Showing posts with label social oppression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social oppression. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Marketing Death to a Sick America

Wherever there is pain and oppression, the lords of predatory capitalism will always find a way to profit from it. 

Are you a poor black kid who can't retrieve your wayward football from the unkempt yard containing Cujo's rabid litter-mate? In your kind of neighborhood, you obviously don't seek help from a responsible adult. You definitely don't want to call the cops. So you just close your eyes and fantasize that you're the super-hero designer of Northrup Grumman's stealth bomber. Your lost football will then magically float back to you just like an unmanned Predator drone. Because let's face it: you live in a Perma-War economy now, and the Trump administration is taking money away from poverty programs and giving it to the Pentagon. But please don't despair, all you poor and hungry children of America, because the Military-Industrial Complex is here to help. What a "turbulent world" needs is not more education and medical care and social programs. It needs more spying and destruction and maiming and killing. And so it's only natural that Northrup Grumman would take Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech and made it their very own.




Are you a working class refugee hopelessly hooked on opioids? Astra Zeneca is here to help - not by building rehab facilities, of course, but by pushing an anti-constipation drug designed specifically for junkies like you. Of course, the actor who plays the junkie on TV doesn't look like an actual junkie. In fact he is very hot. He is not only hale and hearty, he wears a hard hat and appears to be the boss on a major construction site. So the subliminal message here is that it's not the Oxy or the heroin that's holding you back. Those drugs are good for you, build up your muscles better than steroids. Your main problem, dude, is your embarrassing inability to have a bowel movement. So get "unplugged" and dream the dream of a full-time job.  Maybe you can even hallucinate piloting a stealth bomber while you're sitting on the toilet. Oh, and always indulge your addiction responsibly.



Are you a black or brown person who fears that you will one day get shot during a routine traffic stop or sentenced to solitary confinement for possessing a small amount of dope? No need to block highways or stage sit-down strikes or meet with politicians. Instead, always have an ice cold can of Pepsi at the ready as the weapon of choice to render your oppressor harmless. Or better yet, allow white super-model Kendall Jenner to do the honors for you, with a Bob Marley imitator crooning in the background for some added social justice ambience. And the world will live in perfect harmony forever as people slurp their sugary drinks and develop diabetes... which might sadly go untreated because there is no universal health care in America. Maybe Astra Zeneca can help. Or maybe you can join the military and bomb other oppressed people in turbulent countries far, far away from America the Beautiful.

Why bother with the messiness of Black Lives Matter, when #ResistanceInc is the cool way to go? We mustn't let the class war rear its ugly head. It might disturb the oligarchs, who only want to help through the magic of marketing more death to desperate people barely holding on in the end stage of Capitalism. 

The first rule of free market neoliberalism is to create a crisis. The second rule is never let it go to waste.