Sitting facing each other in an auditorium filled with nearly 1,000 cheering people at a CNBC-sponsored event at Columbia University in New York, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and Microsoft founder Bill Gates fielded questions from Columbia Business School students on the recession, investing and what’s the next Microsoft.

And you know how late-imperial ruling classes get decrepit, and become unable to acknowledge, let alone redress, their objective problems? Here are your top two “free market” geniuses’ remarks on where they see us standing in history:

Buffett: “The financial panic is behind us…. I did not worry about the overall survival of our economy.”

Gates: “We proved that we can make mistakes. But the fundamentals of the system, a marketplace-driven system where we invest in education and a great infrastructure for the long-term, that’s continued…. Capitalism is great.”

See? This has been merely a “financial panic,” not a huge recession, not a normal and predictable result of the radical mal-distribution of wealth under corporate capitalism, not the onset of Great Depression III, not a harbinger of Peak Everything, not a wake-up call in a make-it-or-break-it century.

Yes, mistakes were made, even though nobody expects a capitalist ever to make one, do they?

Take it from Bill and Warren: The future looks bright for this great system of ever-expanding resource consumption and behavioral manipulation!

Advertising Age is reporting that, due to its fear of a backlash arising from “parental concerns that [its] advertising and packaging was preying on fears of the H1N1 virus,” Kellogg Company, the billion-dollar-a-year profit engine that peddles Cocoa Krispies and other junk food, is removing preposterous “anti-oxidant” claims from Cocoa Krispies boxes.

Here is Kellogg’s official announcement:

Kellogg Company today announced its decision to discontinue the immunity statements on Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereals.

Last year, Kellogg Company started the development of adding antioxidants to Rice Krispies cereals. This is one way the Company responded to parents indicating their desire for more positive nutrition in kids’ cereal.

While science shows that these antioxidants help support the immune system, given the public attention on H1N1, the Company decided to make this change. The communication will be on pack for the next few months as packaging flows through store shelves. We will, however, continue to provide the increased amounts of vitamins A, B, C and E (25% Daily Value) that the cereal offers.

We will continue to respond to the desire for improved nutrition, and we are committed to communicating the importance of nutrition to our consumers.

Let’s run that through our handy-dandy, unpatented Consumer Trap Marketing-to-English Translator, shall we?

The results:

Kellogg Company today announced its decision to discontinue the immunity statements on Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereals. Meanwhile, we won’t tell you here that by “Rice Krispies,” we also mean “Cocoa Krispies.” Including that fact would disclose that we are basically selling candy here.

Last year, Kellogg Company started the development of adding antioxidants to Rice Krispies and Cocoa Krispies cereals. This is one way the Company responded to parents‘ indicating their desire for vulnerability to deceptive claims about more positive nutrition in kids’ cereal lives.

While science* shows suggests that these antioxidants may help support the immune system, given the public attention on that we know our vitamin-sprayed sugar crunch doesn’t have a prayer of preventing H1N1, the Company decided to make this change. The communication will be on pack for the next few months as packaging flows through store shelves. After all, it would cost us money to remove them now. We will, however, continue to provide spray on the increased amounts of vitamins A, B, C and E (25% Daily Value) that the cereal offers continues to provide us with an excuse for passing our product off as [wink, wink, make air quotes] “part of a nutritious breakfast.”

We will continue to respond to ignore both the desire for improved nutrition and the nutritional and economic inferiority of our mega-processed and packaged product to plain old whole-grain bread, and we are committed to communicating the importance suppressing knowledge of nutrition and home economics to among our consumers targets.

Fuck you, and goodnight.

* When science is even conceivably on our side, it is absolute truth. Climate change? Dangers of excessive sugar intake? Needs more research.

How hip and independent is it, really, though, to shave your junk?

Not so much. Not so much at all.

Take a look at this viral marketing video from the Gillette Corporation.

Note the instructions to “make sure” to use shaving cream not soap, the very latest 5-blade razor (one wonders where this bit of the marketing race will end — 57 blades?), and, of course “moisturizer” (the substance formerly known as “lotion”). All these just happen to be products made by Gillette, so what might a rational soul make of its chummy, flattering, “hip” shaving “advice”?

The real story, of course, is that the existence of body hair has now become a great marketing vehicle for the shareholding class, complete with the standard tools of big business marketing: false promises (larger penises and more “fun” will result for those who do as they’re programmed to do by Gillette and the “viral” “culture” it is sponsoring) and threats (if you don’t use the newest Gillette Fusion razor, you might shave off your vitals).

As in so many areas, all this speaks to our howling need to make the 2010s into a new and improved 1960s.

Along the way, why not lose the shave-bot programming and the sponsored pseudo-hipsterism? Why not lose the chains of corporate babydom and cull the living, hairy, grown-up flower?

“He’s a vacuous opportunist. I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.”

This has been confirmed ever since Obama chose his cabinet, and the reality just keeps getting repeated by Obama himself. The neoliberalism (not my favorite word — I prefer plain old “capitalist,” or even “market totalitarian,” both of which are less confusing and more penetrating) is an article of faith with this empty vessel/mainstream Democrat.

First, there was the recent “We believe in capitalism; we believe in people getting rich” profession of the Faith.

Now, it’s quite literally church time.

And the head preacher’s core message is the same old tired, outdated, utterly disproven one that capitalists and their minions always preach: capitalists need more money.

This claim has been around for ages. In Das Kapital, Marx ripped into its expression as the early 19th-century businessman’s dogma known as Say’s Law. A century later, when the dim war criminal Ronald Reagan took office and began fronting for corporate capitalism’s Great Restoration, “Say’s Law” was repackaged as “supply-side economics.” Ever since then, as Big Money has enjoyed unbroken market-totalitarian conditions, all “serious” politicians have had to pass this litmus test. Even if they don’t openly preach “supply-side economics,” each aspiring “major” leader must adhere to capital’s insistence that the one and only possible cause of economic problems within capitalism is insufficient money at the top, in the hands of the overclass.

Think Obama sees through this sociopathic mantra? Think again. Here is what he is now preaching to us from in front of stained-glass windows:

And since the problems we face are all working off each other to feed a vicious economic downturn, we’ve had no choice but to attack all fronts of our economic crisis at once. The first step was to fight a severe shortage of demand in the economy. The Federal Reserve did this by dramatically lowering interest rates last year in order to boost investment.

How do you combat a severe shortage of demand — i.e., the lack of buying power among the masses of ordinary product-purchasers? That’s right: You make sure the investing class has more money! Then they’ll…

And there’s the rub. The obvious problem is that the rich are too rich for their own good. Capital, as it usually does, got what it asked for, and now it is too powerful. The overclass has, once again (think 1873-1893 and 1929-1940), won its own poker game.

As a result, there are really only two possible ways out of this New Depression: 1) the temporary fix of a new round of credit-cards for the commoners, or 2) major economic reforms plus a big new dose class-struggle-from-below.

Alas, Obama, for all his supposed smarts and “community” compassion, is unable and/or unwilling to understand this, being the social-climbing mainstream Great Restoration/market-totalitarian politician that he is. He simply ain’t gonna do it, folks, no matter how much pain he has to pretend to feel. Like all good New Democrats, he will choose ignominious defeat over opening the slightest crack toward questioning the system. Just listen to him.

