Archive for the 'Assholes' Category
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.
Thursday, August 19th, 2010
“The Role of the Consumer”
When they feel they’re safely talking amongst themselves, big business marketers get honest. Take the case of a thought piece in the latest issue of Advertising Age by one Andy Gould, senior VP of an ad agency in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Gould’s complaint:
Too Many Campaigns Still Ignoring the Role of the Consumer
OK. So what is “the role of the consumer”? Perhaps being asked whether you think using old growth timber to make toilet paper softer is something our society should be tolerating?
Not quite. Turns out the role Gould, whose firm works on the Cottonelle account for Kimberly-Clark, has reserved for “the consumer” is rather less substantial:
As I look back at two of our most successful campaigns this year, all the agencies involved identified the role of the consumer very early on. For Cottonelle’s Roll Poll, we decided every piece of communication should be geared toward getting people to vote on which way they rolled their toilet paper (over or under). For the Pop-Tarts Flavor Tournament, we wanted to put 20 flavors head to head in a March-Madness-style bracket, and have teens influence the outcome of each matchup until we had named a champion. Determining these things at the beginning of the process (at the same time as the messaging piece) gave us the time to make the work more interactive, and allowed us to structure things so that what users did and said during the campaign actually impacted the creative work.
Giving consumers something to do is one of the musts of digital work, but even outside of the digital realm, I think many of us believe it’s the best way to connect with people today. Doesn’t work that actually requires something of the consumer stand a better chance of creating genuine impact
And some people still dare to suggest that capitalism and democracy are two different things!
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
ROFLMFAO of the Day
The New York Times today features a book review of Denial: A Memoir of Terror, by Jessica Stern, pictured at left, a faculty affiliate of the Belfer Center’s International Security Program and a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School at Harvard University.
It isn’t directly related to big business marketing, but in this review, Ms. Stein utters one of the most remarkable lines I’ve read in a long time, a line that speaks volumes about the totalitarian, Big Brotherian nature of this society and its elite-training institutions.
After attributing terrorism against “us” to a string of psychological and cultural factors she apparently doesn’t connect to politics or history or the distribution of world power (such are the requirements of maintaining Harvard and NSC connections), here is Stern’s epic howler:
“Harvard is a humiliation factory, and yet we don’t produce a lot of terrorists.”
OMFG. I mean, really? WOW! I almost fell out of my chair. Seriously.
I won’t waste your electrons reciting the marathon list of torturers and war criminals trained and housed at Harvard. You can do that yourself with a bit of internetting.
But permit me two items, won’t you?
1) Neo-Harvard-Man poster-boy Barack Hussein Obama is presently commander-in-chief of two wars, both pointless, one patently illegal. He has substantially increased the rate of drone bombings and military assassinations in both these festivals of mass death.
2) From Wikipedia:
Henry Kissinger received his B.A. degree summa cum laude at Harvard College in 1950, where he studied under William Yandell Elliott. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University in 1952 and 1954, respectively. In 1952, while still at Harvard, he served as a consultant to the Director of the Psychological Strategy Board. His doctoral dissertation was titled “Peace, Legitimacy, and the Equilibrium (A Study of the Statesmanship of Castlereagh and Metternich).”
Kissinger remained at Harvard as a member of the faculty in the Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs. He became Associate Director of the latter in 1957.
Kissinger played a key role in a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia to disrupt PAVN and Viet Cong units launching raids into South Vietnam from within Cambodia’s borders and resupplying their forces by using the Ho Chi Minh trail and other routes, as well as the 1970 Cambodian Incursion and subsequent widespread bombing of Cambodia. The bombing campaign contributed to the chaos of the Cambodian Civil War, which saw the forces of dictator Lon Nol unable to retain foreign support to combat the growing Khmer Rouge insurgency that would overthrow him in 1975.
