Mount Holyoke College prof Douglas J. Amy insists that “Government is Good,” and has a whole detailed site all about why.
Cenk Uygur, meanwhile, explores the other side of this ideological divide, and decides today’s big business power-grabbers aren’t interested in democracy or even capitalism; but that’s only to be expected from “corporatists.”
Political PR maven Jonah Sachs insists progressives have gotta stop being so damned rational. He argues that public opinion in this country isn’t swayed by analytical arguments but by emotional appeals.
Guess who uses social-media sites the most? That long-neglected demographic caste, the stay-home moms.
Paul Krugman wrote it weeks ago, but I’m still trying to get to the end of his long essay asking the musical question, How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? The answer to his query’s easy, really. Economics is either the most or second-most fraudulant “science” out there (competing with sociology). Economic theory has less to do with the world most of us live in and more in common with the virtual worlds created by or for role-playing gamers
Henry Gibson, who passed away Monday, had a long and solid acting career ranging from Nashville to Magnolia and Boston Legal. But he’ll always be known as “the Poet” on the original Laugh-In. Gibson was a prime example of that show’s basic premise. Laugh-In was suit-and-tie guys (what we’d now call the Mad Men generation) looking gently askew at Those Darned Hippies. Saturday Night Live, by contrast, WAS Those Darned Hippies.
At least Gibson died without the tragic career footnote faced by Peter, Paul and Mary co-singer Mary Travers. She faced her cancer-ridden final months with the indignity of having one of her group’s hit songs reworked into the unauthorized political hatched-job “Barack the Magic Negro.”
The Wall St. Journal now has a slick “style” magazine supplement called WSJ. (Yes, the period is part of the name.)
Its fall cover depicts a gold-painted apple and the headline “Forbidden Fruit: Selling Luxury in the Age of Abstinence.”
Which is precisely what the section’s articles and advertisements proceed to do.
Page after page (88 in all) lauds the charms of gaudy wristwatches, private jets, Lincolns with “eco” features, fashions (including fur items), jewelry, wines, boots, hotels, purses, and accessories for rich white people of all adult ages and genders.
The cover, though, really says it all.
How do you sell things/services/experiences of little to no practical value, at a time when even CEOs pretend to be regular folks trudging through thes times like the rest of us?
By re-imaging them as icons of daring rebellion.
Be un-PC! Thrift, practicality—BORING! Show the petty little people of this world you don’t give a damn about them. Look as unashamedly silly as any “white gangsta” teen hanging in the malls.
The biggest remaining locally-based financial company couldn’t resist the offer of really cheap office space at what, for three years, had been the home of the previous biggest locally-based financial company, Washington Mutual.
For one Seattle woman I know, who’s been working for Russell after being laid off from WaMu, it means she’ll be back in her former building.
For Seattle civic boosters, it means a modest stemming of the downtown office glut and several hundred more customers for local lunch spots.
For Tacoma civic boosters, it means the loss of the town’s biggest private employer, the anchor of its downtown revival hopes, the great white-collar hope that T-Town could rise beyond its economic tripod of shipping, manufacturing, and the military.
For Russell’s out-of-state owners, it means nothing more than an everyday cost cut, a paean to the Almighty Stock Price.
…jump start the economy? Felix Salmon sez, “Pay the Artists!”
Today’s Sunday paper is down to 76 pages (plus ad flyers, supplements, and comics). Weekday papers this past month have had as few as 26 pages. (That’s not the “news hole;” that’s the whole paper, ads and all.)
I’m not calling this feature a “death watch,” because the Times still has a lot further down it could go.
As yet, no major US city has lost all its daily papers. None probably will.
But the papers that remain could become unrecognizable. They could become tiny journals of record, like slightly more mass-market versions of the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce. They could become glorified pundit-newsletters promoting the local business community’s agenda of the day. They could become, to borrow from the old National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper Parody, “newscasts in print,” lurid sheets emphasizing crimes, fires, and mayhem.
…these online “abstracts” of New Yorker articles better than the articles themselves.
…“What’s a green job anyway?”
…if you have a perversely cynical definition of “fun.” As more and more homeowners face foreclosure, condo and townhome homeowner associations could go bust. The result could be a “death spiral” of collapsing home values.
We’ve previously noted the similarities between the Bushies’ arrogant hubris and the “create your own reality” corporate-motivation side of New Age philosophy. Now, Barbara Ehrenreich makes the even more obvious connection between this “law of attraction”/”visualization” ideology and the recent Wall Street misadventure:
“The tomes in airport bookstores’ business sections warn against ‘negativity’ and advise the reader to be at all times upbeat, optimistic, brimming with confidence. It’s a message companies relentlessly reinforced—treating their white-collar employees to manic motivational speakers and revival-like motivational events, while sending the top guys off to exotic locales to get pumped by the likes of Tony Robbins and other success gurus. Those who failed to get with the program would be subjected to personal ‘coaching’ or shown the door….”No one was psychologically prepared for hard times when they hit, because, according to the tenets of positive thinking, even to think of trouble is to bring it on.”
I’ve also noted that the Obamans’ “hope” mantra is vastly different from positive thinking’s yin-without-yang, comedy-without-tragedy worldview. Hope says the pains of life do exist, but they don’t have to persist.
Of late, I’ve been noting the eerie similarities between two U.S. corporations with similar names:
Let us compare and contrast, shall we?
AIP: First release: the original The Fast and the Furious. AIG: First business: corporate insurance for US and European firms in China.
AIP: Worked on low budgets. Shot some films in as few as two days. AIG: Spared no expense, at our expense, to enrich its own speculators.
AIP: Carefully market-tested titles and posters before making each film. AIG: Brazenly insisted its mortgage-based derivatives were safe and secure.
AIP: Redubbed the original Mad Max from Australian into American. AIG: Stamped questionable investment products with “AAA” ratings.
AIP: Mixed-and-matched film genres to make new hits (I Was a Teenage Werewolf, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini). AIG: Sliced-and-diced mortgages into credit default swaps and other slabs of tainted loan-burger.
AIP: Used subsidiary names to release even-lower-budget films (including the original Little Shop of Horrors). AIG: Renamed its consumer insurance division “21st Century” to protect it from the now-tarnished AIG brand.
AIP: Helped launch the film careers of Annette Funicello, Jack Nicholson, Cher, Vincent Price, Pam Grier, Peter Fonda, and producer-director Roger Corman. AIG: Paid “failure bonuses” to high-ranking derivative traders and executives.
AIP: Taken over by sitcom producer Filmways (The Beverly Hillbillies). Film library now owned by MGM. AIG: Taken over by the U.S. government.
AIP: In-house formulae of sex, horror, and comedy helped inspire The Rocky Horror Picture Show. AIG: Media critic Robert Stein has decribed politicians’ and pundits’ response to the bonus scandal as “Bailout Rocky Horror Shows.”
AIP: Known for its hokiness, its audacity, its improbable stories, and its ridiculous monsters. AIG: Not much different.
