In case you missed it, China’s state capitalists are now saying that they are pushing to be manufacturing 40 million automobiles a year by 2020.

It will be interesting to see if capitalism makes it that far without the onset of the mother of all depressions.  Personally, I doubt it.

But this news is extremely important, nonetheless.  Not only does it support the thesis that few things can boost corporate capitalism like cars, but it is also an enormous indictment of China’s worst-of-both-worlds overclass.  If their efforts come to fruition, they will spell catastrophe for the Chinese people.

The arrival of greenwashing as a top priority in corporate capitalism’s core industrial complex is expanding and refining the art and science of halo-ware as a 21st-century marketing strategy. “Halo products” are newfangled loss-leaders designed to provide cover for business-as-usual.

Two times in just the past week, Automotive News, an insider gossip and news publication, has mentioned the h-word in its reporting on forthcoming “green cars”:

October 1, reporting on the pathetic gas-electric hybrid Chevy Volt:

The Volt is being marketed as a “halo car” to underscore GM’s green credentials.

October 4, reporting on the “fashion-statement” (translation: over-priced, under-efficient) subcompact Fiat 500:

Jesse Toprak, analyst for TrueCar.com, believes the 500′s Italian design will help those Chrysler dealers who win the franchise to lure new customers. “The halo effect of this car and the utility of this car will grab younger clientele and early adopters,” he says.

“Green cars,” of course, are not the only major form of halo-ware. “Green energy” is right there, too, if the truth be told.

After a century of maximizing profits by working in precisely the opposite direction, U.S. car capitalists are now saying this:

“There will be less than 30, on our way to 20 to 25,” Ford CEO Alan Mulally said in response to questions on the future lineup of nameplates after addressing the Confederation of British Industry in London. “Fewer brands means you can put more focus into improving the quality of engineering.”

All the while before this reversal, these creeps were spending scores of millions to propagandize you about “Quality is Job 1.”

[source: Bloomberg via Automotive News]

The overclass is arranging one last big profit-suck from cars-first transportation.

Part of that arrangement is a drive to restrict price competition by “consolidating” the number of car dealerships in the country.

Ford, for instance, is taking advantage of the recent crisis in the automotive industrial complex to slash the number of Ford sales outlets by 50 percent.

As reported by Automotive News, the motive is clear and classic:

With industry sales volumes forecast to rebound slowly, Ford and other automakers want to rationalize and improve the profitability of their sales networks by consolidating dealerships.

In plain language, this means Joe and Jane Sixpack will be facing higher prices in the future than they otherwise would have, sans “consolidation.”

Nobody hates competition like a capitalist.

Ruling social classes age. After they get their boots squarely on enough necks, they begin to flatter themselves for it. Eventually, as memory of reality recedes, senility sets in, and they lose the capacity to do anything creative or flexible or realistic. Boondoggles become the only game in town.

The U.S. overclass entered into terminal dementia beginning in the late 1970s, and is now utterly braindead.

Consider this post from the editors of Investor’s Business Daily. In it, the IBD editors rightly disparage the Chevy Volt as a hopeless boondoggle.

But they also manage to say that the Volt is the product of “government stupidity,” rather than capitalists’ long-standing and utterly unchallenged dictatorship over transportation policy in the United States:

It wasn’t exactly Michael Dukakis riding in a tank wearing a Snoopy helmet, but it was close. President Obama, who reportedly hasn’t driven an inch himself since taking office, visited a GM plant in Hamtrack near Detroit on Friday to drive a Chevy Volt 10 feet off an assembly line. It was a perfect image, as the American economy is being driven off a cliff by this White House.

The administration, at taxpayers’ expense, has labored mightily and brought forth an Edsel that needs to be recharged. If a camel is a horse designed by committee, the Chevy Volt is a car designed by government. It is a perfect example of industrial policy run amok, of what happens when government picks winners and losers. Without heavy subsidies and government ownership, it never would have been built.

Aside from being absolutely false — the Volt was designed by GM, of course, the self-flattering blindness on display here is simply epic. Whatever one thinks of the cliche about camels being bad horses, the inarguable fact is that the automobile is capitalists’ idea of a horse, with all that implies about capitalists’ idea of energy efficiency and safety and sustainability in human mobility systems.

As this shows, our out-of-control moneyed overlords are so far gone on their own BS, they can’t even tell when they’re plainly tying their own nooses. The Chevy Volt is a sign of corporate capitalist dominance and desperation, as is market-worshipper Barack Obummer’s sponsorship and pimping of it.

If the public ever gains control of transportation policy, we will have to show these heedless murderers what government’s real idea of a horse is.

Apparently Eric Schlosser is now working on the important issue of the corporate capitalist food trade’s impact on food safety.

In this op-ed Schlosser relays a fact I’d missed until now:

China has become the largest exporter of food to the United States after Canada and Mexico. About 60 percent of the apple juice in America — like peanut butter, a product consumed largely by children — now comes from China.

From the perspective of energy-use, this is sheer insanity, stark proof of the point that what makes sense to capitalists is very often murderously short-sighted behavior that any functioning democracy would find a way to stop.

At this point, any sane society would be moving very aggressively to build its way back out of cars-first transportation.  Part of that effort would be steep taxes on gas guzzlers.

In the United States, where we not only don’t begrudge people getting rich, we don’t even allow them to be questioned, what are we getting?

This:

DETROIT — It’s diet time for the once best-selling SUV in America.

The redesigned Ford Explorer has been slimmed down for 2011 and transferred to a car-based platform. And it no longer will be a gas-guzzling hulk with a V-8 under the hood.

Ford Motor Co. said today that the redesigned 2011 model — equipped with an optional, two-liter EcoBoost I4 engine — will achieve a 30 percent increase in fuel efficiency compared with the current V-6-equipped Explorer. EcoBoost has delivered similar fuel economy gains in other cars and trucks.

The current Explorer equipped with two-wheel drive and a four-liter V-6 is rated at 14 mpg city/20 highway. With a 30 percent increase in fuel economy, the EcoBoost-equipped Explorer should deliver 18/26.

Eighteen miles per gallon.

In the car-pushing trade, this is what’s called “hitting the mark”:

“We believe we’ve hit the mark with the next-generation Explorer,” Mark Fields, head of Ford’s Americas unit, said in statement. “It has the potential to change perceptions of what a modern SUV is all about.”

In honest language, this is the same old same old:  Capitalists selling the largest possible vehicles, the planet and its people be damned. “Hitting the mark” means figuring out how much waste you can get away with under new conditions.

Q: Why is the FICA tax a percentage, while federal, state, and local gasoline taxes are fixed, named numbers?

A: Corporate capitalism is addicted to cars-first transportation, and must therefore increase its public subsidy over time.

This is especially true in systemically normal times, during which the masses lose economic ground to the overclass.  In other words, keeping the Bubbas driving is more important than keeping them fed, clothed, sheltered, insured, or anything else.

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.”

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…