Marketing Strikes Again (7/28/24)

© by Mark Dempsey

People are easy to manipulate. A hypnotist can just make suggestions, and they'll cluck like a chicken. No injections, chloroform on rags, etc are necessary.--just suggestions. Humans are that easily led.

The credits at the end of our entertainment demonstrate that dozens, if not hundreds of people work to make the show's scenario and plot convincing. That’s certainly more than a hypnotist, but much less than the constant stream of “marketing” we see daily in the media, especially about our public policy.

For example, why does the government need to be stingy? It can’t build homes for the homeless, feed the hungry, or even make higher education free. Why we’re running out of money! And we must rely on taxes collected from the population! Our government doesn't make money...apparently, dollars grow on billionaires!

Except not:

Here’s more marketing: All the police procedural TV shows solve the crimes. Perry Mason figures out even the most convoluted murders. All the science, fingerprints, and DNA make even the most obscure crime traceable.

And this copaganda has been particularly effective. Between 1982 and 2017 US population increased 42%. Spending on police increased by 187%. Heck, the police for Ohio State University have a military surplus MRAP (armored personnel carrier)--just the thing to break up those frat parties!

But, in reality, how much crime do police solve, never mind prevent? “The statewide clearance rate for crimes was just 13.2 percent in 2022, according to a new report. The rate for poverty crimes was only 7.2 percent. Despite receiving billions of dollars in funding — including more than $25 billion in 2022 — California police are solving few crimes.” (from here)

The FBI estimates property crime costs the entire country roughly $12 billion. Yet wage theft by employers it estimates is $50 billion. Guess who goes to jail….?

So…the fix is in. The population is slowly waking from its trance. It’s tempting to say “F…k this!” and throw a hand grenade (Trump) into the situation. But things are never so bad they can’t get worse.

Will Trump wake them up? Will Kamala really be an improvement? I wouldn't bet on it.

What Would Kamala Harris Do About Corporate Power?

What Would Kamala Harris Do About Corporate Power? - a detailed look into her record by Matt Stoller

Meanwhile:

US Voters Want Change, Biden’s Exit Hasn’t Fixed That - nice summary of why Democratic talking points aren't working.

 

 

Experiencing a foreign culture / attending a concert

 

© by Mark Dempsey

Through a series of coincidences, we got some tickets to see Mexican Mariachi star Pepe Aguilar and his family in concert at the Golden 1 Center–a basketball arena transformed into a horse show arena, complete with dirt floor and fencing. The show's title: Pepe Aguilar presenta Jaripeo: Hasta Los Huesos.

Jaripeos consist of bull riding, caballos bailadores (dancing horses), and live music. Although I’ve even read science fiction about off-planet adventures, not in my wildest imagination did I ever conceive of an event where people would ride dancing horses while singing, never mind a jaripeo. Could this be “culture shock”?

The “hasta los huesos” phrase in the event title means “to the bone,” as in “bad to the bone.” The consistent theme of this jaripeo was Mexico’s Day of the Dead when the living remember their dead ancestors and relatives with celebrations and honor them with altars containing food and drink they enjoyed when alive. While not that unusual in world cultures–Confucian traditions also honor ancestors with celebrations and altars–the Mexican tradition has lots of skeletons and skulls.

At one end, the arena had a stage populated by roughly 20 musicians. Centered on that stage, lit from within, were large models of skulls with the names of the principal performers inscribed on their foreheads. The announcer (ringmaster?) of the jaripeo was a man dressed in a skeleton costume, complete with a sombrero, and virtually all of the many dancers who accompanied the vocalists were costumed as skeletons.

The performers themselves wore costumes that recall bullfighters' “suit of lights”- replete with embroidery and glowing sequins. Some dancers even wore costumes with LEDs, and one of the final “dancing” acts included two twelve-foot-tall LED-lit skeletons who danced with one another as the music played.

So Mexicans aren’t nearly as squeamish about death as gringos. They dance with it; they play with it; they acknowledge it and keep it consciously in their environment rather than denying it. Mexico truly has a different culture.

The first two riders who circled the arena held a Mexican flag and an American flag, while the skeleton-master-of-ceremonies cried “¡Viva Mexico!” The largely Hispanic crowd echoed this statement with gusto.

The principal entertainers rode into the arena on horseback, microphone in hand, singing. The horses they rode were exquisitely groomed. Their hooves were polished, and their manes flowed gracefully down, often below their neck. We joked that some manes had a perm–they were wavy-haired.

The horses were also exquisitely trained. As their riders sang they danced and pranced to the music. Most of the music was mariachi, or mariachi-adjacent, sung with such passion and gusto that I found tears welling up in my eyes. It’s music from the heart.

Between bouts of music and emotion, non-vocalists entertained. One was a lariat artist, who brought plain, LED-lit, and on-fire ropes to whisk around. Another was a clown parodying a bullfighter with a stuffed animal bull.

