Architects of Our Brave New World

Without the Soviet Union around to keep the capitalists in check, the world turned into a playground for the cowboy capitalists.  It took less than two decades after the fall of the USSR, however, for the party to end. These merry capitalists so abused the prerogatives of their newfound playing fields that they practically brought the whole house of cards down on themselves.  The greatest crisis the West had faced, and still faces, was brought about not by some outside force, a foreign evil empire, but by the evils that lurked within its own DNA.  If there is any one individual we have to thank for this historical turn, it is Reagan and Thatcher chum, Mikhail Gorbachev.
         The cowboy economists had their counterpart in foreign policy in U.S. neo-conservatives who saw in the demise of the USSR a unique historical moment in which they could win for the capital of the empire true global dominance.  Just as the financiers could not resist overreach, the strategic planners threw caution to the winds and began to "consolidate" the empire.  Even before the Bush cabal stole the presidency in 2000, Democrat Bill Clinton had gotten the ball rolling. Ground to dust under the thumb of Western interests was the deceased Josef Tito's Yugoslavia, a country that represented --aside from its considerable success as a socialist country--no threat to any people but its own. Then Reagan's Evil Empire morphed into Bush's Axis of Evil.  But the targets of American policy were not limited to Iran, Iraq and North Korea or even lesser regimes in Cuba, Libya and Syria.  
      Neo-conservative overreach gave us Barack Obama. As fate would have it, it was just as the American permanent government began withdrawing its support for a Bush regime that had given us two failed wars with hundreds of thousands of deaths, the tearing up of freedoms going back to the Magna Carta and the institution of techniques to get prisoners to talk going back to Torquemada, that the financial Panic of 2008 took place. Barack Obama, hand-picked to redeem a regime in disrepute at home and abroad, a man who had voted against the war in Iraq, was now tasked with virtually saving the capitalist system from itself.  The tears of joy on the cheeks of the victorious voters who had virtuously given us our first Black president had not dried before disturbing signs began to emerge.
     Gorbachev, who spent most of his tenure claiming to be saving socialism and the USSR, ultimately betrayed the forces in the USSR committed to socialism and communism and became the midwife of its demise.  Barack Obama, the chosen messiah, his advance Nobel Peace Prize in hand, groomed by the elite to bring us back into the community of normal nations by getting us out of the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rein in the torturers and close Gitmo, would now have to deal with an accident of history brought on by financial wizards who had written notes for an estimated half a quadrillion dollars in derivatives and credit debt obligations.  He was, to put it mildly, side-tracked by events threatening a world wide depression.  Few Democrats who had voted for him could have predicted in the fog of the financial panic that ensued that, like Gorbachev, he too would serve as a midwife for a demise, this time the demise of a liberal tradition that went back not to a revolution in 1917, but to the near revolutionary crisis brought on by the Great Depression of 1929.
      All the ingredients seemed to exist in 2008 for another New Deal.  In both foreign policy and economic policy, the poverty and dangers of conservative policies had become manifest. Here, too, Bill Clinton's policies anticipated the unbridled recklessness that the conservatives later fully unleashed.  NAFTA was a slap in the face for American workers. Risky mortgages were pushed on the poor as a substitute for affordable housing.  The tearing up of the Glass-Steagall act unleashed a Walpurgisnacht of financial wheeling and dealing.  Yet, even before entering the White House, President-elect Obama began surrounding himself with the very men who had not only stood by and watched, but had actively engineered financial policies that had garnered unheard of wealth for the few, and total disregard for the plight of ordinary citizens.  Similarly, in foreign policy, he kept on into his planned cabinet men chosen by the so-called Iraq Study Group led by none other than James Baker and Lee Hamilton, two perennial gate keepers for the permanent government.  For Americans who knew the players, it became clear how an Obama administration would operate.
