Archive for November, 2008

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

Exactly What Are We Bailing Out?

The Tweedledums gave away a trillion dollars to the vultures in charge of juggling the great growing wodges of surplus capital* the overclass can’t find a place to invest productively.

A day or two after his victory, the Tweedle-D’s new President-elect revealed that his idea of “helping the middle class” is another give-away — this time, to the U.S.-based automobile corporations!

Now, Tweedle-D Party Radio, a.k.a. “Air America Radio,” has its stable of parrots squawking about what a grand, populist, commoner-helping thing this is “bailout” would be.

And, even as I type, the CEOs who pay themselves king’s ransoms to destroy the planet, squander its finite supply of energy, and murder 40,000 of their countrymen every year are up on Capitol Hill, begging bowls out and solemn professions of socio-economic concern/threat on their caviared lips.

What a freaking crock! Let’s take a quick peek at what’s actually being proposed here, shall we?

The monstrosity depicted at left is the sort of “cutting edge” new technology that is the supposed point and promise of a post-bailout Detroit. It is, you see, a “hybrid” Cadillac Escalade! It has an electric motor to complement its conventional V8! Dare we dream of such a gloriously transformed future? I swoon.

No, wait, I’m outraged.

Even the “car enthusiast” motorheads who write automobile reviews for The New York Times can spot this portentous scam:

You can coax the Escalade Hybrid into electric-only mode, same as a Prius, but if you need to accelerate at all, or go up the slightest hill, or go faster than 30 miles an hour, you awaken the 332-horsepower V-8 under the hood.

Therein lies the dilemma of this truck: its mileage is great compared with a regular Escalade’s, but that’s like saying the American economy is great compared with Zimbabwe’s.

I managed to eke out 22.3 miles a gallon on one highway-biased trip, and about 20 m.p.g. over all. The hybrid system’s benefit is most pronounced in urban driving, where Cadillac claims a 50 percent improvement in fuel economy. (The gas-only Escalade is rated 12 m.p.g. in town, 18 on the highway, with all-wheel drive.)

Bizarrely, the Environmental Protection Agency does not provide mileage estimates for the four-wheel-drive Escalade Hybrid because its weight vaults it into the category of heavy-duty trucks, which need not be rated.

To create the Escalade Hybrid and its full-size Chevrolet and GMC siblings, G.M. cooperated with BMW and the former DaimlerChrysler to develop a mind-boggling hybrid transmission that can deploy two 60-kilowatt electric motors in tandem with a gas engine, operating either in continuously variable mode or through four fixed gears.

The system also captures regenerative braking energy and uses an auto-stop feature to minimize idling. Using this technology, G.M. can wring more than 20 m.p.g. out of its full-size S.U.V.’s.

But we’re still talking about a three-ton truck. Mercedes boasts that a 200-pound man can sit atop a C-Class door without damaging the hinges; with the Escalade, it feels as if the 200-pound-man is already inside the door.

What if, instead of all the hybrid trickery, you simply subtracted 1,000 pounds of weight, using unibody construction and a direct-injection V-6 engine paired with a conventional six-speed automatic? Couldn’t you have an equally posh and enormous three-row interior with all-wheel-drive and 20 m.p.g. economy? You certainly could, because I just described the Buick Enclave, a vehicle in G.M.’s own portfolio that underscores the Escalade Hybrid’s Rube Goldberg approach to efficiency.

Of course, what the Times‘ auto critic is never going to tell you is that automobiles — all automobiles — are Rube Goldberg machines. With a few exceptions like ambulances and fire trucks, using them to accomplish mundane trips around town is like using a chainsaw to slice and butter your morning toast. It is the ultimate capitalist boondoggle: Selling the schlemiels two (or more) tons of unnecessary shit instead of a bike or a tennis shoe or a subway ticket! What a great gig! Accumulate, accumulate — that is Moses and the Prophets!

And you also see here what a fucking joke things like “hybrid” engines are going to be in the hands of private industry. Slap that label on the thing, and the schlemiels stop asking questions! A great marketing tool!

What we need to do, of course, is to nationalize the automobile corporations, and use their assets to manufacture rail stock and other equipment needed for rebuilding our towns to favor walking, bicycling, and rail travel. As a stopgap, we should also manufacture and distribute very simple automobiles that get 40 MPG or better, and tax the hell out of both gasoline and gas-guzzlers.

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* In case you’re interested in these kinds of things, Keynes used the term “surplus capital” in The Economic Consequences of the Peace.  Of course, “surplus capital” is also “surplus surplus,” since capital is society’s savings, its fund for repairing and transforming itself.

Monday, November 17th, 2008

Behind the Marketing Veil: The Fruits of War

Friday, November 14th, 2008

Memo to Biofuel Propagandist Josh Tickell

America is not addicted to oil, Josh. It’s addicted to cars, which are the single most ecologically wasteful invention in world history.