Believe it or not, the concert, excuse me “jaripeo,” also included a bull-riding contest, exactly like rodeos. Not your typical concert...!

All-in-all, we certainly got more than we bargained for in entertainment, and a lesson worth remembering about how limited imagination is. This discovery might be encouraging in a discouraging world. Perhaps how we’ve imagined things to be is not the end of imagining. Perhaps there’s a counterpoint to the notion that things are never so bad they can’t get worse, to which I say “¡Viva Mexico!”

For those who want video of a jaripeo:

–Mark Dempsey is married to a Hispanic woman (who is in the US legally, even if she weren’t married) and is grateful to have her as a constant reminder that things don’t always have to be done the American way. He’s also mindful that going to a concert unmasked is dangerous. See this graph of recent test positivity:

…so he wore his KN-95 mask

7/20/24 Links - Healthcare for the homeless, Bernie endorses Biden

 A California Medical Group Treats Only Homeless Patients — And Makes Money Doing It

Excerpt: It is sad but telling that the editors of this KFF Health News story find the need to justify health care for the homeless by touting that it is financially self-supporting, as opposed to, say, saving overall medical cost by reducing costly (and designed to be scarce) ER use by the homeless, or improving public health, say by reducing disease outbreaks (tuberculosis, anyone?) or just being the right thing to do. But in our neoliberal system, mercenary considerations dominate all others.

Bernie Sanders Wants Joe Biden to Stay in the Race 

Bernie is loyal to Biden despite disagreement over Gaza–a prime example of the kind of politics necessary for a functioning democracy.

China shows the way...

‘It’s good news’: Scientists suspect history about to be made in China - The world’s economy is growing. China’s economy is growing. Yet greenhouse gas emissions appear to have peaked.


Meanhile, Michael Roberts writes an account of the latest Chinese government get-together. Excerpt: As the Asian Times writer put it: “what is economic success, what is value creation? Maybe, just maybe, it’s the approach that delivers the most tangible improvements in people’s lives, instead of trillion-dollar companies and billionaire CEOs.”

Biden's actual economics

 

Since Biden took office, the Pentagon budget has grown by $212 billion and the budget for social & economic programs has shrunk by $30 billion: pic.twitter.com/tQEfVVH6LQ

— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) July 11, 2024

Real Quotes From Hypothetical Gurus

Real Quotes From Hypothetical Gurus
by Caitlin Johnstone

“Being a guru is weird, man. I mean, how many different ways can you say ‘Hey you ever notice how everything just kinda is? Well, it just kinda is!’ But the words come anyway. Somehow they keep on coming.”

~ Hank “Bonesaw” Lucille

❖

“The most worthwhile spiritual teachings don’t actually teach you any new knowledge. Rather, they direct your attention to aspects of your own experience that you’d previously overlooked or hadn’t paid much attention to. They get you questioning your unquestioned assumptions about very fundamental components of your experience like your sense of self, your means of perception, and the workings of your own mind. The most skillful teachers therefore don’t require you to trust them or take anything they say on faith, because you can immediately examine everything they’re pointing your attention toward for yourself in your own experience.”

~ Margaret Tetherwood

❖

“Authentic spirituality is scarcely even recognizable as spirituality. It doesn’t give you new beliefs — it strips your old beliefs away. It doesn’t uplift you from the muck and mess of this world — it plunges you headfirst right into it. It doesn’t help you become a better person — it dispels the illusion that there was ever a person to begin with.”

~ Margaret Tetherwood

❖

“Beauty is just the experience of having truly seen something. If you’re not seeing beauty somewhere, you’re not really seeing what you’re looking at. Everything has beauty. The failure to recognize it lies always with the beholder.”

~ Quincy Harrington-Cho

❖

“Psychedelics are useful not for the hallucinations they give you but for the hallucinations they take away.”

~ Alice Cave

❖

“I’ve killed off so many Hanks along this crazy path. Angry Hank. Hank the victim. Hank the cage fighter. Tough guy Hank, and then spiritual guy Hank after him. One of the last ones to leave was Cool Hank, but he had to go, because, man, you really do not get to be cool on this path. You really, really don’t. Being radically truthful on every level leaves you raw and undisguised, right out in the open, in all your dorky awkwardness. If you really let old lady Truth have her way with you, you’ll never get to feel cool again. How could anyone be cool with their fuckin’ ribcage splayed open to the whole entire world?”

~ Hank “Bonesaw” Lucille

❖

“Love — the real kind — is simply having a deep and intimate ‘yes’ to something. If you have a deep and intimate ‘yes’ to everything about your partner, then you may say that you fully love your partner. If you have a deep and intimate ‘yes’ to everything about your own body and mind and all their expressions, then you may say that you fully love yourself. If you have a deep and intimate ‘yes’ to everything that arises in your experience of the world, then you may say that you are fully living in unconditional love.

