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!

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.

Take a look at this clip of Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz:

Schultz acknowledges that capitalists are hoarding cash. Why are they doing that, according to him? “The only reason is…the anxiety and uncertainty that exists about the political system.”

One could certainly ask CBS why a billionaire who started a coffee shop and holds that highest and most relevant of intellectual credentials – a 1975 bachelor’s degree in Communications from Northern Michigan University – gets to say anything on national TV about what ails the political economy in 2011.

Anyhow, let’s instead change the characters here, shall we? Let’s imagine that foxes have been devouring hens from the henhouse on Farmer Smith’s farm.

CBS: Mr. Fox and Farmer Smith, why are there so few hens in the henhouse these days? How do we rebuild the population in there? Mr. Fox, since you invented farming, let’s start with you. What the problem out there?

Fox: Well, we all know how delicious hens are [belches and picks teeth], don’t we? The one and only reason they are dwindling has to do with how Farmer Smith is paying for the tractor. Will he use cash? His credit card? How can we foxes know what to do next, when we have such a crisis of confidence about that tractor payment?

Farmer Smith: Some might say I should put a door on the henhouse and start shooting foxes. But everybody knows foxes are the engine of any productive farm, so we must actually open the windows on the henhouse, too. Meanwhile, I’ll be meeting with my neighbor farmers to consider how we should pay off our tractors. Soon, we’ll all be up to our elbows in chickens!

This has to do with political marketing, but check out what the upper-class bimbo Jackie O had to say about reality. If MLK was a fraud, what, pray tell, was JFK?

As usual, you have to look at places like TCT for any actual logic on these topics, despite the supposed central glory of the personages involved.

Now we know why they sat on this for 47 years. What a pinhead!

In this unending totalitarian thrust, any activity that leaves room for further commodification will eventually be seized upon and efforts will be made to increase the degree to which it employs maximally profitable corporate wares. In the process, nothing counts but the bottom line.

And so it is that our old friend the Kimberly-Clark conglomerate is now pushing Kleenex brand hand towels, on the theory that cloth towels are a dire public health risk. Words can’t do justice to the amazing chutzpah of this campaign:

The shamelessness of this stunning proof of capital’s inherent heedlessness does not, of course, stop Kimberly-Clark from claiming that it “challenges itself” to “respect our planet and conserve its resources.”

Orwell was an amateur compared to this stuff.

The United States is “a nation that finds joy in the impossible.”

The Kennedys, the missile-gapping stiffers of MLK, the architects of escalation and covert regime change (when their boy Diem started displaying signs of softness) in Vietnam, “had no patience for the status quo.”

The Peace Corps “changed the world” and did something — something unnamed, of course — to reduce poverty and injustice.

Going to Catholic Mass every day?  Not a pathetic, anachronistic, pointless, holier-than-thou gesture, but “an act of rebellion against brutal modernity.”

Love that soft-hearted, tender, indulgent, not brutal stuff the Mass-meisters did before we went and got all modern…

Well, anyhow, you do have to hand it to somebody with the capacity to lie to himself and others at this level and still keep his legs moving.

Mr. Burke’s rise has been a quiet but noticeable one. His first job after graduating Harvard Business School was devising product ideas for Grape-Nuts, then owned by General Foods in White Plains, N.Y., not far from his childhood stomping grounds in and around Rye, N.Y.

In a private meeting, Irwin Gotlieb, the global CEO of WPP’s GroupM, Bill Koenigsberg, president-CEO of independent Horizon Media, and Rob Norman, chief executive of GroupM’s North American operations, were among the executives who got their first good look at Chief Operating Officer Stephen Burke, the senior Comcast Corp. executive who at the time was months away from officially being named the incoming leader at the mammoth NBC Universal.

Mr. Burke’s pedigree and management style point to an executive who thrives on intense, albeit quiet, competition. “The stimulus for him is more about the work than all of the other stuff that comes with it,” said William Burke, his youngest brother.

[T]he end goal will be to try and hitch Comcast’s massive cable footprint and the set-top box technology upon which it relies to hours of NBCU content to drive new TV-viewer behavior, such as responding to TV commercials with a remote and pushing the evolution of so-called “addressable” advertising.

These new formats could ultimately make TV advertising more valuable even as TV watching becomes a more diffuse activity. It’s this mix of “pipes, data and content,” said one senior media executive familiar with Mr. Burke, or the ability to devise entertainment as well as the means by which people see it, that might make the $37 billion-plus combination of Comcast and NBCU more compelling to Procter & Gamble or Unilever.

Indeed, Comcast has the opportunity to carve a new media landscape. “Comcast didn’t acquire NBC Universal to move Steve Burke to run the network,” said Group M’s Mr. Gotlieb. Instead, he suggested, Comcast purchased the company “because they saw significant synergies going forward” that include marrying the company’s ability to reach consumer homes with the content that draws consumers to the TV set, computer screen and digital device in the first place.

Such is the stuff of the scions of the executive salary, the absentee dividend, the classic stuffed-shirt pose:  “to drive new TV-viewer behavior.”

If you live to know your grandchildren, be sure to tell them this was the way corporate capitalists responded to the gathering trends of the early 21st century.

*pauper & bauble*

Not surprising, but telling: The “British Royal Family” have taken to marketing their mega-pampered zombie selves via marketing data-scraper Facebook.

Shows what amazing stuff plugs straight into this decrepit culture. The corporate capitalist overclass can’t bring itself to tolerate 10 seconds of serious discussion of any one of the smorgasbord of dire crises facing it (and us), but these paleo-Yahoos and their running IQ test (if you “like” them, you fail) are welcome news, a dear old friend of the culture of sponsored stupidity.

It’s what they call marketing synergy, one hand washing the other.  A pack of undead figurehead feudal claimants both lending and drawing aid and comfort to and from the heedless, clueless Davosian hackocracy now busily driving the world over the last cliff in history, with “royals” on their “friends” page.

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.