathetic attempt at an excuse for all this suppressed history. “Nobody knows,” my ass, dickhead. This is massively documented by mountains of historical evidence. Read a book, you über-idiot.
And check out how Limbaugh the neo-fascist doper scorns the truth as “just a multicultural curriculum which is designed to get as many little kids as possible to question the decency and the goodness of their own country.”
Horror of horrors! Questioning one’s own country?
Better to have the kiddies stick with what past generations have gotten: an intentionally falsified jingoist curriculum which is designed to prevent as many little kids as possible from questioning the decency and the goodness of their own country, a.k.a. citizenship responsibility #1.
After all, where would the Rush Limbaughs of the nation be without that implanted, continuing curriculum?
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
More Blood for Autos?
{Source: American Physical Society*}
Click on the graphic at left. When you do, you’ll see one of the car capitalists’ dirty little open secrets: If and when they do finally start to sell more fuel efficient cars, the rate of death on US highways is going to rise beyond its present clip of 40,000+ annual snuff-outs.
That’s because, as the figure shows, the car-makers have been using the increasing efficiency of modern engines to make heavier cars that get about the same MPG as prior generations of lighter cars. So, there has already been some decent progress in making more fuel-efficient gas engines. But the increase has gone almost entirely into making heavier, safer cars, rather than lighter, better-MPG, but substantially deadlier cars. Vehicle mass, you see, is one of the main factors in the survivability of the frequent high-force collisions that inhere in autos-über alles transportation.
In the abstract, of course, some of the heightened danger that would come from making cars lighter and more MPG-efficient could be reduced by having everybody change to smaller, lighter cars all at once. But that isn’t going to happen, because, since it would undoubtedly require strong governmental rules and actions, it would do the one thing the car capitalists fear the most: legitimize autos-über alles as a central topic of popular democratic politics. And, if that ever happens, people might start to ask what alternatives exist. For the overlords of big business, that’s the slipperiest of slopes. Hence, it’s verboten — a topic no responsible, serious “leader” can raise.
What we’re pretty clearly going to get instead is a “bailout” that compels whatever car corporations remain to start using engine efficiency gains for higher MPG results. That will mean a swath of much smaller, lighter vehicles will be on the road, running alongside all the SUVs and heavier current vehicles.
Here’s my prediction: When that change comes online, in the next 5 years or so, the annual death toll on US roads will eclipse 1979′s record of 51,103 killed.
[And note the similarity there in the background circumstances: The worst years on record were the oil crisis years of the late 1970s and early 1980s...]
Change you can die for!
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* The American Physical Society’s new energy-efficiency report is well worth studying.
Monday, November 24th, 2008
Barack O-Boondoggle
He’s technically smart, especially compared to the Texas Vegetable now in office, but he does NOT get it. He talks of the historic nature of our present socio-economic crisis, but has zero understanding of where we stand in history. Parroting the usual one-sided self-flatteries about American hard work, optimism, and creativity that pass for mainstream history, he can only imagine finding new ways of doing more of the same.
The core goal and promise is also the core impossibility: “fuel[ing] long-term economic growth.”
That simply ain’t gonna happen, and would be a complete disaster if it did. The planet is past Peak Oil, Peak Water, and Peak Farmland. It is also past the point where slight changes can make a difference in climate change, species loss, pollution, etc.
The only way forward, the only way to preserve political progress and modern society’s primary benefits is to create an economy capable of not just tolerating but leading toward economic contraction. And that ain’t capitalism, which must always grow, without end.
Instead of acknowledging the dire need for public industry, Obama is going to do what Dmitry Orlov observes all leaders sponsored by decrepit and outdated overclasses do: promulgate new and expanded elite boondoggles.
This, of course, is insanity writ large: Using the most powerful office in the world to do the same old things, while expecting different results.
A great many Obamaniacs are going to be massively disappointed…
Saturday, November 22nd, 2008
The Chevy Volt: ROFLMAO!
After years of breathless pre-advertising, here’s what “the backbone of our economy” is disclosing about its “cutting-edge” new “green” automobile, coming (maybe) next year:
G.M. says the car, which is scheduled to arrive in showrooms two years from now, will be able to travel 40 miles on a charge, but it will also have a small gas engine to extend the range to as much as 640 miles using both the battery and gasoline (the 1.4 liter, four-cylinder engine is intended to run a generator that will power the car and recharge the batteries once they are depleted). It is expected to cost about $40,000.
A 40-mile range! After billions spent over years!
