The power of advertising

Where would modern society be without advertising? Individual advertisers might think they are just trying to sell a particular product but advertising as a whole sells us an entire lifestyle. If it weren't for advertising the whole of society would be quite different. The economy, for instance, would be plunged into a crisis without the adverts and all the publicity that fuel our desire for limitless consumption.

As John Berger observed in his book "Ways of Seeing", all advertising conveys the same simple message: my life will be richer, more fulfilling once I make the next crucial purchase. Adverts persuade us with their images of others who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The purpose is to make me marginally dissatisfied with my life - not with the life of society, just with my individual life. I am supposed to imagine myself transformed after the purchase into an object of envy for others - an envy which will then give me back my love of myself.

The prevalence of this social envy is a necessary condition if advertising is to have any hold on us whatsoever. Only if we have got into the habit of comparing ourselves with others and finding ourselves lacking, will we fall prey to the power of advertising.

While fanning the flames of our envy advertising keeps us preoccupied with ourselves, our houses, our cars, our holidays and the endless line of new electronic gadgets that suddenly seem indispensable. Tensions in society and problems in the rest of the world, if attended to at all, quickly fade into the background. They are certainly nothing to get particularly worked up about. After all, there can't be any winners without losers. That's life.

Furthermore, together with the holy rituals of shopping (people get dressed up now to go shopping in the way that they only used to get dressed up when they went to church) advertising is one of the ways in which we are quietly persuaded that our society is the best of all possible worlds (or at least so good that it is not worth campaigning for any fundamental changes). Adverts implicitly tell us to get off our fat arses and do some shopping, and the idea that the shelves of the shops are full of the latest products is indeed one of the most effective ways in which contemporary society gets its legitimation.

People like John Berger are also not entirely over the moon about the impact that advertising and shopping have on the value of political freedom. Freedom is supposed to be the highest value in our societies, but in the age of the consumer that freedom is all too readily identified with the freedom to choose between Pepsi and Coke, McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken, Toyota and Ford, and people lose interest in the various political freedoms and our ability to participate in the process of exercising democratic control. There are lots of criticisms that could be made of modern democracies, but no one is going to pay much attention to them if they are more interested in becoming happy shoppers.

In all these ways advertising helps to keep the whole socio-economic show on the road. We are rarely aware of this because we are too busy working to earn the money to pay for the objects of our dreams - dreams that play on the screen of our mind like the little clips of film we see in the commercial breaks.

The next north-European ice age

There are still a few people in northern Europe who think that global warming might not be such a bad thing. In Britain, where summer can sometimes seem to last little more than a few weeks, many would welcome the idea of it getting a bit hotter.

Unfortunately things are not so simple. Global warming doesn't just mean that the world will slowly get warmer. Paradoxically, it could cause certain areas to get colder - a lot colder. The latest predictions are that northern Europe could even be plunged into an ice age. While areas of south-eastern Europe, such as Greece, would continue to get hotter and drier, Britain could find itself, in the winter months at least, surrounded by sea ice.

The reason for this concerns the Greenland ice sheet. This is one of the biggest expanses of ice in the world - around 1,500km long and 600km wide. It is so big that if it all melted sea levels would rise by 7 metres. Due to rising emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels, this ice sheet is melting at an alarming rate. But how could the melting of the Greenland ice sheet threaten to plunge northern Europe into a new ice age?

The link in the chain of events is what some call the Gulf Stream and others call the Atlantic Conveyor. This is the stream of warm water that comes up from central America and flows across the Atlantic to northern Europe. It is this huge mass of warm water which accounts for the relatively high temperatures enjoyed by Britain, for instance, compared with parts of Canada and Russia which are equally far north of the equator. Warm water is conveyed across to Europe near the surface of the Atlantic, and at its northernmost point it cools and sinks because the water from the tropics has a higher salt content, making it denser and so heavier than the water near the arctic. The cold, dense water then flows south close to the ocean floor, back towards central and south America to complete the cycle.

Scientists are beginning to make bleak predictions of an impending ice age in the northern hemisphere because they have observed that the water flowing from the melting Greenland ice sheet is flowing into the path of the Gulf Stream. The water from the melted ice will reduce the density of the water in the Gulf Stream, stopping the water sinking in the north, thereby cutting off the deep southerly current, which, in turn, will cut off the northerly flow of warmer water. At that point the seas around Britain will begin to freeze.

