What we face is a continuation of the shift away from involving people in society as political citizens of nation states towards involving them as consumption units in a corporate world.
– Philip Elliott (Intellectuals, the ‘information society,’ and the disappearance of the public sphere)
Welcome, consumption unit, to the corporate world! We have arrived at the pinnacle of civilization! We are now moving parts in a global capitalist machine of resource extraction, labor exploitation and ecological destruction that throws up, at the end of a long tortuous process, consumer products designed, packaged and marketed for the 10% of the world’s people who can afford to buy them. (The other 90% can go pound sand.)
Our corporate world provides us with everything we need. And not only this, but we are free to choose among a cornucopia of "goods" we might desire. Let us pause before the sodas and consider our choices! Let’s choose between Coke and Pepsi. Douglas Atkin, in The Culting of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers says
Today’s most successful brands don’t just provide marks of distinction (identity) for products. Cult brands are beliefs. They have morals – embody values. Cult brands stand up for things. They work hard; fight for what is right… Brands function as complete meaning systems
But there's something fishy about all this freedom. It is with great dismay that I must point out that our freedom to choose between two almost identical, harmful to both our bodies and the earth, differently labeled cans of flavored soda-water has evolved into something that can’t be honestly called freedom. And it doesn’t become freedom by being expanded to hundreds of varieties of the same basic flavored soda water. It is a choice between brands; an empty caricature of freedom which denies the underlying sameness of the items on the menu.
I know that choosing an image is “choosing” something. But it is a choice with very little individual sovereignty in it, and it is a choice that comes with enormous hidden costs. If the choice were available to me I would choose not to waste the resources of the planet on cans of flavored sugar water. I would choose to nationalize this expensive infrastructure and turn it to providing adequate drinking water for the more than a billion on the planet who need it.
But this choice is not on the menu. The choice to use 60% of the earth’s resources in creating products to market to the 10% of the world’s population who can afford to buy them is not on the menu. Nevertheless, it is a pretty fancy menu with professional quality high production values. And I am told to stop bellyaching about the definition of freedom and focus, instead, upon this beautiful menu in front of me; I am told to grow up and not be so picky about what’s left out of what is an enormously varied list of choices I have been given. I am told that in this paradise of consumer choice, at the pinnacle of civilization, we have everything we need to be happy. We are free to be happy!
And, on top of that, being in that lucky 10% of the world's population that qualifies as good consumers (and to be in that select group you need about $73,000 in total assets - $4,118 to be in the top half by the way), puts one in a very select group. And 71% of Americans are in this group.
So us American consumers are pretty special. In fact our lifestyle is "non-negotiable." When President George H.W. Bush attended the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 that's what he said:
The American lifestyle is non-negotiable.
It was a powerful statement. Made more powerful by being backed up by the most powerful military force in the world. That powerful military had, the year before, forcefully ejected Saddam Hussein from the oifields of Kuwait and destroyed his army. It is clear that, since our non-negotiable lifestyle depends upon oil, we are going to use our military to protect our freedoms - many of which require burning lots of oil – even if that involves breaking things and killing people in other countries.
So we've got the world's most powerful and expensive military making sure nothing interferes with our consumption of the fancy items on our menus. Our freedoms are really, really well protected. Lucky us!
But I just can’t stop worrying about some troublesome considerations as I contemplate my freedom and happiness as a very special American consumer. I can't get around the blunt facts of physiology and psychology which clearly show that, in reality, our pets are happier than we are.
It seems this modern world of industrialized consumption is an unnatural way of life. We didn’t evolve to live in inhospitable cities as a collection of isolated family units. We evolved living among small intimate tribes of around a hundred people of all ages who knew each other well and had very little personal material possessions. And what they had they shared. We live as maladapted paleolithic hunter gatherers pretending to be civilized and suffering deeply and profoundly in our isolated cages - cages furnished with useless stuff we bought because we believed it would help with the alienation.
“We see more advertisements in one year than people 50 years ago saw in a lifetime. And if you think about it, what is the point of an ad except to make us unhappy with what we have. So, 3,000 times a day, we’re told that our hair is wrong, our skin is wrong, clothes are wrong, our furniture is wrong, our cars are wrong, we are wrong but that it can all be made right if we just go shopping.” (From The Story of Stuff)
I am also told that I hold a precious key to my freedom and happiness – my vote. I can express my concern over the untenable situation of global resource extraction, labor exploitation and ecological destruction by voting. But as I look at the situation, this information, rather than making me feel empowered, just makes me sad.
I know I don’t get to vote for what really matters. I get to choose a brand that has spent a lot of advertising money campaigning for elections. A brand that gets this money from those who have much more of it than I and which is thus much more receptive to those wealthy and powerful donors than it is to me.
And together they write the menu which I get to choose from. A menu that has no Single Payer – not even a Public Option, no repeal of corporate “personhood,” little or no support for viable alternatives to fossil fuels – in fact which offers subsidies to fossil fuel industries… I could go on and on.
Those things don’t win elections, I am told. And my choice lies between two political machines created for the sole purpose of winning elections. Winning elections is what matters. It is all that matters. And it is all that motivates policy in this world of competing election-winning machines. Elections have consequences. Solutions for catastrophic climate change are never going to be one of them.
It's basic game theory.
Given that we have a spectrum of people’s political preferences from far, far left through far, far, right which follows (presumably, in this theory) a standard normal curve, with the most extreme positions having the fewest adherents and the most “centrist” positions having a majority, it then makes political sense to run candidates who can sell themselves most effectively to the most populous middle.
So someone out on the “far left” end of the curve is going to have few to their left who will vote for them no matter what. And if a more moderate “lefty” challenges them in a primary that “moderate” will take all the “leftish” votes to their own right and split the votes between them and the “far lefty.” That’s why Democrats cheer when a bat-shit crazy T-partier challenges a more “moderate” Republican. If the T-partier wins there’s way more ground between them and the Democrat for the Democrat to try and capture than if the more “moderate” Republican won.
