One things associated with GE’s tax cheat news is the corporate giants’ p.r. spamming of YouTube, via its various loyal employees.
Obviously, General Electric isn’t the only big US business to ever try this.
UPS, for example, spammed YouTube with videos of randomly chosen people doing karaoke versions of its “That’s Logistics” tune. Advertised as a fun contest, these started showing up right after al Qaeda sent printer bombs through UPS and FedEx offices in Yemen.
The attempt seemed designed to distract people from much more frequently seen news on the UPS-flown bomb packages.
Whatever their inspiration, they were unsuccessful, for easily explained reasons. They were horrible. Most of the people in them could neither sing nor hold the rhythm of the tune.
In a similar vein is GE’s current line dance contest.
It’s possible GE instigated this as a bit of innocent fun built off Alan Jackson’s “Good Time” tune.
The more cynical reading is the company knew the New York Times was readying a piece on its tax avoidance.
And knowing well what the impact of it would be on user-created media content, it mobilized one preemptive counter p.r. effort encouraging employees to make their own line dance commercials and upload them as (1), examples of all the corporate happiness associated with GE, and (2), as video spam that might soak up poorly crafted search terms on the company.
The only problem with the plan is that all of the employee line dance commercials really suck. And that wouldn’t matter if people didn’t have the tax avoidance news always in memory when viewing such things.
However, they do. And so everyone comes off as astro-turfing lickspittles — whether they are or not — dancing out their joy for a giant firm that, at least in the short term, is thought of as a primary example of corporate evil.
Here’s what always happens when a big corporate shibboleth has really bad publicity.
About a week later a couple reporters from the ruling class will publish something contradictory. It was all a product of crappy reporting, they’ll indicate. And this will be used to stir the pot, get lots of eyeballs, and work toward guaranteeing that once again nothing can be done about the deeply immoral in corporate America.
Today it was the Huffpost, posting “the truth about ge’s taxes.”
The New York Times had it all wrong, said the reporters — Jeff Gerth (who used to be a top investigative reporter at the New York Times but who was now publishing this through the much lesser auspices of ProPublica) and Allen Sloan of Fortune.
Here are the best lines:
Why should you care about this? Because we all have a stake in how this plays out. Thanks to the uproar over GE, we now risk ending up with legislation that targets GE but produces all sorts of unintended consequences. Public rage can make for bad law.
Public rage can make for bad law. Savor the hypocrisy of it. Public rage is perfectly OK in the guise of the Tea Party and the November elections sweeping into power extremists who are now in full on war against the working class. But public rage against GE is bad. Public rage over layoffs (front page headline in today’s LA Times: Teacher hiring hard because of layoffs) and deprivation for everyone but corporate America, which deserves more bribing, is bad.
Read the entire thing — I’m not providing a link, it’s easy enough to find through Google — and you have the case of reporters who were also working the story and are now doing their best to grab their pieces of glory.
Except it won’t move the down marker. I’ve found that after a promising launch, ProPublica sucks. It’s a place where famous reporters who’ve been encouraged to move on or jumped a sinking ship go to die.
Anyway, even with Huffington Post’s eyeballs, the venue doesn’t have the muscle to change the argument.
Plus, it’s a bad pairing. You can’t be the front for the intellectual hoity-toity wealthy liberal and then expect some relatively brief piece defending General Electric to make people wince.
The rage over General Electric, from where I stand, can’t hurt.
Realistically, nothing much moves the corporate masters of universe of the US, anyway, not even tens of thousands of people, say, protesting in Madison, Wisconsin.
They know they can just shovel more money into political opposition work and lobbying and wait people out.
For example, Jeff Immelt isn’t going to leave Obama’s economy and jobs advisory board over any amount of shame heaped on him by current events. Forced to show up in the news, he tells people the equivalent of “Let them eat cake.”
And the President isn’t going to do anything unless it becomes so hot he’s forced to act. Jeff Immelt will need a solid boot in the pants and a firm “Good riddance!” to guarantee he’s put out the door. I won’t be surprised if our President never dumps him.
