Archive for April, 2009
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
All Creep, All the Time
Back in the hoary yesteryear of 2007, there was a minor brouhaha over the State Farm Insurance Company’s placement of its logo on the cross-bars of basketball stanchions during NCAA games. At the time, The New York Times‘ fine advertising columnist, Stuart Elliott, reported on the marketing advance, naming it as a good example of ad creep.
Elliott contacted State Farm marketers, who disclosed their motives:
“Consumers consume media differently from three years ago,” said Mark Gibson, assistant vice president for advertising at State Farm in Bloomington, Ill. “It’s not enough to just run a 30-second commercial in a program.”
This admission of existing marketing-stimuli being “not enough” was, of course, followed by de rigueur professions of the corporation’s tender concerns for “consumers”:
In seeking alternatives to traditional ads, State Farm’s goal is “naturally, seamlessly integrating
the brand into a venue in a way that doesn’t take away from the event,” Mr. Gibson said.
If it causes disruption or becomes something people don’t like, it’s an issue,” he added, “and
consumers will let you know in their own way.”
So far, Mr. Gibson said, there have been no complaints about the signs. They are appearing at
universities that include Arizona State, Auburn, Baylor, Brigham Young, Florida State, Iowa State, Marshall, Miami, North Carolina State, Purdue, Texas A&M, the University of Colorado, Vanderbilt and the University of California, Los Angeles.
“State Farm was very sensitive about the schools doing this and didn’t push if a school felt it
was not right,” said Greg Brown, president at the Learfield Sports division of Learfield Communications in Plano, Tex., which represents 32 universities in their dealings with corporate marketers.
“The college landscape is a much more reserved landscape than Nascar or a variety of other
sports enterprises,” Mr. Brown said. “There’s headroom in what we do, by comparison, but we
don’t do something the schools won’t agree with.”
Mr. Brown says he believes “we’ve struck a nice balance” with the State Farm signs, because
they are visible to fans at the games as well as viewers on TV but are “not in your face.”
Time travel with me now to the year 2009, won’t you. What do we find here?
Voila:
and…
and…
Monday, April 27th, 2009
The Latest in Military Marketing
While the US Navy sells working class youth the idea that fighting wars is a safe, fun, brave video game, the US Air Force has apparently just finished using White House assets to scare bejeezus out of New York City, undoubtedly as part of yet another forthcoming fascistic advertising blitz.
Wanna bet whether Mr. Change appears in it?
What a wonderful world…
Monday, April 20th, 2009
Obamanocchio: Case Closed
It’s a daily, even hourly, cascade, this waterfall of Obama-fraud revelations. The Cabinet from Wall Street and War Crimes ‘R Us, the continued and new war crimes, the corporate-insider Health Czar, even the half-assed retreat on stem-cell research: Obama voters, you got bought and sold, straight up, big time, no doubt.
Today’s backstab(s)? [Post update -- I told you this was hourly...see below...]
The Obama administration said on Monday that it had no plans to reopen negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement to revise its labor and environmental provisions, as then-Senator Barack Obama promised to do during his presidential campaign.
Post update, later the same day:
Chalmers Johnson says the CIA is outdated and rotten to the core, and ought to be closed down.
What does Mr. Change say? That the CIA “is more important than ever,” and also this:
“I want to be very clear and very blunt,” Mr. Obama said. “I’ve done so for a simple reason, because I believe that our nation is stronger and more secure when we deploy both the full measure of our power and the power of our values including the rule of law.”
Yes, let’s give a big cheer for the great reformer who pledges to keep the rule of law on our list of potential tactics! After all, it sure can be a mighty convenient argument, when conditions are right for its deployment, of course.
Sunday, April 19th, 2009
Our Oh-So-Patient Overclass
The mainstream excuse for letting capitalists keep economic surpluses is that they deserve it because of their patience in waiting for a return and foregoing consumption.
That’s always been a massive joke, of course, since surplus-takers have never foregone an ounce of personal luxury.
And, as Frances Wheen suggests, the abstinence theory of private capital was formulated after and against Marx’s emphasis on the taking of unpaid and alienated labor-time as the real core of business fortunes.
