A Contract With America It's Not

Last month a witty Democratic operative was heartless: "We no longer have a party caucus capable of riding this wave. We have 80-year-old leaders and 90-year-old ranking members. This isn't a party. It's a giant assisted living center. Complete with field trips, gym, dining room and attendants." Heartless but... determined to rip off one of the scabs that has turned the Democratic Party into something-- at best-- just less horrible than the Republican Party.

The energy and ideas and activism that are propelling the progressive movement forward-- and could help defeat Republicans in 2018-- is unrelated to Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, Joe Crowley and their incompetent and corrupt House leadership team. None of them are among the members of Congress who have worked with and been inspired by the resistance.

So, of course the new DCCC logo/slogan/whatever is nothing but laughable. Do you wonder why polls show that progressives are less motivated than Trumpists to show up and vote in 2018? I wonder how much consultants were paid to come up with this and how many hours of debate went into the decision. Is the slogan as powerful as "Make America Great Again?" The guy who broke the news that the DCCC had come up with this-- instead of a substantive platform to run on-- Jeff Stein, reported that a member of Congress told him that the DCCC is releasing the new slogan on Monday-- "A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages." Stein added that the congressmember "noted that this is the result of months of polling and internal deliberations among the House Democratic caucus." Maybe instead of all those internal deliberations and that expensive polling, they should have spent some time paying attention to Bernie and coming to grips with why exactly he's the most popular politician in America while their leader, Nancy Pelosi is tied with Paul Ryan as the least popular-- in the eyes of the voting public-- member of the House.

Why So Many Celebrities? They Are the Masks that Humanize Corporations

The Coca-Cola organization without the smiling celebrity mask (source)

by Gaius Publius

On this side of the Atlantic, George Monbiot is an underappreciated writer. The piece I'm about to quote makes just two main points, but they are stunning. The subject under consideration: Why is the modern world awash in celebrities, from actors who've "done something" to people like the Kardashians, who appear to have done nothing at all but "be famous."

We've even just elected our second celebrity president, a man known more as a "brand" than as person, the first being Reagan. Why did we do that?

Why are there so many of celebrities, and what do they really do? Is it something about the media, or the 20th century nationalization of publicity, that creates these people — for example, via the earlier movie fan magazines and now television and the Internet? Or is media not the cause? Is the presence of all these celebrities in our media a result of something else, of something more hidden from us?

Monbiot thinks he has the answer to the question "why so many celebrities?" and I think he's right. His two main points:

▪ Corporations are lifeless predatory monsters. They need human faces to make them look like our friends. This is like putting a face-like mask on a robot before it asks you out to dinner ... to eat you. Celebrities act as their masks and supply those human faces.

▪ At the same time that celebrities humanize the corporations that use them, they themselves become less human, productized, marketed (by themselves and others) as things — masks or "brands" — good mainly for their utility to the corporate world that employs them.

As Monbiot puts it in his piece: "Celebrity is not harmless fun – it’s the lieutenant of exploitation." The essay is called "Imaginary Friends". Here are two excepts, each making one of the two points above.

Celebrities As Human Masks for Inhuman Products and Entities

About the first point, Monbiot writes (my emphasis):

The rise of celebrity culture did not happen by itself. It has long been cultivated by advertisers, marketers and the media. And it has a function. The more distant and impersonal corporations become, the more they rely on other people’s faces to connect them to their customers.

Corporation means body; capital means head. But corporate capital has neither head nor body. It is hard for people to attach themselves to a homogenised franchise, owned by a hedge fund whose corporate identity consists of a filing cabinet in Panama City. So the machine needs a mask. It must wear the face of someone we see as often as we see our next-door neighbours. It is pointless to ask what Kim Kardashian does to earn her living; her role is to exist in our minds. By playing our virtual neighbour, she induces a click of recognition on behalf of whatever grey monolith sits behind her this week.

