What's Wrong With These Pictures?

The cartoon lady in the top picture is black, unfairly paid.... and grinning her face off anyway.

The cartoon lady on the bottom is white, unfairly paid.... and somewhat upset.


From obviously the same White House artiste who brought us the cheesy "Life of Julia" series comes a brand new series of e-cards supposedly touting the Fair Pay Act. Rather than storming around the country demanding a national minimum wage as he did during his last campaign, Our Leader just wants all the people to send these cartoons to our friends and neighbors, in case they didn't know working women exist in a living hell and are either ecstatically happy about it or mildly chagrined, as the case (or race) may be.

What we really need is a conversation about the stagnating wages of both sexes, not to mention the fact that in not one of the 50 states does a minimum wage job pay a month's rent. Not one. Or how about the fact that unions are being destroyed at a dizzying clip, or that those touted "re-shored" manufacturing jobs at places like tax-evading, profit-bloated G.E. pay only half of what they did just a few years ago? But I digress.

In one of the e-cards, another cheerful white woman is shown in the express lane of the grocery store. We are told, "It's true, in more than 50% of American households, women's salaries help pay the bills, buy the groceries and provide for their families."


The implicit message, of course, is that Cheerful White Woman has a husband who also works, since she only "helps" to pay the bills. If she were the sole breadwinner, she would not be smiling in the supermarket. You can trust me on that.


I have to say, if the Romney campaign put out cartoon crap like this, buying into the mythology of the happy slave woman, there would be hell to pay, cries of racism. But since a black president's staff is putting out the distasteful propaganda, don't expect Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O'Donnell to gin up any manufactured outrage. They'll save the outrage for when the Romney campaign makes fun of the cartoons. Or when Republicans block the bill in Congress in another War on Women skirmish. But it will be win-win for the Democrats anyway -- they'll have another wedge issue to fund-raise off.


This latest White House propaganda campaign is obviously geared toward solidly middle-class, independent, Ann Romney-leaning women voters who don't have to worry about impending eviction or having enough money in a single crappy checking account to feed their kids, and who don't want to worry about the poor women who have no choice but to worry about this stuff. And it is also bending over backward to prevent the Republicans from bringing up that "angry black woman" malarkey again.  

How in the world can an anti-sexism, post-racial politics P.R. campaign come across as so damned... sexist, and even racist? Once again, this White House will succeed in pleasing nobody and offending everybody.

No Need to Worry About Food Stamps. My Salary 'Helps'!

His Icy Hotness

If you have been paying any attention to corporate media political coverage the past couple of days, you might think you were trapped in a seventh grade time warp. This is the narrative: Obama is the cool kid, and Romney is the nerd. Obama is the slow-jamming killah  and Romney the bumbling rich snob who has probably never even killed a fly. (Remember -- Obama did once kill a fly on national TV!). It's Ferris Bueller vs. Napoleon Dynamite. It's the junior high school election as covered by the junior high school newspaper. It's surface, it's shallow, and it's stultifying.

The president is being criticized for his unseemly bin Laden chest-thumping by the GOP, who used to have the market cornered on warrior presidents who never went to war themselves, but made a big show of landing on aircraft carriers and crowing "Mission Accomplished." Barack's bellicosity is so much more refined than Bush's, after all. He does not mumble and he doesn't strut (much) and he doesn't smirk. He slow-jams the Osama Bump, he kills at the White House Correspondents Dinner, he oozes charm and drives dorky Karl Rove nuts. You can practically hear the Turd Blossom whine in the latest SuperPac ad criticizing Barry for being cool: "It's not fair that you're the popular kid, and Mitt's the loser! Waaaaah."  

It's hard to tell which came first: the media complicity chicken or the government propaganda egg. Seemingly on cue, cable outlets and TV networks and major newspapers have all come out with the same story.  Even though tomorrow is International Workers' Day, what we are really supposed to celebrate is the first anniversary of the Death of bin Laden. Obama will give NBC an exclusive and "unprecedented" interview in the Situation Room on how it all went down. He'll coyly defend keeping the death pics secret even as he dishes on the gory details. He may even boast once again on those targeted drone killings that officially don't exist. The New York Times ran a glowing op-ed on "The Warrior President" which had Glenn Greenwald in fits. (Me too. It portrayed Obama as a tough guy who can both dance and operate a drone joy stick by proxy. Take that, Norman Mailer!). 