Despite the continuing complacency of his entranced supporters, Obama is proving, as Reed has long argued, that he’s 100 percent hopeless in this core area of our collective conundrum. He is indeed a vacuous neoliberal opportunist.

I have the strong feeling that 2010 is going to look a lot like 1994. And God only knows what we’ll get in 2012, if people don’t rise up and fight this corporate bullshit . . .

Kaufman, of course, reports a corporate paper executive’s recitation of the industry’s standard public story of how and why this appalling waste happens:

Customers “demand soft and comfortable,” said James Malone, a spokesman for Georgia Pacific, the maker of Quilted Northern.

That, of course, is a howling lie. The one and only reason for the advent of puffed-up toilet paper is the normal corporate capitalist sales imperative, not any kind of spontaneous clamoring from us ordinary ass-wipers.

Here is the real scoop, from a classic 1998 Wall Street Journal report titled “The Tricky Business of Rolling Out a New Toilet Paper,” by the excellent Tara Parker-Pope:

This [purportedly fancy toilet paper] is Kimberly-Clark’s biggest push ever in the $3.5 billion-a-year U.S. toiletpaper business, where it is a relative newcomer. Its original Kleenex toilet-tissue brand struggled after its introduction in 1990. The company merged with Scott Paper, maker of the Scott and Cottonelle brands, in 1995 and created Kleenex Cottonelle, which helped Kimberly-Clark gain a 23% share of the market. But it trails rival Procter & Gamble’s Charmin, which has 30%. Among premium tissues, Kleenex Cottonelle still ranks a distant fourth behind Charmin, Fort James’s Northern and Georgia-Pacific’s Angel Soft. Overall, bath-tissue sales are flat and premium brands are losing share to economy-priced tissue.

In other words, the real spur to all this environment-raping TeePee was stagnant corporate profits, not popular demand. Left to their own devices, people gravitate toward “economy-priced tissue.”

This, of course, meant that people simply could not be left to their own devices, them and nature be damned.

Pope conveyed the outlines of the usual consequent marketing procedures, which have since yielded the true course of events:

Kimberly-Clark hosted focus groups to talk to consumers about toilet paper, and asked them to compare leading brands with the new Kleenex Cottonelle textured tissue. They discovered that even though tissue advertising doesn’t talk about how well a toilet paper wipes, that is what customers are thinking about.

In the meantime, the company will launch a new, softer version of Kleenex Cottonelle in the rest of the U.S. Those more-traditional ads show a bubble drifting onto folds of toilet tissue. But the product package includes the “clean, fresh feeling” promise, in an effort to prime consumers for the eventual appearance of the textured tissue nationwide.

In similar fashion, the alleged proof of the alleged product benefit comes after, not before, claims about it are implanted into “the consumer”:

“If we have news that’s important for a consumer, then we can find a way to tastefully communicate it,” says Tom Falk, group president of Kimberly-Clark’s North American tissue, pulp and paper business.

The advertising solution is an anthropomorphic roll of toilet paper with a heavy British accent (the voice of London actress Louise Mercer from the old NBC sitcom “Dear John”). “I’m new Kleenex-Cottonelle toilet paper, and I understand you have a cleaning position available,” the tissue says. “I have a unique, rippled texture designed to leave you feeling clean and fresh. I’d love to show you what I can do.”

In another ad, the tissue brags that consumers prefer it to the leading brand. “Looks like all my bottom-line thinking is paying off,” the tissue says. For now, the ads will claim only that consumers say the new tissue leaves them feeling cleaner than other brands, but Kimberly-Clark is “working on a way to objectively measure cleaning better,” says Mr. Willetts. “There’s no method right now.”

Oh, there’s a method alright. George Orwell is spinning in his grave…

Turns out, the reporters took advantage of the unheard-of chance by actually asking Obama a question!

“Why, Mr. President, are you nominating the Raytheon Corporation lobbyist William J. Lynn III to serve as Deputy Secretary of Defense? Isn’t that an egregious violation of your campaign promise and subsequent Executive Order to stop doing this kind of thing?”

Obama’s answer? Not so new:

“The president brushed [the question] off, saying he would not return “if I’m going to get grilled every time I come.”

So, in other words, this “surprise visit” was old wine in a new bottle, a staged event all about coercive image-making, with no connection whatsoever to any new openness. If the Press Room is going to ask President Obama questions, then he’s not coming there. Simple as that.

No wonder Ronald Reagan, the figurehead-in-chief when political marketers perfected the art and science of photo-op psy-ops, is one of Obama’s heroes.

“Change you can believe in.”©®™

The cellular telephone industry’s response? It’s well worth reading in its entirety:

Safe Driving- Everyone’s Responsibility
January 12, 2009 8:50 AM
Posted By: John Walls, Vice President, Public Affairs, CTIA – The Wireless Association®
Related Categories: Wireless & Safety

This morning the National Safety Council announced it now supports a total ban of cell phone use while operating a vehicle. There is no question that irresponsible use of a wireless device is on the long list of potential driving distractions, including the NHTSA documented number one driver distraction of drowsiness. The industry agrees with the National Safety Council and numerous other well-regarded safety organizations on several safety issues, such as bans on text messaging while driving and restricting cellular use by teen or inexperienced drivers. But when looking at the implications of a total ban, it’s important to look at all of the situations that can occur and consider the ramifications of a total prohibition.

For example, should a mom or dad be prevented from taking a call from their 14 year old daughter, telling them the movie she was at ended a lot earlier than expected, and that she and her friends were out front waiting for a ride home? Or that their young son was at a different entrance to the mall or the school with his friends, and they wanted to tell their parent there had been change of plans and they were somewhere else? How many times a day in the country do you think a businessperson needs to let a client know they’re running a few minutes behind for that important meeting, and that a call, dialed sensibly and kept brief, could inform the client and maybe save a deal and certainly soothe any hard feelings from a misunderstanding. Calls to or from day care, the school nurse, your boss… there’s a long list of very real scenarios that illustrate practical needs to responsibly make or take a brief call.

We believe that safe, sensible, and limited use of a cell phone when you’re behind the wheel is possible. There are certainly inappropriate times to make or take a call, and your number one driving priority is always operating the vehicle safely. The fact of the matter is there are numerous well-known and proven driving distractions, and addressing just one of them (and one that by many accounts is significantly down the list) could very well lead to a false sense of security for drivers. There are reckless and inattentive driving statutes on the books in all of the states, and law enforcement officers have the discretion to enforce those as they see fit. We completely support that action…. If someone is driving irresponsibly because of cell phone use, they ought to be cited for that. And under current law, they can be.

The industry also has a long-standing commitment to a public service announcement campaign regarding safe driving, and that includes a new set of radio ads which we offered to co-brand, at no cost to them, with state chapters of the Governor’s Highway Safety Association. We are also proud of the fact that nearly 300,000 calls are made every day to 911, via a cellphone. The devices are perhaps the greatest safety tool we have today, and as I said earlier, there are a multitude of scenarios where responsible, sensible, safe, and brief use is possible and should be a part of any discussion.

