The Consumer Trap

Archive for September, 2010

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

Psychosis

New York Times headline, seriously presented without falling-down-laughing emoticons:

Drilling Plans Off Cuba Stir Fears of Impact on Gulf

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

Powerful Evidence of Media Effectiveness

Turns out Americans are radically misinformed about the distribution of wealth in their own society, thinking it is much more equal than it actually is. Turns out the distribution of wealth Americans think would be ideal is far more equal still than that, and is basically Scandinavian:

Slate commentator Timothy Noah, who blogs about the research showing the above, observes:

I noted that in 1915, when the richest 1 percent accounted for about 18 percent of the nation’s income, the prospect of class warfare was imminent. Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation’s income, yet the prospect of class warfare is utterly remote. Indeed, the political question foremost in Washington’s mind is how thoroughly the political party more closely associated with the working class (that would be the Democrats) will get clobbered in the next election. Why aren’t the bottom 99 percent marching in the streets?

One possible answer is sheer ignorance. People know we’re living in a time of growing income inequality, Krugman told me, but “the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it is.” The ignorance hypothesis gets a strong assist from a new paper for the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science: “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time.” The authors are Michael I. Norton, a psychologist who teaches at Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist (and blogger) at Duke. Norton and Ariely focus on the distribution of wealth, which is even more top-heavy than the distribution of income. The richest 1 percent account for 35 percent of the nation’s net worth; subtract housing, and their share rises to 43 percent. The richest 20 percent (or “top quintile”) account for 85 percent; subtract housing and their share rises to 93 percent. But when Norton and Ariely surveyed a group whose incomes, voting patterns, and geographic distribution approximated that of the U.S. population, the respondents guessed that the top quintile accounted for only 59 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Of course, sheer ignorance is indeed one reason for this fundamental failure of American democracy. But what, pray tell, is the cause of that sheer ignorance?

Answer: Our capitalist media, which would lose corporate sponsors and incur rightist flak attacks if they reported coherently and often on the distribution of income and wealth.

That, plus the Business Party, with its Republican and Democratic factions, which similarly steer clear of the topic, refusing to mention, let alone politicize, it.

Market totalitarianism, in other words.

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

“Confronting Consumption,” Indeed

What passes for a political and intellectual left is stone-cold stupid when it comes to matters of personal life and corporate capitalism.

The anchor of this stupidity is the continuing inability of would-be radical thinkers and activists to get past the discombobulating slave-words “consumer” and “consumption.”

Unable to see that calling product users and citizens “consumers” and lumping all their activities and intentions into the category of “consumption” does irreparable damage to any chance at coherent social criticism or democratic movement-building, the “consumer” haranguers plow blithely on, tilting at the windmill of “consumer culture” or “consumer society,” while saying next to nothing about the basic realities of corporate capitalism and its ever-growing big business marketing juggernaut.

This endless pursuit of a dead-end has recently been redoubled by the “scholars” associated with this smugly confused book. In it, the various assembled academic career-builders profess to be attacking “the consumption problem,” without ever stopping to ask whether part of that alleged problem might be the continuing reign of the massively biased concept of “consumption.”

Worse, in the name of an attack on waste they can never quite explain, they actually dare to say that “economistic thinking” is part of the problem, rather than a vital part of the solution. The fact that mainstream economics ignores capitalist waste and qualitative outcomes is no reason to toss out “economistic thinking” altogether. In fact, a true economics would be a devastating expose of the present system and the overclass it exists to enrich.

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

“The Consumerist,” My Ass

Consumers Union is certainly an admirable and important group. It is also an unfortunate one. Not only does it legitimize the slave-word “consumer,” but it has also declined into a mere shopper’s watchdog that has nothing to say about corporate capitalism and its radical incompatibility with a decent human future.

Seems that CU has now picked up the website called The Consumerist. The site, cited with affection by sources like Advertising Age, redoubles and hipsterizes all the present flaws of CU.