The Nation goes so far as to point out that the President is even deliberately starting to act black just to drive Mitt nuts:

 .... he's rubbing their faces in it, just like he did when he sympathized with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for getting arrested in his own home. And that gleams like troll gold to Republican strategists.

Obama has dared to be a cool black man more often lately. First, in January, he sang, “I—I’m so in love with you” at a fundraiser at the Apollo Theater, with Al Green in the audience, a totally engaging moment the Rove ad doesn’t fail to sneer at. (As Maureen Dowd wrote, “For eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected.”) Then, for a Black History Month celebration in the White House, Obama sang a few bars of “Sweet Home Chicago” with B.B. King, once again looking terrifically comfortable in his own (black) skin.

It's the youth vote, stupid! Maybe if the president portrays himself as a celebrity and knocks a few bucks off their crushing college debt, they'll get all fired up and head to polls this fall instead of Occupying. Personally, I give young people more credit. For one thing, you have to come equpped with a certain propensity for being sucked into a personality cult. For another thing, it's pretty insulting to be pandered to when you're unemployed and in hock to big banks up to your ears, only to be cajoled by a jive politician "Stupid youth, vote!"

Obama actually won the "Marketer of the Year" award from Ad Week after the 2008 campaign. His political machine and the access-hungry corporate media establishment are partnering up and rebranding his brand. New Obama has a spine of sub-zero titanium. He kills terrorists with frigid resolve. He slow-jams, but in a dignified adult way.  Even though he pretends not to be as sexy, that graying hair and dulcet voice make everybody hot. He is cool enough that he can still send shivers up Chris Matthews' leg. He is so cool that he makes the Republicans sweat. He is the personification of the Icy Hot Pain Relieving Patch! You've all seen that commercial:

Barack Obama Icy Hot is a typical politician topical pain reliever that gets ICY to dull the brain pain, then gets HOT to relax it away. He It temporarily relieves major angst minor pain associated with unemployment, lack of insurance, being spied on, foreclosure arthritis, tendonitis, and muscle strains and sprains.

Obama Icy Hot speeches formulations include Wall Street-vetted FDA permitted crumbs active ingredients to relieve minor pain. Obama Icy Hot products contain platitudes menthol or a combination of slow jams menthol and after-dinner jokes methyl salicylate.

These ingredients create cooling and warming sensations that divert attention from the actual pain and help block the pain signals being sent to the brain.

Racist War Propaganda

At first I thought this was the trailer for another Star Wars sequel when I saw it on TV over the weekend. Guess again:

Notice all those boxes of "Aid"' on the assault vehicles? Do they contain blood money for the relatives of the collateral damage? Bribes for the puppet dictators? Wads of cash for private contractors? Snickers?

This recruiting film is obviously aimed directly at a whole generation of  desperate unemployed and underemployed people -- and judging from the leading man, specifically at  African-American teenagers, whose unemployment rate is a staggering 42%. It is just another example of institutionalized racism, what author Michelle Alexander calls The New Jim Crow. The main character in the commercial is shown racing toward oblivion, the better to escape the chaos of life on the streets  and  NRA-enabled gun murders at the hands of vigilantes or a long stint at a for-profit prison for a petty drug conviction. The voice-over booms over the Dolby soundtrack: "Where chaos looms, the few emerge. Marines move toward the sounds of tyranny, injustice and despair — with the courage and resolve to silence them. By ending conflict, instilling order and helping those who can’t help themselves, Marines face down the threats of our time.”

The solution that our corporate-run government offers is not to abolish racial profiling by police thugs and civilian watch commanders, but to expand it for even more profit for themselves. Escape injustice and despair here by embracing it over there! And we'll even give you your own gun. "Which way would you run?" asks the recruiting commercial.

Besides the blatant racism inherent in this film, it also presumes geographical ignorance on the part of its target audience. The defunding of public education does serve a purpose, after all. These movie Marines storm the Normandy beaches and magically, immediately arrive in Afghanistan to rampage across the desert in a crusade of aggressive humanitarianism. War is Peace.

Leave it to the military industrial complex to partner with Hollywood to produce this overblown piece of pricey propaganda, and then waste even more taxpayer money to run it on the cable TV shows we already pay to watch. They have no shame because they are psychopaths.