According to the story, Sandberg considers it her mission to deny the impact of social structure and political policy on women. “[I]n her view,” the Times reporter explains, women “must take responsibility for their careers and not blame men for holding them back.”

Ms. Sandberg sees herself as more than an executive at one of the hottest companies around — more, too, than someone who will soon rank among the few self-made billionaires who are women. She sees herself as a role model for women in business and technology. In speeches, she often urges women to “keep your foot on the gas pedal,” and to aim high.

And, as she engages in such trite talk about “men” and fails to mention social class or the backward state of U.S. family welfare programs, exactly how self-made is Ms. Sandberg?

According to her 2004 NYT wedding announcement, “She is a daughter of Adele and Joel Sandberg of Miami. The bride’s father, an ophthalmologist, is a partner in Eye Surgery Associates, a group practice in Hollywood, Fla.”

Well, there you have it. Aren’t those the same basic conditions facing all little girls? Daddy’s a surgeon and I’m prepping for Harvard — I refuse to slip and have to go to FSU! And baseball starts at third base, right?

And is Sandberg spending her every hour trying to turn Facebook’s billions into better services, as her creepy CEO would have you presume? Um, unless you’re a major Procter & Gamble shareholder, not quite:

Part of Ms. Sandberg’s role has been to cultivate relationships with large advertisers seeking new ways to engage with customers — particularly female ones — online. She was instrumental in signing up advertisers like Procter & Gamble. After several meetings with Facebook, Procter chose the platform for a new Secret deodorant campaign aimed at young women.

“P.& G. wants to be where the people are, and more and more people are spending their time on social sites,” says Alex Tosolini, vice president of Procter’s global e-business unit. “The purpose of our Secret campaign was to inspire women of all ages to be more fearless.”

It’s a message that sounds similar to Ms. Sandberg’s. And it bumped domestic sales of Secret deodorant by 9 percent in the first six months of the campaign and raised Secret’s market share by 5 percent from the period a year earlier.

Glory, glory hallelujah! What great times we live in!

The issue popped up this past week in this howler enunciated by Mark Zuckerberg:

“We don’t build services in order to make money,” he wrote in a personal letter to shareholders included in [Facebook's IPO-related SEC] filing. “We make money in order to build better services.”

Rofl-Lulz.

One might ask if Facebook would be willing to appoint a majority of ordinary Facebook users to its corporate board, so as to assure itself of the authenticity of its supposed efforts at “better” services.  Should there be ads on Facebook?  Should Facebook accumulate the world’s biggest marketing database and make money for Mark Zuckerberg and other rich people by selling the scraped, uncompensated information to other corporate capitalists?  Who votes “No”?

Yeah, didn’t think so…

Since then, events have proceeded in such a way as to push TCT to proffer a new thesis, one that TCT hereby states as a 97 percent serious, 3 percent hyperbolic claim: In corporate capitalist America, electoral politics is a mere marketing operation.

Selling is the foundational reality, market research and advertising the basis for every peep of the communication and action that comprise an “election.” Brands never change, though their respective sales trends wax and wane.  Choice attaches entirely to the minutiae of style and microscopic difference that undergird almost meaningless product differentiation.  The degree of democracy involved is perhaps — a big perhaps — 3 percent greater than in economic marketing of goods and services, where it is vanishingly small. In both processes, the odds of the masses changing the range of choices offered by those with the money and the power is exceedingly low.  Coke or Pepsi.  Jack Johnson or John Jackson.

And, just as in regular product marketing, the amount of money spent from above always increases.

That’s confirmed today, as the Archdruid writes this howler:

Marxism reached its high-water point in the 1950s and then receded, as the golden promises of Das Kapital gave way to gray bureaucratic inefficiency and, in time, total systemic failure.

ROFL.  What “golden promises” would those be?  Anybody who had actually read Capital would be well aware of the fact that it contains exactly zero promises of any kind.  Seriously.  Take a look.

In reality, of course, Karl Marx was hugely affected by the work of Justus von Liebig, the coiner of “Liebig’s Law,” which points out that ecosystems are only as strong as their weakest links.

The Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids, however, can’t be bothered to crack an actual book he doesn’t like for entirely a priori and conventional reasons, despite his claim to value rebellious thought and varied opinions and analyses.

The degree to which even the wildest forms of green thinking remain utterly  captive to conventional American dogma is truly astounding, and not a little scary.

Puma, GE, Red Bull, Marc Jacobs, President Obama, and 200 other brands are on Instagram.

Instagram, of course, is yet another vanity-based marketing ploy on what the Robber Barons at Facebook call “the graph,” aka the data mining trick that is “the social net.”

The fact that Ad Age sees Obama, aka MOY 2008, as a mere brand is about as honest and apt a piece of information as you’ll get from the U.S. corporate media.