Hence, automobiles are the problem, not fuel, as you wish and claim in your massively wrongheaded and softheaded Sundance-awarded propaganda movie. Biodiesel is hopelessly unworkable as a fuel for our 200-million+ fleet of two-ton mobility boxes. Worse, it is also a terrible, intolerable diversion from addressing the problem of cars-first transportation in the USA.

Despite your awards, by failing to confront cars, you are damaging the Earth, not helping it. And, in the process, as you must know at some level, you are also attacking the billions of desperately poor people who need the land, food, and water that you’re encouraging North American car-sellers to grab for themselves.

Ever wonder why so many apolitical lame-o celebutards are fired up about your bogus pie-in-the-sky?

There’s a reason…Look it up.

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

TV Watchers: Micro-Managed Profit-Rats

From Advertising Age for November 6, 2008:

As Ratings Fall, Networks Take on Ad-Skipping

With DVR penetration knocking on 30%, much of America now views the ability to skip ads on TV as something approaching a birthright.

While they haven’t had much choice in the matter, the broadcast networks say they’re OK with this, that DVR users watch more TV and disproportionately more shows from ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS, which can’t be bad, right?

But the networks haven’t given up on the dream of a world of must-see advertising and are quietly attempting to take back that right — let’s call it a privilege — on the next generation of digital platforms. Already, the networks have effectively eliminated ad-skipping on broadband and have made that a prerequisite in deals with online distributors such as Hulu, Joost and Veoh, as well as ABC.com’s full-episode player.

ABC is even trying to export the model offline with its latest video-on-demand agreements with Cox Communications and Verizon’s Fios, which allow next-day, on-demand access to shows — with fast-forwarding disabled for the ads. More ABC VOD deals are in the offing, and the network says they’ll all be ad-skip-free.

Love that “let’s call it a privilege” remark! How dare “consumers” think they have a birthright.

But, never fear, you dear, sweet dividend collectors: It’ll take a while, but the necessary work to win back the little piece of lost ground will happen:

Since DVR penetration is likely to hit 50% in the next few years, the business model is looking like an endangered species, unless the networks can figure out how to insert a fresh ad into programming when it’s watched after the fact.

Interestingly, cable operators could hold the key to that hurdle. Cablevision won the right in federal court to introduce a network DVR. Since the content resides on Cablevision’s servers and not on a DVR hard drive, the company could, theoretically, insert a dynamic ad that would make a time-shifted viewer as valuable as a live viewer. Cablevision could also disable ad-skipping altogether, which Time Warner Cable does with its “Start Over” service…

Progress, in fact, is already being made among the rodents:

“We have to be very careful not to overstep our bounds,” said Chris Allen, director-video innovations at Starcom MediaVest. “People won’t accept five- or six-minute [advertising] pods you couldn’t fast-forward, but three or four ads over a one-hour show — they are fairly tolerant of it.”

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

Market Totalitarianism: No Mere Metaphor

They won’t stop until we stop them.  They can’t.  Their system requires it, fuels it, refines it, extends it.

No sphere is safe. The profit-seekers devour all they find as they race one another to get their super-size slice before the death of the ecosphere. Nothing sacred. No holds barred.  No boundaries hold.

The latest from Advertising Age:

“Reaching Consumers at Work Could Be Next Great Frontier”

Seems that even the airtight, scientifically managed dictatorships of the corporate workplace are being cracked ajar and scoured for a few more grains of mind-control over prospective product-purchasers:

Before they make a purchase, 93% of Americans consult their co-workers for advice, according to a new study from Big Research on socializing in the workplace.

The study from the independent consumer-research firm was conducted via WorkPlace Media’s “proprietary permission-based network” of over 920,000 U.S. companies across a variety of industries. WorkPlace is a media company that helps brands reach consumers at work.

The survey offered some interesting insight into how much people socialize at work. Of the 3,389 U.S. employees surveyed in the study, 68% admitted socializing with co-workers during work breaks, and another 42% said they phoned, texted or e-mailed friends and family from the office during the work day.

“It’s a traditionally advertising-free and uncluttered environment,” said Stephanie Molnar, CEO of WorkPlace Media, who quite naturally considers marketing to at-work consumers an effective way to build brand awareness.

Ms. Molnar recognizes that marketing to at-work consumers is in its infancy stages. She estimates that less than 10% of U.S. companies partake in it, but she thinks it’s a growing field. Ms. Molnar said the WorkPlace network reaches seven out of every 10 working Americans, which is more than the combined circulation of daily newspapers in the U. S.

“We’re finding that marketers we talk to are extremely intrigued by this opportunity,” she said.

They buy your work-time and tell you what to do on the job, no policy questions allowed. They offer you irrelavent, dim-bulb, focus-grouped, mud-slinging 30-second TV ads to help you choose between Corporate-D and Corporate-Dumb every four years. Then, they tell you your free time is what makes you free and what makes all the rest of it worthwhile.