As you can see, this is a true classic of capitalist obfuscation, obstruction, and excuse-making.

Shall we parse the highlighted phrases and their actual meanings?

“irresponsible use”: The problem here is the users, not the makers. (Note: This is every heroin dealer’s defense. It is also every corporate capitalist’s.)

“long list of potential driving distractions”: Automobile travel is multiply dangerous. So why are you picking on us?

“number one driver distraction of drowsiness”: Sure, we kill, but we aren’t the number one killer.

“it’s important to look at all of the situations that can occur and consider the ramifications”: Here comes our best argument.

Best Argument #1: “their 14 year-old daughter”: If you ban cellular phoning while driving, your daughter is more likely to be abducted, raped, …. (Note: Threats have been a classic vehicle of overclass coercion, throughout history. They remain in force, partially as a core device in big business marketing campaigns. Death threats like this one are rare, but certainly not unpredented. Think of long-running Michelin tire imagery, or Florida orange growers’ ads.)

Best Argument #2: “save a deal”: Business deals are more important than automotive fatalities.
“We believe”: Science is awholly-owned tool of corporate enterprise; we reserve the right to reject it as mere opinion, whenever it isn’t to our liking.

“your number one driving priority”: We repeat — the problem is you and your priorities, not us and ours.

“a false sense of security”: Now we’re just getting Orwellian on your ass. To wit, if we eliminated cell phone calling from cars, you idiots might get cocky and drive even worse! That’s right, cell phone calling actually makes driving safer, by scaring them with some healthy dangers.

“law enforcement officers have the discretion to enforce those as they see fit”: Existing laws could cover this problem, so why bother making them explicit? Yes, and billionaires have the perfect right to sleep under bridges.

“If someone is driving irresponsibly because of cell phone use, they ought to be cited for that.” Rather than directing police by making clear and definite laws, let’s pretend our discussion here is enough to accomplish the needed (but not needed) standard.

“long-standing commitment”: We knew about this all along, and took care of the problem long ago.

“a public service announcement campaign regarding safe driving”: Public service advertising is a perfectly good substitute for laws, so why trouble ourselves with law-making?

“300,000 911 calls a day”: Now we’re changing the subject. And, of course, we don’t mention how many of those 911 calls come from inside moving automobiles.

“perhaps the greatest safety tool we have today”: Our product has some legitimate uses, so you shouldn’t be asking any questions about its illegitimate ones.

All this is but the latest airing of the timeless behind-the-scenes voice of capital, which, as it continues to promulgate unsafe products and product uses, has long said to itself and its caretakers:

‘Après moi, le déluge!’ ['After me, the flood!'] is the watchword of every capitalist and every capitalist nation. Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society. To outcries about physical and mental degradation, premature death, the torture of overwork, it answers: ‘Ought these to trouble us, since they increase our profits?

A day or two after his victory, the Tweedle-D’s new President-elect revealed that his idea of “helping the middle class” is another giveaway — this time, to the US-based automobile corporations!

Now, Tweedle-D Party Radio, a.k.a. “Air America Radio,” has its stable of parrots squawking about what a grand, populist, commoner-helping thing this is “bailout” would be.

And, even as I type, the CEOs who pay themselves king’s ransoms to destroy the planet, squander its finite supply of energy, and murder 40,000 of their countrymen every year are up on Capitol Hill, begging bowls out and solemn professions of socio-economic concern/threat on their caviared lips.

What a freaking crock! Let’s take a quick peek at what’s actually being proposed here, shall we?

A “Hybrid” Mega-Turd

The monstrosity depicted at left is the sort of “cutting edge” new technology that is the supposed point and promise of a post-bailout Detroit. It is, you see, a “hybrid” Cadillac Escalade! It has an electric motor to complement its conventional V8! Dare we dream of such a gloriously transformed future? I swoon.

No, wait, I’m outraged.

Even the “car enthusiast” motorheads who write automobile reviews for The New York Times can spot this portentous scam:

“You can coax the Escalade Hybrid into electric-only mode, same as a Prius, but if you need to accelerate at all, or go up the slightest hill, or go faster than 30 miles an hour, you awaken the 332-horsepower V-8 under the hood.”

“Therein lies the dilemma of this truck: its mileage is great compared with a regular Escalade’s, but that’s like saying the American economy is great compared with Zimbabwe’s.”

“I managed to eke out 22.3 miles a gallon on one highway-biased trip, and about 20 m.p.g. over all. The hybrid system’s benefit is most pronounced in urban driving, where Cadillac claims a 50 percent improvement in fuel economy. (The gas-only Escalade is rated 12 m.p.g. in town, 18 on the highway, with all-wheel drive.)”

“Bizarrely, the Environmental Protection Agency does not provide mileage estimates for the four-wheel-drive Escalade Hybrid because its weight vaults it into the category of heavy-duty trucks, which need not be rated.”

“To create the Escalade Hybrid and its full-size Chevrolet and GMC siblings, G.M. cooperated with BMW and the former DaimlerChrysler to develop a mind-boggling hybrid transmission that can deploy two 60-kilowatt electric motors in tandem with a gas engine, operating either in continuously variable mode or through four fixed gears.”

“The system also captures regenerative braking energy and uses an auto-stop feature to minimize idling. Using this technology, G.M. can wring more than 20 m.p.g. out of its full-size S.U.V.’s.”

“But we’re still talking about a three-ton truck. Mercedes boasts that a 200-pound man can sit atop a C-Class door without damaging the hinges; with the Escalade, it feels as if the 200-pound-man is already inside the door.”

“What if, instead of all the hybrid trickery, you simply subtracted 1,000 pounds of weight, using unibody construction and a direct-injection V-6 engine paired with a conventional six-speed automatic? Couldn’t you have an equally posh and enormous three-row interior with all-wheel-drive and 20 m.p.g. economy? You certainly could, because I just described the Buick Enclave, a vehicle in G.M.’s own portfolio that underscores the Escalade Hybrid’s Rube Goldberg approach to efficiency.”

Of course, what the Times’ auto critic is never going to tell you is that automobiles — all automobiles — are Rube Goldberg machines. With a few exceptions like ambulances and fire trucks, using them to accomplish mundane trips around town is like using a chainsaw to slice and butter your morning toast. It is the ultimate capitalist boondoggle: Selling the schlemiels two (or more) tons of unnecessary shit instead of a bike or a tennis shoe or a subway ticket! What a great gig! Accumulate, accumulate — that is Moses and the Prophets!

And you also see here what a joke things like “hybrid” engines are going to be in the hands of private industry. Slap that label on the thing, and the schlemiels stop asking questions! A great marketing tool!

What we need to do, of course, is to nationalize the automobile corporations, and use their assets to manufacture rail stock and other equipment needed for rebuilding our towns to favor walking, bicycling, and rail travel. As a stopgap, we should also manufacture and distribute very simple automobiles that get 40 MPG or better, and tax the hell out of both gasoline and gas-guzzlers.

* In case you’re interested in these kinds of things, Keynes used the term “surplus capital” in The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Of course, “surplus capital” is also “surplus surplus,” since capital is society’s savings, its fund for repairing and transforming itself.