The CIA provided education for the military officers directly involved in the coup against Allende,[33] and funding for the mass anti-government strikes in 1972 and 1973; during this period, Kissinger made several controversial statements regarding Chile’s government, stating that “the issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves” and “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.”
On September 11, 1973, Allende [was overthrown in a US-backed coup led by] Army Commander-in-Chief Augusto Pinochet, who [appointed himself] President. A document released by the CIA in 2000 titled “CIA Activities in Chile” revealed that the CIA actively supported the military junta after the overthrow of Allende and that it made many of Pinochet’s officers into paid contacts of the CIA or US military, even though many were known to be involved in notorious human rights abuses.
On September 16, 1973, five days after Pinochet had assumed power, the following exchange about the coup took place between Kissinger and President Nixon:
Nixon: Nothing new of any importance or is there?
Kissinger: Nothing of very great consequence. The Chilean thing is getting consolidated and of course the newspapers are bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown.
Nixon: Isn’t that something. Isn’t that something.
Kissinger: I mean instead of celebrating – in the Eisenhower period we would be heroes.
Nixon: Well we didn’t – as you know – our hand doesn’t show on this one though.
Kissinger: We didn’t do it. I mean we helped them.
Kissinger took a similar line as he had toward Chile when the Argentine military, led by Jorge Videla, toppled the democratic government of Isabel Perón in 1976 and consolidated power, launching brutal reprisals and “disappearances” against political opponents.
During the Angolan Civil War (1975–2002). Kissinger supported FNLA, led by Holden Roberto, and UNITA, led by Jonas Savimbi, the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) insurgencies, as well as the CIA-supported invasion of Angola by South African troops.
The Portuguese decolonization process brought US attention to the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, which lies within the Indonesian archipelago and declared its independence in 1975. Indonesian president Suharto was a strong US ally in Southeast Asia and began to mobilize the Indonesian army, preparing to annex the nascent state, which had become increasingly dominated by the popular leftist FRETILIN party. In December 1975, Suharto discussed the invasion plans during a meeting with Kissinger and President Ford in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. Both Ford and Kissinger made clear that US relations with Indonesia would remain strong and that it would not object to the proposed annexation. US arms sales to Indonesia continued, and Suharto went ahead with the annexation plan.
In an April 3, 2008 interview by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution, Kissinger re-iterated that even though he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq he thought that the Bush administration rested too much of the case for war on Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.
Insofar as it produces historic personages, Harvard produces almost nothing but terrorists.
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
Dawn of Death: The Apex of Shamelessness
Partly for intellectual/political reasons and partly because I grew up on the habit, I still watch some television. Last night, I nearly choked on my frozen yogurt when I saw this especially stunning mind-rape come on:
Now, I’m no greenhorn when it comes to the mega-chutzpah that goes into the planning and production of corporate marketing campaigns, which, with the possible exception of organized monotheism, are far and away the most carefully considered and lavishly funded form of dishonesty in human history.
But this just takes the fucking cake, here, folks.
What is the point of de-oiling animals after they have been exposed to petroleum leaks? The Procter and Gamble (Dawn is a P & G brand) ad above would have you believe that it is a simple rescue mission that yields lovely, happy-bunny outcomes. Wash the oil off the feathers or fur, and the critter goes home just fine and dandy. Maybe even cleaner and better!
Let’s leave aside the obvious question of going home to what — the same ecosystem in which they just got oiled, the one to which they were born and are adapted?
At the level of the animal itself, petroleum-soaked feathers or fur, serious as it is, is only the secondary problem. The primary problem is oral ingestion or dermal absorption of oil. Swallowing or soaking in petroleum is a catastrophe to the organism:
The impact on bird eggs and bird and animal babies is worse.
P & G HQ
So, what is the above advertisement for Dawn dish soap? It is a knowing lie, designed to get people to pay a premium for Procter and Gamble’s heavily advertised brand of liquid soap. As all marketing planners know, “a sure-fire way to get consumers to pay more for our products even in these difficult times is to make some ‘green’ claims.”
