Since then, events have proceeded in such a way as to push TCT to proffer a new thesis, one that TCT hereby states as a 97 percent serious, 3 percent hyperbolic claim: In corporate capitalist America, electoral politics is a mere marketing operation.

Selling is the foundational reality, market research and advertising the basis for every peep of the communication and action that comprise an “election.” Brands never change, though their respective sales trends wax and wane.  Choice attaches entirely to the minutiae of style and microscopic difference that undergird almost meaningless product differentiation.  The degree of democracy involved is perhaps — a big perhaps — 3 percent greater than in economic marketing of goods and services, where it is vanishingly small. In both processes, the odds of the masses changing the range of choices offered by those with the money and the power is exceedingly low.  Coke or Pepsi.  Jack Johnson or John Jackson.

And, just as in regular product marketing, the amount of money spent from above always increases.

Puma, GE, Red Bull, Marc Jacobs, President Obama, and 200 other brands are on Instagram.

Instagram, of course, is yet another vanity-based marketing ploy on what the Robber Barons at Facebook call “the graph,” aka the data mining trick that is “the social net.”

The fact that Ad Age sees Obama, aka MOY 2008, as a mere brand is about as honest and apt a piece of information as you’ll get from the U.S. corporate media.

For those interested in this topic, check out this new report from the Sunlight Foundation. Its main finding:

If you think wealth is concentrated in the United States, just wait till you look at the data on campaign spending. In the 2010 election cycle, 26,783 individuals (or slightly less than one in ten thousand Americans) each contributed more than $10,000 to federal political campaigns. Combined, these donors spent $774 million. That’s 24.3% of the total from individuals to politicians, parties, PACs, and independent expenditure groups.

For those still laboring under the illusion that the Democratic Party is somehow an exception to the rule of capital, the report shows that:

Over time, the share of all individual campaign contributions coming from The One Percent of the One Percent has increased for both parties, increasing from 17.8% in 1990 to 32.1% in the 2010 election cycle. Consistently, Democrats have been slightly more reliant on The One Percent of the One Percent than Republicans – relying on The One Percent of the One Percent for, on average, about three percentage points more of their itemized campaign receipts.

TCT would suggest that aspiring progressives and radicals can save themselves a great deal of precious energy by keeping this fundamental reality in mind.

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!

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Another election cycle, another year of bitter partisan bickering [ed: exclusively over cynical claims and phony distinctions], another record-breaking mountain of cash spent on political advertising — all of which add up to tight inventory for local TV affiliates. According to Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, ad spending this season will top $3 billion. Borrell Associates has predicted spending will get as high as $4.2 billion this year.

We’ve come to expect steadily increasing ad outlays in political election cycles, but this year is different.

“I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Evan Tracey, president of Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.

Aside from issues of anti-incumbency fervor and Tea Party madness, “the big difference in this election is the Citizens United impact,” he said, but not necessarily because major corporations are funneling more cash into the system. Rather, last spring’s Supreme Court ruling that upended many of the former restrictions on political advertising has given political ad groups more time to spend, and increased fundraising firepower.

Gone are the rules barring such advertising 60 days out from an election, meaning two full months of more spending for [groups with huge amounts of cash].

Here is another example of why ceding the mass media environment to “the private sector” is poison to democracy and society. How much do national and local media outlets love this trend? As “the electoral process” asymptotically approaches complete decline into Coke versus Pepsi land, as welfare-state-hating candibot Tweedledum attacks ashamed, pseudo-liberal candibot Tweedledee for cutting Medicare while candibot Tweedledee is busy crowing about giving “entrepreneurs” more tax cuts, and as real problems become ever more undiscussable, both the cash register and the wall of sponsored hooey ring louder and louder.

Orwell and Huxley would be out of work these days. Dystopian fiction has little left to invent.

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.

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:

The week after his 2008 election, in Chicago, at President Barack Obama’s first substantive sit-down with his economic advisers, it was conceded that no situation on the economic front appeared thornier than the one I had been recruited to manage.

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.

Meanwhile, how’s this for an Obamian gesture?:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration wants to simplify auto loan forms for consumers over the next few months, a U.S. Treasury Department official said today.

Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin said the attempt to clarify car loan disclosures will be part of a broader administration effort to do the same for mortgages and credit cards.

The administration’s goal is “to help consumers get the information they need to make the choices that are right for them,” Wolin said in the text of a speech being delivered today at the New England Council in Boston.

ROFLMFAO. This is exactly, precisely the same sales proposition as the one at the heart of those scurrilous “know your credit score” commercials — the suggestion that ordinary people’s problem is ignorance or complexity or anything and everything but their shriveling incomes. Low and sinking incomes yield low credit scores and car-loan rejections. The form you have to fill out before being rejected is the pimple on that elephant’s ass. But that’s what these creeps are peddling as “change.” Zit cream for the rumps of social diseases.

click to enlarge

It’s hard to express all the ways in which this truly Orwellian item reeks of the worst possible kinds of hypocrisy and evil.  Between its adoption of the timeless Michelin Tires strategy of threatening the lives of children and the sheer impossibility of the core proposition (“Never mind your grinding poverty and medieval life expectancy, subjection to rotating gangs of mercenary despots, and the soldiers that have been firing rockets and dropping bombs into your town since before your parents were born — make your sons doctors!”), there reside scores of other deeply ill and immoral aspects of this effort at “targeting the targets.”

And some people wonder “why they hate us.”

Garcia’s overall thesis is this:

The social programming language of capitalist authoritarianism seeks to activate personal greed, intellectual insecurity and visceral racism as motivators of guided popular political reaction. The Pavlovian logic to this scheme of social manipulation is that all human beings are possessive, gullible and fearful.