For all these reasons, and because my mama and granny didn’t raise a complete fool, I voted for Cynthia McKinney, not Barack Obama. Think about it: Obama is threatening new and expanded wars; spurns single-payer national health insurance; voted for FISA renewal and the mother of all give-aways to Wall Street; wants to include Republicans when he doesn’t have to; thumbed his nose at public campaign financing; almost certainly won’t get tough on the rogue state of Israel; and has been utterly weaselly about his quasi-promise to withdraw from Iraq. To compound all that, he also selected as his running-mate the Botoxed super-creep, Joe Biden, the figure who revealed his stunning secret disdain for democracy to a group of big-wig fundraisers in Seattle two weeks before the election.

So…

Last night, as Obama strode to the podium for his victory speech, why did I find myself welling up with tears and choking out “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword
His truth is marching on. ..

It isn’t that I’ve lost my deep skepticism about what’s on Obama’s agenda. Sure, his speech was wonderful, what with its reference to the New Deal, its borrowing of a major line and an exact cadence from the last public speech of Dr. King, its sublime mention of a 106-year-old woman as a way to think about the future, and its promise of a new puppy.

But that’s not it. Though all these things do raise my hopes a bit, that’s not why I felt, watching Jesse Jackson sob, that a new door has opened. No, it’s something much bigger than Obama himself. It is something my sociology work has convinced me of.

Permit me to explain:

Part of it is something explained by fellow sociologist John Markoff, in his book Waves of Democracy.

While we are trained by vested interests to believe that democracy is a smooth-functioning, stable-state reality that has already been fully achieved and operates mainly by voting and parliamentary procedure, the actual reality is quite different. Democracy, Markoff points out, is an unending, self-expending process. Moreover, it is as much about organizing and movements as it is about rules and procedures and ballots.

Indeed, think of all the things we rightly perceive to be the fruits and blessing of democracy: votes for women, votes for victims of racist apartheid, votes for everybody of a mature age, the 8-hour work day, the right to organize unions and other political societies, environmental standards, the ending of egregious imperial wars, etc. All these things were only ever put on the public agenda and forced into the fabric of democracy by social movements. Left undisturbed by mass mobilizations and principled trouble-making, even the kindliest overseers and the fairest of mundane elections would likely have let all the overcome evils run on indefinitely. Hell, even democracy itself only won its day via fighting in the streets — think back on the American and French Revolutions! Not exactly tea parties, Boston Harbor notwithstanding.

So, as Markoff argues, the reality is that democracy moves in waves. It ebbs and flows. It surges and retreats. While Constitutions, Bills of Rights, and universal suffrage and fair elections are all necessary, they are neither sufficient nor the whole story of what democracy is and how it works. In full sociological view:

[W]e will find movements, often involving transnational components, demanding democratization; we will also find important anti-democratic movements. We will find elites advocating democratic reforms, often in response to initiatives by other states; we will find anti-democratic actions by elites a well. And we will see movements and elites interact: movements pushing elites and elites opening up opportunities for movements. When the processes come together in a great multinational convergence, the result is a wave of democratization (or antidemocracy).

This brings me to the other part of my newfound optimism. This second part comes from Harvard Sitkoff, the excellent historian of the Civil Rights Movement.

In his book, The Struggle for Black Equality: 1954-1992, Sitkoff observes that social movements crystallize only at the rare times when two things come into rough balance — anger and hope.

Nourished by anger, revolutions are born of hope. They are the offspring of belief and bitterness, of faith in the attainment of one’s goals and indignation at the limited rate and extent of change. Rarely in history are the two stirrings confluent in a sufficient force to generate an effective, radical social movement.

As Sitkoff also points out, it is hope that tends to be lacking, as the forces of brutality (the ones that have dared call themselves “Civilization”) tend to hunt out and crush down good, hope-inspiring examples. Only when some tireless strugglers manage to push a daisy up through the pavement does lightning strike and a movement rise. Anger is always there. Given the power of the powerful, hope is usually the rain in the desert, the desperately-needed thing that goes lacking.

Yet, history is never over. Every once in a while, we get a Brown v, Board of Education. As Sitkoff explains, without Brown, there would probably have been no Civil Rights Movement as we knew it, and as we have so greatly (if only incompletely) benefited from:

Brown heightened the aspirations and expectations of African-Americans [and their sympathizers] as nothing before had. It proved that the Southern segregation system could be challenged and defeated. It proved that change was possible. Nearly a century after their professed freedom had been stalled, compromised, and stolen, blacks confidently anticipated being free and equal at last.

This, then, is what I think and pray Obama’s breakthrough victory might ultimately mean — it might very well stand, whatever it ugly sort-run details may be, as the next Brown v. Board of Education, the next long-awaited spark, the next rain that brought a new and bigger and smarter wave of democracy that not only made the desert flower once again, but allowed us to claim still more territory for human decency, sustainability, and love. Like Brown before did before (and our schools are still deeply segregated aren’t they?), Obama’s win might yield a storm of new hope sufficient to unleash the ordinary people once again. It might finally allow us to use, rather than just discuss and nurse, our anger.

So…

Let us take President Obama’s victory and his invitation and make them ours, on our own terms: Let us seize this victory and move once again into the streets. Let us do lay our hands on the arc of history, and use these next thirty years to bend it so as to undo and transcend the vast evils wrought over the last thirty years, by the benighted forces of privilege and reaction. Let us use this landslide and this wave of new youthful energy to put huge pressures on President Obama and those who attend and follow him in Washington. And let us turn this new wave into a wave of not just domestic, but global democratization. Let us continue to fight and win in our culture war (and, yes, we are winning). Let us seize victory from the jaws of defeat and fashion a humane, still-progressive world for our 106-year-old children!

by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, [the capitalist] intends only his [or her] own gain, and he [or she] is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his [or her] own interest he [or she]… promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.

For those actually willing to investigate and answer this question, the evidence is clear: Check out Mercer Consultants’ 2008 quality of life and personal safety survey results.

Mercer, which describes itself as “a global leader for trusted HR and related financial advice, products and services” that “has more than 18,000 employees serving clients in over 180 cities and 40 countries and territories worldwide,” finds that the top US city in its quality-of-life index is:

Honolulu, ranked #28

Meanwhile, even more astounding (from the perspective of ideology, rather than street knowledge) is this:

ZERO US cities are ranked in the top 50 in the area of personal safety!

Meanwhile, Business Week reports on the steady advance of the obesity/Type II diabetes epidemic in the USA:

Despite the many public efforts to promote physical activity and good nutrition in recent years, despite the constant warnings about the obesity crisis, Americans just keep getting fatter. According to an annual state-by-state look at the problem, adult obesity rates increased in 37 states in the past year, and only the District of Columbia saw a decrease—down a mere 0.1%. More than 25% of adults are now obese in 28 states, up from 19 states last year.