As I keep saying, you know what complete excrement you’re getting when industry insiders and The New York Times are mentioning it:
“If you’re the affluent individual who wants to make a statement, it’s one thing,” said Ron Pinelli, president of MotorIntelligence.com, an industry analysis firm. “If you’re Joe the Commuter, you’re not going to spend $40,000 on an electric car. It’s insane.”
You see there the wishful thinking behind all this late, late, late capitalism. Behind the scenes, the overclass must be mired in quiet desperation, despite its unchanging public face.
And then there’s the supposedly democratic public response: The coming public sponsorship, via the Tweedle-D Party and its program of “change” you can choke on (a.k.a. the re-packaging of the usual capitalist boondoggles), of this suicidal greenwashing charade. If shamelessness and corruption were combustible, there’d be no energy crisis for many centuries:
Executives at General Motors, the largest and apparently the most imperiled of the three American car companies, are using the Volt as the centerpiece of their case to a skeptical Congress that their business plan for a turnaround is strong, and that a federal bailout would be a good investment in G.M.’s future.
Rest assured, nobody on Capitol Hill or in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is going to connect these dots…Quite the opposite.
Mad Max, here we come.
Friday, November 21st, 2008
More Hens for the Foxes
Seems that, having now eaten up all but the last few hens in the henhouse, the foxes are demanding and receiving what they always demand and receive — more hens for the henhouse.
President-Elect Barack Obama calls the latest lupine faction panting at the feather-bar — the U.S.-based automotive corporations — not just “the backbone of American manufacturing,” but, in a stunning proof of Dmitry Orlov’s thesis that, even in the face of socio-economic collapse, our decrepit imperial overclass can only propose ever-more and ever-more outlandish capitalist boondoggles, “a critical part of our attempt to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”
Indeed! Just like Adolf Hitler was a critical part the effort to reduce German anti-semitism in the 1930s!
Reality, of course, has been as described by the great Indian journalist, P. Sainath, in yesterday’s edition of CounterPunch:
But that’s the easy part. There’s a lot more [the car capitalists] did, as a major sector of industry – and as part of the larger corporate world of the United States. Over decades, they destroyed both existing and potential public transport. The ‘American Dream’ so far as the automobile went, was an imposed nightmare. In Detroit itself, you can see the skeletons of a once-alive transport system. All across the country, for decades from the 1920s, they bought up public transport systems and shut them down.
Trains were shifted from electric to diesel engines. Sometimes, they were simply done away with and replaced by buses and then cars. Together with Big Oil, Big Auto converted electric transit systems to fuel-based bus systems. In one estimate: In 1935, electric train engines outnumbered diesel train engines 7 to 1. “By 1970, diesel train engines outnumbered electric ones 100 to 1. And GM made 60 per cent of the diesel locomotives.” The electric rail system in and around Los Angeles was almost erased.
Fostering the cult of the individual-owned automobile was a major goal. By 2001, that goal was achieved, beyond belief. Some 90 per cent of Americans drove to work by that year. The findings of the 2001 National Household Travel Survey are striking. Only 8 per cent households reported not having a vehicle available for regular use. The survey showed that “that daily travel in the United States totalled about 4 trillion miles, an average of 14,500 miles per person.” Trips by transit and by school bus each made up just 2 per cent of daily trips taken in 2001.
Meanwhile, the logic of “too big to fail” keeps Big Auto and others of its ilk going. There is never any debate here of whether they should have been allowed to get as big as they did. President-elect Obama says he will aid the auto oligarchs who he calls “the backbone of American manufacturing.” Sure, with that many jobs at stake, any government must worry about the consequences of letting them sink. No question about it. It’s on the basis of that very fear that the Terrible Metal Lizards are able to bargain for handouts from public money. This economy has lost close to a quarter of a million jobs in the month of October alone. So the thought of many more simply vanishing is scary. The US has already lost over 1.2 million jobs this year. Close to half of those in the past three months alone.
So there is a good chance that more public money will be thrown at the auto giants, and that, without larger strategic shifts being imposed on them. Yet, everyone knows this does not mean an industry saved. They could be back soon with demands for still more. At which time, with things being even worse (quite likely) the pressure to save jobs by pouring in public money will be still greater.
As Sainath says, the reality is that despite a rising flood of babble about “new” and “cutting-edge” engine technology, the private automobile is neither more nor less than a failed, unsustainable technology that was promulgated by and for a failed, unsustainable social class. The cardinal lie of this dying but still massively dominant class has been that enriching it and ceding all major decisions to it is the road to maximum human welfare. “Just a few more chickens, and this henhouse will be paradise…”
Hens of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your “guardians.”
