Archive for the 'A Culture of...' Category
Friday, December 18th, 2009
The System Works
So let’s say an overclass that already owns 90 percent of everything needs to perpetuate a couple of profitable and ideologically useful false-flag wars, and also wants to grant itself the biggest handout in the history of public spending. Let’s also say that the population had clearly gotten tired of the comparatively honest, tough-talking faction in the ruling political cohort. What you would then need, if you wanted to get your way, was a new figurehead capable of re-packaging the overclass agenda by means of “nice guy” prevarications.
The basic idea would be to have the new liar strike poses that looked somehow responsive to popular desires for something other than business-as-usual, but to have the new figurehead actually continue on with the real plan, even as s/he sold the image of “change.”
Q: Would it work? Would the people swallow the schtick, and then remain sufficiently confused to let it all unfold, even as the evidence of continuity piled up?
A: This graphic, from a December 21, 2009 Business Week report on a recent Bloomberg poll of 1,000 U.S. adults:
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
What Kunstler Said!
James Howard Kunstler remarks today on the continuing reign of the word “consumer” within our market-totalitarian communications environment:
And, incidentally, what exactly is a “consumer?” And why, at the highest levels of journalism in this land, do we refer to citizens that way? As if the American people have no other purpose except to buy things? Or is that the only way an “economist” can imagine them?
Someday, if we survive the coming capitalist ecocide, people will look back and be amazed at how blind and thoroughly dominated we have been — right up to its end, apparently — in this investors-first epoch.
Meanwhile, it might help raise our odds of passing along this possibility for amazement if at least we, the supposed progressives and radicals, would stop parroting our overlords’ rank biases.
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
What is Capitalism?
Capitalism is an inherently expanding social order in which the goals and powers of profit-seeking, wages-for-worktime-paying private investors are the most important force shaping society.
Capitalists hate free markets, which force them to pass along technological advances in the form of lower prices. To protect themselves from that, in the late 1800s, leading capitalists lobbied state legislatures in the USA to win the right to form the giant conglomerate corporations that have since been the major units of the system. Thomas Edison explained this to The New York Times in February 1892, when he was merging Edison Electric with rival Thomson-Houston Electric to form General Electric.
Capitalism presumes that Earth can sustain endless economic expansion and whatever level of resource consumption that may require.
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
History’s Most Dangerous Machine Marches On
Michael Moore is getting tired of waiting for people to do something. And it is objectively amazing what Obama has been able to get away with in terms of lying to and betraying his own supporters.
The main reason why? Not very complicated:
This continues the general trend.
It is a profound triumph for market totalitarianism. As our decrepit, wildly out-of-control overclass wrecks the world, suppresses the most basic information, and grants itself gargantuan bailouts, we “targets” continue to pursue our addiction to their main ideological and behavioral control device. “Survivor” continues to trump human survival, no contest.
And this is all required by corporate capitalism’s normal existence, which presses its players to devote huge and increasing efforts to the big business marketing process, no matter the costs and dangers.
If we don’t soon recognize the pattern and start to withdraw from it, this will absolutely not end well, for anybody. Endlessly expanded money-making is simply not a viable basis for continuing human civilization.
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
Sympathy for the Scrooge
Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was recently described, rather accurately, by C. Montgomery Burns, proprietor of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, as “the story of a fine businessman who’s hounded into acting nice by three socialist ghosts.”
How fitting then, that the onset of the 2009 holidays brings us Scroogenomics, by economist Joel Waldfogel.
Waldfogel’s topic is the wastefulness of Christmas gift-giving in corporate capitalist America.
In its summary of Scroogenomics, Business Week reports:
Waldfogel says holiday spending is “a massive institution for value destruction.” That’s economist-speak for the fact that so many gifts—billions of dollars’ worth, he contends—match up so poorly with what recipients want or would have bought for themselves. Now, in a new book, Scroogenomics (Princeton University), he puts an updated figure on the waste arising from holiday giving. “U.S. givers spent $66 billion in 2007,” he writes, but the value of recipients’ satisfaction is much lower. Quantified, the satisfaction gap represents “an annual deadweight loss of $12 billion.” That’s approaching what the federal government dissipates yearly, he says, citing the $17.2 billion in misspending estimated by Citizens Against Government Waste.
“Value destruction,” of course, is exactly, precisely the true wonder of Christmas for our overclass of corporate shareholders. As recent events have once again shown, their socio-economic order generates an unending problem of over-accumulation of wealth at the top. In order to alleviate that systemic dilemma on investor-friendly terms, huge and increasing waste is absolutely required. No Christmas-as-usual would mean even worse Depression.
Wittfogel, meanwhile, is not against gift-giving, properly done. He merely points out that our annual Christmas waste-orgy is a mighty poor version of charity and love. We get flattered — mostly by corporate marketers but also by our own hopes, vulnerabilities, and lack of institutional awareness — into thinking all the geegaws and rubbish we circulate are somehow on target, somehow a workable substitute for making the world a better place, somehow a deep lesson learned and applied.
Among its many terrible ironies is the fact that Corporate Capitalist Christmas leaves us not even doing as well as the post-haunting Scrooge. He, you may recall, provided some true essentials, not Pet Rocks, to the Cratchits.
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
The Goose Has Shat
The world of big business marketing is full of these types, these self-important “creative” (reach for your revolver when you hear that word) hipsters who think the sun shines out their portholes, even as they shovel new coals into the maw of the world-destroying juggernaut that is corporate capitalism.
This particular one here is Mr. Dr. Professor Sam Gosling, the newest member of the team at Mindset Media. Mindset is a new arm of the renowned commercial spy agency, The Nielsen Company. Nielsen, of course, has a long history of helping corporate sales engineers use demographic, behavioral, and psychographic data to create “lucrative customer relationships.”
Among Professor Gosling’s publicly-sponsored research endeavors is work in “animal personality.”
As I explained in The Consumer Trap book, big business marketers not only view their targets as means to an end (as “consumers” of their firms’ wares), but as so many Pavlovian beasts.
To corporate planners, we product users are much more manipulable and profitable when we are in the cognitive modes we share with frogs, dogs, chickens, and other sub-human species.
The great fear of big business marketers is that we might become humanly (and perhaps even humanely) conscious of the links between our life-environments, our natural proclivities, and our behaviors. We might see their hand on the lever, in other words. Hence, much of big business marketing comprises an effort to keep us down amongst the squirrels and fishes and lemmings in our triune brains.
So, along comes Dr. Gosling. What can he add to the ever-expanding art and science of for-profit behavior engineering?
Golly, he forgot to mention commercial questions, didn’t he?
On the face of it, this kind of research sounds oh so amusing, and maybe even liberating. But, really, despite the kudos from the major purveyors of pseudo-sociology, what democratic or life-enhancing purpose could this stuff possibly serve? Who would ever care about gaining super-precise understandings of how humans share psychological reactions with the less-conscious animals? The one obvious answer is: our overclass of market-totalitarian behavioral dictators.
So, is our ebullient, supposedly life- and animal-loving scientist troubled by this (often unmentioned) implication?
Hardly:
I don’t know about you, but the animal in me says “Grrrrr!” to that.