In 1991 no state had an obesity rate above 20%. Today more than 20% of adults are obese in every state except Colorado, where the number stands at 18.4%, according to the survey by two nonprofits, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Trust for America’s Health. Mississippi, the worst performer of all 51 on the list (which includes the District of Columbia), stands at 31.7%. Similarly disturbing increases were found in the percentage of adults with Type 2 diabetes, a weight-related disease. The survey found higher incidence of diabetes in 26 states. Four states are above 10%.

Overall, adult obesity rates have doubled since 1980, from 15% to 30%, and two-thirds of U.S. adults are now considered overweight or obese. The national rate for diabetes in adults has grown from 5.2% in 1980 to more than 8% now, and one in three Americans has hypertension—often weight-related. The report estimates that the direct health-care costs of obesity exceed $61 billion annually.

Of course, the massively obvious and overwhelming primary cause of all this disaster — corporate capitalism and its marketing juggernaut — cannot be mentioned. Hence, Business Week conveys the confounded confusion of the worried “experts”:

The U.S. “is not treating the obesity crisis with the seriousness it deserves,” said Jeff Levi, executive director of Trust for America’s Health at a press conference. He complained that while obesity rates keep climbing, federal funding for programs to address the problem has been steadily reduced over the last several years. “The only thing going down is the money spent to prevent this epidemic.”

And all this is much worse when you remember that the distribution of wealth and power in the United States is also extremely pyramid-shaped. Those Mercer rankings are by and for the pampered business consultants Mercer sends around the globe. Imagine how much less happy and safe life is for the ordinary mortals seeking, rather than downsizing, jobs in the cities Mercer ranks!

And, as Business Week reports, like all other major diseases, obesity/Type II diabetes is tightly and inversely correlated with individuals’ social class situations. To wit:

7 of the 10 [US] states with the highest obesity rates [are] also in the top 10 for poverty rates.

Reality could hardly be simpler: Unrestrained corporate capitalism leads to market totalitarianism, a social order in which the priorities of the investing class invade and increasingly dominate all three spheres of modern life — work/economy, politics, and personal life/civil society.

The plain logical fact is that letting corporate investors select our macro-options for us means that we were destined to live as we now do in the United States, where cars, television, and highly processed foods and products literally dictate the ways we move, think and feel. It’s all as bad for our health and happiness as it is profitable to the Richistanis among/above us.

The Emperor has no clothes, and Adam Smith is deader than a doornail. So, crank up the band and let our ruling class mount the stand and wave as they accept the medal they deserve for the kind of competition they’ve run… it’s the dog-shit medal.

In “A Generational Challenge to Repower America,” Gore says:

In recent years, our politics has tended toward incremental proposals made up of small policies designed to avoid offending special interests, alternating with occasional baby steps in the right direction. Our democracy has become sclerotic at a time when these crises require boldness.

There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment.

The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more – if more should be required – the future of human civilization is at stake.

[W]hen we look at [our] seemingly intractable challenges at the same time, we can see the common thread running through them, deeply ironic in its simplicity: our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges – the economic, environmental and national security crises. We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change. But if we grab hold of that common thread and pull it hard, all of these complex problems begin to unravel and we will find that we’re holding the answer to all of them right in our hand.

The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels.

What if we could use fuels that are not expensive, don’t cause pollution and are abundantly available right here at home? We have such fuels. Scientists have confirmed that enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world’s energy needs for a full year. Tapping just a small portion of this solar energy could provide all of the electricity America uses. And enough wind power blows through the Midwest corridor every day to also meet 100 percent of US electricity demand. Geothermal energy, similarly, is capable of providing enormous supplies of electricity for America.

The quickest, cheapest and best way to start using all this renewable energy is in the production of electricity. In fact, we can start right now using solar power, wind power and geothermal power to make electricity for our homes and businesses.

But to make this exciting potential a reality, and truly solve our nation’s problems, we need a new start.

That’s why I’m proposing today a strategic initiative designed to free us from the crises that are holding us down and to regain control of our own destiny. It’s not the only thing we need to do. But this strategic challenge is the lynchpin of a bold new strategy needed to re-power America.

Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.

Bravo and amen, right?

Not right: Like the rest of the phalanx of overclass power-guardians to which he still belongs, Al Gore is unwilling to expose capitalism to any question. As a result, he actually does not mean what he says. Contrary to his own words, Gore remains utterly unwilling to permit consideration of the changes it would take to cure the disease he is trying to publicize.

Why do I say this? Where’s the proof?

Here it is:

We could further increase the value and efficiency of a Unified National Grid by helping our struggling auto giants switch to the manufacture of plug-in electric cars. An electric vehicle fleet would sharply reduce the cost of driving a car, reduce pollution, and increase the flexibility of our electricity grid….

If you want to know the truth about gasoline prices, here it is: the exploding demand for oil, especially in places like China, is overwhelming the rate of new discoveries by so much that oil prices are almost certain to continue upward over time no matter what the oil companies promise. And politicians cannot bring gasoline prices down in the short term.

However, there actually is one extremely effective way to bring the costs of driving a car way down within a few short years. The way to bring gas prices down is to end our dependence on oil and use the renewable sources that can give us the equivalent of $1 per gallon gasoline.

In other words, cars are non-negotiable in Gore’s plan, despite the fact that they account for 70 percent of “our” addiction to petroleum. In addition, via its encouragement of suburbs and its stimulation of greatly increased industrial production of many kinds, cars-first living also creates a huge further unnecessary drain on our existing electrical power grid. Making cars and suburbs ain’t cheap.

Yet, Gore naturally assumes, cars-first must continue.

This non-negotiability of automobiles exists, of course, because corporate capitalism itself is not negotiable, despite its blatant non-sustainability and consequent extreme danger to the human future. The simple fact is that without the preservation of the ultra-wasteful but ultra-profitable autos-über-alles way of living in the United States, corporate capitalism would implode. Ergo, not even Al Gore can summon the courage to say “cars must go.”

Instead of saying that, Gore says says in his speech that “people rightly complain about higher gas prices” — as if cars could ever be made ecologically and financially inexpensive.

But the basic facts are inherent in the technology and the system that forces it upon us: In order to serve as the primary mode of everyday transportation in any society, the automobile requires sprawling cities. Sprawling cities in turn dictate long commuting distances for vehicles carrying one or a few occupants. Long commuting distances require relatively high-speed travel, in order to get those occupants to their scattered, appointed places reasonably on time. High speed travel in cars for one or a few occupants requires comparatively large-sized, collision-worthy vehicles. (Glorified golf carts going 45 mph are super-extreme deathtraps.) Comparatively large-sized, collision-worthy vehicles are inherently heavy and massively fuel-inefficient.

All in all, it’s simply an inescapable fact that building cars to carry one or a few occupants and equipping those cars with the hundreds of pounds of comforts, amusements, and safety mechanisms that make the trips bearable is also super-wasteful of energy, albeit also super-profitable for investors. No amount of design or alternative fueling is going to change that.

Yet and still, capitalists can’t and (barring a popular uprising) won’t do without all this waste/profit.

The planet, meanwhile, can’t do with much more of it. Generating enough new electricity from wind and solar to make it all happen: a) is almost certainly impossible, and b) would eat up the entirety of the new infrastructure Gore is now proposing. Whether we burn oil to do it, or sacrifice our one-time shot at building a sustainable electric grid to it, perpetuating autos-über-alles for much longer will spell death to progressive human society.

