A Divided Nation Agrees on One Thing: Many People Want a Gun

 Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/us/guns-2020-election.html?searchResultPosition=2

Oct. 27, 2020

By Dionne Searcey and Richard A. Oppel Jr.

CHANTILLY, Va.— Like many Americans, two women a thousand miles apart are each anxious about the uncertain state of the nation. Their reasons are altogether different. But they have found common ground, and a sense of certainty, in a recent purchase: a gun.

Ann-Marie Saccurato traced her purchase to the night she was eating dinner at a sidewalk restaurant not long ago in Delray Beach, Fla., when a Black Lives Matter march passed and her mind began to wander.

Advertising vs. Democracy: An Interview with Jean Kilbourne

Oct. 23, 2020

By Hugh Iglarsh

Link:https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/23/advertising-vs-democracy-an-interview-with-jean-kilbourne/

There it is, on page 56 of Jean Kilbourne’s book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel: the graphic that stopped me cold and made me realize just how prophetic was her work (originally published in hardcover in 1999 as Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising). It was an ad for a German marketing firm, contained within a decades-old issue of the trade journal Advertising Age. Beneath a corporate cornucopia of All-American legacy brands and products – Levi’s, Pepsi, Camel cigarettes, a Chiquita banana, a Big Mac, etc. – was the caption, “Let’s make America great again.”

With its depiction of American “greatness” as a collage of heavily advertised commodities, the ad would have seemed crass and stupid when it first appeared, but hardly remarkable. Now, of course, that cluster of words and pictures glitters with irony and implication. The caption of this homage to consumerism suggests a link between the slick hucksterism of the ad business and the fanatical nationalism of the MAGA cult. Is the connection real? If so, how does the Trump phenomenon – that cheesy mash-up of reality TV and Triumph of the Will – relate to the marketing and PR that saturate American culture and consciousness? Is Trump’s ugly but compelling political spectacle, which hogs the media foreground, an outgrowth of the inescapable, desensitizing background noise that is advertising?

The Shrinking of the American Mind

 By Roger Cohen

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/opinion/Trump-biden-debates.html?searchResultPosition=1

Among the words or phrases that were never spoken in the two presidential debates were:
Syria, human rights, drones, democracy, inequality, dictatorship, Israel, Palestine, Middle East, United Nations, World Health Organization, Guantánamo, European Union, Britain, Brexit, France, Italy, Hong Kong, Africa (or any single African state), South America, terrorism, multilateral, authoritarianism, alliance.
That’s a pretty good measure of the shrinking of the American mind.
President Trump never mentioned Afghanistan, where the United States lost more than 2,400 lives and spent some $2 trillion over the past two decades. Joe Biden did, once.
One of the characteristics of a nightmare is that it is all-consuming. Everything beyond it fades into the murk. President Trump, in an extraordinary sustained broadcast of his self-obsession, has managed to corral the world into the shadow of an orange colossus.
Yes, Trump was more civil in the second debate, and Biden, ahead in the polls, did himself no harm. Still, it was an affair of stunning mediocrity and myopia.
 

Who’s the Tax Cheat: The Lady in Jail or the Man in the White House?

Oct. 10, 2020

By Nicholas Kristof

While reading that President Trump had claimed $70,000 in highly dubious tax deductions for hair styling for his television show, I kept thinking about a homeless African-American woman named Tanya McDowell who was imprisoned for misleading officials to get her young son into a better school district.

McDowell was sentenced to five years in prison in 2012, in part for drug offenses and in part for “larceny” because she had claimed her babysitter’s address so her son could attend a better school in Connecticut.

U.S. Slides Backward In Social Progress Index

 As the world makes slow if uneven progress on social and environmental performance, the United States is falling behind its peer nations, among the few countries to see its Social Progress Index (SPI) score decline during the past decade.

Prof. Richard Wolff - Is Capitalism On Life Support?