The Wall Street Journal actually had an editorial today suggesting Obama should govern like Reagan. Tax cuts, deregulation, yada yada yada. Talk about audacity.
Can we revisit this for a moment? Reagan abandoned fiscal responsibility at the first blush of recession. He spend more and borrowed more than any other president in history, and set the stage for the Bushes who followed to do the same. He left with an overheated economy (read:bubble) about to pop and a savings and loan crisis waiting in the wind.
He got out of town just in time that his veep, the one-term Bush, took the blame.
In fact, it's exactly like this Bush leaves office, except that the mess is banks and not S&Ls, and the dollars are much bigger. And for six of eight years, there was was no democratic congress to blame.
We've seen how conservatives and Republicans govern for 28 years now. What a mess. Obama should govern in a very different direction.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Optimism and How To Profit From It
NewAdvertising writes the following about the new Pepsi campaign:
All this is carried out with relentless optimism for the future...aimed squarely at the Optimistic Millenials identified by the Pepsi Optimism Project. They're the generation that, whenever we do research with them, expresses an enormous longing for the optimism of the sixties.They envy the generation's protest, music, dress, sexual mores and so much more. They believe they missed a critical period in relatively recent history. See a earlier blog post from The New Advertising on the 60's & 70's generation vs Pepsi's New Millennials.
So, if you are corporate America looking at this information, what do you do with it? Work toward leading a country toward a more just, less fascist, more creative, compassionate society?
Uh, yeah right.
Tom Waits once said he never licensed his songs for commercial use because Corporate America would strip out the message and attach the meaning to the sale of a product; buy this thing, attain the feeling that the song originally evoked. And that is precisely Pepsi's plan:
So it's no surprise that the look of both the site and the video is 60's pop-art-like. Just take a look at Roy Lichenstein 1962 painting "Art" ...
When we look at the damage that capitalism causes, it can really be reduced to a simple idea that everything - everything - has a monetary value and no value otherwise.
All this is carried out with relentless optimism for the future...aimed squarely at the Optimistic Millenials identified by the Pepsi Optimism Project. They're the generation that, whenever we do research with them, expresses an enormous longing for the optimism of the sixties.They envy the generation's protest, music, dress, sexual mores and so much more. They believe they missed a critical period in relatively recent history. See a earlier blog post from The New Advertising on the 60's & 70's generation vs Pepsi's New Millennials.
So, if you are corporate America looking at this information, what do you do with it? Work toward leading a country toward a more just, less fascist, more creative, compassionate society?
Uh, yeah right.
Tom Waits once said he never licensed his songs for commercial use because Corporate America would strip out the message and attach the meaning to the sale of a product; buy this thing, attain the feeling that the song originally evoked. And that is precisely Pepsi's plan:
So it's no surprise that the look of both the site and the video is 60's pop-art-like. Just take a look at Roy Lichenstein 1962 painting "Art" ...
When we look at the damage that capitalism causes, it can really be reduced to a simple idea that everything - everything - has a monetary value and no value otherwise.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Memos to the madmen in DC
Wow. Just getting over the Obama win hangover, and it's been forever since I posted. So a few quick memos for the new year:
Memo to the GOP: Don't freakin' lecture me. After six years in which GW and the GOP Congress turned a surplus into a sinking swamp, with your president handing a trillion-dollar deficit to Obama, you have no credibility when you say anything about deficits, spending or debt. Nothing new here, either; Reagan turned a $50 billion deficit under Carter into a $200 billion-plus gap. The first Bush raised the ante to $400 billion.
Plus, y'all seem to always leave a bank or S&L collapse when you leave the White House. This time, it was your president, his Treasury chief and his Fed chief who demanded a $700 billion bailout, no questions asked, and no one gets hurt. Now you want us to believe the kooky conservative few who voted against it are the real voice of a fiscally stingy GOP.
Really, if any of you are really worried about deficits and balanced budgets, you should be glad we're in charge.
Memo to historic revisionists: FDR rocked. Based on a couple of widely dismissed academic studies that did things like not count working on roads, bridges and great buildings as working, the righties on Fox and elsewhere keep saying that the New Deal didn't help ease the Great Depression.
In fact, of course, unemployment fell every year but one -- the one in which FDR listened to clueless conservatives and backed off.
But let the academics debate that. FDR got elected four times. Americans sure thought things were getting better under him.
Memo to journalists: Get real. So some web site got a couple of porn kings to say they'd like a government bailout, and everyone has to pick it up? Giving the right wing fodder to tout it as 'Obama bailing out porn." Hell, I'd like a bailout. Want to interview me?
Nonsense. This is the biggest government mess is years, money is going all over the place without any accountability, and you want to focus on guys who won't see a dime?
Memo to the GOP: Don't freakin' lecture me. After six years in which GW and the GOP Congress turned a surplus into a sinking swamp, with your president handing a trillion-dollar deficit to Obama, you have no credibility when you say anything about deficits, spending or debt. Nothing new here, either; Reagan turned a $50 billion deficit under Carter into a $200 billion-plus gap. The first Bush raised the ante to $400 billion.
Plus, y'all seem to always leave a bank or S&L collapse when you leave the White House. This time, it was your president, his Treasury chief and his Fed chief who demanded a $700 billion bailout, no questions asked, and no one gets hurt. Now you want us to believe the kooky conservative few who voted against it are the real voice of a fiscally stingy GOP.
Really, if any of you are really worried about deficits and balanced budgets, you should be glad we're in charge.
Memo to historic revisionists: FDR rocked. Based on a couple of widely dismissed academic studies that did things like not count working on roads, bridges and great buildings as working, the righties on Fox and elsewhere keep saying that the New Deal didn't help ease the Great Depression.
In fact, of course, unemployment fell every year but one -- the one in which FDR listened to clueless conservatives and backed off.
But let the academics debate that. FDR got elected four times. Americans sure thought things were getting better under him.
Memo to journalists: Get real. So some web site got a couple of porn kings to say they'd like a government bailout, and everyone has to pick it up? Giving the right wing fodder to tout it as 'Obama bailing out porn." Hell, I'd like a bailout. Want to interview me?
Nonsense. This is the biggest government mess is years, money is going all over the place without any accountability, and you want to focus on guys who won't see a dime?
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