From ImmeltMustGo today:
It’s wrong for GE C.E.O. Jeffrey Immelt to get a 100 percent raise while asking middle-class workers to take major pay cuts — and all while leading President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
Because we united on this issue, ABC and NBC did national television news reports on our push to boot Immelt. Mainstream news outlets like the Washington Post, The Nation, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Reuters syndication wrote stories. Insider Washington publications, like Politico, National Journal, Roll Call, and The Hill, reported on it, too.
Immelt himself was even forced to respond to us in an interview.
To get this much attention in corporate media over an issue of corporate influence in politics is a big moral victory by itself. But we’re not going for a moral victory. We’re going for an actual victory …
[The 200,000 who signed the ImmeltMustGo petition] got us a bunch of attention. But to get a victory, we’re going to need even more.
Surprisingly, over the weekend a much larger number of people than expected tuned into “GE and Jeff (Taxavoidination).”
Click the “watch on YouTube” button to see the view count.
The masters of corporate America shipped all non-military domestic manufacturing overseas. The only middle class making-stuff jobs remaining are those in artisan work for the plutocracy and the corporate socialism of arms manufacturing, still being underwritten by the people who’s jobs and livelihoods are being destroyed.
As for the rest of America’s work, the Internet has destroyed or grossly undervalued much of it.
However, readers will have noticed by now that the Internet’s work of crushing record companies, video production, newspapers, magazines and what not did not spark an alternative revolution in which the jobs and opportunity just transferred to others more intellectually lively.
What has actually happened is a great condensation. The wonderful magic of Google and social networking didn’t actually empower lots and lots of little guys. It just empowered the same old giants who dominate the top of search engines or who attract the most celebrity groupies on Twitter. Occasionally there has been room made for newcomers, just like the old-comers, except cheaper — like Huffington Post.
The winners, or the biggest, get the majority of the spoil ever more efficiently thanks to Google and the habits of human beings which predicate anything past results halfway down the first returned search page don’t count. Alternatively, whoever has the most followers or friends, just like back in high school, wins everything.
Tom Tomorrow made a comment on this last week on his shift of position to the DailyKos.
Too many papers have decided that they no longer have any use for this art form which grew in their stead, adapting itself entirely to their rhythms, and as that market contracts, there’s been no simultaneous expansion online. The niche that editorial cartoons filled in newspapers is almost entirely occupied by Daily Show clips online. Why do so few political sites feature political cartoons? Why did the Huffington Post, with verticals devoted to almost any topic you can imagine, never launch a comics section?
I’ve got a chance to help counter that trend, in some small way..
The biggest names, in this case he has to mean Jon Stewart, get all the spoil from a landscape that should have supported a lot more.
Jon Stewart was great two years ago. Now that you don’t even need a tv to see him several times a day — that it’s impossible to miss him for even a couple hours while randomly browsing — he’s sickening.
Boy it’s great that Jon Stewart’s omnipresence has shoved everyone else into the dumper, isn’t it? It’s just right and proper that one person in a country of 300 million should get absolutely all the spoil in his niche.
Anyway, back to the news story on all the businesses to leave — everything — because it’s all dying here:
Most of the industries share common reasons for their bleak prospects, including damage from advances in technology, industry stagnation and external competition, he says.
Because labor costs and regulations are high domestically, many manufacturers send their production to foreign countries. Downward price pressure from domestic wholesalers, retailers and consumers forces U.S. producers to cut costs to offer a competitive price. Many firms that cannot outsource have a difficult time competing …
Video post-production is another industry done in by the do-it-yourself opportunities presented by new technology. Once requiring specialized expertise, many of these tasks can be done on even an average home computer.
Companies such as Technicolor have suffered as a result. Industrywide, revenues have fallen 25% in the past decade to just north of $4 billion, with another 11% decrease predicted by 2016.
In terms of video post-production, here’s how technology worked. Exactly the same as it did for making music.
The software for doing it got into everyone’s hands. Every residence can make its own videos.
