The state-capitalist firm General Motors has been running a marketing campaign with the tagline “Everyone Deserves Excellence.” A standard piece of product differentiation, the campaign is designed to promote the false notion that GM is doing something new in making and pushing wildly expensive petroleum-guzzling death machines.  It is not, of course.

But now the other shoe is dropping.  Turns out the new tagline is also a set-up for this:

NEW YORK (Reuters) — General Motors Co. is in talks with JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo on deals aimed at providing improved access to consumers for auto loans at its U.S. dealerships.

The negotiations with JPMorgan and Wells Fargo are intended to broaden the availability of auto financing — particularly to subprime borrowers and for leases. Such a move would remove a potential investor concern around GM ahead of a planned initial public offering, according to the sources.

So, the “excellence” that even the “subprime” deserve turns out to be yet another high-interest loan on a lemon product.

And the atrocious Obama Administration is performing its unwavering role.  Saying it knows it “can’t win every fight,”* it will accede to exempting car dealerships from the purview of the Potemkin Village it is now setting up to provide the illusion of “consumer protection.”

This overclass has nothing left but bubbles.

*Translation:  “We don’t actually fight any fights.”

Rachel, you are certainly correct that OilBama blew it.

But two wrongs don’t make a right. Passing an “energy bill” is not going to do jack shit to prevent future oil rig explosions or any of the other costs and dangers of the status quo.

The reasons:

1. 80+ percent of U.S. oil use is due to cars-first transportation.  71 percent goes directly into gas tanks, and at least another ten percent goes into making cars, building asphalt roads, and automobile-induced generally inflated petroleum use.  If we do not radically demote the automobile in this society, more deepwater oil drilling and rig disasters are assured.

2. Doubling or tripling automotive fuel efficiency standards in the US car fleet is very easy to say, and essentially impossible to do, unless you spend trillions of dollars doing so.  If we are to switch over to glorified electric golf carts, we will need to rebuild our entire existing road and fueling infrastructure, as well as our whole electrical grid.  If we are going to spend trillions, we should rebuild our cities and towns to facilitate truly sustainable transportation, not more cars.

3. Doubling or tripling automotive fuel efficiency would merely slow the pace of oil use.  It will absolutely not “get us off oil.”  In fact, trying to double or triple automotive fuel efficiency would INCREASE the rate of petroleum used in road and vehicle building, both of which would be required to make micro-cars exist in sufficient numbers and platforms.  The automobile in any viable cars-first format is a 1,500-plus-pound metal and plastic box for moving people distances that ought to be covered by walking, bicycling, and using shared public transit vehicles.  As such, it is inherently oil-instensive and radically unsustainable.  Why haven’t you ever pondered that, Rachel?

4. Alternative fuels do not, and probably will not, exist, except as counterproductive tricks on end-users desperate for answers.

5. Until you liberal wonks stop working to keep people tied to shameless sell-outs like Obama, none of your fantasy-world legislative rebellions stand a ghost of a chance of happening.  We need social movements and serious discussion of reality, include the necrosis of the Democratic Party, not misleading and unserious beltway pwog talking points.

Grow up, Rachel.  This isn’t a game.

I apologize.  Try as I might, it remains impossible to underestimate President Obama.

Considering the topic at hand, that was perhaps the most bloodless, pathetic speech in U.S. history.  Flaccid would be too strong a word for it.  People coaxing kittens away from yarnballs are more outraged and urgent.

And Obummer promised even less than the moldy crumbs I’d expected.  Another elite, stacked commission of inquiry, another Harvard creep in charge of another institution, and promises of promises about unnamed “clean energy” vaporware.  That’s it.  Not another penny for public transportation, our decrepit railroads, or even electric cars.  Zip.

This guy is a somnambulant babysitter on Xanax.  He makes Clinton look good, Al Gore passionate.  Somewhere, a career-chip office is missing its Level 29 Bureaucrat.

And this isn’t funny, either.  If there was ever going to be a moment for raising the topic of seriously overhauling our suicidal cars-first transportation order, this was it.

Not a hint of a whisper of a peep about that from this place-holding corporate pitchfork-catcher.

Tragic.

Obama is just a complete wipe-out, a true sock puppet distracting his duped followers from the corporate capitalist death-trade he represents and believes in.

The latest proof is an email he’s apparently sent to his entranced minions, on this, the eve of what is sure to be a solemn statement of Oval Office timidity.

In this email, Obummer says this:

“The time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a new future. That means continuing our unprecedented effort to make everything — from our homes and businesses to our cars and trucks — more energy-efficient.”

In other words:  Join me in fighting our cancer, by reshaping our tumor!

And there’s also this:

“Many businesses support this agenda because shifting to clean energy creates opportunities for entrepreneurship. This is how we will reinvent our economy — and create new companies and new jobs all across the country.”

What exactly are “clean energy” and “this program” to which we merely need to “shift”?  Nobody, including Mr. Obummer himself, has a clue, because neither exists.

Most likely, what Obama is suggesting is more subsidies for negative EROEI ethanol production and tax breaks for the electric cars that the overclass is planning to use as a distraction.  Neither of these things is remotely serious as a potential solution to the ridiculous level of energy waste that cars-first transportation, on behalf of our investing class, imposes on us.  And any fool who suggests otherwise is literally dumping more petroleum onto a raging inferno.

All the while, according to Obama, “entrepreneurship” is the answer rather than the force that brought us exactly to this deregulated, profits-über-alles point.

Suicidal ideology you can believe in…

If you’ve paid attention, you know that, every step of the way, British Petroleum, the commercial media, and the disastrous and fraudulent Obama Administration have been understating the scale of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

So, one natural question is what might they be covering up?  How bad might this all really be?

One knowledgeable person with the handle “dougr” has posted an answer at The Oil Drum:

What is likely to happen now?

Well…none of what is likely to happen is good, in fact…it’s about as bad as it gets. I am convinced the erosion and compromising of the entire system is accelerating and attacking more key structural areas of the well, the blow out preventer and surrounding strata holding it all up and together. This is evidenced by the tilt of the blow out preventer and the erosion which has exposed the well head connection. What eventually will happen is that the blow out preventer will literally tip over if they do not run supports to it as the currents push on it. I suspect they will run those supports as cables tied to anchors very soon, if they don’t, they are inviting disaster that much sooner.

Eventually even that will be futile as the well casings cannot support the weight of the massive system above with out the cement bond to the earth and that bond is being eroded away. When enough is eroded away the casings will buckle and the BOP will collapse the well. If and when you begin to see oil and gas coming up around the well area from under the BOP? or the area around the well head connection and casing sinking more and more rapidly? …it won’t be too long after that the entire system fails. BP must be aware of this, they are mapping the sea floor sonically and that is not a mere exercise. Our Gov’t must be well aware too, they just are not telling us.

All of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore directly to the oil deposit…after that, it goes into the realm of “the worst things you can think of” The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the well, that could literally come flying out…as I said…all the worst things you can think of are a possibility, but the very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more. There isn’t any “cap dome” or any other suck fixer device on earth that exists or could be built that will stop it from gushing out and doing more and more damage to the gulf. While at the same time also doing more damage to the well, making the chance of halting it with a kill from the bottom up less and less likely to work, which as it stands now?….is the only real chance we have left to stop it all.

It’s a race now…a race to drill the relief wells and take our last chance at killing this monster before the whole weakened, wore out, blown out, leaking and failing system gives up it’s last gasp in a horrific crescendo.

We are not even 2 months into it, barely half way by even optimistic estimates. The damage done by the leaked oil now is virtually immeasurable already and it will not get better, it can only get worse. No matter how much they can collect, there will still be thousands and thousands of gallons leaking out every minute, every hour of every day. We have 2 months left before the relief wells are even near in position and set up to take a kill shot and that is being optimistic as I said.

If the structural situation is what dougr fears and dougr is also right that “Our Gov’t must be well aware too, they just are not telling us,” then Tony Hayward certainly isn’t the only one who deserves the stony lonesome.  Might we see consecutive Dimbot prezzes impeached?

This, ladies and gents, is what’s “new” from the Chrysler Group LLC.

This, “the first car to roll out since Chrysler’s alliance with Fiat”? An SUV! An SUV that “starts at” $32,995! An SUV that gets 16 MPG in city driving!

The ad? A ham-handed raft of stale jingoism, flattery, and deceptions, made by the always atrocious Wieden and Kennedy propaganda mill.

This much is screamingly obvious: “Our” overclass (and it includes the new Italian bosses) is simply and completely incapable of doing anything new, in even the slightest degree.

As I said over at The Consumer Trap, in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, there is an uncontrolled gusher of conventional “everybody’s to blame” dogma parading around passing itself off as serious social criticism.

This phony, knee-jerk analysis is merely the flip-side of the capitalist dogma insisting that demand for products arises exclusively from spontaneous popular wishes and unsullied technological innovations only, no corporate manipulation involved. It’s an excuse and a denial, in other words.

What we need now is realistic descriptions of and remedies for the institutionalized, class-based decisions that continue to impose petro-intensive living on human societies. Swallowing the familiar trope that the main problem resides in your looking glass is a step away from, not toward, such realism.

Meanwhile, this new DbC page is dedicated to collecting examples of the mental virus that denies the existence of an overclass and blames “us” all instead. Please feel free to send in cases you encounter.

DbC Hall of Mirrors Inductees:

Chris Clugston:  With zero evidence to back his assertions, Clugston claims “Americans ‘just don’t get it’ regarding the unsustainable nature of our American way of life,” and that anger at BP is a “self-righteous” distraction from the deeper fact that we have met the enemy and it is us.

Peter Fowler:  “If BP Is Evil Then So Are We All,…because we demand the oil they are forced to take these sorts of risks to get.” So, in Fowler’s telling, coerced acceptance equals policy origination.

Joanna Weiss:  Weiss frets, “I couldn’t help but wonder how much I should hate myself.”  She talks of “our oil-drenched lifestyles” as if we all asked for them and would refuse to consider alternatives, if given a choice.  Joanna thinks cars-first transportation comes from a “culture of expansion,” not corporate capitalist dictatorship. Evidence for any of these claims? None, and none needed. They are merely true by statement, since they replicate conventional business-society tropes.

The automobile is the ultimate commodity. Getting people to use it for the vast majority of their mundane commutes is getting them to buy fantastic amounts of unnecessary profit-bearing materials. It is overkill on four wheels, all for the primary benefit of the corporate overclass.

And, as auto-makers push to expand the frontiers of commodification, the degree of non-necessity grows with each model-line up-tick.

The latest news item in this saga speaks volumes about the murderous twinning of complexity and triviality in our market-totalitarian times: The “new” General Motors Corporation is recalling 1.5 million automobiles because their award-winning heated wiper-fluid systems are causing engine fires.

However have we poor suffering humans survived this long without heated wiper fluid in our 3,000-pound grocery-fetchers?

Just received a forward of a new moveon.org appeal. The group, founded to protect the horrendous Bill Clinton from facing perjury charges, wants us all to join Presidents Bush and Obama in their diagnosis of “our” disease and then “tell” Congress* “It’s time for a bold plan to get America off of oil. Please learn from the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and take action to end the U.S. addiction to oil.”

Hey, dipshits: It’s cars, not oil. And its capitalists, not “us.”

*The last time a major “highway bill” was before Congress, in 2005, it passed 503-12, with all 12 of the nays coming from ultra-right Republicans happy to get a puffball chance to grandstand their supposed hatred of government spending. Zero Democrats spoke or voted against the bill, which reduced the “traditional” share of money going to public transportation.

Washing oiled wildlife is a fraudulent gesture designed to further enrich corporate stockholders while burying the relevant facts.