Archive for April, 2010
Friday, April 30th, 2010
Sisyphus Had it Easy
Except in boom phases, the economic terms of capitalism always get worse for commoners. (We won’t think about ecology for now.)
This is most true in recessions, when capitalists redouble their efforts to expand their gross profit margins.
And, voilá — today’s New York Times reports as follows:
The broadest measure of the overall economy grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.2 percent in the first quarter of 2010, after gains of 5.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 2.2 percent in the third quarter.
While the expansion in output was welcome, it still has not brought the level of hiring growth needed to recover ground lost during the recession.
But as the unemployment rate has hovered around 10 percent for the last eight months — most recently it was 9.7 percent in March — concern about the job situation has persisted.
Even though any pickup in business is welcome, modest improvement may not be enough to ease the lasting pain caused by the so-called Great Recession, many economists say.
Consumer spending grew at an annual rate of 3.6 percent in the first part of the year.
Hiring only recently began to materialize, with the economy adding 162,000 jobs on net in March, of which 48,000 were temporary Census-related positions. The economy had destroyed about eight million jobs since the recession began in December 2007.
In standard NYT procedure, the overall tone of the story is one of mystified concern, with lead and conclusion both conveying muddled non-interpretations. As usual, the actual explanation is there, but buried in a single, hurried mid-story paragraph:
Businesses have found ways to make more with fewer resources, meaning that they have been able so far to meet additional demand for their products without bringing on many new workers. Companies are also sitting on a tremendous amount of cash, economists say, and appear unwilling to spend it.
In economic terms, what’s happened is that, in these lean times, our “entrepreneurial” overclass has indeed “found ways” to boost productivity, which is the amount of GDP produced per hour by the U.S. workforce.
In fact, according a recent estimate published by The Conference Board, in 2009, U.S. productivity grew by 2.5 percent in 2009, while overall GDP fell by 2.5 percent. Hence, the overclass was able to produce 2.5 percent less wealth while paying for 5.1 percent fewer hours of labor.
What this means is that there is not going to be any serious job growth unless the economy grows faster than 5 percent (the point these days at which labor demand would start overtaking capitalists’ ability to produce more with fewer employees) for a sustained period.
From a working class perspective, this means that, every year, as capital become more labor-efficient, the size of the boom it would take to bring back decent times for workers gets bigger, and hence, less likely.
(What all that means for the planet’s ecospheres is an equally important and damning topic.)
That’s the facts, Jack.
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
FTC = MIA
“Social gaming is a math equation. When you put millions of [advertising] dollars down to protect [a franchise], you will win it.”
– Lisa Marino, Chief Revenue Officer, RockYou, Inc., a startup hoping to make profits on Facebook via “social games,” quoted in Bloomberg Business Week
Advertising, in other words, is an intentionally anti-competitive undertaking.
Thank god we have the marvelous President Obama, who is delivering so much change, as promised! Surely, his Federal Trade Commission will be intervening and imposing huge fines on these shameless economic criminals.
Surely.
Monday, April 26th, 2010
The Power of Targeting
This week’s Advertising Age has a story on what happened when it asked one of its reporters to be a guinea pig testing how much specificity a marketing research firm could produce by doing a routine marketing study on the life patterns of one of its reporters. Using its databases, the unnamed targeting firm produced the following results, as described by the Ad Age reporter in question:
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — I had to ask: How the hell did they do that?
I’m no neophyte when it comes to targeting — not only do I work at Ad Age, but I cover direct marketing. Yet even I was taken aback when, as an experiment, we asked a database-marketing company to come up with a demographic and psychographic profile of me based on publicly available information. Was it ever spot-on.
The company doing the analysis, which asked to remain nameless, used seven sources of information, including public records and census data, online-shopping data, catalog and retail-purchase history. From that it concluded my date of birth, home phone number and political-party affiliation: Republican (note: I was in high school when I registered). It gleaned the fact that I was a college graduate, that I was married and that one of my parents had passed away. It found that I have a number of bank, credit and retail cards at “low-end” department stores.
It knew not just how long I’ve lived at my house but how much it cost, how much it is worth, the type of mortgage that’s on it and — within a really close ballpark guess — how much is left to pay on it. It estimated my household income — again nearly perfectly — and determined that I am of British descent (here, I fooled the company; I’m also Romanian and Colombian, but the record didn’t show that). Oddly, what didn’t turn up was my occupation or e-mail address.
But that was just the beginning. What followed was the psychographic profile the company was able to compile.
A deep dive
It correctly placed me into various groupings such as: someone who relies more on their own opinions than the recommendations of others when making a purchase, whether it’s clothes or a car; someone who is turned off by loud and aggressive advertising; someone who is family-oriented and has an interest in music, running, sports, computers and is an avid concert-goer; someone who is never far from a web connection generally used to peruse sports and general news updates; and someone who sees health as a core value.
Scary? Certainly there will be people bothered by that level of detail and accuracy.
So, for those keeping score, such is the present state of this always speedily advancing art/science. As I argued in The Consumer Trap book, the perceptive powers of the corporate overclass have long since dwarfed those of the Census Bureau. And, obviously, that’s increasingly so.
