Archive for September, 2011
Tuesday, September 27th, 2011
USPS: Zombie Politics
When Ralph Nader steps in, it’s a sure sign it’s too little, too late. Hence, Nader is now trying to save the United States Postal Service by more of his trademark narrow special pleading.
Problem? The USPS was mortally wounded in 1967, when it had to stop opening savings accounts due to government restriction of both the size of deposits and its ability to pay interest rates competitive with those then offered by private banks. A second severe blow came in 1971, when Nixon pushed it to the very edge of the public sector in retaliation for a postal union strike. Eleven years later, the death-blow was delivered — of course — by the Reagan Administration, which ended meaningful public subsidy and required the post office to survive by selling its own “postal products,” which — also of course — were not to include things like savings accounts or insurance policies or anything else that might compete with the so-called private sector, despite the common practices of the rest of the supposedly free world.
More recently, mainstream politics have further strangled the USPS, including by the method about which Nader now complains, the amazing requirement that the USPS pre-pay its workers’ pensions to the government.
Why do I mention all this, apart from its obvious relevance to the TCT theme of the private sector’s reliance on the maiming of public-sector competition? (How attractive would a USPS savings account paying even the measly 2% rate that killed the practice back in the 1960s look in our age?) The answer can be seen here, at Deliver magazine.
What is Deliver? Published by the USPS,
Deliver magazine, is [a] resource for mail marketing strategies brought to you by the United States Postal Service.® What We Do: Deliver magazine arms marketers with research, news and commentary impacting their industry.
That’s right. Deliver magazine is a public-sector enterprise that advises capitalists on how to prepare and send junk mail! Now, there’s an activity that doesn’t need to be regulated by the supposed representatives of the people!
Go take a look at Deliver‘s website. There, you will discover such shining examples of the public spirit in action as this piece, “Power in the Mailbox”, by spammer-marketer Steve Cuno (who also happens to post apologies for his trade at randi.org, where they hold to the view that capitalism is rational and honest):
Time for a disclaimer before I proceed. I’m not attacking e-mail marketing. I shall contrast it with direct mail only to bring out some of the latter’s advantages. E-mail has advantages, too, but that’s another column for another day.
A number of unique factors work in direct mail’s favor. One is what your English literature teacher called “willing suspension of disbelief,” our ability to set aside reality and lose ourselves in a story. When a direct mail letter shows up in a personally addressed, stamped envelope, part of us wants to believe that someone took a moment to compose, print, address and post it, just for us. All the better if the letter calls us by name and bears a signature in fountain pen–evoking blue. A good writer can make an e-mail blast sound personal, but there is no electronic substitute for the look and feel of a signed letter in a stamped, addressed envelope.
Willing suspension of disbelief knows no demographic limitations. Consider my publisher friend. A technologically savvy marketing insider, she knows my shop, understands digital printing, publishes my articles and, on occasion, pops for lunch. Had she paused to analyze, she would easily have seen that the letter in her hand was direct mail. But — and this is the point — she chose not to pause and analyze. Nor did other recipients. Remember, these were high-balance customers, not exactly the intellectual dregs of society. Of those who replied, 80 percent willingly suspended their disbelief and thanked the bank president for writing them.
The near-overnight appearance of spam laws and filters provides another. No sooner had e-mail blasts arrived than the public demanded laws restricting them, servers blocking them, and junk filters dispatching them.
By contrast, laws governing physical mail are far less restrictive, despite more than 200 years of opportunity to enact them — and for good reason.
Yes, in America, we don’t regulate the mail. We merely cripple and prostitute its deliverer.
Monday, September 26th, 2011
Diagnosing Ghosts
It never stops, apparently. Would-be greens just love to blather on about “our culture” being the root cause of ecological destruction, as if capitalists don’t exist, and “we” somehow freely and pristinely chose what we got.