“And really, what else is there? Why be in argument with anything that already is? You can work toward positive changes in our world while holding a deep and intimate ‘yes’ to everything that already is here and now. If you start an argument with the present moment, you’ve already lost the debate anyway. Unconditional love is just being real about reality, and then doing what comes naturally.”

~ Louisiana Fetterman

❖

“The human organism seemingly creates the ego out of a desire to feel in control of life, but the joke of it all is that the ego has never really existed, and that life is never, ever under control. There has never at any time been an actual self anywhere who could exert any kind of control over any of this; it’s just an imaginary construct that gets imbued with the power of belief out of the organism’s concern for safety and security, and then all your personal dramas and conflicts and anxieties and fears arose out of the contracted energy of that belief. But the whole thing was based on a complete fiction! That’s why awakening is so often immediately followed by laughter: because that whole mess never even happened. It was all an imaginary clown show for ghosts who never bought tickets.

“Other animals don’t have this problem. Because they don’t have the capacity for abstract thought, when those organisms experience frightening events in their lives they aren’t able to kind of pop their attention out of their bodies and enter a mental fantasy world starring an imaginary ‘me’ character to help them feel as though things are more manageable and controlled. So instead they just shake the fear out of their bodies and move on.

“The human organism can learn to do this too, but its immense capacity for abstract thought tends to get in the way. All that newly evolved brain matter has in many ways made humans quite stupid.”

~ “Andromeda”, as channeled by Cynthia M Scott

❖

“Time is a mirage.
Life is impersonal energy masquerading as personal experiences.
Reality is made of unknowing.
I am nothing but a welcome mat
for anything that could possibly be.”

~ Alice Cave

❖

“Enlightenment will cost you everything, but after you’ve paid the toll you realize that the big pile of cash you’d been protecting your entire life was just a bunch of worthless Monopoly board game money that whole time.”

~ Omshanti Ramananda Kowalski

7/9/24 Warren Mosler's Bloomberg Interview

 Does Modern Monetary Theory recognizes fiscal limits? Mosler says "Yes!"

 ...rate cuts by central banks are deflationary because they deny the economy interest income... Increasing rates is inflationary if national debt is large. Ownership of government bonds is largely wealthy people, so their income increases with higher rates.

7/6/24 Links

Michael Hudson: We Need a New Political Vocabulary - from Naked Capitalism. Hudson examines the well-funded degradation in political descriptions.

“It can’t be said often enough that the change in where the center was perceived to sit was not organic but the result of a well-funded, open-ended campaign codified by the Powell Memorandum of 1971, with effective propagandists like Milton Friedman as its vanguard.”

Consequences of the British Election - Ian Welsh. Excerpt:

“The Conservative austerity policies severely gutted Britain:

• The grant to local governments dropped 60% from 2010 to 2020. They’re the ones who run most of the government: libraries, fire departments, council housing, roads, public transit and so on.
• 20% of libraries closed
• Spending on old people down 35% with one estimate saying this killed 45K people.
• Inflation adjusted wages are lower than in 2007, and the inflation numbers are certainly lower than reality.
• Rent and housing costs are way up.
• Twenty percent less people get cancer treatment on time.
• The UK now has the highest homelessness rates in the Western world.
• Gutted universities, one of the few world class industries left in Britain (and one which brings in a lot of foreign currency.)

And so on. Tory rule has been a catastrophe.”

…and, lest you believe Labour’s victory means some lefties won: Starmer’s role in Assange’s persecution

7/7/24 update about Labour (from nakedcapitalism.com):

Labour is not going to deliver Funding the Future

Keir Starmer Is Very Serious About the Status Quo In These Times

The Rejection of Starmerism Craig Murray

7/5/24 Links

Beyond kingdoms and empires:

A revolution in archaeology is transforming our picture of past populations and the scope of human freedoms - (Aeon) An archaeologist questions the conventional wisdom that empires were always the apogee of success.

Economics 101:Why introductory economics courses continued to teach zombie ideas from before economics became an empirical discipline

A perennial favorite: The Federal Budget Is Not Like a Household Budget: Here's Why

Raising Wages Does Not Make Businesses Close

(c) by Mark Dempsey     

The cashier at a nearby store solemnly told me that a restaurant in her shopping center closed because California raised the minimum wage for fast food workers in April 2024. I was going to protest that labor wasn't the only reason restaurants close, and sure enough, a recent LA Times article (The fast-food industry claims the California minimum wage law is costing jobs. Its numbers are fake) by Michael Hitzik exposes that bit of deception now making the rounds. 

Convincing workers to lobby against wage increases is as old as employment itself. After all, post-civil war landlords ginned up racism to divide-and-rule the tenant farmers, keeping them poor, desperate and tractable. But this latest exercise in cynical labor-baiting breaks new ground in the despicable tradition of crushing the poor.

