From: the.wise.one@abel.co.uk   
      
   Obama's 100 Days -- The Mad Men Did Well   
      
   By Pilger, John   
      
   April, 29 2009   
      
   [John Pilger's ZSpace Page]   
      
      
   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 Cesar Chavez - "Si, 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 cliches, 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.   
      
      
   http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3848   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)