An obsession with celebrity does not lie quietly beside the other things we value; it takes their place. A study published in the journal Cyberpsychology reveals that an extraordinary shift appears to have taken place between 1997 and 2007. In 1997, the dominant values (as judged by an adult audience) expressed by the shows most popular among 9-11 year olds were community feeling, followed by benevolence. Fame came 15th out of the 16 values tested. By 2007, when shows like Hannah Montana prevailed, fame came first, followed by achievement, image, popularity and financial success. Community feeling had fallen to 11th; benevolence to 12th.

Which leads to two sub-points:

A paper in the International Journal of Cultural Studies found that, among the people it surveyed, those who follow celebrity gossip most closely are three times less likely than people interested in other forms of news to be involved in local organisations, and half as likely to volunteer. Virtual neighbours replace real ones.

The blander and more homogenised the product, the more distinctive the mask it needs to wear. This is why Iggy Pop is used to promote motor insurance and Benicio del Toro is used to sell Heineken. The role of such people is to suggest that there something more exciting behind the logo than office blocks and spreadsheets. They transfer their edginess to the company they represent: as soon they take the cheque that buys their identity, they become as processed and meaningless as the item they are promoting.

An American example — the nameless person cast as "the most interesting man in the world" is needed to put a face to a product few can recall by name, especially now they've retired the old, nameless "most interesting man" and hired a nameless younger replacement.

You can even apply the idea to something much less bland and far more objectionable, like the Republican Party. You need a celebrity as outlandish as Trump to market that product, to take your eyes off what's really underneath. None of the other members of their vaunted "deep bench" could have done a tenth of what Trump accomplished as an obscuring mask for the vile set of policies known as "Republicanism."

Trump was a good mask because the party's "customers" saw Trump and not the party or its goals. With any of the others as the party's virtual face, most people would see right through them to the Republicanism beneath. As masks they'd be worthless, transparent, obscuring nothing.

Celebrities Become Products

Once they become masks for others, celebrities become products themselves. While they're busy humanizing corporations, corporations are busy productizing celebrities. Monbiot:

The celebrities you see most often are the most lucrative products, extruded through a willing media by a marketing industry whose power no one seeks to check. This is why actors and models now receive such disproportionate attention, capturing much of the space once occupied by people with their own ideas. Their expertise lies in channelling other people’s visions. ...

You don’t have to read or watch many interviews to see that the principal qualities now sought in a celebrity are vapidity, vacuity and physical beauty. They can be used as a blank screen onto which anything can be projected. Those who have least to say are granted the greatest number of platforms on which to say it....

[But as] soon as celebrities forget their allotted role, the hounds of hell are let loose upon them. Lily Allen was the media’s darling when she was advertising John Lewis’s. Gary Lineker couldn’t put a foot wrong when he stuck to selling junk food to children. But when they expressed sympathy for refugees, they were torn to shreds. When you take the corporate shilling, you are supposed to stop thinking for yourself.

When celebrities take corporate money, in other words, masking and humanizing the product or operation, they become products as well, marketable only to the extent that they don't intrude an identity of their own onto the scripted (painted-on) identity the "mask" is intended to project.

Corporations As "Imaginary Friends" 

As to Monbiot's title, "Imaginary Friends" — for Monbiot the friends are the celebrities, and they are indeed imaginary. Kim Kardashian could be as imaginary as the Marlboro Man, a person who never existed, and none of us would know it. Celebrities are real to us in our minds alone, and we do imagine they are our friends.

But considering their function — to put a human face on the inhuman machinery of exploitation — it's easy to see that our actual "imaginary friends" are really the corporations themselves, whom we are taught to imagine as human, likable, even friendly, but who in fact would kill us the minute the cost-benefit analysis went their way but not ours. Is McDonald's your friend? Is WalMart?

How about Coke, the company that makes the happy fizzy drink? The Coca-Cola company is a nonhuman, profit-seeking corporation that is guilty of murder to protect its profits. Only its paid, smiling-mask faces want to "teach the world to sing."

