Obama’s 100 days – The Mad Men Did Well
April 30th, 2009Via: 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 César Chávez – “Sí, se puede!” or “Yes, we can” – 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 clichés, 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.
Wow, so filled with truth I read every word.
Pilger has had Obama pegged from the get go. This is one of his best yet at exposing the fraud…. at least for those who will listen. Thanks for posting this Kevin.
Pilger. I wonder why he is an outcast?
(Chris Floyd is usually on the money too)
Pilger definitely puts the bought-and-paid-for media to shame…
I don’t know who John Pilger is, but just like Mark Morford (who I actually like alot)he’s presenting his view of reality and presents things here the way he wants to. Its his interpretation of “reality.”
Not that I am any different in cherry picking how I want to view Obama. And Yes I am a person that happens to live in a country that was “desperate to be rid of George W Bush.” I guess you could give me liberty or give me death, but in the polling booth I sure as hell picked Obama over McCain. Christ. I still have a brain.
I don’t know what the truth is about Obama. Sure, he was packaged and sold to Americans just like anyone or anything else is in our “we sell it, you’ll buy it” or else society.
Anyways. in my day job, I actually have to read the laws, regulations, and Executive Orders that have come out of the Obama Administration. I happen to like what I see that he has signed with his pen so far. There are many examples here:
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/executive-orders/obama-subjects.html
I just don’t see the dark side in these documents as portrayed in the article by Pilger.
It was an educational experience for me to read through the Executive Orders signed by Bush, Clinton, Reagan, etc. I actually found something good by Bush re the environment, e.g. conserving water, etc. Almost made me think that Bush had a change of heart at the end of his career as President, but have that Executive Order is saved on my work computer.
I think that one must be educated in the ways our legislative system works in the U.S. to understand a few things. Not that I know much, but the U.S. Congress and Senate authorized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama can speak all his thoughts about what he wants to do to end wars, start wars, etc. until he goes deaf, dumb, and blind. But in the end game, I do believe all those in the Congress must create a bill that authorizes the withdrawal from any wars we are waging across the world.
I don’t know what to think. Have I been conned by the salesman selling Obama? Sure. That’s there. But I don’t get why no one has ever mentioned a word about this law (I can’t find the citation for the bill right now, just an article)
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/03/30/obama_signs_major_land_conserv.html
Reading the actual bill brought tears to my eyes.
Anyways I am just going to shut my keyboard down now cause I think most of you reading Cryptogon ignore me anyways cause I tend to be so long winded.
But I’m not going to write Obama off just yet.
Since none of the current wars were legally declared, I think Obama has the authority to simply order the troops home without any OK from Congress. It doesn’t surprise me that he hasn’t. I fully expected a continuation of empire. I actually expect several humanitarian wars to be waged in the next year or two.
What I find most scary is the hints of marching the U.S. towards some utopian socialist dream society and all this talk of “remaking America” – where was the mandate for THAT? It doesn’t take much extrapolation to see a time in the near future when people will be fully dependent on government and government will control nearly every aspect of everyone’s lives.