Hence, we must transcend Al Gore and the masters he continues to serve. As Gore himself says:

If we keep going back to the same policies that have never ever worked in the past and have served only to produce the highest gasoline prices in history alongside the greatest oil company profits in history, nobody should be surprised if we get the same result over and over again. But the Congress may be poised to move in that direction anyway because some of them are being stampeded by lobbyists for special interests that know how to make the system work for them instead of the American people.

Or, properly stated:

If we keep going back to the same policies that have never ever worked in the past and have served only to produce the highest gasoline prices in history alongside the greatest oil company profits in history, nobody should be surprised if we get the same result over and over again. But the Congress will move in that direction anyway because some all of them are being stampeded by the capitalist class, who always make the system work for them instead of the American people.

If you doubt this, check out the latest dog-and-pony show conducted in the U.S. Congress: the June 23, 2008 House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing called “Energy Speculation: Is Greater Regulation Necessary to Stop Price Manipulation? – Part II.”

What did the two wings of the Business Party have to say in this bit of theater?

The R wing, mostly unabashed about its service to the overclass (major exception: its “social conservative” marketing operations targeting scared white commoners), admits “America [exactly what part of "America" we don't say, of course] is addicted to oil” while seeking to lay hands on more of the substance of choice: “We” need to drill more and prod “our” allies, like the gang-rape-victim-jailing Saudi “royal” family, to pump us more of the good stuff.

Then we’ll be OK, we’ll be OK, we’ll be OK…

See?

More interesting and, as always, much less honest is the D faction of the Business Party. What is its way of avoiding the Carmageddon issue on behalf of the choosing class?

Well, for starters, where would you guess, if the D Team really were an opposition party, the Chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce might come from? California? Seattle? Portland or Eugene, Oregon? Madison, Wisconsin? Or some other hotbed of ecology, right?

But from whence does the actually existing Energy Chair arise? Why, Detroit, of course!

And what does the Honorable Motor City representative have to say about why “America is addicted to oil”? It’s not really a problem of demand, of course:

The environmental community says the answer is to conserve energy, to change the way we live, work, and play.

Well, that’s:

a valid point.

But it isn’t any part of the business of Congress, since the structure of demand is just one of many:

long-term solutions that will likely take at least 10 years; they will do little to solve the immediate problem we face.

In reality, the urgent business of Congress, this fine D-bot Chair says, is not to raise the issue of why we’re addicts. No, it is to start by observing:

The Saudis note that oil supply-and-demand seem to be in balance and that there is no substantive basis for current prices.

Got that? “There is no substantive basis for current prices” of petroleum! We have no underlying problem!

So what is the trouble we face?

Even the Department of Energy’s own Energy Information Administration says that “the flow of investment money” has contributed to the spike in oil prices. Yet the Secretary of Energy dismisses speculation as a cause of spiking oil prices and the Treasury Secretary agrees, shrugging it off as a “tough period.” In short, real solutions from this Administration are harder to find than a $3 gallon of gas.

See? See? It’s just the dealers, man! They’re gouging us, man — totally harshing our buzz, man! We just need to get some new dealers, see! Help us rough up our dealers, OK, man?

Then we’ll be OK, we’ll be OK, we’ll be OK…

See?

Can you say “Carmageddon?”

I’m sorry, but that’s demagogic, misleading balderdash. The price of oil is but a symptom of the real problem, which is the intractable addiction of our corporate capitalist overclass to peddling automobiles. Corporate capitalism means autos-über-alles, which means we will remain chained to increasingly expensive petroleum, the supply of which has recently passed its peak.

It saddens me to see Nader failing to live up to what is perhaps the greatest challenge of our times. Just when we need his help in trying to open U.S. transportation policy to democratic scrutiny and control, he chooses instead to imply that, if we’d just picket a few bad apples, everything would return to the cheap-gas good old days.

Of course, this failure has deep roots in Nader’s work. Take the case of Unsafe at Any Speed, the book that launched him to his well-deserved fame.

The book starts with Nader spotting a telling contradiction:

For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people… Unlike aviation, marine, or rail transportation, the highway system can inflict tremendous casualties and property damage without in the least affecting the viability of the system. Plane crashes, for example, jeopardize the attraction of flying for potential passengers and therefore strike at the heart of the air transport economy… The situation is different on the roads.

Something quite deep must keep cars from being scandalized, right? After all, Nader observes, if one is objective about it, “[t]he automobile tragedy is one of the most serious of these man-made assaults on the human body.”

And at the outset of Unsafe, Nader seems poised to name and explain that deep something:

“A great problem of contemporary life is how to control the power of economic interests which ignore the harmful effects of their applied science and technology.”

What could “the power of economic interests” be other than corporate capitalism?

Yet, despite these bold opening statements, Unsafe at Any Speed never came close to connecting the required dots. After his introduction, Nader proceeded to present 298 pages of very detailed evidence that car-making corporations most definitely do not put human safety first in designing and selling their products. But, despite his own seeming recognition of the need to do so, nowhere in Unsafe does Nader relate the scandalous engineering decisions he documents to the ordinary business motives and imperatives of corporate investors. “Capitalism,” “class,” “investment,” “investors,” “profit,” “rich,” “wealthy” – none of these words appeared in the book’s index, and none were major conceptual elements of Nader’s renowned exposé.

Without a coherent explanation of corporate capitalism, however, Nader’s book, despite its shocking revelations, yielded a rather picayune understanding of both the depth of “the automobile tragedy” and the politics of its possible remedies.

Consider, for instance the way Nader finished this sentence:

“[T]he public has never been supplied the information nor offered the quality of competition to enable it to make effective demands through the marketplace and through government for…”

For… what? Nader did not call for a safe, non-polluting, and efficient transportation system. Instead, here’s all Nader put after that momentous “for”:

“a safe, non-polluting and efficient automobile that can be produced economically.”

Thus, the man who called autos-über-alles “one of the most serious of these man-made assaults on the human body” ended up limiting himself to asking for better cars!

But could any conceivable autos-über-alles system ever really be “safe, non-polluting, and efficient”? Are better cars or cheaper gas really enough to solve our mounting problems? Can anybody really understand “why the automobile has remained the only transportation vehicle to escape being called to meaningful public account” and why “America is addicted to oil” without understanding the capitalist interests and imperatives involved? I think not.

Ralph, with all due respect, it’s high time to move your thinking into the twenty-first century. We

The recent testimony of Big Oil executives is a classic case-in-point. Marketed to the public as a stern interrogation of those mainly responsible for the nation’s rapidly deepening energy crisis, the whole thing was utterly faux, a true dog-and-pony show.

Here’s why:

The real problem is much deeper than just the practices of the oil corporations. It is: a) Peak Oil, and b) the deep inability of our overclass even to admit the Peak Oil problem exists.

Exxon-Mobil, to take one major example, is one of the largest non-state oil producers in the world. It is a dominant force in the oil states that remain too weak and corrupt to nationalize their production schemes — in places like Indonesia and the Niger Delta countries, and in the United States, which, despite its long-lost self-sufficiency, remains a serious petroleum producer. In such abject places, E-M produces a large amount of crude oil, something like 3-4 million barrels a day.

