The Consumer Trap

Archive for June, 2009

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

As the Democrats Stab Your Back…

Canada spends half of what we do per capita on healthcare and they do have some waiting lists, but they’re really not as bad as the right wing portrays them. The waiting lists are a result of their level of spending. Our problem in the US is we spend a lot of money but we have a bad system. In Canada they have a good system but they just don’t spend enough money on it. We have great hospitals and great nurses and well-trained doctors and lots of fancy technology. We have what we need, and yet we still can’t take care of patients because the financing system doesn’t work.

– Steffie Woolhandler, M.D.

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

Single Payer Reaches Bipartisan Status!

Alas, it’s only “bipartisan” among that puny, powerless group known as the entire voting public:

So, half of Republicans now favor Medicare for All.  Think about that.

What is our glorious President Change and his magnificent Party doing about that, armed as they are with not only a 90-percent mandate among their own party members, but a clear majority of the opposition?  Why, they’re continuing to search for a “bi-partisan” answer — in the U.S. Senate, of course.

This is a major proof of Uncle Whiskers’ old point about the state being the executive committee of the ruling class. Our ruling class is too unhinged and out-of-control to cede anything that suggests your right to live is separate from your status as a piece of “human capital.”

Conclusions?

Obama is 100 percent part of the problem, not the solution. Collaboration is his middle name.  He is an epic disaster, a sick joke, a Reaganesque plague upon the nation.

Worse, our always deeply hamstrung system of self-government is now utterly broken.  What more proof do you need?  Jesus Palomino — half of Republicans already favor Medicare for All, yet that obvious and easy and massively popular policy remains “off the table”!!!!!

Time for a new social movement, a new president, and a new Constitution.  Time to stop being fooled by political marketers.  Time to make sure the 2010s will make the 1960s look like the 1950s.

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Official Face of the Overclass

This, my friends, is 85-year-old Gloria Vanderbilt!  Gloria is, of course, not just mommy to the journalistic cipher Anderson Cooper, but also the never-laboring heiress-socialite great granddaughter of railroad robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the fine figures who helped ensure that rail transport in the USA would be privately owned and widely despised, rather than publicly provided and widely beloved.

I hereby nominate Gloria as the official 21st-century cover-girl for our corporate overclass.  She’s just absolutely perfect!  Way decrepit and long past any pretense to vigor, she epitomizes the de rigueur look of our times:  The dyed, implanted fake hair.  The scramble for each and every possible plastic-surgical denial of reality.  The vapid self-satisfaction and outdated posings in the face of blatant irrelevance and onrushing death.

Sublime, isn’t it?

And Lady Glo isn’t just the perfect looker.  She even seems to be channeling and verbalizing the core thoughts of her social class-mates, young and old alike:  “I’m determined to be the best I can be for as long as I can, and when I’m not, I have my plans.”

Well, bravo, hmm, hmm!  How true-to-life can one possibly be, hmm, hmm?

One catches the general principle at work (and I use that word “work” ironically) here.  It’s a slight adaptation of old Corny’s classic admission about class power and the (non-)rule of law:  Reality?  What care I about reality?  Hain’t I got the money?

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Dmitry Orlov: An International Treasure

Mr. Orlov is one of the most penetrating and stimulating thinkers out there.

I highly recommend reading through his blogged version of his recent talk in Ireland.

Friday, June 12th, 2009

Etrade: Selling Stocks With Racism

While stuck watching the profoundly moronic and outdated Belmont Stakes in my apartment’s exercise room last weekend, I encountered E-Trade’s notorious “black baby” commercials.  I almost fell off my treadmill.

Watch this appalling shit here and here.

As the white baby controls all aspects of the situation and voices all the reasoned thoughts, the black baby sings, trips out, echoes white logic, and makes a sexual come-on.  Can you imagine these ads getting made and aired if the skin colors were reversed?  No chance in hell.

I guarantee you that all of this was carefully planned by E-Trade’s marketing team.  As I documented in my book, The Consumer Trap, big business marketers are extremely sensitive to racial stereotypes, and are driven by the logic of their enterprise to exploit and perpetuate, not challenge, them.

The other important aspect of this blatant neo-racism is that it is targeted at elite audiences, who absolutely eat it up, not least because they think it’s a great thing for they themselves to be willing even to look at and possibly, maybe interact with a black person (both acts they have only recently begun to contemplate).

The truth, of course, is that contrary to long-running claims that Joe Sixpack is the source of all benightedness, our lovely overclass has always held by far the worst and least accurate view of human beings and human affairs.

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

The Continuing War on Schooling

Among the multiple disasters being perpetuated by Obama is the lack of anything but the status quo ante on education. Like basically everything else, schools are clearly in for more of the same under the reign of the 2008 Marketer of the Year.

But let’s stop to ask about the real reasons our schools are “failing,” shall we?

The consensus answer among our overseers is that educational failure is internal, not external to schools themselves.

For those susceptible to this standard Business Party line, I would not only remind you that, in the USA, we spend more than twice as much money on big business marketing than we do on all forms and levels of education combined, public plus private.

I would also refer you to the recent statement of Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Killiam Klinton, and spokesperson for the far left end of the “serious” politicians. Here’s Mr. Reich’s explanation of the inherent limits of education in this, history’s richest and most powerful empire:

Not all of our young people can or should receive a four-year college degree, but we can do far better for them than we’re doing now. At the least, every young person should have access to a year or two beyond high school, in order to gain a certificate attesting to their expertise in a particular area of technical competence. Technicians who install, upgrade, and service automated and computerized machinery — office technicians, auto technicians, computer technicians, environmental technicians — will be in ever-greater demand.

So, why can’t we all go to real college? Because, as Reich knows but cannot say (for fear of losing his cushy, undeserved elite academic gigs and his insider connections), that would constitute a mortal threat to our overclass, which relies on “matching” our brains and expectations to the structure of employment, entertainment, and politics produced by corporate capitalism’s market-totalitarian logic. Too much knowledge and self-confidence is simply intolerable to that order. It literally couldn’t be handled.

The truth, of course, is that this is nothing like an equal opportunity society, despite the frequent incantations to the contrary. Equality of opportunity requires equality of condition, from zero up to the starting line for grown-up life (which brain biology now shows to be something like age 25). We have nothing of the sort, and Obama is making excuses, not answers, for that.

Schools are merely one symptom, not a cause, of our terrible disease. To the extent they could help cure the disease, they are intentionally barred from doing so.