In reality, then, the above ad is nothing more and nothing less than this: the use of the gargantuan, heart-rending, only-just-begun biological destruction from the Deepwater Horizon blowout as a photo-op for raking in more profits for P & G shareholders, all while sowing Satanic disinformation about the very reality troubling the very victims of the scam.
And, of course, it gets worse. Serious studies of bird survival after petroleum exposure show that “rescuing” birds ranges from being somewhat helpful to being utterly futile and inhumane.
And guess which organization is working to sell the rosiest possible view? That’s right: The International Bird Rescue Research Center, the very group to which P & G sends money as part of this marketing scheme.
The very group whose executive director writes letters of praise to P & G.
The very group that says this on its FAQ page:
Q: What do you use to wash birds?
A: We use “Dawn” dish washing liquid. IBRRC has conducted research on most of the commonly available cleaning agents and “Dawn” meets all the criteria we have established for appropriate cleaning agents. Those criteria are the ability to remove most oils, effectiveness at low concentrations, non-irritating to the skin and eyes, rapid removal from feathers (rinsing), and is easily accessible. Procter and Gamble now donates all “Dawn” detergent to IBRRC and other rehabilitation organizations.
The very group that answers another key FAQ thus:
Q: What is your survival rate?
A: The survival rate will differ with each oil spill because of all the factors that effect it. Some of those factors are the toxicity of the oil, how rapidly the birds are collected and stabilized, what condition the bird was in before it was oiled, and the species involved. We have had release rates as high as 100% and as low as 25% in the early years. We now average about 50% to 80%. Again, it depends on many variables and cannot be predicted.
Did you catch that liar’s shift? What is your survival rate? We won’t say, but here are some statistics about our RELEASE rate.
In other words, the IBRRC is a Procter and Gamble front, a mere pimp for P & G’s “cherished strategy of introducing increasingly sophisticated — and increasingly costly — household staples.”
By the way, a regular 24.0z bottle of Dawn liquid dishwashing detergent presently sells for $5.49, or 22.9 cents per ounce on drugstore.com. I guarantee you that the dollar stores my grandmother frequents sell an indistinguishable product for one dollar.
I can only quote, once again, from the late Robert L. Heilbroner:
At a business forum, I was once brash enough to say that I thought the main cultural impact of television advertising was to teach children that grown-ups told lies for money. How strong, deep, or sustaining can be the values of a civilization that generates a ceaseless flow of half-truths and careful deceptions?
Sunday, May 30th, 2010
Paid Addlers
Somewhere, Alexander Cockburn remarks that the unspoken role of mainstream journalists and pundits is to render plainly intelligible facts into nonsense.
A prime example is this absolute twaddle from Frank Rich in today’s edition of The New York Times:
Of all the president’s stated goals, none may be more sweeping than his desire to prove that government is not always a hapless and intrusive bureaucratic assault on taxpayers’ patience and pocketbooks, but a potential force for good.
OMFG. It seems Rich may actually believe this preposterous double-talk! (“Sweeping”? Seriously, wtf does that word mean in this sentence? Perhaps a Freudian slip showing Rich knows, at some level, that the claim under consideration is indeed a sweeping — a sweeping under the rug, into an ashcan, “off the table”…)
Let’s take the item that most Obama dupes would raise as proof of Rich’s typeset lobotomy: “health care.” If Rich’s story were true, would Obama have strangled single-payer medical insurance in favor of the corporate players and the Mercedes-driving, race-horse breeding doctors? Of course not.
This president has no goals, other than to hold office and babysit the status quo on behalf of the overclass, before which he is an abject and eager lackey. Adolph Reed had that fact nailed down and reported in 1996:
Rich’s tall tale is powerful evidence that our system works in the sense Cockburn diagnoses. So is that fact that Reed’s repeatedly proven point remains buried in miles of mainstream and blog-meistering dogshit.