Management relentlessly blames labor, too. In its press release announcing closure of dozens of California's Rubio's restaurants its management declared labor costs were the last straw in a terrible string of business-impairing incidents, including COVID. Examining Rubio's financial statements, however, draws a different conclusion. Private equity bought the chain, and encumbered the restaurants with a debt load that would not be sustainable if they paid workers a living wage. The debt load, not the labor costs, was the decider.

Many businesses like  Starbucks have even claimed poverty when negotiating with their workers about wages, then spent more than the wage demands in stock buybacks. Conventional economics backs these kinds of claims, solemnly predicting increased unemployment if wages are raised. Rather than rely on this theoretical outcome, however, some economists have examined what actually happens when minimum wages rise, comparing the higher and lower wage jurisdictions. The result: no increase in unemployment accompanied the wage rise.

Polish economist Michal Kalecki wrote about what motivates businesses to engage in such deception in his 1943 paper Political Aspects of Full Employment. He observes that businesses know that well-paid employees provide a better customer base--the foundation of a more profitable business--but employers prefer "Labor Discipline" to that better economic outcome. Labor Discipline is the power to dominate workers. It sends the message that "You had better take whatever job is on offer, or suffer the indignities of poverty, even homelessness and starvation...and if you rebel, we'll put you in a cage."

Testifying to the effectiveness of the propaganda, currently, the US has five percent of the world's population, but 25% of its prisoners.

How about drones instead of fireworks?

 

This is amazing 🎇🇺🇸pic.twitter.com/gwvcBSDydN

— Miti 💙🕊️ (@Miti_Blue) July 5, 2024

Let's have a sense of proportion: COVID-19 fraud pales to insignificance compared to others

(c) by Mark Dempsey

The mainstream press continues to distract and misdirect public anger about fraud and misconduct, focusing on pinpricks while ignoring arterial bleeding. Here's an excerpt from a Chicago Tribune editorial headlined Monstrous COVID-19 fraud leaves taxpayers holding the bag*:

"It's sickening to consider how, in the midst of a crisis that was killing more than 1 million Americans and disrupting countless livelihoods, so many of our fellow citizens seized an opportunity to exploit relief efforts for personal gain."

Some foreign-sounding guy (Hadi Isbaih) practiced fraud in claiming COVID-19 relief payments. Why how like those foreigners!

Note: No mention of the CDC fraud (ignoring air quality as a COVID spread source) that actually did the killing. No mention of populations that continue to be at risk because air quality standards aren't promoted.

In financial terms, the COVID payment frauds are tiny when compared to the recent scandals, among them bank frauds like the subprime/derivatives meltdown of 2007-9--now called the "Global Financial Crisis" (the GFC). That was orders of magnitude larger, and favored an even more select group of fraudsters--Wall Street's financiers!

According to its own audit, during the GFC the US central bank extended credit to the Wall Street fraudsters amounting to between $16 and $29 trillion. The COVID relief fraud may amount to about 3% of the bank frauds. The result of those GFC fraudulent loans was 8 - 10 million foreclosures, and a massive loss of home ownership. And nobody went to jail! (Thanks Obama!)

Since then, Wall Street's private equity pirates picked up those foreclosed homes for bargain-basement prices and began raising rents. One study confirms that 58% of the current homeless populaton were the result of rents rising faster than wages. 

This is a variation on the theme that Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism"--taking advantage of distress to make a profit. Klein describes it operating in the Iraq war(s). When the US invaded, French and Russian oil firms had contracts to develop the Iraqi oilfields. After that invasion, American firms somehow became favored.

A more recent bit of news reports the US central bank--the Federal Reserve--is paying 5.4% interest to banks for the reserves they have on deposit, yet ...

"megabanks aren’t passing along that generosity to their customers’ savings accounts, since those savings accounts continue to pay the preposterously low rate of 0.01 percent interest, despite 11 rate hikes by the Fed since 2022.

"A detail that goes missing in mainstream media reports on this generous payout by the Fed is that the Fed and banking system were able to survive for 95 years without the Fed paying any interest on bank reserves. The Fed began paying interest on reserves at a time when the megabanks on Wall Street were in the process of imploding during their self-inflicted financial crisis of 2008 [the GFC!] and needed every handout they could conjure up from the Fed...."

This next headline is self-explanatory: Tech Firms Prey on Poor Under Guise of Expanding Access to Financial Services. But it's those dang furriners!

The question that remains unasked is: Who can blame poor people from defrauding a system that preys on them when they're down? These stories are evidence that most mainstream media's reporting tactics amount to straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel. The editors express outrage about the gnats and ignore the camels altogether. And that is really what's sickening to consider.

*Published in the Sacramento Bee 7/1/24