For those interested in this topic, check out this new report from the Sunlight Foundation. Its main finding:

If you think wealth is concentrated in the United States, just wait till you look at the data on campaign spending. In the 2010 election cycle, 26,783 individuals (or slightly less than one in ten thousand Americans) each contributed more than $10,000 to federal political campaigns. Combined, these donors spent $774 million. That’s 24.3% of the total from individuals to politicians, parties, PACs, and independent expenditure groups.

For those still laboring under the illusion that the Democratic Party is somehow an exception to the rule of capital, the report shows that:

Over time, the share of all individual campaign contributions coming from The One Percent of the One Percent has increased for both parties, increasing from 17.8% in 1990 to 32.1% in the 2010 election cycle. Consistently, Democrats have been slightly more reliant on The One Percent of the One Percent than Republicans – relying on The One Percent of the One Percent for, on average, about three percentage points more of their itemized campaign receipts.

TCT would suggest that aspiring progressives and radicals can save themselves a great deal of precious energy by keeping this fundamental reality in mind.

The latest hipster band?  Aspiring novelists?  Nope, the “cool” and “creative” mini-capitalists behind such stunningly important work as the Dr Pepper Social Program. Click the picture to see their amazing genius on display.

You have to hand it to these two yankers.  Clearly, they’ve sensed that corporate marketers themselves love to be flattered as they “award” out their button-pushing assignments.  Hence, the pomo-nerd “Code & Theory” moniker and the pseudo-intellectual/bored-ecstasy-dealer presentments.

All in the name of tricking the kids into becoming “fans” of a brand of soda-pop on the world’s biggest marketing data-harvesting engine, of course.

Such are the priorities and things that are cool in early 21st century America…

Mental illness is obviously as epidemic as ever within the overclass.

It’s also something of an IQ test, this Vertu geegaw. See if you can spot the pseudo-intellectualisms, flatteries, and effete product differentiations in this promo blurb:

Constellation is the first handset with a full touch screen from Vertu. Designed with simple elegance at its core, each Constellation is handmade using state-of the art technologies and manufacturing techniques including 8 megapixel camera with ruby surround, hard worked leather and our unique high fidelity sounds system. With one delicate touch you can navigate effortlessly and intuitive [sic] to explore the exclusive services available and a range of carefully curated apps providing bespoke services and information at your fingertips.

Lulz and barfz.

Why not put 2 and 2 together, and demand that the United States not only stop the euthanasia, but reverse course and develop a robust, modernized postal system?

We know the USPS used to be permitted to open and maintain savings accounts, and that national postal services still do so in other nation-states.

We might also observe that the reason everybody states for tolerating the further erosion of the USPS — the rise of email, fax, SMS/text, and internet messaging, and the attending decline in paper-based letters and volumes — is merely a new form of the human process the Post Office was intended to encourage. Why permit the overclass to enjoy making the first half of the point without pressing them on the second? Why not fuse reason and radicalism, on a topic that few could dispute is of deepest importance?

So, Occupiers, why not occupy Post Offices and insist that the USPS be reinvigorated and launched into the business of building and maintaining a modern communications infrastructure, as well as maintaining some appropriate amount of snail-mail delivery? Why not use the USPS to compete with the corporate squatters who are now allowed to suppress public enterprise while sucking money-for-nothing from the patchy, over-priced, for-profit, advertising-intensive, second-rate telecom system in this country? Why not insist that the Postal Service build a modern, universally-available national internet, with lower prices, minimal marketing overlay, and no place for payouts to private investors? Why not out-compete the cell phone oligopolies and their pathetic but hugely expensive war over meaningless market shares? Why not insist that junk mail and corporate marketers pay first-class or even first-class-plus rates to use the public’s physical mail system?

While we’re at it, in our moment of deserved but dangerous bankster bashing, why not also press to restore the banking function to the Post Office? A 2% savings account sounds pretty good right about now, doesn’t it? And the deposits could be used to finance the USPS’s modernization and universalization of the means of citizen-to-citizen communication.

Why not insist on preserving and expanding a major public enterprise that provides decent jobs to people who do honorable, vital tasks? Why not stick it to the Man — and in some vital organs, for a change?

Consumers claim they’re keeping a close eye on holiday budgets, so how to explain this year’s record-breaking post-Thanksgiving retail sales?

The answer, of course:

The secret is landing on the right marketing message, but it’s no simple feat. For retailers, planning for the Christmas ads just now airing kicked off months ago. Many begin assessing the season as soon as the last holiday season ends, with the heavy lifting in market research and consumer testing happening in late spring or early summer.

Social engineering, in other words.

All to the intended (for the overclass) end:

Research from Shopper Sciences, part of IPG’s Mediabrands, found that 80% of shoppers surveyed spent more than they planned to Black Friday weekend. Shoppers have been “living in a siege state of mind,” said Shopper Sciences CEO John Ross, so consumers are susceptible when they stumble on that perfect item that wasn’t on the list.

Tis the season — of induced stumbling and susceptibility!