Yet, all the while, they are throwing trillions at manipulating your every possible waking moment — even now at your job — to maximize their chance of selling your something of their own, exclusive, self-interested design, you and the rest of the planet be damned.

The degree of overclass effort, control, and waste would spin the heads of the most grasping and megalomaniacal of history’s pathetic pantheon of state-based totalitarians…

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A cousin headline from today’s Ad Age:

Smartphones Could Fuel Surge in Video Gaming

Studies Reveal Growth Potential for In-game Ads

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

The Cloud-Dwellers

I begin my forthcoming book, Automobiles Über Alles: Capitalism and Transportation in the United States, by reviewing the main reasons why the insane, super-dangerous, ecocidal capitalist boondoggle known as the automobile-industrial complex (a.k.a. “the backbone of our economy”) has never reached the public agenda in this, its lodestar and cradle, the USA.

One of the major reasons for this increasingly dangerous failure of democracy is the abject failure of aspiring critics to transcend prevailing ideology, which has long insisted that “Americans are having a love affair with the automobile” is all anybody ever needs to know about where cars-first transportation comes from.

The core claim of prevailing ideology is, of course, that capitalists are mere servants of the pristine, pre-existing wishes of the spontaneously car-enamored masses.

Alas, that has always been less than half the story.  The truth is that whatever amount of love ordinary Americans might hold for the horseless carriage (and this quantum is always imputed, never documented or qualified) is thin soup compared to capitalists’ unyielding ardor for it.  Indeed, as I demonstrate in the book, corporate capitalists don’t just love selling cars to ordinary Americans.  They are deeply, systemically, literally addicted to it.

Meanwhile, by failing to pierce prevailing obscurantist, capitalism-excusing dogma, even the best would-be car-critics have inadvertently helped render autos-über-alles unintelligible and undebatable.

Many (maybe most) car-critics seem never even to have troubled themselves over the need to explain capitalist interests.  Alan Thein Durning, Jane Holtz Kay, Katie Alvord — all hate cars, yet each treats them as nothing more than seductive but ill-chosen spouses, as a love affair gone wrong.  Reading their work provide literally zero opportunity to see and contemplate how big business proprietors have participated in shape transportation options.  As a result, where there ought to be a framework for appropriate, effective, and efficient democratic action, such thinkers produce only pie-in-the-sky harangues about changing one’s lifestyle — “Divorce Your Car! (Alvord) — and pathetic political quarter-measures — “leave a copy of this book on the bus” (Durning).

I call these fluff-meisters “the lifestyle haranguers.”  “Shop your way to a better future!” is their idea of adequate politics.

Alas, as I also document in the book, even the most strident and open would be-radicals have also remained prisoners of euphemism and psycho-babble.  I call these fiercer but no less vague and discombobulating critics “the cloud-dwellers.”

To be sure, the cloud-dwellers seem to yearn to connect the dots between the masses, the classes, and the cars.  But, probably due to a combination of fear and their own unwitting indoctrination, they have never actually done so to any meaningful degree.  Instead of careful explanations of interests and institutions, we hear, once again, only of airy, amorphous, undiscussable things like “the car culture.”  If and when issues of corporate capitalism arise among the cloud dwellers, they get treated — at best — as mere things done by a rogue “industry,” rather than as what they patently are: the extremely carefully calculated profit-maximizing actions of corporate capitalist planners.

This is not the place to present my whole book-section on the cloud-dwellers’ failure to lay the groundwork for bringing reason and reconstruction to America’s planet-wrecking transportation order.

For now, I merely point you to the magnum opus of Derrick Jensen, “an anarcho-primitivist, author, lecturer, philosopher, and tireless fighter for a beleaguered, dying planet.”

For Jensen, as for basically all green activists, the story of autos-über-alles remains one of “culture.”  Despite their occasional claims that “I’m more focused on capitalism right now,” contemporary greens continue to prefer generality to specifics.  In their seemingly larger harangues, capitalists may receive a mention, but corporate capitalist interests, actions, and powers get no serious explanation.  None.

The problem with that is that, by telling far less than half the story, the public continues to be deprived — by its own would-be champions — of the chance for developing a sharp, realistic understanding of the nature and logic of the dire crisis emanating from capital’s continuing dictatorship over transportation in this country.

I think it’s no exaggeration to say that, if we don’t soon develop and share such understanding, we will remain roadkill beneath the wheels of the vested interests, who are not about to tolerate serious change in this, their “backbone” area.

As Tony Benn says, “addicts have a way of killing to get what they need.”

As any medical scientist knows, talking about “the drug culture” merely explains the results, rather than the cause, of substance addiction.  Precisely the same point goes for “the car culture.”  It is less than a beginning.

We have not yet begun to fight, despite the lateness of the hour and the scale of the threat…

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[Afternote:  Check out the interviewer's use of the word "consumerism" in the interview containing the "Im more about capitalism" quote above.  Obviously, despite her scorn, the speaker of the word hasn't thought for a second about its rotten history and its discombobulating bias.]