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

[E. Wayne Johnson]

*
*"... He is able to succour  /sucker / them that are tempted."



C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> "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.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
> *URL:* http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3848
>
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