Writing in Salon, author, talk-show host and card-carrying liberal David Sirota made an excellent point in Faces of Economic Death—
If you've turned on the tube these last few weeks, you've probably been a collateral casualty of the biggest televisual war of attrition in recent memory... I'm talking about the now never-ending throwdown between two of the most in-your-face salespeople our mediascape has ever manufactured: Geico's unnamed gecko and Progressive Insurance's chipper saleswoman, Flo.
No doubt, you know them both -- the green lizard's smile and cockney accent feign earnestness while the aproned Flo goes for the same effect through the saccharine enthusiasm of an “Office Space” character. It's mildly cute, but don't be fooled: As the best-known avatars of the insurance industry, these two are aggressively competing for our cash through re-education-camp levels of repetition, hoping to harass us into buying their product...
Think about it: The gecko and Flo do not embody the capitalist vision of private competition fostering innovations that serve the greater good. They are not, say, two private manufacturers grabbing for customers in an entrepreneurial competition that will result in major technological advances.
Instead, the gecko and Flo front an insurance and related banking sector that is a government-supported endeavor — car and health insurance are mandated and/or subsidized by the state, and deposits are federally guaranteed. This sector, which pools collective resources for (theoretically) collective benefits, provides services that are obviously crucial to the economy. But those services produce little added value beyond their baseline functions — and that’s why the sector was once regulated like a utility.
It's true—you can't turn on the TV without encountering "re-education-camp levels" of mind-numbing repetition, and all of these efforts are put forward to sell you car insurance, which the state says you have to have. Sirota is referring to the non-productive nature of what is often called the "FIRE" economy (Finance, Insurance & Real Estate). For the moment, we are blissfully (mostly) free of the Real Estate part of this phony arrangement, but those pesky Finance and Insurance sectors just won't go away. Here's Sirota again—
But since the 1980s’ decline of manufacturing, the insurance and finance sector has doubled its share of gross domestic product, hitting 8 percent last year. That's twice as large as both the construction and information sectors — and ongoing taxpayer bailouts promise to exacerbate the asymmetry even more.
This is certainly great for insurance companies — for example, it provides them excess billions to buy an absurd amount of ads. For the rest of us, though, the growing imbalance between real wealth creation and worthless paper pushing is bad news — and that’s why the gecko and Flo are so deeply disturbing. More than just the moment's most annoying shills, they are the cheeky visages of our nation's long-term economic decline.
Cheeky visages of our nation's long-term economic decline—Sirota has hit the nail on the head. Once our corrupt legislators handed the keys to the Kingdom to now-glorified utilities, we were on the road to Perdition. And as the gecko and Flo demonstrate ad nauseum, nothing has changed. And it ain't gonna change.
We're not going to start making things again and give you a good paying job here in the good ole United States of America. Instead, we're just going to run car insurance commercials until what's left of your brain turns to mush. And once your grey matter has turned to porridge, we'll design a new bunch of clever advertisements to sell you pharmaceuticals that might alleviate your brain-has-turned-to-mush problem. Death by a thousand commercials.
Who would have thought that a CGI-animated little green lizard and a super-helpful but annoyingly cheerful saleswoman would embody the Empire's downfall? On second thought, and leaving out the specific details, it was easy to see this coming all along.
Heh--wonder how many teevee viewers out there who sit giggling at the exploits of the gecko have any idea that GEICO stands for Governemnt Employees' Insurance Company, and if it would change their opinion of the company if they did. :)
Posted by: Bill Hicks | 01/13/2011 at 12:16 PM