The latest purveyor is a source who damned well ought to know better: The Post-Carbon Institute. Here is the pronouncement of Peter Whybrow, M.D., whom the POI publishes as its voice on “culture and behavior”:
We had perfected the consumer-driven society. The idea was simple and irresistible. It tapped deep into the nation’s mythology and for a brief moment, during the exuberant years of the dot-com bubble, the Dream was made material. Vast shopping malls proclaimed prosperity throughout the land. Horatio Alger’s story was once again our story—the American story—but this time on steroids. Temptation was everywhere. And true to our instinctual origins, we were soon focused on immediate gratification, ignoring future consequence. Shopping became the national pastime. Throwing caution to the wind, at all levels of our society we hungered for more—more money, more power, more food, and more stuff.
The United States is the quintessential trading nation, and for the past quarter century we have worshiped the “free” market as an ideology rather than for what it is—a natural product of human social evolution and a set of economic tools with which to construct a just and equitable society. Under the spell of this ideology and the false promise of instant riches, America’s immigrant values of thrift, prudence, and community concern—traditionally the foundation of the Dream—have been hijacked by an all-consuming self-interest. The astonishing appetite of the American consumer now deter-mines some 70 percent of all economic activity in theUnited States.
Wow. To borrow from E.P. Thompson: Folks, this here is what you call an orrery of errors. It’s 100 percent made-up, unexamined mainstream pseudo-history, repackaged as being somehow alternative and liberating and honest.
According to Dr. Whybrow, not only have “we” somehow “hijacked” ourselves, but “Our nature has no built-in braking system. More is never enough.” Sure, right. I think I’ll go home tonight and kill myself by eating 27 pepperoni pizzas. According to the good doc, that’s my biologically-dictated fate, and yours, too.
With liberators like these, with this kind of quarter-baked rot parading as rebellious social criticism, who needs the corporate media?
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011
A Thaw for Greenwashing!
Hurray! Capitalists are finding that the Great Recession is good for greenwashing. Per Advertising Age:
People care less about the environment or green marketing claims than they did a few years ago, yet they’re also less likely to doubt marketers’ green claims or motives, according to the new Green Gauge Report from GfK.
The 2011 version of the study, based on surveys of more than 2,000 respondents between June 9 and July 5, found only 33% said the environment is “very serious and should be a priority for everyone” this year, down from 39% last year and 46% in 2007. At the same time, 41% of people agreed with the statement “first comes economic security, then we can worry about environmental problems,” up 13 points from 2007, according to GfK.
Despite people being less responsive to environmental ad claims, they seem to believe them more often. The Green Gauge report found 39% of people say business claims about the environment aren’t accurate, substantially lower than the 48% who believed that three years ago. And 37% of respondents this year said business and industry are fulfilling their responsibility to the environment, up 8 points from 2007.
This, of course, is music to the corporate ear:
“There’s a thawing in attitudes toward greenwashing,” said [study author Timothy Kenyon]. “There’s also a realization from consumers, given the economy, that [companies] can only do so much.”
And there’s even more excellent news:
People also increasingly get their environmental information from marketers, Mr. Kenyon said.
Things to notice here include the explicit discussion of the landscape for greenwashing. That’s powerful evidence that, behind closed doors and despite public denials, greenwashing is indeed the ultimate, intentionally planned aim of corporate “green” marketing efforts.
Also, don’t let the obscurity of the name “GfK” fool you. This is the biggest of big-time work:
You can rest assured the “consumer package goods” giants are lapping up this exciting research.
Thursday, September 15th, 2011
Foxes Blame Farmer for Henhouse Massacre
So, the CBS Evening News has been running a series of interviews with important figures it holds, in its unwavering commitment to objective journalism, to have special insight and ability to diagnose what’s wrong with the U.S. economy. Who are these figures, to whom we are supposed to defer? You guessed it: Corporate CEOs!
Take a look at this clip of Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz:
Schultz acknowledges that capitalists are hoarding cash. Why are they doing that, according to him? “The only reason is…the anxiety and uncertainty that exists about the political system.”
One could certainly ask CBS why a billionaire who started a coffee shop and holds that highest and most relevant of intellectual credentials – a 1975 bachelor’s degree in Communications from Northern Michigan University – gets to say anything on national TV about what ails the political economy in 2011.