The mask hides the psychopath beneath. And that's why we have celebrities, to keep us from noticing all that we're surrounded by.

GP
 

Starbucks Is So Passé! The Marketing of Coffee Takes a Turn

Supposedly "translated" by Bing: "The café with care given the exposure the white-collar workers on LinkedIn. ‪#‎walterscoffee‬" (Hmm, seems to lose something in "translation." But the link works.)

by Noah

Inspired by Breaking Bad, aka the greatest TV show ever, an astute Turkish food and beverage industry veteran named Deniz Kosan has created what looks to be the "world's first Coffee Super Lab," as reported by TODAY.com, and it's not even disguised as a laundromat, chicken restaurant, ordinary RV, or anything else. Walter's Coffee Roastery brazenly operates, as Gus Fring would say, "hidden in plain sight," in Istanbul, Turkey.

The Turks are known for their love of coffee, always have been, but it took Kosan to see that Breaking Bad was the perfect merchandising opportunity for his coffee, or, as Walter White himself would say, "the product."

Kosan has designed his coffee shop to look like Walter White's beautiful subterranean high-tech stainless-steel meth lab. His employees even dress up in those wonderful yellow hazmat suits and black masks that Walter and his young protégé, Jesse Pinkman, don for every cook of "the product."

That's not you-know-who and you-know-who, is it?

Kosan says that the precise moment of inspiration came to him as he watched Season 3, Episode 6 of the legendary show. That's the episode in which former high school chemistry teacher, now master meth maker, Walter White (Bryan Cranston) discusses fine coffee with Gale Boetticher (David Costabile), his ill-fated assistant. Walter marvels at Gale's brilliantly brewed coffee and wonders aloud, "Why the hell are we making meth?"



Why make meth, indeed! Kosan knows that, in the real world, coffee is a far more popular drug, and it has the extra advantages of not costing as much and being totally legal. Not only that, but you can add sugar -- as much as you want!

Speaking of sugar, Walter's Coffee Roastery also sells a beautiful blue candy that looks, very suspiciously, just like Walter White's classic blue "product." It's even sold over the counter -- again, in plain sight!

Ahem, samples of "the product"?

Unfortunately, Walter's Coffee Roastery only has the one location -- in Turkey. For now, that is. But, just like Walter White's meth spread 'round the world, there's always hope that one day soon there will be a Walter's Coffee Roastery near you. When you have what people want, expansion is easy.

Kosan's move is as good an example of inspired marketing genius as you will ever find. I'd be hard-pressed to find a better way to sell a food or beverage product based on the creepy factor or crime factor of a TV show or movie.  I suppose one could start up a Texas Chainsaw Massacre Steak House. Silence of the Lambs, anyone? Maybe I'll just move to the Gulf Coast and open up a chain of BP Seafood Huts. "The secret is in the oil."

That's definitely not Walter and Jesse (or Skyler).

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If you happily buy a 48-oz "half-gallon" of ice cream, you may well be persuadable that global warming is some harebrained theory

NOTE: PHOTO OF A HALF-GALLON
OF BREYER'S ICE CREAM DELETED --
SEE BELOW

Thanks to modern technological miracles of miniaturization, the half-gallon of ice cream, which had previously been shrunk to 1¾ quarts, as seen here (that's 56 instead of 64 ounces), has now been shrunk to a breathtaking 48 ounces, which is to say 1½ quarts. You can't stop the march of science. (Or can you?)

by Ken

One morning last week on NPR's Morning Edition I heard a promo for a piece coming up in half an hour about how fewer Americans believe in global warming now than believed in . . . well, I don't know how long ago. I realized later that I had managed to not hear the piece, and while I made a stab at finding it on the website, I didn't. (It occurred to me that I don't know whether it was a story from NPR or from the local WNYC news desk.) I know I should go searching for links to whatever study or poll was being reported here, but for the time being I'll settle for the basic information I got from that promo.

