Archive for the 'market totalitarianism' Category
Monday, October 11th, 2010
Purest Shit: The Ruling Ideology in 60 Seconds
With a twinkle in his eye, former neo-robber baron, safety slasher/multiple murderer, and U.S. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow tonight offered the pithiest, purest statement I’ve ever seen of the central claim of our market totalitarian overclass and its bi-partisan political puppets.
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Alas, all decrepit, outdated ruling classes have long since grown incapable of distinguishing their own circumstances and interests from those of everybody else.
Saturday, October 9th, 2010
It Only Gets Worse
I have reluctantly concluded that voting for candidates* has become meaningless in the market totalitarian, one-party United States. The equivalence and mutual venality of the two brands comprising the reigning Business Party duopoly is now complete, as is their eager “bi-partisan” participation in the surrender of all political discourse to the inherently irrational form of television advertising.
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.
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
Powerful Evidence of Media Effectiveness
Turns out Americans are radically misinformed about the distribution of wealth in their own society, thinking it is much more equal than it actually is. Turns out the distribution of wealth Americans think would be ideal is far more equal still than that, and is basically Scandinavian:
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.
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
Real Anti-Smoking Ads
Luis Cayetano lives in Australia and writes this excellent blog and this one also.
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.
Tuesday, September 7th, 2010
Google = BP Mouthpiece
As Herman and Chomsky pointed out, there are structural rules to the way commercial media work. One of the most basic is that commercial media exist to serve their advertisers first.
Hence, it comes as no surprise that Google, the corporate internet search portal/media conglomerate, whored itself out to BP after the Horizon Deepwater oil rig explosion.
According to Advertising Age,
Before BP could stem the oil gusher at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, it unleashed $100 million in ad spending, largely on network TV, to stem the damage to its image. But it also started spending heavily where it had never spent much before: buying ads in Google’s search results.
How much did BP spend on search? In two months, BP went from spending very little on search advertising — about $57,000 a month — to becoming one of Google’s top advertisers, dropping nearly $3.6 million in the month of June alone, according to an internal Google document obtained by Advertising Age. That pushed BP into the upper echelon of search advertisers, in a league with Expedia, which spent at least $5.9 million in June, Amazon, which spent at least $5.8 million, and eBay, which spent at least $4.2 million.
This is a significant outlay, even for BP, which spent $94 million on advertising in 2009, and $78.7 million in the first six months of 2010 alone (excluding search), according to Kantar Media. Search advertisers only pay when their ads convert or get a click, and in June the crisis was still at full-boil, driving clicks on BP’s ads.
Why is there no public, not-for-profit internet service and search provider? After all, the public invented the internet, and the United States has the world’s highest communications bills.
The answer is market totalitarianism, which forbids such questions from being within a mile of “on the table.”
Monday, August 30th, 2010
Unseriousness is Everywhere
Under market totalitarianism, only unserious solutions to problems are eligible for consideration.
Consider the Clintonian tobacco settlement, which uses corporate tobacco money to hire corporate capitalist ad agencies to make advertisements nominally devoted to discouraging smoking, then purchases time to run those ads within commercial media.
Not only does this mean that foxes end up making the supposedly anti-fox-in-the-henhouse imagery, but the results are created with a careful eye to not upsetting the commercial media outlets in which they run.
Results? Instead of searing pictures of people being treated for and dying from lung cancer and COPD, this:
