> tinted moisturizer is a right wing conspiracy of the day
The Incredible Niche Marketing Machine of Neoliberalism
If consumer boycotts are the opiates of the brainwashed, boycotting chicken strips is sort of like shooting up Tylenol
It may not surprise you to learn that without knowing much about the details I found last week’s whole Chick-Fil-A debacle frankly infuriating, as both a citizen and a consumer. Because on the one hand, all consumer boycotts implicitly endorse the same insidious fairytale that “consumer choice” is a perfectly acceptable substitute for democracy that led America to the current paradigm in which the right of gays to marry is literally the only realm in which public sentiment seems to matter anymore. And on the other hand, hello, has anyone in the progressive political establishment even eaten at a Chick-Fil-A since Party of Five was on the air? Why must consumer boycotts always penalize businesses that make food I could actually afford to eat if I lived closer to a suburban mall?
Has anyone ever heard of the Unification Church? Their philosophy of marriage is far more frightening than any wingnut breaded chicken tycoon, and they pretty much control the entire sushi business. And were you aware that the Koch Brothers have been busy cornering the market on Kobe beef? Someone in the White House seems to be, since it looks like they special ordered some for last year’s State Dinner with the country that gave us the Unification Church! And while I’m on the subject it bears repeating that every morning half the women in New York squirt thousands of dollars worth of raw concentrated gay hate and uterus tyranny onto their faces.
That’s right folks, I’m talking again about tinted moisturizer and its vital role lining the pockets of the most generous gay bashing school reforming mind control enthusiasts in America, the DeVos clan of Grand Rapids, Michigan. But I’m also talking about marketing, the right-wing ideology Democrats always smugly seem to assume—on the basis of…Shepard Fairey?—they totally understand But they totally don’t, and so for the same reason no brilliant DCC operative ever thinks to launch a PR stunt boycott of Koch kobe or cult sushi or $42 sunscreen or anything else only the 1% can actually afford, none of its kindred hacks in the lamestream media establishment ever seem to connect the dots between high end neoliberal thought leaders with the downmarket anti-thought crowds with whom they run.
I most recently confronted this disconnect during a very cursory investigation of one of the biggest recipients of Laura Mercier lucre of late, an obscure institution called Northwood University to which the various Devos foundations donated nearly $7 million between 2008 and 2010 alone.
Well, turns out Northwood is the alma mater of Dick DeVos, the son of Amway founder Richard DeVos who ran the company for nine years before he left to, among other things, spend $41 million running unsuccessfully for governor. Its roots trace back to an epiphany a liberal arts college admissions officer had about the public education system back in the fifties: kids were getting so steeped in unnecessary math and science, they'd become completely hopeless at middle management core competencies like Boss Sycophancy 101 and Intro Executive Infallibility…
Now, not coincidentally, Northwood has also gained a reputation of late, according to Salon, as "the new powerhouse for ridiculous GOP economics." Golly, will you kids bewaxing elegiac about Arthur Laffer and the Chicago boys when you get a load of Northwoodnomics, which is steeped in the theories of this guy Ludwig von Mises, next to whom Milton Friedman is “practically a socialist!”
Even Milton Friedman, in an interview with Reason, recalled being somewhat annoyed when Mises stormed out of a meeting of economists who had been talking about the proper levels of taxation with the angry declaration that “you are all socialists.”