Friday, August 6th, 2010
Neither recession nor depression shall slow the spread of corporate marketing’s Census-dwarfing surveillance on American households.
For those tracking this inexorable totalitarian phenomenon, The Wall Street Journal has been running a useful series. For those who know the institutional reasons, the main pattern is entirely unsurprising:
The [WSJ] conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.
Unauthorized placement of spyware is large:
The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred.
It is also increasingly powerful:
Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them. These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.
“It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.”
Interestingly, it is also another very powerful argument in favor of public enterprise and nationalization of our communications infrastructure. Wikipedia, a non-profit, somehow manages to thrive without planting any spy code.
Thursday, August 5th, 2010
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.
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010
The first 4,400 purchasers of General Motors’ new Chevrolet Volt hybrid car are receiving a free gift from the public in excess of $10,000. This takes the form of a $7,500 tax credit, plus a gift of a home charging station that starts at $2,500 excluding installation (and the installation requires an electrician rewiring part of your house).
This, in a nation with a pathetic, decrepit, elite-strangled and financially imperiled public transit system.
Monday, July 26th, 2010
Reality has gotten harsh enough to compel even the professional addlers to peek behind the curtains:
Many companies are focusing on cost-cutting to keep profits growing, but the benefits are mostly going to shareholders instead of the broader economy, as management conserves cash rather than bolstering hiring and production. Harley, for example, has announced plans to cut 1,400 to 1,600 more jobs by the end of next year. That is on top of 2,000 job cuts last year — more than a fifth of its work force.
As companies this month report earnings for the second quarter, news of healthy profits has helped the stock market — the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index is up 7 percent for July — but the source of those gains raises deep questions about the sustainability of the growth, as well as the fate of more than 14 million unemployed workers hoping to rejoin the work force as the economy recovers.
“Because of high unemployment, management is using its leverage to get more hours out of workers,” said Robert C. Pozen, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and the former president of Fidelity Investments. “What’s worrisome is that American business has gotten used to being a lot leaner, and it could take a while before they start hiring again.”
And some of those businesses, including Harley-Davidson, are preparing for a future where they can prosper even if sales do not recover. Harley’s goal is to permanently be in a position to generate strong profits on a lower revenue base.
In some ways, the ability to raise profits in the face of declining sales is a triumph of productivity that makes the United States more globally competitive. The problem is that companies are not investing those earnings, instead letting cash pile up to levels not reached in nearly half a century.
“As long as corporations are reinvesting, the economy can grow,” said Ethan Harris, chief economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “But if they’re taking those profits and saving them, rather than buying new equipment, it hurts overall growth. The longer this goes on, the more you worry about income being diverted to a sector that’s not spending.”
“There’s no question that there is an income shift going on in the economy,” Mr. Harris added. “Companies are squeezing their labor costs to build profits.”
The trend is hardly limited to Harley. Giants like General Electric and JPMorgan Chase, as well as smaller companies like Hasbro, the toymaker, all improved their bottom lines despite slowing sales in the second quarter. Among the S.& P. 500 companies that have reported second-quarter results, more than one in 10 had higher profits on lower sales, nearly twice the number in a typical quarter before the recession, according to Thomson Reuters.
“Whole industries are operating at new levels of profitability,” said David J. Kostin, chief United States equity strategist at Goldman Sachs. “In the downturn, companies managed to maintain higher profit margins than ever before.”
Profit margins — the percentage of revenue left over after expenses — crumble in most recessions, as overall sales fall but fixed costs like infrastructure, commodities and rent remain the same. In 2002, during the recession that followed the bursting of the technology bubble in addition to the Sept. 11 attacks, margins sank to 4.7 percent. Although the most recent downturn was far more severe, profit margins bottomed out at 5.9 percent in 2009 and quickly rebounded. By next year, analysts expect margins to hit 8.9 percent, a record high.
[Source: The New York Times, July 26, 2010]
The New York Times, of course, implies that all this is some kind of anomaly, rather than still more evidence that corporate capitalism works as it is intended to work — it puts the rich first in any and all situations.
The truth is that the basic institutional logic of the system was explained in 1966 by suppressed Harvard and Stanford men Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy. Take a look at that book, plus Harry Braverman’s sequel, Labor and Monopoly Capital, and see if the above reportage conveys anything that ought to be surprising.
Sunday, July 25th, 2010
Given that they haven’t yet bothered to think through the basic labels and human relationships involved, it’s no surprise that “consumer” activists have a positive talent for hatching profoundly silly attempts at combating the big business marketing juggernaut.
The latest such windmill-tilt is the effort to support new regulations on advertising food to children. The New York Times reports:
Lucky Charms. Froot Loops. Cocoa Pebbles. A ConAgra frozen dinner with corn dog and fries. McDonald’s Happy Meals.
These foods might make a nutritionist cringe, but all of them have been identified by food companies as healthy choices they can advertise to children under a three-year-old initiative by the food industry to fight childhood obesity.
Now a hard-nosed effort by the federal government to forge tougher advertising standards that favor more healthful products has become stalled amid industry opposition and deep divisions among regulators.
Of course, the new rules are being written by the U.S. Congress, so their arrival is long overdue, as the assembled representatives perform their duty and let their major donors nibble away at the proposed rules.
Meanwhile, always the naivest crowd in the room, “Some advocates fear the delay could result in the measure being stripped of its toughest provisions,” observes The Times.
How long have you been asleep, Activist Van Winkle? This is what Congress does. It represents money.
At the same time, the whole thing is a blatant play-acting farce in the first place. Advertising junk food to kids, which the new regulations might possibly mildly impede but certainly not stop, explains at most 10 percent of the modern obesity epidemic. A far larger chunk (pun intended) results from rampant addiction to television and televisual “new media,” all massively and aggressively sponsored by corporate capitalist marketing. Another, also much bigger cause of obesity is cars-first transportation, without which corporate capitalism would implode.
There’s also something slippery about the gambit of trying to respond to fight all this by limiting what advertisers can say. The First Amendment is not a toy.
A real response to corporate capitalist lying and killing would involve advocating aggressively competitive public media and public enterprise. Quadruple the budgets of PBS and the NEA, and charge them with voicing the public interest, free from the need to keep private sponsors happy. Launch public, non-profit enterprises that make and sell products designed to be cheaper and better and healthier than the most harmful corporate wares. Fight for a program of radical reconstruction of the nation’s town and cities, to de-emphasize televisual addictions and cars-first travel.
These are serious, potentially meaningful answers. Hoping that Congress will stop one particular advertising claim about junk food is a tempest in a very, very small teapot. Given our moment in human history, it is simply a joke, coverage in The New York Times notwithstanding (or perhaps confirming).
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
As our screamingly decrepit and hidebound overclass sets up camp atop its record piles of hoarded cash, let us recall what John Maynard Keynes concluded at the end of his magnum opus:
“I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment; though this need not exclude all manner of compromises and of devices by which public authority will co-operate with private initiative.”
