Funny, isn’t it — the extravagant tricks required to preempt something that’s supposedly stillborn and/or self-destroying and/or a road to serfdom, if not simply impossible?

One might also wonder if the case of the model telecom legislation pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council will also be taught as part of another of ALEC’s efforts — an attempt, on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to plant state laws “requiring that all high school students take a class in ‘free enterprise’ as a condition of graduation.”

Facebook is notorious for constantly evolving its platform, both for users and advertisers.

It is about that time of year and the signs are all around: stores are filled with festive decorations in hopes of enticing early shoppers, every commercial announces the perfect gift for him or her, and the Starbucks red cups have finally made their annual appearance. Yes, it is time to pull together our holiday wish lists. But it’s is not just you and me making lists; top brand and agency marketers are dreaming of what Facebook might give them this holiday season.

Among dear Laura’s wishes:

Third-party tracking within social ads.

Agency and brand marketers are also accustomed to including their own tracking urls within display advertising. While this is possible within certain Facebook marketplace ads, whenever a brand wants to use an ad with ‘social context’ (e.g. embedded like/share/read/listen button or sponsored story ad), they forego the ability to include third party tracking.

Obviously there are great benefits to running the ads with social context. They tend to be a highly efficient way of garnering ‘likes’ or desired actions since the user can engage directly within the ad unit. These ad units are also more relevant to users since they incorporate behaviors of users’ friends and provide a positive word of mouth experience.

On the flip side, the inability to include third party tracking makes it more difficult for brands to track downstream actions of these users. Perhaps Facebook will consider allowing a hybrid that serves the dual purpose of keeping users within the Facebook platform, but allowing brands to track their other activities on the brand page.

As heart-rending as Tiny Tim, isn’t it? Who among us hasn’t shed tears over corporate capitalists’ still-limited ability to track people’s downstream actions?

Not to worry, though, friends. Facebook, Ms. O’Shaughnessey reminds us, is certainly no Scrooge to its own true constituency:

Facebook is the world’s most pervasive social network and has a constantly improving advertising platform. Although the metrics and analytics are not totally comprehensive, and not an exact replica of display advertising, the power of social ads, the incredible targeting and the reach of the platform means that marketing on Facebook should be a crucial part of every brand manager’s marketing mix. As Facebook continues to innovate, marketers will certainly get some of the capabilities they long for and will continue to get new functionality that ties into the social graph [sic + wtf? + predictable explanation] and enables the most powerful advertising online.

If you doubt this phenomenon is real, consider this fact, as mentioned, all the way from Australia, by TCT commenter Luis Cayetano: In May of 1958, Erich Fromm was interviewed at length on commercial television in the United States.

52 years later, that same thing is so far from being possible, it is almost unimaginable. Picture 60 Minutes, for example, devoting not just one but two segments (see the run-time of the Wallace interview of Fromm) to letting, say, Noam Chomsky explain his present view of the society and the world.

No fucking way that happens now, obviously. Sponsors these days, having grown all the more powerful and having learned well the dangers of unpoliced television, would never permit it, and the producers and reporters, knowing that, would never in a million years propose it.

I might entertain the possibility that this claim is anything but a smokescreen, were it not for news like this:

The average annual growth of China’s advertising industry stood at nearly 31 percent and the advertising industry has become one of the fastest growing industries in China, said Liu Fan, deputy director of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, during the China International Advertising Development Forum on Oct. 17, which is the first activity of the 11th Western China (Chengdu) Exhibition.

The growth of China’s advertising industry and China’s GDP are positively correlated to a significant degree, he said. China’s advertising industry currently has entered the golden period of development after experiencing four stages of development.

Explosive growth of corporate marketing is a hallmark of and a vehicle for market totalitarianism/capitalist dictatorship. It is a technology that inherently stymies the communication habits and conditions required for creating democracy, socialism, and, ultimately, human survival.

Of course, so does cars-first transportation.

China’s biz-suited big boys (see any girls there?) also like that Earth-killing corporate capitalist industry quite a lot. With all the predictable effects:

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.

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.

Click image to enlarge

Slate commentator Timothy Noah, who blogs about the research showing the above, observes:

I noted that in 1915, when the richest 1 percent accounted for about 18 percent of the nation’s income, the prospect of class warfare was imminent. Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation’s income, yet the prospect of class warfare is utterly remote. Indeed, the political question foremost in Washington’s mind is how thoroughly the political party more closely associated with the working class (that would be the Democrats) will get clobbered in the next election. Why aren’t the bottom 99 percent marching in the streets?

One possible answer is sheer ignorance. People know we’re living in a time of growing income inequality, Krugman told me, but “the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it is.” The ignorance hypothesis gets a strong assist from a new paper for the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science: “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time.” The authors are Michael I. Norton, a psychologist who teaches at Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist (and blogger) at Duke. Norton and Ariely focus on the distribution of wealth, which is even more top-heavy than the distribution of income. The richest 1 percent account for 35 percent of the nation’s net worth; subtract housing, and their share rises to 43 percent. The richest 20 percent (or “top quintile”) account for 85 percent; subtract housing and their share rises to 93 percent. But when Norton and Ariely surveyed a group whose incomes, voting patterns, and geographic distribution approximated that of the U.S. population, the respondents guessed that the top quintile accounted for only 59 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Of course, sheer ignorance is indeed one reason for this fundamental failure of American democracy. But what, pray tell, is the cause of that sheer ignorance?

Answer: Our capitalist media, which would lose corporate sponsors and incur rightist flak attacks if they reported coherently and often on the distribution of income and wealth.

That, plus the Business Party, with its Republican and Democratic factions, which similarly steer clear of the topic, refusing to mention, let alone politicize, it.

Market totalitarianism, in other words.

Luis noticed the recent TCT post commenting on how purportedly anti-smoking advertising in the United States is a pathetic joke, if not slyly pro-smoking. Luis commented:

Here in Australia the anti-smoking ads are way more serious. They show people with mouth cancer, puss coming out of intestines, and lungs with black ooze seeping out of them. It would be an interesting exercise to do a comparative political-economic analysis of tobacco in the two countries.

Here is some proof, as relayed by Luis:

This ad could never run in the USA. Our commercial media outlets would wail that it is too disturbing and clashes with their programming, which is designed to maintain the fatuous mental state that is most conducive to shopping/capitalist ad watching. Indeed, this ad would never get produced in the USA, as our ad-makers know all this and wouldn’t even try to rock the boat.

Luis and I are hoping to put together something longer and more substantial on this topic, but suffice for now to say that Australia has two things the United States does not: a Labor Party and a serious public broadcasting entity.