       In an unparalleled performance of political backward fumbling that would have made medieval alchemists envious, Obama transformed political gold to lead.  Rather than rallying the nation to reverse failed conservative policies as FDR had in his first inaugural address, under the pretense of spearheading a government of reconciliation and compromise with the other side, he oversaw a sequence of events that amazingly allowed the forces of reaction to double down on their attack on the working classes, pretending that they were the aggrieved party.  Tea Party brown shirts began disrupting talks given by liberal legislators, state governors like demagogues Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Chris Christie of New Jersey launched attacks on already hobbled unions and began making deep cuts into state budgets already diminished by the financial crisis. Official, stated, Republican Party policy was gridlock and obstructionism.
      Still clinging to a vestige of hope for real change, American voters re-elected Obama in 2012, but both the House and the Senate fed by the anger and disappointment of many Americans at the apparent ineptitude of the Democrats to offer relief, fell to the Republicans.  With the help of a reactionary Supreme Court, the same court that had made a gift of the presidency to George Bush, the country we will inherit when Obama leaves office is now fully in the hands of large corporations that prey, unchecked, upon ordinary citizens. Union membership is at historic lows.  Attacks on voting rights and gerrymandering help insure Republican victories.  Austerity budgets prevail in state legislatures while the stock market somewhat mysteriously rebounds from its crisis low of a Dow Jones 6000 to its current level of above 18000, lining the pockets of the 1%.
   In affairs abroad, our Nobel Peace Prize winner bombed Libya into its present chaos during a bogus "Arab Spring," threatened to do the same in Syria and watched much of our "victory" in Iraq ceded to the apparently unstoppable new forces of ISIS.  With regard to Iran, "all options are still on the table" as we nervously await the outcome of negotiations over sanctions.  The world is one bombing run on Tehran away from unimaginable horrors.



Note:  For the photo of Obama as Gorbachev credit goes to: https://symonsez.wordpress.com.  I was rather amazed to find in the course of writing this post to find that I was not alone in seeing similarities between the two men.   
 

Drowning in Advertising

Here, in the land that we are told invented advertising, we have reached a state of affairs where we are absolutely drowning in the stuff.  In the brave new world where privatization has become the mantra of the regime, the incursions of advertising into heretofore untouched venues is full apace. Even on so-called public television, more and more commercials are in evidence, and, in a related matter, the time devoted to soliciting viewer contributions has gone up dramatically,  This, it appears, is the concession made by PBS's nominal defenders (against such as former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who during one of the debates stupidly muttered something like, "I guess Big Bird will have to go," [it probably lost him millions of votes].)  In keeping with the trends in evidence since the complete takeover of government by corporate interests, the gentlemen's agreement to keep alcohol ads off the air has deteriorated, more and more booze ads have made their way onto television.  For each half hour of television broadcasting a minimum of twelve minutes of commercials seems the rule, thus giving us almost as much commercial as program time.  News broadcasts have no restraint in presenting advertising disguised as "entertainment news."  ("It's what the people want" we are told.)  Sports broadcasts regularly advertise other sporting events or clutter the screen with streaming banner ads. "Infomercials" directed at a nation whose people grow more obese chomping down on chips and the like seated--or lying down before--their 50-inch "smart" tvs convey the latest non-prescription dietary "supplements," exercise machines, dance videos, etc. particularly at times when women and the unemployed who don't need to keep regular hours are watching.  (This has been a windfall for fat, chubby and obese actors, now preferred by advertisers in an obvious attempt to show people Americans can really identify with.)
       Much of this whorehouse capitalism is the lingering aftermath of the Reagan era, a time when no union or regulatory agency was not fair game for extinction.  Republicans have since perfected the art of tasking their assigned commissioners with the destruction of the very agencies that they are supposed to supervise, although it must be said that Democrats have stood by or actually cooperated in these efforts to maximize the privileges of commerce over the interests of average citizens or any claim to having a decent, safe, lord knows, dignified, standard of living.  At the risk of seeming paranoid, even the mysterious mandate for the nation to "go digital" seemed designed to wrest any possibility of having small, independent media take to the air waves with an alternative message.  It was a windfall for Samsung, et al., however, as millions of perfectly workable analog television sets were set out with the rubbish so that we could enjoy high definition advertising on ever larger, more expensive screens.    