Like “Taxavoidination,” done here in Pasadena on the desktop.
In the old days, I would never have been available to afford video production for DD & the Highway Kings. That was for people with major record label contracts. But those contracts and businesses supported jobs.
Even if you cursed the structure and whims of the recording industry, it still furnished middle class work. Lots of upper class, too.
Now everyone, like me, can make a video and upload it to YouTube.
But “everyone” still can’t make any money from that.
A very smaller number of people, still associated with very big entertainment business, can. And people at YouTube, because they work for a company that provides the only pipe through which everything flows, can make money, not only from the eyes added from everyone who can’t make money on it, but also from the smaller number of very big players from the old industry. Those who’ve survived the great culling.
Case in point, YouTube pimping dogshit ‘promoted’ video at the tops of your vid’s ‘suggestions’ column. With “Taxavoidination” it’s been “What’s ‘Lemonade Mouth’?” by one of the old giants, Disney.
It’s enraging.
So there has been a drastic net loss in jobs and a concentration of riches in a smaller number of players, some of them only slightly different, thanks to the Internet and “technological” revolutions.
See it now before it gets finked on and the corporate police come to drag it away. On YouTube, corporate America likes all the little future lickspittles who give big wet smooches to the television advertising. The other way round, not so much.
Some will have noted that last night, on MSNBC, General Electric changed its corporate advertising, rolling out a different commercial without the country line dance, one retooled to emphasize it makes stuff — like one big jet engine.
It’s everything that’s wrong with corporate power today: News broke last week that General Electric, America’s largest corporation, made $14,200,000,000 in profits last year and paid $0 in taxes — that’s right, zero dollars in taxes. At the same time, C.E.O. Jeffrey Immelt saw his compensation double. Now I hear that GE is expected to ask 15,000 of their unionized workers to make major concessions in wages and benefits.
But what really adds insult to injury is the prestigious and influential position Jeffrey Immelt holds as chair of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. That’s wrong. Someone like Immelt, who has helped his company evade taxes on its huge profits — and is now looking to workers to take major pay cuts after his compensation was doubled — should not lead the administration’s effort to create jobs.
We cannot stand by and watch while we are led down this road. Mr. Immelt must step down from the president’s jobs panel — and if he won’t, President Obama needs to ask for his resignation.
Help us build public pressure on GE’s Jeffrey Immelt to step down or President Obama to get his resignation from the jobs council: Sign our petition at www.ImmeltMustGo.com today!
How can someone like Immelt be given the responsibility of heading a jobs creation task force when his company has been creating more jobs overseas while reducing its American workforce? And under Immelt’s direction, GE spends hundreds of millions of dollars hiring lawyers and lobbyists to evade taxes. All of this at a time when Fox News and the right wing are demonizing public workers, like teachers, as the cause of our economic problems.
Good news, lads! Good news! There’s another Sarah Palin, only better and getting bigger.
Michele Bachmann shows up 34 seconds in. Wait for the scene where her campaign sign is upside-down in the background. (Incidentally, the stitch Nazi now seems benign compared to what was elected in Michigan and Wisconsin.)
If I were to do it over, I’d remove the Hitler parody from Downfall. The President isn’t hopeless. Instead, I’m convinced he has a plan.
Mr. Obama knows the Republicans don’t have a candidate who can beat him in 2012. He sees the television news channels and all the pundits enthusing over a Bachmann run and knows the GOP is so dominated by telegenically insane people like her it can’t possibly win a presidential election.
So the President doesn’t have to lead or take chances. He can continue to allow the country to go to hell, to ignore Wall Street looting, to allow the jobless to languish and be forgotten. He can decline to get involved in fighting for unions in the heartland. He can even institute cuts to domestic programs that result in more people being put out of work because he’s adopted a “Firings Will Continue Until Unemployment Goes Down” strategy to co-opt Republicans.
