[CitizensTruth] Brand Obama

[Robin Migalla]

Hi Andrew, Connie, Kris, Ed, and all other Truth Seekers among our small 
community,

I must confess, Andrew, when I first opened your initial message, I was 
overwhelmed by too many words and quickly deleted it without reading it. 
 The subsequent conversation between Connie, Kris, and Ed piqued my 
interest.  I have a few thoughts I'd like to share.  Lest we personalize 
and moralize issues rather than clarifying them, let's try looking at just 
the facts in Chris Hedges piece.  As far as I can tell the list below 
summarizes these facts (I put braces around items that could render a 
statement that might otherwise be known as fact as personalizing or 
moralizing):

1) His [Obama's] 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...

2) {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.

3) {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.

4) {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.

5) {Brand} Obama will not prosecute the Bush  administration for war 
crimes, including the use of torture, and

6)  He [Obama] has refused to dismantle Bush's secrecy laws or restore 
habeas corpus.

7)  He [Obama] was {happy} to promote nuclear power as "green" energy.

8)  He [Obama] voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

9)  He [Obama] reauthorized the Patriot Act.

10) He [Obama] would not back a bill designed to cap predatory credit card 
interest rates.

11)  He [Obama] opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious 
Mining Law of 1872.

12)  He [Obama] refused to support the single-payer health care bill HR676, 
sponsored by Reps. Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers.

13) He [Obama] supported the death penalty.

14) He [Obama] backed a class-action "reform" bill that was part of a large 
lobbying effort by financial firms. The law, known as the Class Action 
Fairness Act...

15) While Gaza was being bombarded and hit with airstrikes in the weeks 
before Obama took office, "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," according to Seymour Hersh.

16) Even his [Obama's] {one vaunted} anti-war speech as a state senator, 
{perhaps his single real act of defiance}, was swiftly reversed. He told 
the Chicago Tribune on July 27, 2004, that "there's not that much 
difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage. 
The difference, in my mind, is who's in a position to execute." And unlike 
anti-war stalwarts like Kucinich, who gave hundreds of speeches against the 
war, Obama then {dutifully} stood silent until the Iraq war became 
unpopular.

17)  Obama's campaign won the vote of hundreds of marketers, agency heads 
and marketing-services vendors gathered at the Association of National 
Advertisers' annual conference in October.

18)  The Obama campaign was named Advertising Age's marketer of the year 
for 2008 and edged out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com.

Given these facts, I'm not getting a warm fuzzy about Obama, yet.  Can 
anyone here refute these facts or clear up any confusion I'm having about 
them?

Thanks,
Robin


-----Original Message-----
From:	Edward Rynearson [SMTP:edward_rynearson at yahoo.com]
Sent:	Tuesday, May 05, 2009 08:10
To:	citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net
Subject:	[CitizensTruth] Brand Obama

I agree with Chris Hedges. 
 
Ed Rynearson
 

--- On Tue, 5/5/09, citizenstruth-request at six.pairlist.net 
<citizenstruth-request at six.pairlist.net> wrote:


From: citizenstruth-request at six.pairlist.net 
<citizenstruth-request at six.pairlist.net>
Subject: CitizensTruth Digest, Vol 47, Issue 5
To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net
Date: Tuesday, May 5, 2009, 1:56 AM


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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Buying Brand Obama (Connie Smith)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 5 May 2009 01:56:32 -0500
From: "Connie Smith" <dimension04 at sbcglobal.net>
Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] Buying Brand Obama
To: "andrew ritter" <aroyboy44 at hotmail.com>,    "truth seekers"
    <citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net>
Message-ID: <A4C183765AD547D49A426DD0584D49E1 at InspironConnie>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"



"Brand Obama" my foot.  The article-writer below worked 2 decades for 
"Brand New York Times" -- while Obama helped poor people and taught 
constitutional law.  Let's wait and see who turns out to be the better 
man. 

Given his humanitarian-saturated upbringing, what Obama's probably doing is 
duct-taping some societal structures for the short-term so that they 
collapse (as they must) SLOWLY, instead of suddenly and catastrophically -- 
and maneuvering to prevent his assassination, which would certainly occur 
if he just fired all the nazis outright, like JFK did.

If you were in office, and if you were smart, you would proceed in the same 
way.

I myself have been immune to being a fan of ANYBODY.  As a young newspaper 
reporter immediately out of school, I spent time with celebrities like The 
Doors and The Lettermen and Robert Goulet and a number of others who had 
big followings, but it was so clear to me they were "just people" that I've 
forever been immune to any kind of charisma.  However, I am attracted to 
good character.  (And that has panned out very well in my life -- I am 
apparently a good judge of it.)

