Archive for the 'Politics of Marketing' Category
Monday, November 16th, 2009
The Radical Truth About Energy
Nathan Lewis of Cal Tech says we’d need 10,000 plutonium (not uranium) reactors to produce 80 percent of existing energy consumption. To do that, we’d need to build a new plutonium plant every other day for the next 50 years, without any interruptions.
Conservation is coming and coming hard, my friends. The only question is whether we’ll retain any say in the adjustment process. Our current rulers, Obama distinctly included, don’t want us to gain the first glimmer of
awareness of the basic facts.
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
Department of Cats and Bags
Two items pertaining to the real nature of “the free market.”
Item 1: Existing Business Markets Depend on State Suppression of Basic Information
In 2003, researchers at a federal agency proposed a long-term study of 10,000 drivers to assess the safety risk posed by cellphone use behind the wheel.
They sought the study based on evidence that such multitasking was a serious and growing threat on America’s roadways.
But such an ambitious study never happened. And the researchers’ agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, decided not to make public hundreds of pages of research and warnings about the use of phones by drivers — in part, officials say, because of concerns about angering Congress.
On Tuesday, the full body of research is being made public for the first time by two consumer advocacy groups, which filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the documents. The Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen provided a copy to The New York Times, which is publishing the documents on its Web site.
Item 2: Corporate Capitalists Know Private Enterprise is Often Inferior to Public Enterprise
A government-run public [medical insurance] plan would have “unfair advantage over private plans, eventually crowding out private plans from the marketplace,” said Bruce Josten, executive vice president of government affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
More Blood for Autos?
{Source: American Physical Society*}
Click on the graphic at left. When you do, you’ll see one of the car capitalists’ dirty little open secrets: If and when they do finally start to sell more fuel efficient cars, the rate of death on US highways is going to rise beyond its present clip of 40,000+ annual snuff-outs.
That’s because, as the figure shows, the car-makers have been using the increasing efficiency of modern engines to make heavier cars that get about the same MPG as prior generations of lighter cars. So, there has already been some decent progress in making more fuel-efficient gas engines. But the increase has gone almost entirely into making heavier, safer cars, rather than lighter, better-MPG, but substantially deadlier cars. Vehicle mass, you see, is one of the main factors in the survivability of the frequent high-force collisions that inhere in autos-über alles transportation.
In the abstract, of course, some of the heightened danger that would come from making cars lighter and more MPG-efficient could be reduced by having everybody change to smaller, lighter cars all at once. But that isn’t going to happen, because, since it would undoubtedly require strong governmental rules and actions, it would do the one thing the car capitalists fear the most: legitimize autos-über alles as a central topic of popular democratic politics. And, if that ever happens, people might start to ask what alternatives exist. For the overlords of big business, that’s the slipperiest of slopes. Hence, it’s verboten — a topic no responsible, serious “leader” can raise.
What we’re pretty clearly going to get instead is a “bailout” that compels whatever car corporations remain to start using engine efficiency gains for higher MPG results. That will mean a swath of much smaller, lighter vehicles will be on the road, running alongside all the SUVs and heavier current vehicles.
Here’s my prediction: When that change comes online, in the next 5 years or so, the annual death toll on US roads will eclipse 1979′s record of 51,103 killed.
[And note the similarity there in the background circumstances: The worst years on record were the oil crisis years of the late 1970s and early 1980s...]
Change you can die for!
_______
* The American Physical Society’s new energy-efficiency report is well worth studying.
Saturday, November 22nd, 2008
The Chevy Volt: ROFLMAO!
After years of breathless pre-advertising, here’s what “the backbone of our economy” is disclosing about its “cutting-edge” new “green” automobile, coming (maybe) next year:
G.M. says the car, which is scheduled to arrive in showrooms two years from now, will be able to travel 40 miles on a charge, but it will also have a small gas engine to extend the range to as much as 640 miles using both the battery and gasoline (the 1.4 liter, four-cylinder engine is intended to run a generator that will power the car and recharge the batteries once they are depleted). It is expected to cost about $40,000.
A 40-mile range! After billions spent over years!
As I keep saying, you know what complete excrement you’re getting when industry insiders and The New York Times are mentioning it:
“If you’re the affluent individual who wants to make a statement, it’s one thing,” said Ron Pinelli, president of MotorIntelligence.com, an industry analysis firm. “If you’re Joe the Commuter, you’re not going to spend $40,000 on an electric car. It’s insane.”
You see there the wishful thinking behind all this late, late, late capitalism. Behind the scenes, the overclass must be mired in quiet desperation, despite its unchanging public face.
