Archive for the 'Assholes' Category
Wednesday, December 8th, 2010
Cartoon of the Day
Mike Flugennock‘s latest cartoon on Obama and the Democratic Wing of the Business Party.
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010
What They’re Working On
As their host society skitters toward the cliff, what are our late-imperial corporate capitalists placing at the top of their managerial agenda? About what you’d expect, according to Advertising Age, which reports on the prat standing at the right in the picture to your left:
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.
Tuesday, November 9th, 2010
The Dead and the Dying
*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.
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.
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010
Ratt Attack
Just as the 2008 Marketer of the Year was trying to salvage himself and his pathetic scam of a political party from their gargantuan “hope and change” election fraud of 2008, I came across the new book by his erstwhile “car czar,” the Wall Street racketeer, Steven Rattner. Rattner, who bribed a New York State pension manager to dump investment capital/workers’ retirement savings into Rattner’s hedge fund, the Quadrangle Group, is married to none other than the former chief money-bagger of the Dimbot-cratic Party.
Rattner’s new book recounts his brief tenure as the government’s overseer of General Motors, one of the overclass money-sucking entities Obummer so eagerly and lavishly bailed out in 2009.
Rattner reveals two things that shed floodlight on who Obummer really is.
First, this, which betrays exactly how conventional BO has always been:
Amid the steepest economic slide since the 1930s, President Change thought not of the workers, but of the corporations, in other words.
Even more telling is this piece of self-pitying advice from Rattner to his intended audience:
Being vetted can be a full-time job. I had begun talking to my attorneys in mid-December, in part to ascertain whether public office was feasible for me. Every senior appointee has to complete two massive documents: the SF-86, an impossibly tedious security-clearance statement that requires listing—just for example—every foreign trip an applicant has taken in the previous seven years, and the SF-278, which involves the disclosure of every financial interest and obligation. Like most recent administrations, this one had added its own questions, derived from past debacles, such as Zoë Baird’s failure to become Bill Clinton’s attorney general after neglecting to pay the so-called nanny tax. I can’t count the hours I spent complying, but I do know that the honor of working for the federal government cost me more than $400,000 in legal fees.
This remains the kind of person becomes a “czar,” regardless of (D) or (R) affiliation.
What percentage of the U.S. population finds it burdensome to list their investment holdings and recent overseas travels? To recall whether they paid FICA on their nannies? Needs to start with their attorney when asked to join the White House staff? Lives in a 25-room Manhattan apartment, wherein occur soirees “supporting candidates who are more conservative and pro-business than the incumbents”?
The kind that Obama likes and hires, that’s who.
And, by the way, take a look at this Rattner character’s bio and book. He’s as arrogant as the day is long. And what did he ever do or invent to award himself his own massive ego? He buddied up to his owner/publisher when he was a “journalist” at The New York Times, then parlayed the friendship into a Wall Street sinecure and eventually his own hedge fund, wherein he operated via naked graft. In other words, he’s a simple social climber and thief who’s never done anything for anybody but himself.
Personally, I wouldn’t let him in my front door.
Such is “democracy” in America, meanwhile. As Chomsky always says, we have one party, the Business Party, which, for marketing purposes, happens to maintain two quasi-factional wings.
Friday, August 27th, 2010
TweedleRep and TweedleDem in Oregon
In the Age of Obama, a.k.a. the supply-side Reagan Revolution that was actually started by Carter, it keeps getting easier and easier to practice my SMBIVA pledge.
Here in Oregon, a state that has always been a net exporter of dollars to the Pentagon and has also never summoned the nerve to economically live up to its reputation as an “alt” place, we have a “race for Governor” happening this year.
It could not be more comical or less meaningful.
On one side stands an ex-NBA basketballer, Chris Dudley, Republican, whose supposed qualifications for the job are a Yale diploma and enough money and name-recognition to have purchased himself the primary.
Dudley, as clunky with words as he was with a free throw, presents himself in the TV ads through which this campaign, like all other major campaigns, takes place, as a competitor and an outsider, who will bring — wait for it — “new ideas” to Oregon. The “new ideas” in question?
I’ll get state spending under control, without raising taxes.
I’ll do everything in my power to help small businesses, instead of punishing them.
I’ll focus on jobs.
What else could one say to this hoary package of discredited claims, or to the spectacle of a proud Ivy Leaguer selling them as “new”? ROFLMFAO.
And what of the inevitable TweedleDem?
He, an ex-Governor who called the state “ungovernable” at the end of his last turn as Head Babysitter, and whose girlfriend is now under investigation for graft as a contractor who receives money from the public on the theory that what she does is “helping the state attract green jobs,” wants to “ask Oregonians for their help” in reversing the Great Depression III in the state. How?
Now, there’s a radical new plan of action, no? Maybe we Oregonians could all become six-figure consultants on how to run the world on vaporware…
If it’s possible: ROFLMFAO even more!
Market totalitarianism: It’s what’s for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and, of course, FourthMeal.