Obama can go to community colleges and make empty talk about winning the future, travel to South America to cement more off-shoring and arms deals for what’s left of US manufacturing. And he can start a pointless war which, unless I’m missing something, will peter out as soon as the US military stops most close air support aimed at destroying Moe’s heavy weapons. Which will leave a lot of NATO overflying of two new failed states, one with Moe in his bunker plus oil, one without those two things, maybe like a big version of Djibouti.
It will continue the war boom in the US. There is no political cost to it.
And he’ll still get elected because the Michelle Bachmanns will move the GOP standard for a presidential candidate into ever more fearful and atrocious territory.
However, Mr. Obama’s plan won’t be free for the Democratic Party. By the time the election rolls around, many of us will again be so alienated and depressed by his inaction and expedient policy that the country will be faced with what happened as chronicled above.
The potential exists for the Tea Party to take the Senate and even more of the House away from the Dems when the base, dispirited, stays home or becomes unenthusiastic about holding its collective nose and voting for people simply because one party is ragingly nuts and inhumane, the other not so.
The popular uprisings in Wisconsin and Michigan aren’t guarantees the tide will turn in Dem favor, particularly now that they’ve been moved off most of the news.
Not worth clicking the link explaining only once again why I have only minimal use for Twitter and vice versa. I remain surprised I even have one follower.
This is worth a listen, though. Good version of a good tune.
Facebook = functionally similar. Forced jollity, optimism and glad-handing or you’ve no ‘friends’ and no one to ‘like’ your posts.
Related:
Norman Vincent Peale-ism by way of Colin Powell:
Don’t follow anyone who’s not going anywhere.
With some people you spend an evening: with others you invest it.
Be careful where you stop to inquire for directions along the road of life.
Wise is the person who fortifies his life with the right friendships.
If you run with wolves, you will learn how to howl. But, if you associate with eagles, you will learn how to soar to great heights.
From a bit review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sidedhere.
Select posts from here are syndicated at GlobalSecurity.Org’s SITREP here.
Originally, as part of that, the idea was to give the blog contributors Adsense. The term “revenue sharing” was used.
In practice, “revenue sharing” with anything Google means Google gets all the share.
That’s because AdSense, as a model, makes no sense for individual writers. Even if they plaster it all over their pages.
The ads are always woefully inappropriate. The algorithm that chooses them is dumber than dirt. And the click throughput is marginal to non-existent.
Now, if you exist everywhere all over the globe, as Google does, it works. For everyone else, it’s just giving Google free space.
I wouldn’t have actually looked at this closely — in the back of my mind the little voice always said it was a scheme of trash — if the Adsense things hadn’t suddenly stopped running on the SITREP posts.
This was because Google halts them if it decides you need to update your tax information.
When I looked at the problem on my Google dashboard, this is what I discovered.
Google doesn’t pay until a $100 threshold is reached. However, long before that milestone, it will summarily badger you to keep updating your settings with verifications of phone numbers, personal identification numbers and additional tax filing information.
Anyway, in 18 months of SITREP contributions, AdSense had earned me a big $15.00.
Readers will be amused to be informed there’s obviously no click through to an endless procession of brain dead ads for “military challenge coins,” dubious degrees in intelligence from seemingly non-existent schools said to be somewhere in Fairfax County, Virginia and power supplies and water containers shopped to gold-hoarding extreme right survivalists and assorted white supremacist kooks who believe hyperinflation and the end of all things are nigh.
At the rate AdSense was making money for me, it’d be a mere seven years before Google cut my first check. Laughable and worthless don’t even begin to encompass it.
Today’s raft of AdSense rubbish — go check here: An ad for AdSense (!), a blandishment that Glenn Beck is “broke” from one of the more popular neo-Nazi extreme right political websites, and come-ons for military-style emergency radios and flexible water tanks.
Today I point you toward the best history of Julian Assange yet. And it is published outside the routes of celebrity big media where the kings spit and urinate upon the subject, tell him it’s raining, and then proceed to pick the body and skeleton clean of all things for sale as tallow for the soap factory.
It’s not published at the New York Times which would have sniffed due to its lack of pro journalist disdain. Originally, seemingly delivered by the New Zealand Herald and something called The Monthy.