And then there’s the supposedly democratic public response: The coming public sponsorship, via the Tweedle-D Party and its program of “change” you can choke on (a.k.a. the re-packaging of the usual capitalist boondoggles), of this suicidal greenwashing charade. If shamelessness and corruption were combustible, there’d be no energy crisis for many centuries:
Executives at General Motors, the largest and apparently the most imperiled of the three American car companies, are using the Volt as the centerpiece of their case to a skeptical Congress that their business plan for a turnaround is strong, and that a federal bailout would be a good investment in G.M.’s future.
Rest assured, nobody on Capitol Hill or in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is going to connect these dots…Quite the opposite.
Mad Max, here we come.
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
Wabbit Hunting: Pelosi’s Turn
A month ago, it was Hank Paulson feigning at playing the cartoon fool.
Now, it’s the pancaked cadaver known as Nancy Pelosi, she who stands for, you know, some stuff and who got into politics to, you know, do some things.
Here’s Mrs. Pewosi’s “Be vewy, vewy quite” aside to the audience:
“Emergency assistance to the automobile industry would be conditioned on executive compensation restrictions, a prohibition on golden parachutes, rigorous independent oversight, and other taxpayer protections to ensure that any companies that benefit from this assistance — and not the taxpayers — bear the full burden of repaying any costs that are incurred,” Ms. Pelosi said.
“It is essential for the domestic automobile manufacturing industry to re-emerge as a global, competitive leader in fuel efficiency and in new, path-breaking energy-efficient technologies that protect our environment. For the automobile industry to be truly viable, it must continue to move in this direction.”
She don’t know her overclass wabbits — or her basic physics — vewy well, do she?
This matewial is daisy fwesh, though, ain’t it? Weawistic, too…
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
It’s the Depression, Stupid!
In the market-totalitarian United States, where TV has long since severed the public’s neural paths from so many dimensions of vital reality, history repeats itself and, tragically and farcically, nobody even notices.
Take the onset of the hitherto credit-averted Great Depression we are now experiencing. The facts are stunningly simple: At just about the time the corporate capitalist overclass began taking back the small popular gains embodied in the New Deal and the anemic “War on Poverty” (it was more like a skirmish, if that), credit cards made the transition from upper-class convenience to a major way of making ends meet for the masses. Soon thereafter, huge sums of capital began to accumulate on Wall Street, looking for some profitable place to go next. What money didn’t chase itself in circles or become fourth homes and private jets went back into increasingly sketchy loans, very often and increasingly against what was quaintly called “home equity.”
Predictably, at the beginning of the “home equity” lending cycle, there was both a major flow of cash into previously squeezed middle-class hands, and a corresponding price boom in suburban housing. For a time, for many commoners, it felt like a bonanza that would never end.
But the basic fact was and is that loans have to be either repaid from earnings or repudiated, and, from the beginning, the whole credit expansion was a blatant substitute for expanding earning power in the middle and working classes. Why pay the rubes when you can loan them the money? And what better distraction from the fast-eroding ways to make wages and salaries than a new credit card in the mail, or, even better, a new “line of credit” secured by an assuredly wondrous future?
This game seems over now, rather obviously.
And what are we hearing from the overclass at this fork in the road? More massively amnesiac, self-serving magical thinking, of course: In fact, what we’re already in the process of getting as a purported “solution” to the economic crisis is neither more nor less than the practical implementation of the right wing’s pet theory of what causes Great Depressions.
Ever since their masters started disassembling the New Deal, the right-wing economists (whose ideology, with the indispensable help of the Democratic Party, has long since swallowed almost all the liberals) have contended that a mere failure to take decisive action to boost Wall Street in 1929 was what caused the GD of the entire 1930s. Now, they are getting their chance to put that immensely silly but now-dominant hypothesis into real action.
The other (real) explanation of the last Great Depression, of course, was that the 1920s stock bubble was a symptom not a cause of the disease, which was excessive wealth polarity. From the time of the first public deregulation of corporate mergers (the 1880s) to the Roaring Twenties, the investing class had taken all it could get while buying into its own claim that having more money at the top is always a good thing for society and the world. From 1929 to Hitler’s conquest of France, that delusion proved its accuracy in unusually clear ways.
Sound like a familiar pattern?
I predict the forthcoming “market rescue” will produce the same results as last time: Wall Street may be temporarily quasi-stabilized, but to no lasting effect. This will be because, despite overclass myopia, the disease is deeper and wider than Wall Street. It has to do with the normal workings of what Noam Chomsky calls the unmentionable five-letter word: c-l-a-s-s. When the rich player has taken all the chips, and when another round of IOUs no longer holds credibility, poker games must end. Likewise, when the overclass has flogged and hogged its way through its last viable lending scheme, its own self-seeking behavior confronts it (and all of us) at last.
All in all, I think the evidence strongly suggests that the 2010s will be a lot like the 1930s all over again, but with way bigger stakes and far less room for dawdling and error.