Does anyone have a hard time believing that it's so, that Americans -- awash in a relentless campaign of lies and obfuscation by the Far Right (for once in total sync with its corporate overseers) -- have strayed even farther from reality than they were back whenever? Of course we have to be careful about this "having a hard time believing," because it can sound like the process whereby those under the sway of Far Right "thinking" now process reality: It's whatever makes me feel best to believe. So let me b e clear: I'm not saying that the report is true because I can believe it's true. I'm just saying that, assuming it is true, I for one could hardly be less surprised. After all, as I keep pointing out, did anyone really imagine there would be no awkward consequences from allowing an entire political party and movement to lie absolutely at will?

I thought about this last night when I allowed myself to buy some ice cream. I normally don't, because the only concept of "portion control" I'm able to enforce personally is "Portion Size = 1 Container," which is not a beneficial approach when it comes to ice cream or cookies or whatever. The only counterstrategy I've developed is just not to have the stuff in the house. But for some combination of reasons which probably wouldn't be of interest to you, last night I proposed and ratified a one-night-only Ice Cream Purchase Exception.

I was already aware that the ice-cream makers, possibly in response to my "Serving Size = 1 Container" principle, have done their share, maybe more than their share, to assist me with my portion-control deficiency, by shrinking the containers. I knew that the old half-gallon of ice cream had shrunk from 64 to, like, 59 ounces. (Oh, they don't call it a "half-gallon" anymore. That would be fraudulent packaging. But to a lot of us older folk, the container we're talking about is "the one that used to be a half-gallon.") I did, however, do a double take when I noticed that the special I was eyeing in my supermarket flier, which I was judging reasonably enough priced to continue with this authorized ice cream purchase, was for a 48-ounce container. 48 ounces? That's a friggin' quart and a half!

This form of downsizing is hardly confined to ice cream, and is hardly new. Packaged-goods packagers have known this trick for, well, as long as there have been packaged goods. Only now it has become standard marketing practice. The half-gallon of orange juice, the pound of coffee, the 12-ounce package of chocolate chips -- all historical artifacts, by merchandisers who would rather shrink their packages than raise the per-package price, though I suspect that plenty of them are doing both.

I always wonder if the marketers really think consumers don't notice. Or is it just that as long as all the marketers do it, what are consumers gonna do about it?

Still, they seem to think they're fooling us. Whenever I've seen a marketing person asked about a product downsize, the answer has been a self-righteous, what-else-can-we-do declaration along the lines: "It's our only alternative to increasing the price." Suggesting that they really believe it won't occur to their customers that paying the same amount for less ice cream, OJ, or coffee is a price increase. And an increase for which we consumers actually have to pay, since we're the ones who have to pay the manufacturers' costs for producing resized packaging and retooling their production process to package the revised quantity.

NOTE: STOCK IMAGE OF A CARTON
OF ORANGE JUICE DELETED --
SEE BELOW

My favorite creative approach to product downsizing was that of a cutting-edge orange-juice maker that was the first I noticed to shrink its erstwhile half-gallon from 64 ounces to (as I recall) 59, and in the process festooned the new carton with the bold declaration: "NEW EASIER-TO-HANDLE CARTON." And it was true, the carton was definitely a little easier to handle -- because it was smaller!!! Shrink it to a pint and you could hold it in the palm of your hand. Were customers fooled? A certain number of them were, I'll bet.

It's worth remembering that the modern approach to selling political candidates more or less like packaged goods was pioneered by the people who were on the cutting edge of marketing packaged goods, the kind of people who might actually think you could shrink a half-gallon of ice cream to a quart and a half and consumers wouldn't notice.

I'm guessing the people who bought the new OJ container and were pleased that it really was easier to handle are also the people who turn thumbs-up on the right-wing lies and obfuscations about climate change. Hey, if the globe is getting warmer, why am I shoveling so damn much snow?

Well, we'll need more research before drawing any conclusions. (That's a joke. Not necessarily a funny joke, but a joke.)