It traces Julian Assange from youth to his contribution to the cypherpunks mailing list and the crumbs he left as “Proff,” all the way to the present. (When Crypt Newsletter received occasional mail from him ca. these years, it was always signed from “Proff.”)
Many observations stand out. I’ll sample two.
First:
Assange had once regarded WikiLeaks as the people’s intelligence agency. In January 2007 he sincerely believed that when WikiLeaks published commentary on the Somalia assassination order document it would be “very closely collaboratively analysed by hundreds of Wikipedia editors” and by “thousands of refugees from the Somali, Ethiopian and Chinese expat communities”. This simply had not happened. Commentary by the people on material produced by their intelligence agency never would. He had once hoped for engaged analysis from the blogosphere. What he now discovered were what he thought of as indifferent narcissists repeating the views of the mainstream media on “the issues de jour” with an additional flourish along the lines of “their pussy cat predicted it all along”. Even the smaller newspapers were hopeless. They relied on press releases, ignorant commentary and theft. They never reported the vitally significant leaks without WikiLeaks intervention. Counterintuitively, only the major newspapers in the world, such as the New York Times or the Guardian, undertook any serious analysis but even they were self-censoring and their reportage dominated by the interests of powerful lobby groups. No one seemed truly interested in the vital material WikiLeaks offered or willing to do their Own work.
It’s a demonstration of the well known state-of-affairs in which the publication of unwelcome but necessary information goes unremarked upon, belittled or blocked because it is not delivered by giant media gatekeepers.
In the United States, for example, such outside-the-boundaries material is just ignored due to a combination of factors including sheer timidity, slave relationships to official sources, slave relationships to corporate ownership and NIH, or not-invented-here, syndrome.
This apparently led Assange to conclude most of the world would just not pay attention. He was right until WikiLeaks published the “Collateral Murder” video, provided by Bradley Manning.
Assange then allied with the New York Times, the Guardian and others to deliver the rest of Manning’s information dump. While this might have resulted in WikiLeaks becoming more powerful and effective, reality just became more tortured.
The resulting fame from delivery through these structures, agencies WikiLeaks was supposed to supersede, has for now coincidentally neutralized the exercise more effectively than any US government campaign against Assange could.
The messenger became the message, writes the article’s author, Robert Manne.
The Guardian, Der Spiegel and The New York Times leveraged and monetized Assange and WikiLeaks to the hilt, hard at squeezing every possible dollar out of the organization and its founder’s story. Even to the hardened cynic the personal contempt revealed by the unraveling process has been startling.
Colleagues of Assange deserted the operation for many reasons, some of them very well-explained by Manne and connected to the founder’s personality and the publicity firestorm and celebrity brought on by Manning’s information dump.
Manne writes:
For once, the cliche is true. What happened over the next ten months is stranger than fiction. With the release of the “Collateral Murder” footage, WikiLeaks became instantly famous. At the suggestion of a journalist at the Guardian, Nick Davies, Assange decided to publish the new material he had received from Manning anonymously in association with some of the world’s best newspapers or magazines. Complex and heated negotiations between WikiLeaks and the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel were now conducted. Even though these negotiations are one of the less interesting aspects of this story, already three books from the news outlets involved offering their own perspectives have been published. Assange had long regarded the western media as narcissistic. It is likely that his judgment was now confirmed.
“In early April 2010 hardly anyone had heard of Julian Assange,” reads the piece near its end. “By December he was one of the most famous people on Earth, with very powerful enemies and very passionate friends.”
Yesterday’s lunch saw Martin Bashir on MSNBC devoting some time to WikiLeaks, specifically Bradley Manning and additional charges brought against him by the Army. One of the guests was a friend of Manning’s who related that solitary confinement was destroying the person he knew.
However, there’s always an obvious problem with the story. It has to do with the celebrity of WikiLeaks and the aspect of the two, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.
Neither are sympathetic even though the treatment of Manning is unconscionable. Every time you see the now common pictures of him a little voice in the back of the head says: There’s a kid who was the most senseless and fit for the job.
