Archive for October, 2010
Monday, October 11th, 2010
Purest Shit: The Ruling Ideology in 60 Seconds
With a twinkle in his eye, former neo-robber baron, safety slasher/multiple murderer, and U.S. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow tonight offered the pithiest, purest statement I’ve ever seen of the central claim of our market totalitarian overclass and its bi-partisan political puppets.
To see it, click here, navigate to the video for October 11, 2010, and view the minute from 7:40 to 8:40.
This is indeed, as Snow says, “the theory.” It is the innermost dogma of supply-side economics, which is business investors’ unwavering self-worshiping insistence, the facts be damned. In this context, Snow is relating it to the Federal Reserve’s policy, but “the theory” rules all spheres of economic policy in this age, the White House distinctly included.
The great point of falsity, of course, resides in the phrase “lots of people’s household wealth.” What percentage of the population bases its spending levels on the value of stocks? Infinitesimal, because an infinitesimal percentage owns enough stocks to matter at this level. And the few who do? They save and reinvest a huge share of the income gains they constantly receive.
Alas, all decrepit, outdated ruling classes have long since grown incapable of distinguishing their own circumstances and interests from those of everybody else.
Saturday, October 9th, 2010
It Only Gets Worse
I have reluctantly concluded that voting for candidates* has become meaningless in the market totalitarian, one-party United States. The equivalence and mutual venality of the two brands comprising the reigning Business Party duopoly is now complete, as is their eager “bi-partisan” participation in the surrender of all political discourse to the inherently irrational form of television advertising.
And the amount of money flowing into the whole sham is, of course, as always, setting new records. All without a single, solitary policy matter seriously at stake from either “side.”
Inevitably and intentionally, meanwhile, what passes for campaigning now is corporate television saturated with the most cynical, dishonest, and insubstantial bullshit blips you could imagine.
As Republicans run Orwellian ads combining supply-side government bashing with feigned upset at cuts to Medicare, here is the stuff of Democratic Congressbots’ “politics”:
“I’m (fill in the name), and I’m working in Congress so people with good ideas can grow and expand [interesting contrast here!] their businesses. That’s why** the tax breaks I passed help entrepreneurs create high tech jobs.”
That’s not made up: watch Wu’s Woo. Like I say, Orwell couldn’t make this stuff up.
SMBIVA, for realz.
*Ballot measures, despite their own extreme perversion and vulnerability by the money-and-TV electoral system, retain some potential democratic meaning. I’m certainly voting for this one, for example.
**The Congressbot here manages to fuse supply-side cant with the claim that supply-side tax cuts are effective because the Congressbot “worked in Congress” for them.
Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
“Analytical” Marxism
Here is what the towering minds of “analytical Marxism” have to say about our topic here at TCT:
“Capitalist markets generate a culture of consumerism.”
This string of careless, thoughtless, conceptual violence comes from not just A sociologist, but perhaps THE sociologist in the United States, a person supposedly not just trained to detect and avoid bias and slippage, but a self-described scholar of analytic rigor above and beyond the ordinary.
“Markets,” of course, are not only a stratospheric abstraction, but a particularly dangerous one. As a genuinely analytical sociologist has observed, “the market” is actually a conceptual black box. Markets do nothing. Capitalists and traders and buyers and others merely do things that end up getting called “the market.” To start at the end and treat that start as an explanation is to skip actual sociological description and analysis of outcomes — to remove from view things like the trillion-plus-dollars-a-year big business marketing juggernaut. Thanks for that, “analytical Marxist!”
Next, “consumerism.” Adopting that word is simply a form of self-sabotage, for the elementary historical and logical reasons I always mention. Devoting an entire book chapter to it? Thanks for that, “analytical Marxist!”
Finally, trying to inflate “consumerism” into a general culture (whatever that is) is to remain defiantly unwilling to think carefully, all in the name of familiar obscurantist slogans. Thanks for that, “analytical Marxist!”
With analysts and Marxists like these, who needs ideologues and liberals?
Monday, October 4th, 2010
“Food”
Mechanically separated chicken, a staple of corporate capitalist food marketing:
