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What this country needs is the return of blow jobs in the oval office -- if not in every office cubicle across this repressed and regressive land. Not this dark Eros of endless war.

Sex might be the last bastion where spontaneity can occur. Why do you think the commodified culture reduces it to the hyper-control of pornographic repetition and the cultural inquisitors demand abstinence before marriage?

Corporate hegemony is dependent on the repression of the spontaneous, the ability to be present and engaged in the joys and sorrows of the manifest moment (that is...to do anything but shop).

If sex were not stigmatized and/or commodified, then people might begin asking some troubling questions regarding the roles they have accepted as subjects of this corporate/consumer empire.

The emotional plague...the lack of sexual and emotional health is a crucial part of any analysis of modern culture. Repressed sexual desires create alienation.

The Vision of a Non-Repressive Society

Eros and Civilization is one of Herbert Marcuse's best known works. Written in 1955, it is a synthesis of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.

Its title alludes to Freud's Civilization and its Discontents. Marcuse's vision of a non-repressive society, based on Marx and Freud, anticipated the values of 1960s countercultural social movements.

In the book, Marcuse writes about the social meaning of biology - history seen not as a class struggle, but fight against repression of our instincts.

He argues that capitalism is preventing us from reaching the non-repressive society "based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations".

He argues that Freud's contention that repression is necessary for civilization to persist is ill-founded - instead of being destructive, Marcuse considers that a liberated eros is upbuilding.

Marcuse starts with the conflict postulated by Freud in Civilisation and Its Discontents - the struggle between human instincts and the repression brought on by the socially-tuned conscience (aka superego).

Freud claimed that biological clash between Eros and civilisation is inevitable and results in the history of man being one of his repression: 'Our civilisation is, generally speaking, founded on the suppression of instincts.'

Sex produces the energy, and it is repressed so the energy can be channeled into progress - but the price of progress is the prevalence of guilt instead of happiness.

"Progress", for Marcuse, is a concept to rationalise the perpetuation of the prevailing system into the future, an end to which the happiness of people in the present (and the pleasure principle is all about the present) is sacrificed.

Marcuse argues that 'the irreconcilable conflict is not between work (reality principle - life without leisure) and Eros (pleasure principle - leisure and pleasure), but between alienated labour (performance principle - economic stratification) and Eros.'

Sex is allowed for 'the betters' (capitalists...), and for workers only when not disturbing performance.

He believes that a socialist society could change this by replacing the 'alienated labor' with "non-alienated libidinal work" thus resulting in "a non-repressive civilisation based on 'non-repressive sublimation'".

In other words, Marcuse believes that a socialist society could be a society without needing the performance of the 'poor' and without as strong a suppression of our drives as in today's society.

The argument depends on the assumption that repression is largely an historical phenomenon (history of humankind is that of repression).

Marcuse concludes that biological repression itself is not the problem but that our troubles stem from the additional 'surplus repression' produced by the specific historical institutions of our own period.

