Archive for the 'Political Marketing' Category
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:
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
Ghostwritten Politics
Supposedly, it’s just way too crude to say that the state is the executive committee of the ruling class, that politics is the shadow business casts on society.
Meanwhile:
WASHINGTON — In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that was no accident.
Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.
E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.
The lobbyists, employed by Genentech and by two Washington law firms, were remarkably successful in getting the statements printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress.
Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points — 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats.
Source: The New York Times, November 14, 2009
Friday, November 13th, 2009
Executive Pay: Not so Limited
In a follow-up to our last post, here’s today’s news:
Pay czar open to raising salary limits for new hires
November 13, 2009 – 12:01 am ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Two days after GM Chairman Ed Whitacre said the government should loosen its restrictions on executive pay for bailed-out companies, the White House pay czar signaled his willingness to raise salary caps for new hires.
“Caps,” sure.
