Archive for the 'Political Marketing' 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.
Thursday, August 5th, 2010
Obama Streamlining Car-Loan Rejection Process
President Obummer, ever the valiant, true-believing, prevaricating babysitter of the status quo, is presently touring the Upper Midwest, peddling the notion that his tragically stupid bailout of the doomed, massively downsized automobile industry is some kind of jobs program, rather than a desperate effort to stave off public consideration of Peak Oil and the radical unsustainability of capitalism.
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.
Monday, April 12th, 2010
The Worst of Both Worlds: Afghanis Enjoying Both Kinds of Targeting
The latest Advertising Age reports on a truly surreal marketing campaign. Inside Afghanistan, a country with one-tenth the population but only 1/1000th the GDP of the United States, the occupying army is now running advertising campaigns putting the burden for rebuilding the society squarely on — can you guess? — ordinary Afghanis:
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.”
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Amen, Manuel!
Manuel Garcia, Jr. has published an excellent essay on the logic of corporate capitalist political marketing. Read it here.
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.
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
Rape in Context
From The Daily Howler:
Total spending on health care, per person, 2007:
United States: $7290
Switzerland: $4417
France: $3601
United Kingdom: $2992
Average of OECD developed nations: $2964
Italy: $2686
Japan: $2581
To anyone with an ounce of sense, it’s obvious what those data mean. A real progressive would scream and yell about those remarkable data. But in the career liberal world, all is silent. We’ve been silent for the past fifteen years—since the last time we failed.
(Note: Paul Krugman discussed similar data in a series of columns in 2006. Michael Moore discussed this situation in 2007, in Sicko. But go ahead: Name the liberal journal, or the career liberal journalist, who used the work of Krugman or Moore as a springboard to a long, shrill discussion. Which of our liberals did that?)
People are happy with their current insurance for a fairly obvious reason: They don’t know how badly they’re being looted! In part, they don’t know that basic fact because our career liberals simply won’t tell them. “We’re not Europe,” Serious People write. And that has largely been that.
Nuff said.
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:
