This is completely true

Regardless of Klein's thinking about BrandO, she nails the previous admin with this:

There are many acts of destruction for which the Bush years are rightly reviled – the illegal invasions, the defiant defences of torture, the tanking of the global economy. But the administration's most lasting legacy may well be the way it systematically did to the US government what branding-mad CEOs did to their companies a decade earlier: it hollowed it out, handing over to the private sector many of the most essential functions of government, from protecting borders to responding to disasters to collecting intelligence. This hollowing out was not a side project of the Bush years, it was a central mission, reaching into every field of governance. And though the Bush clan was often ridiculed for its incompetence, the process of auctioning off the state, leaving behind only a shell – or a brand – was approached with tremendous focus and precision. Naomi Klein h/t humorzo.

You betcha

A reviewer of Robert Kuttner's new book, Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency:

If it sounds like I'm angry, I am. I hate that most of my adult life has been lived in a country that has become the testing ground for so many hare-brained ideas and crack pot nostrums.

Between the poles of faceless regulation and unbridled markets, that's a good description: a testing ground, with human guinea pigs.

It's one thing to attempt creative approaches to finance; it's another to allow them to run amok throughout municipal, state and global economic systems.

Who gave us the dispensation to introduce the fraudulent language of marketeers and advertisers into the realm of governmental prudence and our derived sense of what actually works? At what instant did bullshit become normative evidence for critical decisions?

In the Rumsfeldian world of that which we don't know we don't know, we do not need Ms. Palin or Mr. Fuld supplementing the void with their inspirations. Kuttner was on Democracy Now today.

Dissent does not dissent from marketing format

Democracy Now offered a worthwhile segment today of War Made Easy, Norman Solomon's dissection of USian war stupidity, over the last half-century.

The portions broadcast offered a range of strategic media manipulation, ranging from the explicit to the implicit (a new set design for the "war room" to make the Pentagoons look cool), etc.

It ought to be getting a little clearer to Harry Hummer and Suzie Sixpack that, across the mediascapes of radio, cable, newspapers, magazines, NASCAR events, Yellow Ribbon Magnet Manufacturers, War Marketeers of all stripes, etc., which are now their only eyes and ears, a scandal is constantly, nakedly recurring: the breaking of knowledge by power, the control of access to "intellectual property," that fake capitalist category, and the manipulation of phony psycho-public platforms as staging areas for simulations of critical assent.

So it was a bit dismaying to find so little shared substance of War Made Easy on the site created for it, which seems cast in the tired blurb 'n sell mold.

How come it hasn't been possible to put up a few clips from the documentary, a youtubation or two (where Solomon is already under attack), and a chapter from the book, a richer faq, etc. along with the pointers to where to buy the DVD?

the tres amigos.