News & Articles

Okay people, we need to discuss billboards. Yes, we really must.
At best, these giant corporate placards are problematic – they garishly loom over us, clutter our landscapes, and intrude into our communities with no respect for local aesthetics or preferences. Now, however, billboards are getting a high-tech re-boot, allowing advertisers to invade not only our places, but also our privacy. Having to see billboards everywhere is bad enough; far worse, though, is that the modernized, digitalized, computerized structures can see you! And track you.
Clear Channel Outdoor Americas, having already splattered the country with tens of thousands of billboards, has revealed that it is partnering with AT&T and other data snoops to erect “smart” billboards that will know and record when you drive or walk past one. Using your own mobile phone, they can then follow your travel patterns and consumer behavior. Aggregating that information with other available data, Clear Channel can then know the average age and gender of passersby who see an ad on a particular billboard and know whether they later make purchases.

It’s “a bit creepy,” says Andy Stevens. And he works for Clear Channel! He’s the corporation’s vice president for “research and insights.” Stevens rationalizes the zippy new Ever-watching Orwellian Billboard as just another step into the digital future: “We’re just tapping into an existing data system,” he shrugs, noting that the millions of profiles collected by Clear Channel is “Obviously… very valuable to an advertiser.”
And even more valuable to us persons who treasure our privacy and have given no permission to be targeted and tracked by a billboard huckster. And we thought government spying was out of control! For information on corporate snooping, go to www.epic.org.

What is fueling “Hurricane Donnie” Trump

Elites tend to be… well, elite. As in, “clueless” about what your everyday working stiff is thinking.
Most hoity-toities don’t even think or care about what the great unwashed think, but cluelessness about the masses can be disastrous for political elites. Today’s Republican establishment, for example, now finds that it is so out of touch with regular voters that it faces a howling, Category-5 hurricane that’s threatening to implode the Grand Old Party.
None of the elites saw Hurricane Donnie coming, and with the blow-hard now raging at full force, the GOP’s upper-crusters still don’t seem to know what hit them, much less what to do about it. They are so out of it that they even tried to blunt his surge by having Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush rush out and say bad things about The Donald, imploring voters to turn their backs on him. To see these two buttoned-down pillars of the moneyed establishment huffing and puffing at the storm was hilarious – and as hopeless as them trying to blow away a real hurricane.
What the aloof, affluent leaders of the Republican Party don’t get is that the source of the storm is not Trump, but infuriated, rank-and-file, working-class voters who feel betrayed by them. None other than Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, the Koch brothers, the corporate CEOs and lobbyists, Mitt & Jeb, and the other well-off swells who run the GOP are the ones who’ve stripped the party of any blue-collar appeal. And they have corporatized governors like Scott Walker and Rick Snyder, running over working families. These GOP elites are single-mindedly pushing a plutocratic agenda of trade scams, tax cuts for the rich, and subsidies for runaway corporations, while constantly slashing at Social Security, Medicare, and other programs that their own non-affluent voters need.
The Party powers now wail that Trump is stealing their voters. But he’s not – he’s just picking up the people the GOP elites threw away.
“How G.O.P. Elites Lost The Party’s Base to Trump,” The New York Times, March 28, 2016.