The accumulated fame, gained by the regular hyping of Cablegate and its use by the big mainstream media has apparently effectively choked WikiLeaks.
Where is the revelation on the ecosystem of corruption at a big US bank? Where’s all the stuff the HBGary dirty tricks operation was aimed at discrediting?
Maybe — hopefully — it will arrive.
But if it does, will it make a difference now? After the Guardian and the New York Times squeeze their rewards from it as official deliverers, framers and monetizers?
Which makes a review of the Guardian’s tell-all book on WikiLeaks a necessary read.
It’s a story, not of brave whistleblowers revealing a specific piece of explosive information, but of an agitated bloke, bored in his army base, Facebooking about how much he missed his boyfriend Tyler, deciding to take Washington’s own disarray to its logical conclusion by vomiting all of its documentation into the hackers’ arena. It was more Oprahite than it was principled, more therapeutic than tactical, more Jeremy Kyle than Daniel Ellsberg. In hilariously comparing this farcical leaking with the Pentagon Papers, describing it as a political event of unprecedented importance, ‘Leigh’ and ‘Harding’ nail the self-importance of Guardian hacks brilliantly. They kill with a satirical sword the attempts by the Guardian and others to doll up the contemporary, much-celebrated and thoughtless cult of let-it-all-out whistleblowing as a stand against warped political authority. I literally LOLed as I turned the page from reading about Manning’s childish informational incontinence to pages containing words such as ‘historic’ and ‘brave’. Brilliant.
The spoofers are also excellent at capturing the media’s cult-like embrace of Assange. ‘Harding’ and ‘Leigh’ recount what a creep Assange is, yet they then profess their ‘own’ and other Guardian journalists’ borderline crush on him! So in one section of the book, we’re told that Assange once signed up to an online dating site with the words ‘I am DANGER, ACHTUNG????????????!’, labeling himself as ‘87% slut’ and someone who likes ‘women from countries that have sustained political turmoil, [because] Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane’. In short, he likes to have sex with exotic blacks rather than boring white birds because – ACHTUNG! – he’s a political rebel.
Hint: Almost all of them involve working for some “US business” selling stuff made in China.
You can quickly go from minimum wage stock boy or girl to sales assistant.
Three — Under Armour, American Eagle Outfitters, Costco — are barely above minimum wage places, fronts for Chinese or east Asian made domestically branded goods.
Or you can be a cook because people still have to eat domestically.
Or you can wait tables and be a gopher for upper middle class shoeshine boys and the wealthy at Royal Caribbean. Visit Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Just remember to tell patrons NOT TO GO BEYOND THE WIRE FENCING surrounding the beach stop.
Numero uno is the somewhat less than overwhelmingly popular answer questions on-line for a penny gig invented by Amazon, Mechanical Turk.
At Yahoo it’s called “virtual question answerer.”
The Wiki entry on Mechanical Turk:
Because [these questions] are typically simple, repetitive tasks and users are paid often only a few cents to complete them, some have criticized Mechanical Turk as a “virtual sweatshop.”[11] Because workers are paid as contractors rather than employees, requesters do not have to file forms for, nor to pay, payroll taxes, and they avoid laws regarding minimum wage, overtime, and workers compensation. Workers, though, must report their income as self-employment income. In addition, some requesters have taken advantage of workers by having them do the tasks, then rejecting their submission in order to avoid paying. However, at least some workers on Mechanical Turk are people who are middle class and do the work for fun.
Other top jobs for the economy that makes nothing, preferring to buy all its goods from China:
Professional Twitter-er, cable box recovery man (because everyone’s now hip to the fact that cable companies suck with rip-off pricing), astro-turfer for products made in China (called a “brand ambassador”), traveling bedpan technician/physical therapist, suck-up for corporate America’s remaining products (called a ‘focus group participant’), video game tester and — wait for it — the ubiquitous cellphone app developer.
Also tutoring for very low wages. Because the economic crash has resulted in teacher lay-offs nationwide.
Unintended hilarity: Article running in section called “Financially Fit.”