The result is a philosophy that is a merger of Freud and Marx, or what one reviewer called an 'eroticized Marx.
Buying the Presidency: Obama Spends $200m on Advertising
“We’ve certainly seen heavy advertising battles before. But we’ve never seen in a presidential race one side having such a lopsided advantage.”
While Mr. Obama has held a spending advantage throughout the general election campaign, his television dominance has become most apparent in the last few weeks.
He has gone on a buying binge of television time that has allowed him to swamp Mr. McCain’s campaign with concurrent lines of positive and negative messages.
Mr. Obama’s advertisements come as Republicans have begun a blitz of automated telephone calls attacking him.
The Obama campaign’s advertising approach — which has included advertisements up to two minutes long in which Mr. Obama lays out his agenda and even advertisements in video games like “Guitar Hero” — has helped mask some of Mr. Obama’s rougher attacks on his rival.
“What Obama is doing is being his own good cop and bad cop,” said Evan Tracey, the chief operating officer of CMAG, who called the advertising war “a blowout” in Mr. Obama’s favor.
Based on his current spending, CMAG predicts Mr. Obama’s general election advertising campaign will surpass the $188 million Mr. Bush spent in his 2004 campaign by early next week.
Mr. McCain has spent $91 million on advertising since he clinched his party’s nomination, several months before Mr. Obama clinched his.
The size of the disparity has even surprised aides to Mr. McCain, who traded accusations with Mr. Obama over the advertising battle in this week’s debate, with Mr. Obama telling Mr. McCain that “your ads, 100 percent of them have been negative” and Mr. McCain saying that “Senator Obama has spent more money on negative ads than any political campaign in history.”
"Joe the Plumber": Patronizing the Working Class
Am I the only American voter who's getting annoyed by all the faux-populist obeisance and condescending lip-service that's being paid to "average Joes" this Fall?
First there was "Joe Six-Pack," the frequently invoked working-class soulmate of Alaskan "Hockey Mom" Sarah Palin. Then, there was "Joe from Scranton," Senator Joseph Biden's strained reinvention of himself as a regular blue-collar guy from Pennsylvania's anthracite region.
And now we have "Joe the Plumber," the Ohio handy man directly addressed by both John McCain and Barack Obama in their final TV debate on Oct. 15.
What's bothering me, first of all, is the form of address itself. Unlike Palin's beer-loving archetype, "Joe the Plumber" is an actual person, with a real last name (It's Wurzelbacher and, yes, that might be hard to pronounce correctly on national TV.)
Yet when someone like Joe Wurzelbacher briefly commands center stage—as a random stand-in for all workers (or, more accurately, would-be small business owners)—he is immediately shorn of his full identity and referred to by his trade instead.
If McCain and Obama were talking about a better-credentialed building trades guy who only goes by one name—like "Jesus the Carpenter"--surname dropping wouldn't seem so patronizing.
(The Democrats, at least, seem to be invoking His name somewhat less than they did earlier in the campaign.)
But there's still a glaring double-standard at work here. It says a lot about how working class people get talked about by politicians of both major parties when they're not being made to disappear entirely into our vast "middle class" (which, at times, seems to include 95 per cent of the population).
When the names of the high and mighty in America—bankers, big businessmen, professors, or generals--come up in prime time debates or on the campaign trail, they never warrant the same disrespectfully informal and/or stereotypical treatment.
For example, when Obama discusses the impact of his tax proposals on a well-heeled Omaha investor (who's also his economic advisor) and not a mere toilet-fixer in Toledo, he doesn't refer to him as "Warren the Billionaire."
How the Banksters are Making a Killing Off the Bailout
What most Americans do not understand, because mainstream media rarely explains it, is the incestuous relationship between the U.S. Treasury and this small band of financial marauders who busted the entire financial system with insane levels of leveraged derivative bets.
The bulk of the $125 billion will be dispersed among Uncle Sam’s own brokers, or in street parlance, Primary Dealers. Primary dealers are those financial firms anointed by the Federal Reserve to participate in the Fed’s open market activities and are required to participate to a significant degree in buying up Treasury securities at every Treasury auction.
In other words, without these firms, the U.S. Government would have no means of financing its own funding needs.
Treasury, therefore, has an obvious conflict of interest in keeping these firms alive, even when they are the walking dead. Here’s how much of the $125 Billion the Fed’s Primary Dealers will collect:
Citigroup, $25 Billion; JPMorgan Chase & Co., $25 Billion; Bank of America and its soon to be acquired brokerage, Merrill Lynch, $25 Billion; Goldman Sachs, $10 Billion; Morgan Stanley, $10 Billion.
In other words, of the first $125 billion outlay from the emergency bailout fund, 76% is going to shore up Uncle Sam’s brokers and $300,000 is going to retain one of Wall Street’s favorite law firms.
In 1988 there were 46 primary dealers. That number had shrunk to 30 by 1999. In June 2008 there were 20, in no small part as a result of the mergers facilitated by Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett.
In rapid succession since July, three more have disappeared from bad bets: Countrywide Securities (shotgun marriage with Bank of America); Lehman Brothers, bankrupt; Bear, Stearns (shotgun marriage with J.P. Morgan Securities).
That currently leaves 17 and that number will drop to 16 when Merrill Lynch is folded into Bank of America. (The rest of the 16 primary dealers that are not getting part of the $125 billion are foreign banks.)
Obama & McCain Wrangle While America Burns
Talk about falling to the occasion! You would not have an inkling from the candidates’ third and final debate at Hofstra University on Long Island that Wednesday had been a day of fearful carnage on Wall Street, throwing into question the desperate efforts of the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve to stabilize the situation.
You would not have known that across the last month the Dow Jones industrial index has lost 25 per cent of its value. You would not have known that in the considered estimation of many economists the United States could well be entering a prolonged recession.
You would not have known that every assertion about the merits of deregulation and about the primacy of market forces is now dead, skinned and nailed to the wall like a moose hide in the Palins’ garage.
Listening to both candidates in that last debate made me think of one of those reverses of the earth’s electro-magnetic field that occurs every 100,000 years or so.
The last month has seen the sweeping away of all the shopworn economic coordinates by which conventional politicians set their course.
Gone are the hallowed landmarks. Yet here were McCain and Obama trudging on, sighting their compasses on bearings that no longer exist.There were, to be sure, dutiful references by both Obama and McCain to the economic crisis, but mostly it was as though they were talking about a minor traffic accident a couple of blocks away.
McCain flourished a proposal to bail out homeowners. Obama claimed that the bankers’ bailout bill for which they had both voted contained exactly such provisions.
Then the two retreated to mechanical reiteration of their tax plans, their health plans, their plans for Energy Independence, all of them topics interminably raked over in the earlier debates.
“At the heart of the financial crisis
lies the historical decline of US imperialism”
“The same people, who for years have preached that the coffers are empty, with no money being available to pay for better wages, education, health care, culture and other social benefits, are now making billions of dollars and euros available if the financial aristocracy requires it.
“When in the past has the class character of governments and the state been so clearly revealed?” White asked.
He stressed, however, that the bailout would not put an end to the financial crisis because its origins lie in the decline of the economic supremacy enjoyed by the US after the Second World War.
In past decades, many industrial jobs in the US were destroyed and the growth of private wealth became increasingly removed from the actual process of the creation of value by the working class.
White then dealt in greater detail with the historic crisis of US imperialism, stressing that Washington’s growing militarism was an attempt to compensate for the loss of economic strength and was targeted at keeping America’s European and Asian rivals in check.
The election of a President Obama would not change this fundamental course. Since the primaries, Obama has made it clear that under his presidency the US military would not be drawn down, but would merely be taking another direction.
Everywhere in the world, working people confront an economic disaster. In every country, the ruling elite has decided to place the entire burden of the crisis on the backs of the working class, White stressed. Dictatorial forms of rule are already becoming visible and the danger of war is increasing.