       Now, especially, it seems, since Obamacare, we have the new infusion of advertising for prescription drugs, "free" medical equipment and even hospitals.  The production values of the latter would probably shock Orwell himself.  Often touting their seriousness by foregoing color HD for more "serious" Black and White, one teary parent after another will praise a given hospital for saving their child's life--or the child herself will appear on screen to express the appropriate gratitude to a hospital that makes the truly scary claim that it was only through the unique care available at their venue that a child's life was saved.  So much for socialized medicine.  This tsunami of advertising by the corporate health interests defies description as merely a sop to the other side.  One can only imagine the degree to which the nature of communication between doctors and their patients has become pathological, with patients asking why a certain advertised drug has not been recommended or whether an advertised procedure is available in the hospital with which their doctor is associated. In many countries, it is illegal to advertise prescription drugs.  Not here.  Not in the land that spends more on health care to far less effect than many countries large and small around the world.
      Pick up any magazine, (those aimed at women are particularly egregious), and the ratio of ads to content is closer to 95%.  In effect, the ads have become the content.  Magazines are often deeply discounted from the newsstand price, on the same principle that has computer printers basically given away by companies like Hewlett-Packard in exchange for the consumer's commitment to buy, for the life of the machine, printer ink which, it has been observed, costs more by volume than Chanel No. 5 perfume.
       It did not take long for the internet to follow suit--in spades--with earlier electronic and print media by taking what should have been and could have been an invaluable communication tool and burying the message in advertising.   I guess we should not be surprised.  Some of a certain age can recall Newton Minow in 1961 decrying the state of the then still new television industry as "a vast wasteland."  That, in the age when Playhouse 90 and the NBC Symphony Orchestra were part of the fare offered to Americans. One need not puzzle over what Mr. Minow thinks of current media.
      What might now be called the "hard-copy" of The New York Times will currently run you about $1,100 a year to purchase.  Since only the most affluent and institutions can now afford to buy the paper, most readers access the Times on-line.  Even here, the right to respond to the paper's articles and such requires a minimum subscription of about $15 dollars per month.  What happens when you go to the paper's internet site?  Well, a banner comes up and then pop-up ads of varying size appears, and one must either scroll down or click on a barely discernible "[x]" or "close" to remove the offending item.  Through the long anticipated magic of video material being embedded along with the news, the paper is now a "mixed-media" vehicle.  Here again, however, subscriber or not, to see the video material one has to first wait through the transmission of an ad or really a television-styled commercial before getting to the content.  In the good old days of newspapers, one had a choice; one could just turn the page and skip the ads.  Some internet outlets, in an apparent expression of sympathy for the users, now allow one to watch a certain period of time and watch a count-down to the point when you can elect to SKIP the ad.  Others will invite you to assist them in their efforts to tailor their advertising to your unique interests.  Of course, they are already tracking you.  At one point, I was searching for a toy truck for one of my grandchildren.  After that, I was deluged with pop-up ads from an actual truck manufacturer for months, the company mistaking my interest in toy trucks for real ones.  Anyone who doubts that "Big Brother is Watching You" at this point has to be living in a cave.
      Of course, giving over all of American media to commerce really shouldn't surprise Americans who were once told, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country."  Now, all those jobs in the auto industry have been shipped out, over the feeble protests of hobbled unions like the once-powerful United Auto Workers, to Japan, Korea, and the benighted Southland of the country where trying to organize a union is still a dangerous proposition.  But "Engineer Charlie," former Secretary of Defense and head of General Motors, Charles Wilson was right after all, at least by the lights of corporate America; it turns out that what is good is waving goodbye to any hope of a decent job in industry.
     And the less disposable income Americans have, the harder corporations must work to separate them from their remaining dollars; squeeze they must.  The American Hershey bar gets smaller and smaller, and the smaller it gets, the more it costs.  Madison Avenue is the midwife, helping Americans give birth to a "new and improved" social order. Good to the last drop.