dinsdag 5 mei 2009

Obama 104

Een absolute aanrader:

Buying Brand Obama

by Chris Hedges

Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, our elected officials continue to have their palms greased by armies of corporate lobbyists, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest.

What, for all our faith and hope, has the Obama brand given us? His administration has spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion in taxpayer dollars to Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to reinflate the bubble economy, a tactic that at best forestalls catastrophe and will leave us broke in a time of profound crisis. Brand Obama has allocated nearly $1 trillion in defense-related spending and the continuation of our doomed imperial projects in Iraq, where military planners now estimate that 70,000 troops will remain for the next 15 to 20 years. Brand Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan, including the use of drones sent on cross-border bombing runs into Pakistan that have doubled the number of civilians killed over the past three months. Brand Obama has refused to ease restrictions so workers can organize and will not consider single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans. And Brand Obama will not prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, including the use of torture, and has refused to dismantle Bush's secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus. 

Brand Obama offers us an image that appears radically individualistic and new. It inoculates us from seeing that the old engines of corporate power and the vast military-industrial complex continue to plunder the country. Corporations, which control our politics, no longer produce products that are essentially different, but brands that are different. Brand Obama does not threaten the core of the corporate state any more than did Brand George W. Bush. The Bush brand collapsed. We became immune to its studied folksiness. We saw through its artifice. This is a common deflation in the world of advertising. So we have been given a new Obama brand with an exciting and faintly erotic appeal. Benetton and Calvin Klein were the precursors to the Obama brand, using ads to associate themselves with risqué art and progressive politics. It gave their products an edge. But the goal, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake a brand with an experience. 

"The abandonment of the radical economic foundations of the women's and civil-rights movements by the conflation of causes that came to be called political correctness successfully trained a generation of activists in the politics of image, not action," Naomi Klein wrote in "No Logo."

4 opmerkingen:

Anoniem zei

Dan blijft er weinig meer over om van te dromen.


anzi

Anoniem zei

Toch even iets anders. Ook iets van Obama. Maar dan over Nederland:

http://www.nrc.nl/economie/article2232822.ece/Obama_Nederland_fiscaal_paradijs

Bij fiscaal-voordeel denk je nu niet meteen aan NL.
Tja..wat daar nu van te denken.

gr,
Merijn

Anoniem zei

Klopt wel, wat berichten uit 2006:

"Nederland belastingparadijs"

Nederland is een belastingparadijs voor buitenlandse bedrijven. Meer dan 20.000 multinationals en individuen voorkomen met een postbus in Nederland dat ze elders belasting betalen. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek van de Stichting Onderzoek Multinationale Ondernemingen.

De postbusbedrijven laten hun belangen behartigen door een trustkantoor, dat voor hen met de fiscus onderhandelt.

Belastingverdragen die Nederland heeft gesloten, zijn gunstig voor buitenlandse bedrijven. De postbusbedrijven leveren volgens SOMO Nederland jaarlijks 9 mrd euro op. Maar de regelingen trekken veel malafide ondernemingen aan, zegt SOMO.

nos
Wanneer multinationale bedrijven opbrengsten kunnen wegsluizen zonder er belasting over te betalen in het land van herkomst, kan dat schadelijk zijn. Onder andere veel ontwikkelingslanden lopen daardoor belastinginkomsten mis, stelt SOMO. Het Nederlandse beleid strookt op dat punt niet met het internationale beleid voor (financiële) steun aan ontwikkelingslanden, vindt de stichting.

Merijn

Anoniem zei

Amerika heeft hard centjes nodig!


anzi

Peter Flik en Chuck Berry-Promised Land

mijn unieke collega Peter Flik, die de vrijzinnig protestantse radio omroep de VPRO maakte is niet meer. ik koester duizenden herinneringen ...