The Consumer Trap

Archive for May, 2010

Monday, May 31st, 2010

Sound Familiar?

“What was it that at every decisive moment made every British statesman do the wrong thing with so unerring an instinct?

“The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had long ceased to be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial network, drawing interest and profits and spending them – on what? It was fair to say that life within the British Empire was in many ways better than life outside it. Still, the Empire was underdeveloped, India slept in the Middle Ages, the Dominions lay empty, with foreigners jealously barred out, and even England was full of slums and unemployment. Only half a million people, the people in the country houses, definitely benefited from the existing system. Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge together into large ones robbed more and more of the moneyed class of their function and turned them into mere owners, their work being done for them by salaried managers and technicians. For long past there had been in England an entirely functionless class, living on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the ‘idle rich’, the people whose photographs you can look at in the Tatler and the Bystander, always supposing that you want to. The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog.

“By 1920 there were many people who were aware of all this. By 1930 millions were aware of it. But the British ruling class obviously could not admit to themselves that their usefulness was at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate. For it was not possible for them to turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs. After all, they belonged to a class with a certain tradition, they had been to public schools where the duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is laid down as the first and greatest of the Commandments. They had to feel themselves true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there was only one escape for them – into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was possible. Difficult though this was, they achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the changes that were going on round them.”

Orwell, “England Your England”

Sunday, May 30th, 2010

Paid Addlers

Somewhere, Alexander Cockburn remarks that the unspoken role of mainstream journalists and pundits is to render plainly intelligible facts into nonsense.

A prime example is this absolute twaddle from Frank Rich in today’s edition of The New York Times:

Of all the president’s stated goals, none may be more sweeping than his desire to prove that government is not always a hapless and intrusive bureaucratic assault on taxpayers’ patience and pocketbooks, but a potential force for good.

OMFG.  It seems Rich may actually believe this preposterous double-talk!  (“Sweeping”?  Seriously, wtf does that word mean in this sentence?  Perhaps a Freudian slip showing Rich knows, at some level, that the claim under consideration is indeed a sweeping — a sweeping under the rug, into an ashcan, “off the table”…)

Let’s take the item that most Obama dupes would raise as proof of Rich’s typeset lobotomy: “health care.” If Rich’s story were true, would Obama have strangled single-payer medical insurance in favor of the corporate players and the Mercedes-driving, race-horse breeding doctors?  Of course not.

This president has no goals, other than to hold office and babysit the status quo on behalf of the overclass, before which he is an abject and eager lackey.  Adolph Reed had that fact nailed down and reported in 1996:

He’s a vacuous opportunist. I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.

Rich’s tall tale is powerful evidence that our system works in the sense Cockburn diagnoses. So is that fact that Reed’s repeatedly proven point remains buried in miles of mainstream and blog-meistering dogshit.

Saturday, May 29th, 2010

Private Enterprise and Its “Regulation”

The New York Times is having one of its better days. Two separate stories expose the same simple but unmentionable truth: capitalists, with the quiet cooperation of the nominally public political structures they dominate, kill and despoil for money.

Story One: “Obviously, we’re all oil industry.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

And Now a Word FOR Our NON-Sponsor

TCT does not accept advertising, and never will.

Nevertheless, John Sayles is so awesome and his forthcoming movie is sure to be so roastingly, epically good, I have to take time from our core endeavor — exposing corporate capitalist cultural engineering — to mention it.

Originally titled Baryo, the film, now called Amigo, is Sayles’ historical dramatization of the first* large-scale act of U.S. overseas military imperialism: the invasion and occupation of the Philippines.

I can all but guarantee you that this film is going to rock your socks all the way to the toes. Just as Matewan is far and away the best labor film ever made by an American, I expect this will be the best anti-imperialist movie to emerge from our culture. Sayles is that talented and well-informed.

And, most of all, the facts of the matter are that profound and worthy of recall.

I’m beside myself with anticipation!

*The first domestic act was King Philip’s War. The first overseas act of military conquest was the seizure and annexation of Hawai’i, but that was small, in terms of actual combat.

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Even Carville Sees It

Black Reagan prefers the preservation of market fundamentalist tenets to execution of the laws and the most elementary kind of ecological concern, as David Pettit very usefully explains.

In fact, as Pettit notes, Zerobama’s now gotten so obvious and odious that it’s started to bother even the professional trickster James Carville, who correctly observes that Obummer is “risking everything” to keep the capitalists happy:

I think they actually believe that BP has some kind of a good motivation here.’ They’re naive! BP is trying to save money, save everything they can… They won’t tell us anything, and oddly enough, the government seems to be going along with it!

The 2008 Marketer of the Year would have to get massively better just to rise up to Epic Fail status. As it stands, he’s every bit as destructive as was his immediate predecessor.

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

Annals of Commodification: Hair Dye

Apparently, “there is no visible gray hair on the heads of any of the 16 female United States senators, ages 46 to 74.”

Meanwhile, plastic surgery, on which privileged people around the world now spend over $30 billion a year, has been expanding by 25% annually.

To my eye, these trends denote several things, including: anti-feminism; a childish (and heavily sponsored) denial of aging; comically bad aesthetics; and, in a supposedly “Christian” nation-state, a profound solipsistic insensitivity to the distribution of world income and wealth.

But the hair coloring craze is not all pull. It’s also a product of the power of corporate capitalism’s marketing juggernaut, which leaves no stone unturned in its drive to commercialize and commodify every possible aspect of human life.  Gray hair?  That’s just another major business opportunity.

The success of the overclass push — despite its venality, its ecological costs, and its moral status in a world where half the people live on less than $2.50 a day and 80 percent less than $10 a day — to sell people (often toxic) patently insipid age-denial goods can be inferred from insider research reports such as this:

Despite the economic downturn, the personal care industry remains an attractive market for suppliers of performance ingredients aimed at delivering the results consumers demand from hair and skin products. The market is ripe for savvy suppliers who can find the right niche and the right buyers for their innovative products to capitalize on the demand for anti-aging, anti-wrinkle, and other products.

Thus does our hagged-out empire stumble on, hoping that putting wigs on cadavers will somehow dispel the rapidly worsening facts.