And I've never been susceptible to brand-names OF or ON anything -- only 
interested in the quality "of the product."  Obama's character and quality 
have been clear and consistent (consistent as humanly possible) since first 
observing him here in Illinois politics in 1997. He is obviously not a 
product nor a brand, but a well-rounded and highly intelligent human being.

The criticisms of him strike me as short-sighted knee-jerk reactions to a 
ship's captain who has had to take over AFTER the Titanic struck the 
iceberg.  The wobbly emergency efforts to keep us from suddenly sinking, 
and a long, slow turn (instead of an immediate shift of the helm and a 
tip-over as a result) are scary but possibly wise moves -- possibly the 
only relatively safe ones that can be made. 

When the pilot headed the commercial airliner for the Hudson River in 
January, it seemed like a horrible move -- especially to everyone on 
board!  But he did the best that could be done under the extreme 
circumstances. There were some injuries, but the job was very, VERY well 
done.

I predict that Obama's wisdom-beyond-his-years will eventually bring us to 
the softest landing possible.  And I feel it's really ignorant of people 
who are not in the cockpit of this out-of-control country to attack him 
when he's doing all he CAN do -- for this nation and for the world. 

That sense of service is where he came from and that's where he will take 
us -- with the injuries that do occur obviously being the fall-out from the 
previous NON-wise, NON-intelligent, NON-service-oriented assholes who ruled 
and wrecked since the turn of the century. 

Those years of long and horrendous momentum CANNOT just be brought to a 
screeching halt in only 3 months!

Connie




  ----- Original Message -----
  From: andrew ritter
  To: truth seekers
  Sent: Monday, May 04, 2009 8:44 PM
  Subject: [CitizensTruth] Buying Brand Obama