Political Corruption

Political corruption refers to the abuse of power by government leaders who exploit their positions of public trust for financial gain, personal ambition, or immoral purposes. In the United States, political corruption has been an issue of public concern since the revolutionary period when colonists rebelled against what they perceived to be a corrupt British government intent on depriving Americans of their rights. To guard against corruption, the Constitution of the United States contains numerous checks and balances and provides for impeachment of federal officers.

More often than not, political corruption in the United States has resulted from “influence peddling,” which refers to the “buying” of influence over elected officials (usually through campaign contributions) in order to affect the content of legislation or government policies. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries (what historians refer to as the Progressive Era), widespread political corruption inspired a broad-based reform movement that produced enduring changes in U.S. political life. The major reforms of that era sought to eliminate the tremendous political influence enjoyed by wealthy individuals, especially owners and managers of large corporations. For example, many states instituted methods of direct democracy such as the initiative, referendum, and recall in an effort to make political leaders accountable to voters. Civil service procedures were implemented in the federal government to reduce the control of political parties over government agencies. In addition, state and federal legislation was passed to limit corporate influence in electoral politics. However, this problem proved difficult to remedy.

Although Congress passed the Tillman Act in 1907 to prohibit corporations from making direct contributions to candidates running for federal office, not a single conviction for illegal corporate contributions had been obtained by 1971, when the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) was passed. The Federal Corrupt Practices Act of 1925 had imposed additional constraints on labor and business campaign contributions but was filled with loopholes and exceptions, thus proving to be equally ineffective.

Until the 1970s, federal election laws were so vague and enforcement so lax that there was usually little difficulty in hiding campaign contributions. The FECA, as amended in 1974 and 1976, changed this state of affairs by requiring strict financial disclosure requirements for candidates in federal elections and by imposing limits on the amount that individuals, political parties, and political action committees (PACs) could contribute to a candidate. Although FECA prohibited corporations and unions from giving directly to candidates in federal elections, it did not prevent corporate and union PACs from making such contributions.

In 1978 the Federal Election Commission issued a ruling that left a loophole for “soft money,” which refers to (unlimited) contributions that individuals or organizations can make to state and local political parties (technically, for various nonfederal party expenditures), that can be spent by the parties to help finance elections of candidates in federal elections, a result that is clearly inconsistent with the intent of FECA’s contribution limitations. Many political analysts and activists believe that “soft money” corrupts the political process by allowing special interests to spend huge sums to influence elections and “buy” politicians. As of 2000, Congress had not remedied this problem despite the fact that many of its members had been elected on the promise of reforming campaign finance laws.

That ages-old scam, the British Monarchy.

The queen, her royal highness, is a little high after ingesting a gin tonic at a reception amid her fawning sycophants. What is she thinking? “I must appear royal. I must. I’m stoned.”

What does she think when she goes to the toilet? “I’m royal, and I’m on the toilet. I’m descended from heaven.”

C’mon!

This little island country whose inhabitants used to paint themselves blue and lived in caves eating rotten boar entrails at a time when street lighting had been invented and libraries of higher learning opened in Babylon.

This little realm that managed to subdue what were termed savages with dark skins all around the world because it built a navy, represented by people who have so little sunlight in their own country and whose skin is so white that it practically glows in the dark.

They committed the biggest rip-off in world history.

The Brits have so much to be proud of with their monarchy. Henry’s chopping the heads off seven wives, another king murdering the child twins in the Tower of London, British soldiers massacring stone-age Zulu warriors with Henry repeating rifles, their compatriots enslaving the entire continent of India, which again was a civilized society long before England’s claims to be.

Incest, stealing, bigamy, adultery, robbing, murdering, with a flag and a Bible at close hand. Right up to our own time. This realm, this England!

The savages they once ruled across the globe were often horrified at the brutality of the British, one savage to another. It’s a fact, Hitler admired and respected the British Empire, as kindred spirits, and hoped they’d come to their senses, and stop fighting him, and join his world crusade.

The list of English misdeeds goes on. Using China as an opium den.

Murdering and starving millions of Irish during the potato famine, and laughing about it.