Anyhow, let’s instead change the characters here, shall we? Let’s imagine that foxes have been devouring hens from the henhouse on Farmer Smith’s farm.
CBS: Mr. Fox and Farmer Smith, why are there so few hens in the henhouse these days? How do we rebuild the population in there? Mr. Fox, since you invented farming, let’s start with you. What the problem out there?
Fox: Well, we all know how delicious hens are [belches and picks teeth], don’t we? The one and only reason they are dwindling has to do with how Farmer Smith is paying for the tractor. Will he use cash? His credit card? How can we foxes know what to do next, when we have such a crisis of confidence about that tractor payment?
Farmer Smith: Some might say I should put a door on the henhouse and start shooting foxes. But everybody knows foxes are the engine of any productive farm, so we must actually open the windows on the henhouse, too. Meanwhile, I’ll be meeting with my neighbor farmers to consider how we should pay off our tractors. Soon, we’ll all be up to our elbows in chickens!
Monday, September 12th, 2011
Now We Know: Jackie Kennedy Was a Moron
This has to do with political marketing, but check out what the upper-class bimbo Jackie O had to say about reality. If MLK was a fraud, what, pray tell, was JFK?
As usual, you have to look at places like TCT for any actual logic on these topics, despite the supposed central glory of the personages involved.
Now we know why they sat on this for 47 years. What a pinhead!
Friday, September 9th, 2011
TCT’s Purpose
TCT reader Nick asked me to explain our basic views. I thought I’d repost my answer, in case any other readers want to add their thoughts.
Here’s what I said, with a few additions and amendments:
Hi, Nick, and welcome to TCT. You ask excellent questions.
The immediate purpose of this blog is to show people how corporate planners (on behalf of the overclass of wealthy shareholders who remain the primary beneficiaries of big business) manipulate “free time” experiences and choices, and to demonstrate that corporate capitalism requires this manipulation, on an always-expanding basis.
The secondary purpose of this blog is to get people to think about how radically unsustainable this arrangement is, and to encourage movement toward a decent alternative. The work you are doing sounds vital. My only complaint about local solutions is that many of their architects tend to forget about the larger levels of reality. But that is certainly not a necessary part of making new local arrangements. And any adequate macro-level changes are certainly going to require radical reconstruction of our towns.
As for my objection to the way people talk about culture, those are of two kinds.
First, a great many supposedly radical thinkers begin from a sophomoric and unscientific definition of the word. Culture, properly defined, if the set of learned habits and behaviors prevailing among a population. As such, it is a very large-bore concept, close in scope to “society.” Meanwhile, many “cultural” theorists use it as a stand-in for one part of life only — free time, or personal life. Often, they shrink it even further to mean merely entertainment. In making that move, they build their attempts at explanation of reality on quicksand.
My more specific complaint about culture is that it is so often twinned with the bias-word “consumer,” to make the doubly stupid concept “consumer culture.” Social science (and the humanity and democracy it exists to serve) demands that its practitioners take care to make their concepts and data as free from bias and as descriptively valid and neutral as possible. To accept the word “consumer” as a valid equivalent for product-using human beings is to forgo the possibility of powerfully and accurately describing people’s product-related activities.
“Consumer” is a capitalist’s narrow view; nothing more, nothing less. It is a rank and destructive bias, poison to objective description of reality and its determinant institutions and processes. It is an ongoing tragedy that social science has swallowed it, without so much as a hiccup.
We live in a capitalist society and a capitalist culture. To choose to call it a consumer society and a consumer culture is to deny the cardinal facts and to confuse and insult the potential audience.
Jettisoning the word “consumer” is a first necessary step toward getting serious about describing humanity’s extremely dire crisis of economic waste and injustice.
The second step is to stop yammering hot air about culture, and to start examining and explaining the details of existing institutions and processes.
Alas, these both remain micro-ghetto endeavors, for a host of reasons.