Better shopping is not going to get the job done, folks. However many issues we face at the micro level of what to buy, our make-it-or-break-it century’s pressing problems all have to do with the lack of democratic control over macro-level policies. You’d never know that, however, by consulting Consumer Reports or The Consumerist, which, as is probably well understood by their corporate partners, divert potentially radical attention from the political to the merely personal level.

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Ratt Attack

Just as the 2008 Marketer of the Year was trying to salvage himself and his pathetic scam of a political party from their gargantuan “hope and change” election fraud of 2008, I came across the new book by his erstwhile “car czar,” the Wall Street racketeer, Steven Rattner.  Rattner, who bribed a New York State pension manager to dump investment capital/workers’ retirement savings into Rattner’s hedge fund, the Quadrangle Group, is married to none other than the former chief money-bagger of the Dimbot-cratic Party.

Rattner’s new book recounts his brief tenure as the government’s overseer of General Motors, one of the overclass money-sucking entities Obummer so eagerly and lavishly bailed out in 2009.

Rattner reveals two things that shed floodlight on who Obummer really is.

First, this, which betrays exactly how conventional BO has always been:

The week after his 2008 election, in Chicago, at President Barack Obama’s first substantive sit-down with his economic advisers, it was conceded that no situation on the economic front appeared thornier than the one I had been recruited to manage.

Amid the steepest economic slide since the 1930s, President Change thought not of the workers, but of the corporations, in other words.

Even more telling is this piece of self-pitying advice from Rattner to his intended audience:

Being vetted can be a full-time job. I had begun talking to my attorneys in mid-December, in part to ascertain whether public office was feasible for me. Every senior appointee has to complete two massive documents: the SF-86, an impossibly tedious security-clearance statement that requires listing—just for example—every foreign trip an applicant has taken in the previous seven years, and the SF-278, which involves the disclosure of every financial interest and obligation. Like most recent administrations, this one had added its own questions, derived from past debacles, such as Zoë Baird’s failure to become Bill Clinton’s attorney general after neglecting to pay the so-called nanny tax. I can’t count the hours I spent complying, but I do know that the honor of working for the federal government cost me more than $400,000 in legal fees.

This remains the kind of person becomes a “czar,” regardless of (D) or (R) affiliation.

What percentage of the U.S. population finds it burdensome to list their investment holdings and recent overseas travels?  To recall whether they paid FICA on their nannies?  Needs to start with their attorney when asked to join the White House staff? Lives in a 25-room Manhattan apartment, wherein occur soirees “supporting candidates who are more conservative and pro-business than the incumbents”?

The kind that Obama likes and hires, that’s who.

And, by the way, take a look at this Rattner character’s bio and book.  He’s as arrogant as the day is long.  And what did he ever do or invent to award himself his own massive ego?  He buddied up to his owner/publisher when he was a “journalist” at The New York Times, then parlayed the friendship into a Wall Street sinecure and eventually his own hedge fund, wherein he operated via naked graft.  In other words, he’s a simple social climber and thief who’s never done anything for anybody but himself.

Personally, I wouldn’t let him in my front door.

Such is “democracy” in America, meanwhile. As Chomsky always says, we have one party, the Business Party, which, for marketing purposes, happens to maintain two quasi-factional wings.

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

Obummer’s Impact

Per The New York Times:

Forty-four million people in the United States, or one in seven residents, lived in poverty in 2009, an increase of 4 million from the year before, the Census Bureau reported on Thursday.

The poverty rate climbed to 14.3 percent — the highest level since 1994 — from 13.2 percent in 2008. The rise was steepest for children, with one in five residents under 18 living below the official poverty line, the bureau said.

For a single adult in 2009, the poverty line was $10,830 in pretax cash income; for a family of four, $22,050.

The number of residents without health insurance in 2009 climbed to 51 million, from 46 million in 2008.