Archive for the 'Corporate Capitalism' Category
Monday, October 31st, 2011
Exhibit G
TCT readers are aware of the Herman/Chomsky “propaganda model” theory of corporate capitalist media operation. As such, they are also aware of the special importance of parallel cases for testing said explanation.
Consider then, this, the announcement that neo-fascist media star Glenn Beck will be one of the featured speakers this year at Advertising Age‘s Media Evolved Conference. The topic of this yearly professional soiree for marketing operatives is “smarter approaches to traditional media buying, the ways social media can enhance consumer engagement with content including TV, brands’ increasing opportunities to create their own media, and how to best use the proliferating platforms, channels and outlets.”
I mention this fact because Beck’s appearance at Media Evolved is far weightier evidence of the accuracy of the propaganda model than almost anything that can be gleaned from observation of broadcasts/content. It is one thing for Beck to be featured as a provider of media content. It is quite another, and far deeper, thing for him to be invited into the media planning stage.
Can you imagine the overclass shitstorm that would occur if Noam Chomsky or even David Barsamian or Amy Goodman were invited to discuss how the media are planned and run, rather than just what they broadcast? It is literally unimaginable, of course, that such would ever happen, precisely because of the certainty and intensity of the ensuing shitstorm.
In terms of evidence for judging the Herman and Chomsky model, the reality that Glenn Beck is an invitee to the most boilerplate and big-time of media planning events trumps just about anything you could think of from the media-output side of the story. Advertising Age is a 100 percent venerable, mainstream corporate capitalist enterprise, and remains a standard tool of the Fortune 500 boardroom. Its Media Evolved Conference co-sponsors include McCann Worldwide, the world’s largest advertising agency group, and a host of other major corporate marketing-servicers. Beck’s Media Evolved co-speakers are field marshals and top spies from a phalanx of big business pace-setters. Would any of these operations or personages risk their access to corporate cash by associating themselves with Chomsky, Barsamian, or Goodman? Not a chance. But Glenn Beck? He causes not a ripple. QED.
Meanwhile, for those interested in media studies, this is also more evidence of what a mistake it is to follow the convention therein of focusing first and foremost on media content and advertising, rather than media planning and corporate marketing. Important as they are, the former are mere symptoms of the latter processes, which are themselves mere symptoms of the continuing reign of corporate capital.
Monday, August 8th, 2011
The TCT Diagnosis
What’s happening? The unacknowledged but totally real, labor-theory-of-value vindicating end of the Reagan Experiment. That’s what.
All sponsored by the vicious, genocidal, ultra-stupid American ruling class and managed by both wings of its purchased two-partied duopoly, in this market-totalitarian society, all formally presided over by a whored-out fool who makes Stepin Fetchit look like an amateur at the trade. Not a pretty picture…not a happy future.
Monday, July 25th, 2011
Piling Up the Fs
While it remains a myth that, in the United States, the period from 1945 to 1980 was marked by increasing egalitarianism, neither was it a time of sharply increasing class exploitation. Then came the Great Restoration, as the overclass decided to get tougher and to step up its political salesmanship. Making more war, jailing more criminals, privatizing everything in sight were the secondary policies. At the core, of course, was “supply-side economics,” or the assertion that providing the rich with more and more money is the key to a permanent economic boom and the best of all possible societies. The rich invest, so the richer they are, the more they’ll invest, right?
Although the corporate media are incapable of asking the question, we might do so: How is this set of claims proving out? What grade should we, the citizens, award for the ongoing experiment in letting corporate capital dictate everything to a human society?
Well, as TCT readers know, the conditions for assessment could hardly be better. The overclass has been raking in cash right throughout the past several years. And the latest results? The Associated Press reports them:
NEW YORK — So much for fears that U.S. companies might stall out in the economy’s soft patch.
Corporate profits are coming in better than expected so far in second-quarter earnings season despite concerns about the potential for trouble ahead.
“The corporate sector’s in great shape,” says Joseph LaVorgna, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank.
All told, 148 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index have reported earnings and 73 percent have beaten the expectations of Wall Street. That’s somewhat ahead of the typical pace of two-thirds that surpass estimates.
Companies that had reported as of Friday had $24.52 per share in operating earnings — profits before subtracting interest and tax expenses — according to S&P senior index analyst Howard Silverblatt. The record of $24.06 per share was set in the second quarter of 2007.
Coming out of the recession, corporations first reported explosive earnings growth early last year. The pace has slowed, but it’s still going. At the current rate, second-quarter earnings would be 17 percent better than a year ago.
So, on supply-side/Great Restoration theory, we are now experiencing an investment boom and full employment.
Can you say epic fail?
Wednesday, May 18th, 2011
Towels: The Latest Enemy of Capitalism
As somebody once observed, capitalism is a system that cannot stop, cannot rest, cannot respect any boundaries, must colonize everything as it drives its players to “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere…over the whole face of the globe.”
In this unending totalitarian thrust, any activity that leaves room for further commodification will eventually be seized upon and efforts will be made to increase the degree to which it employs maximally profitable corporate wares. In the process, nothing counts but the bottom line.
And so it is that our old friend the Kimberly-Clark conglomerate is now pushing Kleenex brand hand towels, on the theory that cloth towels are a dire public health risk. Words can’t do justice to the amazing chutzpah of this campaign:
The shamelessness of this stunning proof of capital’s inherent heedlessness does not, of course, stop Kimberly-Clark from claiming that it “challenges itself” to “respect our planet and conserve its resources.”
Orwell was an amateur compared to this stuff.
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011
Digital Wallpaper
Thesis: “Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society. To outcries about physical and mental degradation, premature death, the torture of overwork, it answers: “Ought these to trouble us, since they increase our profits?”
Context: Peak energy.
Test: Microsoft’s plans.
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011
Blowing Bubbles at School
Economic bubbles are a logical by-product of an epoch in which capitalists are always right. In conventional, supply-side economics, the one and only possible explanation for any problem with the operation of the overall economy is the claim that the rich still don’t have enough money to unleash the economic boom they and their lackeys are always promising.
As they get even more money, the fact remains that, despite the constant claims to the contrary, a shortage of capital has never been the source of any economic crisis within corporate capitalism, a system that generates chronic problems of effective demand, not of too little money at the top.
As the supply of buyers for potential new products remains stagnant or shrinks, the growing over-supply of investment-seeking wealth at the top of the economic pyramid has no productive place to go. Hence, it flows into one or another scheme for making money with little or no investment in hiring new workers. Money chases money, and bubbles, our age’s cutesy term for ultimately baseless financial rackets, inflate and eventually pop.
The latest bubble? Student loans.
Yesterday’s New York Times reported:
Student loan debt outpaced credit card debt for the first time last year and is likely to top a trillion dollars this year as more students go to college and a growing share borrow money to do so.
Two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients graduated with debt in 2008, compared with less than half in 1993. Last year, graduates who took out loans left college with an average of $24,000 in debt. Default rates are rising, especially among those who attended for-profit colleges.
Like all other bubbles, the whole thing is being pushed as a magical answer to “our” economy’s worsening failure to come anywhere close to decently employing everybody who wants a job, as if getting a college degree (or being trained to fix windmills or empty bedpans) in itself creates a new job. Now, that’s bubblicious.
It will be interesting to see if the next decade’s unemployed college grads pick up enough knowledge and courage along with their debt burdens to actually step up and challenge the decrepit overclass still running this stumbling, crumbling society.