And, for the record, the profiled Ad Age reporter is a typical navel-gazing yutz who professes himself untroubled by the results of his “spot-on” commercial profiling. A soul who says he registered Republican as a college student, he writes, “I wasn’t necessarily bothered by the data as much as I was surprised and somewhat impressed by the depth of the profile the company was able to compile.”
Such are the sensitive, far-seeing folks managing the details of our future, ladies and gentlemen, thanks to capitalism. Other people may be scared, but he himself is impressed. So, it’s all good.
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
Farce Day
What if the Montgomery Improvement Association had responded to the segregation of the city’s buses by calling for an annual Transportation Day, instead of a steady campaign of direct action and movement organizing? What if SNCC had held a rally once a year, rather than launching expanding waves of lunch-counter sit-ins? What if, instead of marching, fighting, and continually and radically educating itself and the wider society, the Civil Rights Movement had launched Black Seal, a new “foundation” to certify select corporate products as minimally racist? The United States would still have Jim Crow apartheid laws.
Nonetheless, today we are supposed to “celebrate” Earth Day, and forget the fact that it is social movements, and only social movements, that have ever mattered in the effort to use politics to make large breakthroughs toward a better world.
Denis Hayes, the Earth Day founder who recommends car tires via “foundations” dedicated to the proposition that “the power of the marketplace” has any chance of being anything but a net ecological disaster, today tells The New York Times he thinks it is “tragic” rather than logical that corporations have turned Earth Day into what that august paper terms “a premier marketing platform for selling a variety of goods and services.” What did you expect, Denis, when you suggested that an annual “day” was somehow a serious attack on our overclass’s institutional dedication to planetary ecocide? Gestures are not social movements, no matter how hard one tries to gesture.
Meanwhile, at today’s Earth Day rally in New York City, those keeping track will get another chance to see that corporate capitalists are routinely pulling of feats of propaganda that would make Big Brother poop their pants in fits of jealousy. PepsiCo, the conglomerate whose core business is peddling various forms of unhealthy sugar water cased in plastic, is going to unveil its Dream Machine recycling kiosks. For each bottle shoved into one of these stations, PepsiCo promises to make “a per-bottle donation to the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans, a business training program for disabled veterans.” The amount of that donation to such an amazing cause? Unspecified, of course. But, rest assured, it will be “an amount.” 1/1000th of one cent? That’s an amount, isn’t it? And what vet, fresh back from killing poor people for no reason, doesn’t want to go get harangued about “entrepreneurship” by PepsiCo? That’s just as good as the old G.I. Bill of the 1940s, right?
But all this isn’t the half of it. PepsiCo, the massive plastic and sugar-water pusher, is, all the while and right into the future, a long-standing major opponent of bottle bills, widely and uncontroversially known as far and away the most effective and efficient incentive to beverage container recycling. On behalf of its shareholders and corporate retailer customers, PepsiCo finds bottle bills to be “unwieldy for store customers and suppliers, and inconvenient for consumers.” In other words, bad for profits. Ergo, Pepsi and it corporate capitalist allies work the nation and world to make sure that bottle bills don’t spread from the handful of places where they already exist.
Welcome to Earth Day!
Monday, April 19th, 2010
Regular Bag of the Month
“The people of the United States are in a sense becoming a nation on a tiger. They must learn to consume more and more or, they are warned, their magnificent economic machine may turn and devour them.” — Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (1960)
Sunday, April 18th, 2010
Shitbag of the Month: Paul David Hewson
Urbandictionary.com defines “shitbag” as “a) a very lazy person b) one who deceptively hides their lack of work or effort.”
Bono, in other words.
This shameless mofo not only hasn’t produced a listenable note since 1987, but, far worse, he fancies himself a decent person.
How wrong you can get can be assessed by reading his rambling, navel-gazing atrocities in The New York Times, including today’s new one.
The topic? The wonders of “Africa’s emerging entrepreneurial class.”
Need I mention that using the word “entrepreneur” as a serious category of analysis is perhaps the quickest way to cross oneself off the list of serious analysts? But Mr. Hewson is a mentally ill tax-dodging multi-millionaire Knight of the British Empire. An “entrepreneur,” in other words.
Meanwhile, according to Entrepreneur/Pope Bono, “Civil society as a rule sees business as, well, a little uncivil. Business tends to see activists as, well, a little too active. But in Africa, at least from what I’ve just seen, this is starting to change.” Yes. At least from what he’s seen. There’s some science for you. If Entrepreneur/Pope Bono perceives it, it is real. ROFLMFAO.
Did I mention Mr. Hewson’s mental illness? But I digress…
Also according to Entrepreneur/Pope Bono, “Entrepreneurs know that even a good relationship with a bad government stymies foreign investment.” Foreign investment? Foreign investment! I’d say ROFLMFAO to that, too, but here’s where this heinous shitbag gets downright dangerous. Foreign investors take their money home, don’t they, Paul David Hewson? In the the Third World, they take it home in wheelbarrows. Asshead moron imperialist pimp. The world does not shine out of your stinking butthole. Fuck you, shitbag.
