[Peace-discuss] Obama's 100 Days: Mad Men Did Well

[C. G. Estabrook]

"It is not surprising that the polls are showing that a growing number of
Americans believe they have been suckered - especially as the nation's
economy has been entrusted to the same fraudsters who destroyed it.
Lawrence Summers, Obama's principal economic adviser, is throwing $3trn
at the same banks that paid him more than $8m last year, including
$135,000 for one speech. Change you can believe in."


	Obama's 100 Days -- The Mad Men Did Well
	Apr 28, 2009 By John Pilger

The BBC's American television soap Mad Men offers a rare glimpse of the
power of corporate advertising. The promotion of smoking half a century
ago by the "smart" people of Madison Avenue, who knew the truth, led to
countless deaths. Advertising and its twin, public relations, became a
way of deceiving dreamt up by those who had read Freud and applied mass
psychology to anything from cigarettes to politics. Just as Marlboro Man
was virility itself, so politicians could be branded, packaged and sold.

It is more than 100 days since Barack Obama was elected president of the
United States. The "Obama brand" has been named "Advertising Age's
marketer of the year for 2008", easily beating Apple computers. David
Fenton of MoveOn.org describes Obama's election campaign as "an
institutionalised mass-level automated technological community
organising that has never existed before and is a very, very powerful
force". Deploying the internet and a slogan plagiarised from the Latino
union organiser C?r Ch?z - "S?se puede!" or "Yes, we can" [AND NOW,
DELICIOUSLY, ADOPTED BY THE REELECTION CAMPAIGN OF THE PRESIDENT OF IRAN]
- the mass-level automated technological community marketed its brand to
victory in a country desperate to be rid of George W Bush.

No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was
the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials
alone) that many Americans *actually believed Obama shared their*
*opposition to Bush's wars*. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush's
warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed
he was the heir to Martin Luther King's legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet
if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous "Change you can
believe in", it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious
bully. "We will be the most powerful," he often declared.

Perhaps the Obama brand's most effective advertising was supplied free
of charge by those journalists who, as courtiers of a rapacious system,
promote shining knights. They depoliticised him, spinning his
platitudinous speeches as "adroit literary creations, rich, like those
Doric columns, with allusion . . ." (Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian).
The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote: "Many
spiritually advanced people I know . . . identify Obama as a
Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who . . . can actually help
usher in a new way of being on the planet."

In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus
and demanded more secret government. He has kept Bush's gulag intact and
at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice. On 24 April, his
lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo Bay prisoners were not
"persons", and therefore had no right not to be tortured. His national
intelligence director, Admiral Dennis Blair, says he believes torture
works. One of his senior US intelligence officials in Latin America is
accused of covering up the torture of an American nun in Guatemala in
1989; another is a Pinochet apologist. As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed
out, the US experienced a military coup under Bush, whose secretary of
"defence", Robert Gates, along with the same warmaking officials, has
been retained by Obama.

All over the world, America's violent assault on innocent people,
directly or by agents, has been stepped up. During the recent massacre
in Gaza, reports Seymour Hersh, "the Obama team let it be known that it
would not object to the planned resupply of 'smart bombs' and other
hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel" and being used to
slaughter mostly women and children. In Pakistan, the number of
civilians killed by US missiles called drones has more than doubled
since Obama took office.

In Afghanistan, the US "strategy" of killing Pashtun tribespeople (the
"Taliban") has been extended by Obama to give the Pentagon time to build
a series of permanent bases right across the devastated country where,
says Secretary Gates, the US military will remain indefinitely. Obama's
policy, one unchanged since the Cold War, is to intimidate Russia and
China, now an imperial rival. He is proceeding with Bush's provocation
of placing missiles on Russia's western border, justifying it as a
counter to Iran, which he accuses, absurdly, of posing "a real threat"
to Europe and the US. On 5 April in Prague, he made a speech reported as
"anti-nuclear". It was nothing of the kind. Under the Pentagon's
Reliable Replacement Warhead programme, the US is building new
"tactical" nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between
nuclear and conventional war.

Perhaps the biggest lie - the equivalent of smoking is good for you - is
Obama's announcement that the US is leaving Iraq, the country it has
reduced to a river of blood. According to unabashed US army planners, as
many as 70,000 troops will remain "for the next 15 to 20 years". On 25
April, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, alluded to this. It is
not surprising that the polls are showing that a growing number of
Americans believe they have been suckered - especially as the nation's
economy has been entrusted to the same fraudsters who destroyed it.
Lawrence Summers, Obama's principal economic adviser, is throwing $3trn
at the same banks that paid him more than $8m last year, including
$135,000 for one speech. Change you can believe in.

Much of the American establishment loathed Bush and Cheney for exposing,
and threatening, the onward march of America's "grand design", as Henry
Kissinger, war criminal and now Obama adviser, calls it. In advertising
terms, Bush was a "brand collapse" whereas Obama, with his toothpaste
advertisement smile and righteous clich? is a godsend. At a stroke, he
has seen off serious domestic dissent to war, and he brings tears to the
eyes, from Washington to Whitehall. He is the BBC's man, and CNN's man,
and Murdoch's man, and Wall Street's man, and the CIA's man. The Madmen
did well.

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*From:* Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
*URL:* http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3848