The Consumer Trap

Archive for the 'VEED' Category

Friday, September 11th, 2009

Not Joking: The Face of the “New” GM

Fresh off its public bailout, the General Motors Corporation is about to launch a massive marketing campaign titled “May the Best Car Win.” The intent of the campaign is to show prospective buyers how new and different the post-bailout GM will be. The spokesperson “face” of this coming blitzkrieg? I shit you not:

Script: “They tell me the young whipper-snappers are none too happy with our latest batch of horseless carriages…Well, by gum, this’ll learn ‘em…”

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

Cars, Cell Phones & The (Sponsored) Culture of Narcissism

Raymond Williams called it “mobile privatization.”

I think of it as “life behind screens,” or “bubble life.”

It — experiencing life predominantly through video screens, work sconces, and automobile glass — is not just part-and-parcel of corporate capitalism, but perhaps its #1 intention and requirement vis-a-vis the organization of the lives of the masses.

The latest bubble life news confirms, in spades, that the private automobile may be, as Plan C author Pat Murphy posits, “the greatest creator of alienation between humans that has ever existed.”

To wit, some excellent reportage from a July 18 New York Times story:

Extensive research shows the dangers of distracted driving. Studies say that drivers using phones are four times as likely to cause a crash as other drivers, and the likelihood that they will crash is equal to that of someone with a .08 percent blood alcohol level, the point at which drivers are generally considered intoxicated. Research also shows that hands-free devices do not eliminate the risks, and may worsen them by suggesting that the behavior is safe.

A 2003 Harvard study estimated that cellphone distractions caused 2,600 traffic deaths every year, and 330,000 accidents that result in moderate or severe injuries.

Yet Americans have largely ignored that research. Instead, they increasingly use phones, navigation devices and even laptops to turn their cars into mobile offices, chat rooms and entertainment centers, making roads more dangerous.

A disconnect between perception and reality worsens the problem. New studies show that drivers overestimate their own ability to safely multitask, even as they worry about the dangers of others doing it.

I’ll let the excellent CARtoonist Andy Singer have the last “word” on this totally unsurprising phenomenon:

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Official Face of the Overclass

This, my friends, is 85-year-old Gloria Vanderbilt!  Gloria is, of course, not just mommy to the journalistic cipher Anderson Cooper, but also the never-laboring heiress-socialite great granddaughter of railroad robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the fine figures who helped ensure that rail transport in the USA would be privately owned and widely despised, rather than publicly provided and widely beloved.

I hereby nominate Gloria as the official 21st-century cover-girl for our corporate overclass.  She’s just absolutely perfect!  Way decrepit and long past any pretense to vigor, she epitomizes the de rigueur look of our times:  The dyed, implanted fake hair.  The scramble for each and every possible plastic-surgical denial of reality.  The vapid self-satisfaction and outdated posings in the face of blatant irrelevance and onrushing death.

Sublime, isn’t it?

And Lady Glo isn’t just the perfect looker.  She even seems to be channeling and verbalizing the core thoughts of her social class-mates, young and old alike:  “I’m determined to be the best I can be for as long as I can, and when I’m not, I have my plans.”

Well, bravo, hmm, hmm!  How true-to-life can one possibly be, hmm, hmm?

One catches the general principle at work (and I use that word “work” ironically) here.  It’s a slight adaptation of old Corny’s classic admission about class power and the (non-)rule of law:  Reality?  What care I about reality?  Hain’t I got the money?

Friday, June 12th, 2009

Etrade: Selling Stocks With Racism

While stuck watching the profoundly moronic and outdated Belmont Stakes in my apartment’s exercise room last weekend, I encountered E-Trade’s notorious “black baby” commercials.  I almost fell off my treadmill.

Watch this appalling shit here and here.

As the white baby controls all aspects of the situation and voices all the reasoned thoughts, the black baby sings, trips out, echoes white logic, and makes a sexual come-on.  Can you imagine these ads getting made and aired if the skin colors were reversed?  No chance in hell.

I guarantee you that all of this was carefully planned by E-Trade’s marketing team.  As I documented in my book, The Consumer Trap, big business marketers are extremely sensitive to racial stereotypes, and are driven by the logic of their enterprise to exploit and perpetuate, not challenge, them.

The other important aspect of this blatant neo-racism is that it is targeted at elite audiences, who absolutely eat it up, not least because they think it’s a great thing for they themselves to be willing even to look at and possibly, maybe interact with a black person (both acts they have only recently begun to contemplate).

The truth, of course, is that contrary to long-running claims that Joe Sixpack is the source of all benightedness, our lovely overclass has always held by far the worst and least accurate view of human beings and human affairs.

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

The Flight to $28,300,000 Chairs

So how is our overclass faring in this Third Depression? Per today’s New York Times:

“There’s still plenty of money,” said John Keith Russell, a dealer in Westchester County, N.Y., who specializes in Shaker goods and is president of the 100-member, invitation-only Antique Dealers’ Association of America. “We obviously have seen a slowing in the market, but we have not noticed any weakness in the highest end of the market. The commitment by collectors is still as aggressive as it was two years ago.”

Wealthy buyers are still attending prestigious events like the Winter Antiques Show in Manhattan and making major purchases, said Mr. Russell. He cited a recent buyer from Philadelphia who said she had felt uneasy about investing in real estate or stocks but purchased two significant pieces of furniture. High-end antiques, dealers like to assert, tend to hold their value and can sometimes appreciate enormously over time.

This ugly-ass armchair here is apparently one example of the entrepreneurial stratum’s current sense of where the world’s still-abundant economic surplus might be best utilized at this late date in history. It just sold to an anonymous buyer for $28.3 million.

Louis XVI would have heartily approved. Now, all we need is a few sans-culottes….

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

Keep This Staff!

If nothing else, this, corporate capitalism’s Third Great Depression, is tipping the overclass hand in some interesting ways.

The latest is this letter from the alleged overseer of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rackets, in which we get to see how the executive faction of the investing class tries to justify the salary-based part of its immoral and egregiously outdated appropriation of society’s surplus wealth.

Compare and contrast what bosses say about ordinary employees and what this ass-clown writes about paying $159 million in bonuses to the “managers” of a crashed enterprise:

“It is not realistic to expect that experienced and highly skilled employees wil indefinitely continue to work as hard as they have if we do not provide reasonable incentives to perform…

Meanwhile, here’s my idea of the only staff they ought to be keeping:

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