  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 cr
imes, 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 
risqu? 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."
  Obama, who has become a global celebrity, was molded easily into a brand. 
He had almost no experience, other than two years in the Senate, lacked any 
moral core and could be painted as all things to all people. His brief 
Senate voting record was a miserable surrender to corporate interests. He 
was happy to promote nuclear power as "green" energy. He voted to continue 
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He reauthorized the Patriot Act. He would 
not back a bill designed to cap predatory credit card interest rates. He 
opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872. 
He refused to support the single-payer health care bill HR676, sponsored by 
Reps. Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers. He supported the death penalty. And 
he backed a class-action "reform" bill that was part of a large lobbying 
effort by financial firms. The law, known as the Class Action Fairness Act, 
would effectively shut down state courts as a venue to hear most
 class-action lawsuits and den
y redress in many of the courts where these cases have a chance of defying 
powerful corporate challenges. 
  While Gaza was being bombarded and hit with airstrikes in the weeks 
before Obama took office, "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," according to Seymour Hersh. Even his 
one vaunted anti-war speech as a state senator, perhaps his single real act 
of defiance, was swiftly reversed. He told the Chicago Tribune on July 27, 
2004, that "there's not that much difference between my position and George 
Bush's position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who's in a 
position to execute." And unlike anti-war stalwarts like Kucinich, who gave 
hundreds of speeches against the war, Obama then dutifully stood silent 
until the Iraq war became unpopular.
  Obama's campaign won the vote of hundreds of marketers, agency heads and 
marketing-services vendors gathered at the Association of National 
Advertisers' annual conference in October. The Obama campaign was named 
Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008 and edged out runners-up 
Apple and Zappos.com. Take it from the professionals. Brand Obama is a 
marketer's dream. President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you 
to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy 
or do what the advertiser wants because of how they can make you feel. 
  Celebrity culture has leeched into every aspect of our culture, including 
politics, to bequeath to us what Benjamin DeMott called "junk politics." 
Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. Junk 
politics personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them. 
"It's impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about America's 
optimism and moral character, and heavily dependent on feel-your-pain 
language and gesture," DeMott noted. The result of junk politics is that 
nothing changes - "meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices 
that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage." 
It redefines traditional values, tilting "courage toward braggadocio, 
sympathy toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect, 
identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of brains." Junk 
politics "miniaturizes large, complex problems at home while maximizing 
threats from abroad. It's also
 given to abrupt unexplai
ned reversals of its own public stances, often spectacularly bloating 
problems previously miniaturized." And finally, it "seeks at every turn to 
obliterate voters' consciousness of socioeconomic and other differences in 
their midst." 
  An image-based culture, one dominated by junk politics, communicates 
through narratives, pictures and carefully orchestrated spectacle and 
manufactured pseudo-drama. Scandalous affairs, hurricanes, earthquakes, 
untimely deaths, lethal new viruses, train wrecks-these events play well on 
computer screens and television. International diplomacy, labor union 
negotiations and convoluted bailout packages do not yield exciting personal 
narratives or stimulating images. A governor who patronizes call girls 
becomes a huge news story. A politician who proposes serious regulatory 
reform, universal health care or advocates curbing wasteful spending is 
boring. Kings, queens and emperors once used their court conspiracies to 
divert their subjects. Today cinematic, political and journalistic 
celebrities distract us with their personal foibles and scandals. They 
create our public mythology. Acting, politics and sports have become, as 
they were during the reign of
 Nero, interchangeable. 
  In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional 
gratification, we do not seek reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is 
boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be 
indulged and comforted by clich?s, stereotypes and inspirational messages 
that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest 
country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical 
qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and prosperous, 
either because of our own attributes, or our national character, or because 
we are blessed by God. Reality is not accepted as an impediment to our 
desires. Reality does not make us feel good. 
  In his book "Public Opinion," Walter Lippmann distinguished between "the 
world outside and the pictures in our heads." He defined a "stereotype" as 
an oversimplified pattern that helps us find meaning in the world. Lippmann 
cited examples of the crude "stereotypes we carry about in our heads" of 
whole groups of people such as "Germans," "South Europeans," "Negroes," 
"Harvard men," "agitators" and others. These stereotypes, Lippmann noted, 
give a reassuring and false consistency to the chaos of existence. They 
offer easily grasped explanations of reality and are closer to propaganda 
because they simplify rather than complicate.
  Pseudo-events-dramatic productions orchestrated by publicists, political 
machines, television, Hollywood or advertisers-however, are very different. 
They have, as Daniel Boorstin wrote in "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events 
in America," the capacity to appear real even though we know they are 
staged. They are capable, because they can evoke a powerful emotional 
response, of overwhelming reality and replacing reality with a fictional 
narrative that often becomes accepted truth. The unmasking of a stereotype 
damages and often destroys its credibility. But pseudo-events, whether they 
show the president in an auto plant or a soup kitchen or addressing troops 
in Iraq, are immune to this deflation. The exposure of the elaborate 
mechanisms behind the pseudo-event only adds to its fascination and its 
power. This is the basis of the convoluted television reporting on how 
effectively political campaigns and politicians have been stage-managed. 
Reporters,
 especially those on televisi
on, no longer ask if the message is true but if the pseudo-event worked or 
did not work as political theater. Pseudo-events are judged on how 
effectively we have been manipulated by illusion. Those events that appear 
real are relished and lauded. Those that fail to create a believable 
illusion are deemed failures. Truth is irrelevant. Those who succeed in 
politics, as in most of the culture, are those who create the brands and 
pseudo-events that offer the most convincing fantasies. And this is the art 
Obama has mastered.
  A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left 
to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of data 
and trivia are used to bolster illusion and give it credibility or are 
discarded if they interfere with the message. The worse reality becomes-the 
more, for example, foreclosures and unemployment skyrocket-the more people 
seek refuge and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot be distinguished 
from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, 
in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the 
most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place 
where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe. 
This is the real danger of pseudo-events and why pseudo-events are far more 
pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as stereotypes 
attempt to, but replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine reality by
 the parameters set by th
eir creators. These creators, who make massive profits peddling these 
illusions, have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures they 
control. 
  The old production-oriented culture demanded what the historian Warren 
Susman termed character. The new consumption-oriented culture demands what 
he called personality. The shift in values is a shift from a fixed morality 
to the artifice of presentation. The old cultural values of thrift and 
moderation honored hard work, integrity and courage. The 
consumption-oriented culture honors charm, fascination and likability. "The 
social role demanded of all in the new culture of personality was that of a 
performer," Susman wrote. "Every American was to become a performing self."
  The junk politics practiced by Obama is a consumer fraud. It is about 
performance. It is about lies. It is about keeping us in a perpetual state 
of childishness. But the longer we live in illusion, the worse reality will 
be when it finally shatters our fantasies. Those who do not understand what 
is happening around them and who are overwhelmed by a brutal reality they 
did not expect or foresee search desperately for saviors. They beg 
demagogues to come to their rescue. This is the ultimate danger of the 
Obama Brand. It effectively masks the wanton internal destruction and theft 
being carried out by our corporate state. These corporations, once they 
have stolen trillions in taxpayer wealth, will leave tens of millions of 
Americans bereft, bewildered and yearning for even more potent and deadly 
illusions, ones that could swiftly snuff out what is left of our diminished 
open society.

  ? 2009 TruthDig.com
  Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated 
from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign 
correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, 
including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should 
Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on 
America.  His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and 
the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July, but is available for 
pre-order.


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