“Marketplace is not meant to be an in-vehicle digital billboard,” Santiago Chamorro, GM vice president of global connected customer experience [ROFL!], says to Automotive News.
Author Archive | Michael Dawson
Trouble in the ministry of truth
Apple has touched off a pretty major row in the halls of marketing. Apparently, the next version of its Safari browser will restrict the creation and retention of “cookies,” which are little computer codes that allow big businesses to collect increasingly rich data, without acknowledgement or permission, on internet users.
Google and the comatose left
Google is apparently heightening its censorship of news sources, in response to the Duopoly©’s “fake news” flap.
The Power of Monopoly Capital
I’m not at all somebody who wants to enshrine Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order as the new centerpiece in the old “what Marx said” religion. But, really, I do stand by my conclusion that Baran and Sweezy’s 1966 book was the #1 social science book of the century, Marxist […]
Obama’s Victory: A Sociological Prayer
I’m a sociology teacher, a member of the Pacific Green Party of Oregon, an almost-pacifist, and a libertarian socialist. My intellectual heroes are people like Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, C. Wright Mills, and Noam Chomsky. I believe democracy is much more in the streets than in the halls, and that Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin […]
Emotionomics: A Noteworthy “Revelation” of Market Totalitarianism
“O there are times, we must confess To harboring a whim — we Like to picture old Karl Marx Sliding down our chimney” — Susie Day “Help fund the good fight. By contributing to MR, you help reinforce the left and reclaim the future.” — Richard D. Vogel “To do my part, I just […]
Peace Talk Translations
The corporate media is abuzz with the notion that there is a Palestine-Israel peace conference now happening in Maryland. That this claim is being taken seriously six years into the Cheney Administration is another remarkable proof that, in this bought-and-paid-for corporate capitalist society, journalism is doornail-dead. The real truth, as reported (as a low-paragraph aside, […]
Capitalism’s Beverage & the Obesity Epidemic
The Los Angeles Times reports that Disneyland is retooling its boats-on-water rides because of the raging obesity epidemic in the United States, “to deal with the delicate problem of bottoming-out boats.” People are simply getting too fat for the existing rides, including the now satirically named “It’s a Small World”: “Forty-one years after the whimsical […]
Racism in Corporate Marketing
In the last years before his historically catastrophic assassination, Martin Luther King used to lament to his closest comrades that he was “afraid we’re integrating ourselves into a burning house.” How apt that fear turned out to be is still under-appreciated. Among the burning rooms that have yet to be discussed is this one: corporate […]
Inequality among “Consumers”
Contrary to both mainstream dogma and received cultural-leftist/neo-Marcusian canon, access to commodities has never been anything like equal in the United States. In fact, in this epoch of escalating income and wealth polarity, the newest statistics show that inequality among U.S. “consumers” is now at an all-time high. Bradley Johnson of Advertising Age magazine’s “American […]
Four Virginia Techs Every Day
The reign of the automobile in the United States is imperiling the entire planet. Meanwhile, in 2005, a wholly typical year, automotive collisions took the lives of 43,443 residents of the United States. That is 119 people killed per day, almost four times the 32 people murdered this Monday at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State […]
Let’s Help Levitate a Stronger Anti-War Movement!
On Saturday, March 17, 2007, my mom, son, ex-wife, and I will be joining the March on the Pentagon. Cindy Sheehan will be there. I’m wondering if other MR people will be there, too. If so, would you like to march together, and perhaps even socialize before or after the protest? The organizers advise us […]
“Our” Real Addiction: Capitalist Waste in Transportation
“America is addicted to oil.” Thus spake George W. Bush in his 2006 “State of the Union” speech. At first hearing, this sounds like a remarkable breakthrough in public discourse. A sitting U.S. President admitting that the nation’s relationship to petroleum is one of addiction? Sounds like a major advance in honesty, doesn’t it? And, […]
An Even More Inconvenient Truth
Last night, I saw Al Gore’s new movie, An Inconvenient Truth. There is much to like in this film, not least its clear presentation of stark and convincing evidence about the reality of global warming. But, as you might guess from knowledge of its star’s balsa-wood political career, this movie is a sheep in wolf’s […]
Portland, Oregon, USA, 19 March 2006
10,000 people, with a strong labor feeder march and speakers from Venezuela! Quite encouraging! Click on the image for a larger view. Michael Dawson works for pay as a paralegal and sociology teacher in Portland, Oregon. He is presently writing a book, Automobiles Ueber Alles: Corporate Capitalism and Transportation in America, forthcoming from Monthly Review […]
Powerful Evasion
While it isn’t literally true that Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned (the violin wasn’t invented yet), he did build himself a glorious new palace atop the ashes. And he was one of the prime suspects in the great arson of 64 a.d. According the Roman historian Suetonius, “under cover of displeasure at the ugliness […]
Did Jesus Accept Poverty?
Figuring out new ways to remind ordinary people of the nature and logic of power in this world has — rightly so — become a topic of greatly heightened concern on the left. Events continue to show us the disastrous results of losing so many of our natural allies to the spreading quicksand of religious […]
CNN’s Mounting Slanders against Latin American Democracy
As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky explain in Manufacturing Consent, which stories do and do not receive coverage in the commercially-dominated U.S. news media can be very accurately predicted based on whether or not they can pass through five institutional “filters.” To make it onto the air, a story has to have these five qualities: […]
Terminator (What Else Can You Say?)
Schwarzenegger justifies his murder thusly: “[T]here is no reason to disturb the judicial decisions that uphold the jury’s findings that he is guilty of these four murders and should pay with his life.” Meanwhile: Commandment #1: “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” United States Constitution, Article I, Section 2: Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among […]
Saturday, December 10, 1960: The Debate That Never Happened
At 9:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Saturday, December 10, 1960, NBC television was supposed to broadcast something truly exceptional: a debate on the topic of “U.S. policy toward Latin America” between liberal theorist A. A. Berle and the radical “Texas wobbly” sociologist C. Wright Mills. To the enduring loss of the world, the scheduled debate […]