Now, E-M is indeed a huge corporation that enjoys oligopoly power within its market. Hence, it will always engage in price gouging. Indeed, that’s one of the top reasons why all big businesses exist — to escape full-on price competition and to gouge whenever they can.

But despite the big oil corporations’ record profits, their pursuit of price gouging probably explains no more than 10 percent of the current price of gas at the pump. If the implied claim of Congressional (and other) demagogues — that it’s all price gouging, and nothing deeper — were true, then the record profits would be ten times what they actually are. If corporations could still get barrels of oil for $25, but sell gas to Americans for $4.00 a gallon, we’d be hearing about 380% or 3800%, not 38%.

In reality, below the real but thoroughly secondary problem of corporate price gouging, the fact remains that two much more fundamental things are quite real, no matter who is doing the drilling:

1. It is getting significantly harder to find new oil fields and keep existing ones going at present rates. The world’s remaining supply of in-the-ground petroleum is peaking, if not already declining.

2. Drilling for petroleum is itself extremely petroleum-intensive. You need lots of heavy machinery to drill and transport the product, and it also costs a great deal of energy to explore and test for new fields. E-M is not lying when it says its costs of production are rising quickly.

So, the whole focus on the oil companies, sick and brutal as they are, is simply a distraction.

We ought to form a National Energy Planning Administration that operates like the Pentagon. This new effort should include a new Manhattan Project working to coordinate the radical reconstruction of the nation’s transportation, residential, and production infrastructures so as to put energy conservation truly at the top of the agenda. It also ought to compete fiercely with Exxon Mobil and others in the production of energy, including a drive to scramble like hell to make and distribute as much wind, water, and solar technology as makes sense, before we run out of the inherited hydrocarbon inputs those things will require.

Of course, as things stand, none of this is going to reach the agenda, because it’s all a huge death knell for corporate capitalism, which cannot persist as a dominant force without the energy squandering automobiles-first arrangement we are now stuck with and forbidden to question. In the end, our problem is really cars and capitalism, not oil. That’s the secret to why this extreme global emergency remains “off-the-table,” and why our “leaders” are pointing their feigned anger at the icing rather than the cake. Like the idea that thoroughly money-centered, social-climbing CEOs are unaware of their own salaries, it’s a flimsy hoax.

So, what should we do? Well, as MLK said, privileged classes never surrender their privileges without strong resistance.

The starting point for strong resistance is seeing and telling the truth.

But Reverend Wright is not the only victim of the Obama bus-toss routine. Another major victim has been none other than Martin Luther King, Jr.

As I noted here last month, on the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination, Obama ended a generally picayune and misleading commemorative speech with this conclusion: “One of the forgotten aspects of Dr. King’s legacy is how he demanded personal responsibility as well as societal responsibility.”

This, of course, is standard code-talk for saying “Racism is over, so get off your asses, black people, and fuck you if you don’t.”

This is a blatantly wrong and anti-MLK thing to say, but, as my initial disgust wore off, I found myself wanting to return to the issue. What exactly did Dr. King have to say about personal responsibility?

To answer this question, you don’t have to look very hard. In fact, the topic didn’t just arise, but leaped up, in MLK’s very first major speech, which was about — dig it — BUSES!

Having just the night before been chosen to lead the newly-formed Montgomery Improvement Association, the 27-year-old MLK went to the Holt Street Church to explain to the overflow crowd of bus boycotters why Rosa Parks’ arrest a few days prior was a turning point.

King’s December 5, 1955 speech, as reported by Harvard Sitkoff in his marvelous new book, went like this:

Several hundred blacks crammed the sanctuary and the basement auditorium, while several thousand more lined the sidewalks surrounding the church, listening on loudspeakers to rousing renditions of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” to somber Scripture readings, and to pleas for financial support by numerous ministers.

Then an unassuming Martin King mounted the podium. Few in attendance had ever heard him speak, and the short, chubby preacher was hardly a commanding presence in the pulpit.

“We are here this evening for serious business,” he intoned slowly, “and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its means.” In his rich, deep voice, he calmly recalled the history of bus segregation and asked the black community to protest the arrest of Rosa Parks, “not one of the finest Negro citizens, but one of the finest citizens in Montgomery.”

Having captured his listeners with his deliberate enunciation, King quickened his cadence and wagged an admonishing finger. “You know, my friends, there comes a time, there comes a time when people get tired-tired of being segregated and humiliated, tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” Loud applause and shouts forced King to pause, then to pause further as the throng outside added a rising, clamorous approval.

The volume and pitch of the preacher’s words rose. “There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an alpine November.” A wave of clapping hands and stomping feet shook the church and again made King wait.

“We had no alternative but to protest.” King pointed again for emphasis. “For many years, we have shown amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.”

King’s baritone resounded: “The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.” Looking down at his hands on the sides of the lectern, he contrasted that right with those “incarcerated behind the iron curtain of a communistic nation,” and with the violence and lawlessness of white supremacists who defied the Constitution, stirring more shouts of “Keep talking” that momentarily drowned him out.”If we are wrong,” King contended, “the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong!” Straining to be heard above the din, he thundered, “If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer and never came down to earth! If we are wrong, justice is a lie.”

The preacher waited. “And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight, until justice runs down like water and righteousness as a mighty stream!” The rafters shook. To still the crescendo of cheers, King held both palms aloft and bowed his head. “If you will protest courageously and yet with dignity and Christian love”-his voice lowered-”when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say: ‘There lived a race of people, black people, fleecy locks and black complexion, of people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. And thereby they injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’ [THAT'S RIGHT!] [YESSIR.] [SPEAK. SPEAK!]

“This is our challenge,” he concluded with his head aloft, “and our overwhelming responsibility.”

The rhythm of the words, the power of the rising and falling voice, the bold vision of triumphing over wrong stunned the crowd into sudden silence as King abruptly stepped away from the pulpit, trembling from his effort. Then, rising as one, the congregation shouted its resolve to continue the boycott.

As they say in kindergarten, the wheels of the bus go round and round. Alas, it’s always the wrong people who feel the kiss of the tread…

Here’s Obama’s general explanation:

The struggle for economic justice remains an unfinished part of the King legacy because the dream is still out of reach for too many Americans.

So, in other words, Obama’s version boils down to this: Once you’ve reached “economic justice” for yourself, you’ve “reached” MLK’s dream.

What misrepresentation, in both directions. Not only does Mr. Obama shrink Dr. King’s inherently collective dream of a fair, egalitarian, democratic, and peaceful society down to the size of a raisin the sun, but, by making the “dream” about mere personal economic comfort, he once again does exactly what his massively over-rated “race speech” did — it lets the smug and the comfortable off the hook for their own share of our collective situation. “I’m comfortable, so Dr. King’s dream is real for me!”

At best, this reduces MLK’s dream (which was actually a challenge, if you have an ear and a brain) to the long-running, insipid, selfish “American dream” propaganda line. That particular dogma has always been designed to get people to take their suburban possessions as a reason to abandon all but the most stupid and apathetic form of ethics and politics.