But now, we have the chance to see the true object of overclass patience, the one thing these self-congratulating world-wreckers are actually oh-so-willing to wait for. The blatant reality before us is that our overclass is the ultimate pack of procrastinators. In our age of dire planetary problems, the investing stratum is quite willing to wait until Hell freezes over before they admit they were wrong, that it is indeed quite possible for the rich to be too rich and powerful, and everybody else too poor and powerless. A sick, sick system…
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
The Violence Inherent in the System
In corporate capitalist America, cars-first transportation has always been unquestioned. As a result, we have spent the largest part of the immense wealth that has flowed through our polarized, brutalized society in the last century building the vast automobile system with which we remain stuck. It is by far the biggest, costliest public works project in human history — not even close. It has always been devoted to serving its central purpose, too, which, contrary to long-running propaganda claims, has NOT been transportation, but rather maximum profit for business owners.
Yesterday, The New York Times published a story about new research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Take a look at the video embedded in this story. It is heart-stopping, at several levels.
This extreme violence is what we have been trained to accept as not just normal, but “an emblem of the American spirit” and a confirmation that capitalism is the best of all possible social systems.
It won’t be long before we recognize, one way or another, how very insane we’ve been, ecological, socially, and, yes, economically…
The main IIHS finding, by the way, goes unreported by the NYT:
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
The Unfolding of the Obama Fraud
Adolph Reed, Jr. has never been fooled by Barack Obama:
This has been confirmed ever since Obama chose his cabinet, and the reality just keeps getting repeated by Obama himself. The neoliberalism (not my favorite word — I prefer plain old “capitalist,” or even “market totalitarian,” both of which are less confusing and more penetrating) is an article of faith with this empty vessel/mainstream Democrat.
First, there was the recent “We believe in capitalism; we believe in people getting rich” Profession of the Faith.
Now, it’s quite literally church-time.
And the head preacher’s core message is the same old tired, outdated, utterly disproven one that capitalists and their minions always preach: capitalists need more money.
This claim has been around for ages. In Das Kapital, Marx ripped into its expression as the early 19th-century businessman’s dogma known as Say’s Law. A century later, when the dim war criminal Ronald Reagan took office and began fronting for corporate capitalism’s Great Restoration, “Say’s Law” was repackaged as “supply-side economics.” Ever since then, as Big Money has enjoyed unbroken market-totalitarian conditions, all “serious” politicians have had to pass this litmus test. Even if they don’t openly preach “supply-side economics,” each aspiring “major” leader must adhere to capital’s insistence that the one and only possible cause of economic problems within capitalism is insufficient money at the top, in the hands of the overclass.
Think Obama sees through this sociopathic mantra? Think again. Here is what he is now preaching to us from in front of stained-glass windows:
And since the problems we face are all working off each other to feed a vicious economic downturn, we’ve had no choice but to attack all fronts of our economic crisis at once. The first step was to fight a severe shortage of demand in the economy. The Federal Reserve did this by dramatically lowering interest rates last year in order to boost investment.
How do you combat a severe shortage of demand — i.e., the lack of buying power among the masses of ordinary product-purchasers? That’s right: You make sure the investing class has more money! Then they’ll…
And there’s the rub. The obvious problem is that the rich are too rich for their own good. Capital, as it usually does, got what it asked for, and now it is too powerful. The overclass has, once again (think 1873-1893 and 1929-1940), won its own poker game.
As a result, there are really only two possible ways out of this New Depression: 1) the temporary fix of a new round of credit-cards for the commoners, or 2) major economic reforms plus a big new dose class-struggle-from-below.
Alas, Obama, for all his supposed smarts and “community” compassion, is unable and/or unwilling to understand this, being the social-climbing mainstream Great Restoration/market-totalitarian politician that he is. He simply ain’t gonna do it, folks, no matter how much pain he has to pretend to feel. Like all good New Democrats, he will choose ignominious defeat over opening the slightest crack toward questioning the system. Just listen to him.
Despite the continuing complacency of his entranced supporters, Obama is proving, as Reed has long argued, that he’s 100 percent hopeless in this core area of our collective conundrum. He is indeed a vacuous neoliberal opportunist.
I have the strong feeling that 2010 is going to look a lot like 1994. And God only knows what we’ll get in 2012, if people don’t rise up and fight this corporate bullshit…