UPDATE (4/24/2012):
ABOUT THOSE DELETED IMAGES

Some 10 months after this post appeared, we got the following notification from our bloghost:

We have received a DMCA complaint for your blog, DownWithTyranny!. An e-mail with the details of the complaint was sent to you on Apr 9, 2012, and we reset the post status to "Draft"; you can edit it here. You may republish the post with the offending content and/or link(s) removed. If you believe you have the rights to post this content, you can file a counter-claim with us. For more on our DMCA policy, please click here. Thank you for your prompt attention. [Links not included. -- Ed.]

As it happens, I've never seen the e-mail in question, but since there were just these two online-"borrowed" images -- i.e, the photo of the Breyer's ice-cream carton and the stock image of the orange-juice carton -- and as far as I can tell no online text borrowings whatsoever, I have to assume it's one of those two images for which some scum-sucking imbecile went to the trouble of filing this dreaded DMCA complaint. So in the interest of DMCA compliance I've deleted both images. I will spare you any further thoughts on the mental capacity of the complainer, as well as my fond wishes for him/her and his/her family and acquaintances.

I certainly hope I haven't broken any more rules.

Cheers,
Ken

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OBAMA, MARKETER-IN-CHIEF?

In Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton has a pollster/top strategist who is getting rich off campaign contributions as he steadily sinks his employer's hopes and dreams. The pollster DWT consults, Dave Beasing, is far more successful. He has to be; he works for real companies in the real world that expect results; not for Inside the Beltway Democrats (who never expect results). This morning Dave analyses a masterful political e-mail he, like so many of us, got from the Obama camp.

Whether or not you're personally swept up in Obama Fever, read the following email.  Purely as a piece of marketing, it's brilliant. 
 
1.    Obama's campaign strategists begin with an excellent awareness of public sentiment toward politics-- specifically that most tactics are tired, demeaning, and underestimate everyone's intelligence.
 
2.    They then use that awareness to say they're different from the rest of politics-- and to label anything the opposition does as not understanding those shared values.
 
3.    They quickly parry all attacks by labeling them as personal insults-- not just of their candidate but of the supporters themselves. 
 
Now re-read the 3 points above-- substituting your own industry for the word "politics"-- and learn from Obama. Would he make a great President? That's a different subject. He's a great marketer. 

-Dave Beasing
 

This morning, the New York Times reported that Senator Clinton is launching what even her aides admit is a "kitchen sink" bombardment of negative attacks against Barack.

This is the same stale, Washington playbook that has driven so many Americans away from the political process.

Yesterday, in a speech on foreign policy, Senator Clinton misrepresented Barack's positions and compared him to George W. Bush.

She questioned his "wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security," despite her support for Bush's war in Iraq-- a war that Barack showed the judgment to oppose before it ever began.

These negative tactics are exactly what voters have been rejecting this election season.

While others focus on trying to tear us down, we will continue to highlight what is most inspiring and most important about this campaign-- you.

And while others may try to score cheap political points, millions of ordinary Americans are talking to their neighbors, knocking on doors, making phone calls, and turning out to primaries and caucuses in record numbers to support this movement for change.

Barack has organized and inspired what yesterday's Time magazine called a "new breed of grassroots campaign-- viral, internet-based, built from the ground up."

Today, we are within reach of a goal that is unprecedented at this point in a presidential primary-- one million people giving to this campaign.

Thank you for being a part of this historic moment.

This campaign has always been about bringing new people into the political process. Please help us reach this goal and show your support for a new kind of politics and a new kind of leadership.

Make an additional donation today as part of our matching program, and encourage a fellow supporter to give for the first time:

https://donate.barackobama.com/promise

Thank you for your support,

David Plouffe
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

Every nasty, negative attack Hillary's clown patrol advisors persuade her to make on Obama drives down her approval ratings. This has happened in state after state. But they don't learn. They never learn. The advise she gets is abysmal. And she doesn't fire them. What kind of administration would she put together and run? One filled with nincompoops like Penn and Wolfson and McAuliffe?