But, wait. As always with the “major” candibots, it gets worse. Not only does Obama want to shrink MLK down to his own puny scale, but he blatantly tries to get you to believe that his own past, present, and future sell-outs are somehow compatible with anything MLK ever said or did. King called for democratic socialism and honest racial reconciliation in America. Meanwhile, here’s what Obama would have you think he called for:

[T]hat we’ll be able to find a job that pays a decent wage, that there will be affordable health care when we get sick, that we’ll be able to send our kids to college, and that after a lifetime of hard work, we’ll be able to retire with security.

“Affordable” health care? Seriously? No wonder Obama feels compelled to call MLK’s prescriptions — demands for a society-wide “radical redistribution of economic power” and genuine, practical repair of the crushing damages of racial slavery and Jim Crow — “modest dreams.”

But, wait. It gets even worse than this! It couldn’t possibly be a speech by an aspiring “mainstream” politician without this steaming pile of de rigeur excrement, could it?:

While Obama talked about increasing the number of police on the streets, expanding after-school and other programs and rebuilding the economy to give young people alternatives to crime and hope for the future, he also told the public that government can’t do everything.

“Men, you have to take care of your children,” he said, noting that his own father left him and his mother when he was two.

Echoing an issue that former Vice President Dan Quayle was ridiculed for when he raised it in the early 1990s, Obama said that parents must marry.

Here, the words won Obama a standing ovation.

“One of the forgotten aspects of Dr. King’s legacy is how he demanded personal responsibility as well as societal responsibility,” Obama said.

From the mountaintop to the toilet bowl…

Turns out “Dr.” Jarvik — who looks every inch like a marathon-running vegan — probably didn’t start taking the Lipitor he says in his ads that he’s been personally using thankfully “as a doctor, and a dad” until after he started shilling for the Pfizer corporation, Lipitor’s peddler.

This, of course, raises the obvious follow-up question about whether Jarvik has actually ingested the pills or merely flushed them down his heated, gold-plated crapper.

But whatever the details of these two huge, well-researched medi-frauds may prove be, the most important points are certain to go unmentioned. Among these are:

1) The human meaning of the fact that there was $4.8 billion spent on U.S. drug advertising last year. That sum is greater than the GDPs of each of the Earth’s 45 poorest countries. And $4.8 billion is only the ADVERTISING number, meaning it’s only the tip of the iceberg. As is known by those who take the trouble to comprehend what corporate marketing is and how it works, advertising is merely the endpoint of the marketing process. Before it comes targeting, marketing research, and “product management.” Those processes are much more expensive than even advertising, which, per minute, is by far the most lavishly-funded form of video and pictorial drama, Hollywood blockbusters included.

2) The amount of fraud and waste in the capitalist medical-industrial complex. This cholesterol fracas suggests the share of naked snake-oiling going on is far bigger than even most single-payer advocates have suggested. How affordable could we make single-payer if we also ended these criminal schemes?

3) The profound irrationality of the corporate capitalist health destruction/care process. The amounts big business investors spend on drug marketing are beyond dwarfed by the megabucks they allocate to selling fast food, junk food, television-watching, and automobile-owning/driving. It’s the perfect racket: With one hand, you create the epidemic dangers; with the other, you profitably throw (often fake) pills at the symptoms. It is what Joseph Schumpeter famously called “creative destruction” — but the entity involved in the process is none other than the supposedly (and actually) sacred human life/body. Can you say “blasphemy”?

Peak Oil, in other words, is now beginning to be publicly — albeit only in semi-insider fora such as the Detroit Motor Show — acknowledged as an existing reality by the highest planners in the auto-industrial complex.

Undoubtedly, this is part of a larger plan to begin incorporating the belated admission into corporate marketing and PR campaigns.

Given the genuinely radical and dangerous implications of Peak Oil for said industrial complex and the overall corporate capitalist system, you can bet your bottom dollar that extremely great care and generous funding are going to be devoted to this emerging spin game. Mishandling it (or waiting much longer to launch it) could lead to — horror of all horrors! — public comprehension of the elementary facts and the attending suicidal stupidity of trying to perpetuate the inherently wasteful and dangerous practice of using private cars as the main mode of daily personal transport. The bosses simply must get their story down and out before Joe and Jane Sixpack start to realize that the price of gas is not rising because of OPEC or even Exxon-Mobil, but because of the long-denied limits of Mother Earth.

Henceforth, all corporate (and, hence, also all corporate-political/Republican-Democratic/”bipartisan”) efforts will be devoted to stymieing, short-circuiting, and continually massaging such public awareness.

This is why I find the following additional recent comment by another high GM officer (I told you this is a planned managerial transition here) to be even more newsworthy than Mr. Wagoner’s (perfect name, no?) commencement of overclass admission of Peak Oil:

Senior GM executive and engineer Denny Mooney said: “We need a range of alternatives and ethanol is a step that will get us to the electric car.

“Once we get to the electric car, we can then make truly big gains with the environment by improving how the electricity is generated,’ Mr Mooney, who returned to Detroit last year, said.

Now, this tells you precisely what you need to know: “Once we get to the electric car” — then and only then — we can turn to talking about our basic energy situation

In other words, the very urgently needed democratic discussion of the Earth’s finite energy supply will be permitted only after the reign of the automobile is reconfigured so as to make it a non-debatable, already-on-the-ground premise for such discussion. Spending on cars a gigantic share of whatever (certainly smaller and probably progressively declining) energy supplies we can muster from here on out, you see, will simply be dictated to us by our glorious “free market” “entrepreneurs.” Rest assured: Open choices on this ordering of priorities as between profits and the possibility of continuing to build decent, sustainable human societies can be neither permitted nor even hinted at. And, if the overclass gets its way, they will not.

None of this, of course, means that investors’ dictated arrangement will be practicable or sustainable. On the contrary, hindsight now suggests very strongly that the construction of automobiles-über-alles in America has always been a the prelude to a disaster. From the vantage point of thermodyamics (a.k.a. the laws of physics), the hope for its permanent existence now reveals itself, despite the huge importance of this delusion to the powers-that-be, to have been a blatant pipe-dream. As such, the longer we permit its thoroughly addicted primary beneficiaries to continue to impose it upon us, the smaller will grow our chances of snatching victory from the jaws of onrushing socio-ecological catastrophe.

And this insane insistence on cars-first is not just a conspiracy. It is built into corporate capitalism itself. The horseless carriage is the only horse our investing class can permit us to choose, barring their massively unlikely voluntary renunciation of the powers and privileges to which they are accustomed. In order to sustain the economic arrangements from which they draw their cash flows, the immense, but exquisitely profitable waste comes with the reign of cars is quite literally necessary. No other mode of transport could hope to replace its money-making magic, and the removal of the reign would cause intractable national and global Great Depressions. Hence, to the Richistanis who run the nation and the world, genuine economy, decency, and human survival can never be more that the cart behind their horseless carriage. That horseless contraption, itself a cart behind the rule of Money, is beyond stubborn. Whether we ever start publicly seeing this or not, it is galloping us all straight over the abyss.