Archive for January, 2009
Sunday, January 25th, 2009
Obamanocchio #1
President Obama made a “surprise visit” to the White House Press Room on Thursday. Undoubtedly, this was not an impulse or an accident, but a calculated attempt to create a new kind of photo-op. The idea was almost certainly to make news about the newness of this President not hiding from public-minded questioning. The assumption must have been that the WH press corp would be so bowled over by Obama’s entrance that they’d fawn and gush over him and pump out puff pieces proclaiming his newness and openness.
Turns out, the reporters took advantage of the unheard-of chance by actually asking Obama a question!
“Why, Mr. President, are you nominating the Raytheon Corporation lobbyist William J. Lynn III to serve as Deputy Secretary of Defense? Isn’t that an egregious violation of your campaign promise and subsequent Executive Order to stop doing this kind of thing?”
Obama’s answer? Not so new:
So, in other words, this “surprise visit” was old wine in a new bottle, a staged event all about coercive image-making, with no connection whatsoever to any new openness. If the Press Room is going to ask President Obama questions, then he’s not coming there. Simple as that.
No wonder Ronald Reagan, the figurehead-in-chief when political marketers perfected the art and science of photo-op psy-ops, is one of Obama’s heroes.
“Change you can believe in.”©®™
Saturday, January 24th, 2009
“Made With” Lies
Big business advertising is the art and science of tricking people into thinking and reacting your way. Lies are an absolute staple of the trade.
One major form of lying in advertising is the use of sly linguistic insertions, such as the ubiquitous “up to” gambit — as in the verbal bait-and-switch “save up to [X] percent.”
A slim but dense volume could be composed on this subject. And, as the late Robert L. Heilbroner once remarked,
At a business forum, I was once brash enough to say that I thought the main cultural impact of television advertising was to teach children that grown-ups told lies for money. How strong, deep, or sustaining can be the values of a civilization that generates a ceaseless flow of half-truths and careful deceptions?
One of the most egregious new marketing campaigns in the blatant lie division is McDonald’s “See What We’re Made Of” series.
The ads are an attempt to portray McDonald’s fare as healthy and wholesome. Not only do they deploy pictures like this:
They also do things like describe Chicken McNuggets as “made with white meat.”
The key phrase there is “made with.”
What is the full ingredient list of Chicken McNuggets? It ain’t exactly white meat, bread crumbs and simple cooking oil:
Chicken McNuggets®:
White boneless chicken, water, food starch-modified, salt, chicken flavor (autolyzed yeast extract, salt, wheat starch, natural flavoring (botanical source), safflower oil, dextrose, citric acid, rosemary), sodium phosphates, seasoning (canola oil, mono- and diglycerides, extractives of rosemary). Battered and breaded with: water, enriched flour (bleached wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), yellow corn flour, food starch-modified, salt, leavening (baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, calcium lactate), spices, wheat starch, whey, corn starch. Prepared in vegetable oil ((may contain one of the following: Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness), dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent). [Link]
As Charlotte Gerson notes:
There are 38 ingredients in a McNugget; many of them made from corn. Further down the list there are the mono, diandtriglycerides, and the emulsifiers that keep the fats and the water from separating. More corn flour is used to make the batter, and the hydrogenated oil in which the nuggets are fried can come from soybeans, canola or cottonseed, depending on the market price.
It gets worse: a number of the ingredients come from petroleum products, to keep the items from spoiling or ‘looking strange’ after months in the freezer or on the road. If you are truly worried, look up these ingredients: sodium aluminum phosphate; mono-calcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and calcium lactate. These are used to keep the animal and vegetable fats from turning rancid. Then there are “anti foaming” agents like dimethylpolysiloxene. According to the Handbook of Food Additives, this material is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigenic, and reproductive effector. It is also flammable.
The most alarming ingredient in Chicken McNuggets is “tertiary butyl hydroquinone,” or TBHQ, derived from petroleum. This is sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to “help preserve freshness.” Again, according to A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food. It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” Ingesting five grams can be fatal.
Saturday, January 24th, 2009
Invasion of the Money-Snatchers
My friend, the Prague-based sociologist and author of a classic TCT post, Douglas Pressman, forwards this useful item:
http://projects.flowingdata.com/walmart/
Friday, January 23rd, 2009
FWIW: My Obama Litmus Test
For any who may care, I posted this ditty on the always rousing Candide’s Notebooks:
Nobody yet knows which way Obama will break, though the signs inherent in the staffing selections and the eagerness for voluntarily “reaching across the aisle” give little reason for optimism.
True renewal at this point is quite easy and obvious, given the thirty years* of extreme damage wreaked by the Great Restoration of the investing classes.
FWIW, here’s my short list of acid tests:
1. Structural (not just fleeting) assistance to the working class, to redress the root of the economic crisis, which is way too much money going to the top. This must involve a serious revision of our hijacked tax codes. If Obama were a true renewer, he would also include labor-law reforms to help unions and large new public employment programs.
2. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: The USA should comply with it — we are not doing so, and have not ever really done so — and refuse to send money or offer alliances to all non-signatory and non-compliant nations. On our side, this would mean actually pursuing world disarmament. Obama says, on occasion, he’ll take this path. Let’s see it.
3. Movement away from cars-first transportation, which is a path to energy collapse-apocalypse, even with the greenest of Al Gore’s fantasies coming true. [Obama-optimists take heed: "We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories." [Inauguration speech] At the same time, Obama cautions us that “We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense.” These are NOT encouraging words, at any level.]
4. Cessation of military threats as a tool of foreign policy/a.k.a. compliance with the UN Charter.
5. Strengthening and democratization of the UN.
_______
* The problem we face precedes the just-departed super-war-criminal GW Bush. The problem is our overclass, which has only one answer to every boom and every crisis: “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people.” The “Reagan Revolution” brought a sterner, stronger imposition of this governing principle, which has since been respected every bit as much by “New Democrats” as by Republicans.
Friday, January 23rd, 2009
Twitter Litter
Corporate capitalist transportation system painted itself into a corner and threatening to blow up and/or burn out the world? Market totalitarianism’s answer? Bail it out to do more of the same!
Corporate capitalist for-profit health care radically mis-allocating resources and generating near-universal anguish? Market totalitarianism’s answer? Make it illegal not to purchase private health insurance!
Corporate capitalist media system promoting mass addiction to egregiously vapid time-wasting while simultaneously making it impossible to comprehend the most basic information needed for democratic citizenship? Market totalitarianism’s answer? Make sure commercialism reaches down to the tiniest tentacle of the media matrix.
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