The Brits, the people, seem proud of this history for some reason, as though because of Shakespeare alone, the Union Jack represents some kind of enlightenment.

Here comes the queen. Yell “God save the queen! Maybe it should be “God damn the queen!”

See how daintily the queen extends her hand, displaying her jewels (stolen from the former Ceylon and other places). Her consort, the tall, eagle-looking Prince Philip, descended from German warlords, the people who brought you the Holocaust, changed his German name to a more English sounding one. He looks dashing, superior.

The British at one point literally ripped the gold band off the top of the Parthenon in Athens and looted it back to England. A pack of ocean-going thieves. How did they do it? How did they at one time rule and steal the world?

They built a navy with big guns. They could sail around the world terrorizing natives who had no navy, much as the US today fights only small, impoverished countries that have no air force or navy, no way of fighting back except with their own bodies. We pound ourselves on the chest that we’re the victors. We feel no shame fighting a country much smaller and poorer than we are.

Today, the British island is only a shell of what it once was, with a GNP lower than that of Los Angeles, and a lackey to the United States. Every time the US enters a war, England obediently follows along.

But it still has its queen, who exercises no real power of command, but is a figurehead, riding in her carriage, waving her little bejeweled hand next to her womanizing inbred son with his oddly shaped, duck-like head, and her grandson in his Nazi uniform off at some punk party. She still has her jewels.

People still bow and scrape. Why? The monarchies of Russia and Germany were disposed of long ago.

The answer is this. The Brits are the only imperialists who became expert, developed it to a fine art, that as their own private nigger, you were lucky to be under their sway. They told you how wonderful you were, even though it was implied that you were beneath them. They learned never to tell you this directly to your face, that you were less. But they acted haughty, above it all.

You were lucky to be their personal underling. You knew it too.

The Germans. They used to be too brutal. They’d tell you right to your face they were better than you. Then they’d take a whip to you, if you were as the English like to put it, a “bloody savage.”

The Brits, they didn’t make the mistake the Germans did, being overbearing to the point of unbearable. They’d speak in that lilting poetic tone they have, and talk about you being part of a “commonwealth.”

See how they use the word “commonwealth,” like you as a bloody savage were sharing in it, the wealth, when in fact you weren’t. They were stripping your poor country raw and shipping everything of value back to England. Commonwealth was just pure theft.

They treated you as though you were lucky to have them as overlords, as though it was some kind of higher state than your own miserable wretch situation, like you couldn’t take care of yourself because you weren’t intelligent enough. You were childlike.

You needed the guidance of the British. It was as if you were almost, not quite, but almost, one of them.

Millions of people bought into this. But then if you objected, they’d take a whip to you, and throw you in jail, or simply murder you, if you were as they put it, a “bloody savage” living on an easily conquered tiny exotic island.

The British are a little more circumspect today, but no less arrogant when it comes to their royalty.

Why are Americans so impressed with the English monarchy, instead of laughing at it?

Because, despite our power, despite that fact that we rule the world as a colossus, we’re still (to the English, and to ourselves) a bunch of ignorant, white trash hillbillies, or niggers, impressed by the mere trappings of power. For all our imagined sophistication, we know this to be true, that they’re better. This is what we still think, many of us, in the recesses of our subconscious. In a computer world, it’s still gold, jewels, crowns, platinum dinner plates, and purple embossed toilet paper that matter.

And glamour. And fancy cars. It’s things. They have a lot of things. Royal things.

In other words, it’s still a case of, if you give the natives trinkets, or if you have them or wear them yourself, it makes the ignorant natives happy.

To the English, we’re still a bunch of nose picking, egg suckin,’ ass-scratchin,’ belching, farting ignorant low-rent hay kicking village idiots who better bow and scrape in the presence of the queen…..or else.

“Your majesty.”

It’s the same with the Pope in the Vatican. Gold. Jewels. In the name of religion. Stolen from vulnerable people all over the world over the ages.

It all sounds so lovely. This little nondescript woman descended from God. Did God put the crown on her head? No. The murder of people put that crown there. As long as there are poor darkies or white trash hillbillies willing to bow, where the queen can lord it, from those wanting to be lorded, the English monarchy will live on.

A Brit reading this might say, “how dare you say that?”My answer would be, it’s easy, it’s easy, it’s so easy, to dare.