And that’s why we end up with two similarly "moderate" candidates to choose the “lesser evil” from. If we wanted a “good” vs. “evil” election the temptation would be too great for a “lesser evil” to come into the middle and take a huge chunk out of the largest, moderate, average, part of the normal curve.
Add money to the mix and you will always win elections by playing to the center and depressing the other guys turnout with negative ads. That’s the way the game is played. And the Big Money moves the curve ever deeper into the corporate wasteland because most people can be influenced by heavily financed persuasion. They are plugged into an idiot-IV called the corporate mass media and as a result of its profit driven focus upon 24/7 worldwide, sensationalist violence-whoring, the watching consumers come to feel ever more powerless, insecure and angry.
A “Psychology Today” story called If It Bleeds It Leads: Understanding Fear Based Media, tells us,
fear-based media has become a staple of popular culture. The distressing fall-out from this trend is that children and adults who are exposed to media are more likely than others to (a) feel that their neighborhoods and communities are unsafe, (b) believe that crime rates are rising, (c) overestimate their odds of becoming a victim, and (d) consider the world to be a dangerous place.
So, from the Paleolithic wilderness we have ascended into the heights of cultural development as ideal consumers - frightened feudal lordlets huddled in our castles surrounded by a world populated with dangers and enemies and, as the bills come in and the money drains out, living in the Red Queen’s kingdom where we must run as fast as we can to stay in the same place.
We really have much less than a two party system here in our wealthy democracy. We have the Big Money Party - which is the true “Big Tent” - and which covers all Republicans and most Democrats. This - the true “Big Tent” - is the party of all those who have committed to raising big money to win elections from those who have the big money – namely corporations, billionaires and millionaires.
Then we have a quarter party, a carbuncle upon the right buttock of the Big Money Party, called the “Taxed Enough Already” Party – the T-party. That makes one and a quarter parties. And then we have various hippies and progressives out in the left margins, the No Money Party. And, since the No Money Party has no money, they have no power. And they can’t win elections in the game of centrism, so they’re basically irrelevant. But, charitably, we’ll count them as another quarter party. So we’ve got at most a one and a half party system if you add it all up.
Thanks to this system we have a seamless blending between government and the corptocracy: the revolving door, the regulatory capture, the narcissistic power-seeking. It's also why we don't have the nice things we deserve, like a representative government. This seamless blending is quite clear when we examine the client lists of prominent PR firms, like Burson-Marsteller, the world's largest PR firm. Here is just a sample of its enormous client list:
NBC, Philip Morris, Trump Enterprises, Occidental Petroleum, the state of Alaska, Coca-Cola, the British Columbia timber industry, Dow Corning, General Electric, Hydro-Quebec, Monsanto, Campbell's Soup, the Olympics, and the governments of Kenya, Indonesia, Argentina, El Salvador, the Bahamas, Italy, Mexico, Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria.
Public relations is now inseparable from the business of lobbying, creating public policy, and getting candidates elected to public office. The PR industry just might be the single most powerful political institution in the world. It expropriates and exploits the democratic rights of millions on behalf of big business by fooling the public about the issues...
... public relations has become a huge, powerful, hidden medium available only to wealthy individuals, big corporations, governments, and government agencies because of its high cost. And the purpose of these campaigns is not to facilitate democracy or promote social good, but to increase power and profitability for the clients paying the bills. This overall management of public opinion and policy by the few is completely contrary to and destructive of democracy.
In Washington, D.C., issues are no longer simply lobbied. They are "managed" by a triad composed of (1) public-relations experts from firms like Burson-Marsteller; (2) business lobbyists, who bankroll politicians, write legislation, and are often former politicians themselves; and (3) phony grass-roots organizations - I call them "astroturf groups" - that the PR industry has created on behalf of its corporate clients to give the appearance of public support for their agendas.
- John Stauber
So, let's say you're an ambitious and greedy person seeking a way to gain entry into the glittering world of wealth and power - or, let's say, you're a passionate well-meaning person out to save the world from the power-hungry elite - the process works the same in both cases. The first thing you have to do is that you must raise lots of money. Money that can hire the best PR firms, buy TV air time, etc. You're going nowhere without lots of money. Lots and lots of money. This money can buy you power. And, once you have power, you have access to more money. You can ride this cycle, like a vulture riding warm air currents, straight to the top.
And every few years we get to choose from a menu selected by the Big Money Party. We are urged to vote for the “lesser evil,” which we do with increasing anxiety over the years as we watch the Big Money Party accelerate its attack upon our planet and our communities. “Winning” is when this attack is moderate, “losing” is when it is extreme.
I am a member of the No Money Party. Even though I am considered an American consumer, I don't make much money compared to my fellow American consumers. When I shop I shop at thrift stores and yard sales and I spend a lot of time in my garden. I live simply. I have nothing for the Big Money Party. I am beneath contempt to the Very Serious People who make and design the menus they offer me. I am a "vote" to be manipulated come election time - then I can go to hell.
Way off here in the No Money Party I observe the battle the Big Money Party is fighting with reality, with the Laws of Nature. I am cheered by the fact that money stands no chance in this battle, but I am deeply distressed at the collateral damage that is ensuing - and will ensue before the Very Serious People in the Big Money Party come to realize they have always been nothing more than greedy little children in dire need of adult supervision.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to rise, in spite of the shiny rhetoric spouted by the "lesser evils" I am allowed to vote for. Its consequences are far more serious than the consequences of winning centrist, Big Money Party, elections. Elections do have consequences but the theater in which those kabuki results matter is burning down.