As of late, an oddly disturbing number of friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and current/former co-workers have been presenting with symptoms of having swallowed a whole lot of propaganda that’s doing odd things to their mental digestive systems, so to speak. I won’t add fuel to any fires by describing these people in terms of geographic origin, gender, economic status, education, occupation, personal wealth, intelligence, or any other label. Doing so would only detract from the process. We’re all being exposed to the same stuff these days, and most of us are reacting the same way. Some of us, however, are not.
Göebbels must have learned this sort of stuff for himself in his, ahh, “focus groups”: when people get stressed, then pushed some more, egged on a little, then pushed some more (repeat this process as necessary) their otherwise sane & functional mental barriers are lowered, and it becomes possible to present all kinds of strange information as “fact”. And I mean “fact” in the most Orwellian sense, as in “.. but we’ve always been at war with Oceana!”
So far I have been dealing with them one-on-one via letters, phone calls, emails, casual encounters, in-person visits, etc. Patterns are emerging, and from these I can guess a little of what’s going on and who’s responsible for it.
Thanks to that oh-so-concentrated media power now owned by a handful of the wealthiest corporations (which a few citizens and legislators dignified themselves resisting the encroachment of) we’re seeing a horrid amount of class antagonism being fostered, presumably for the purpose of causing some deliberate misdirection.
One thing you may hear people saying (or more likely muttering) is something about how “all those illegals and welfare queens are making it big on free healthcare while I sweat paying taxes”.
If anyone bothers to check, the so-called healthcare reform act that was signed into law is functionally identical to the one put out in 2006 by the American Heritage Foundation, that über-right think tank that was a favorite of Rove & Cheney. Like the 2006 original, it was written by and for the healthcare industry in order to foster the continuation of its enormous profiteering. It does not provide free healthcare to all; rather, it demands that everyone must purchase it from a private company – and if you check, guess what, rates are rising sharply.
One supposes that these same corporations that wrote the bill (and plan to profit enormously off their new, enhanced, guaranteed revenue stream) have decided to shift public attention elsewhere by pitting half the population against the other half. All it takes them is a quick request to R Murdoch, who phones up his Faux Nooz Entertainment spin-meisters (and a similar call to the current Jack Welch at GE), and soon enough a couple of the networks are flooded with angry stories & opinion about how unfair it is that illegals, welfare queens, indigent poor, etc, are getting free care. No doubt the few hundred million dollars spent putting a smokescreen over this highway robbery is peanuts compared to the trillions they’ll rake in over the next decade.
Another thing you may heard said is something like “49 percent of the people don’t pay any taxes”.
This one came out right around the time it was learned that Gollum Sacks had its best year ever in the firm’s 149-year history. Of course, “experts” assure us this had nothing to do with their backdoor to Treasury, their illegal high-frequency trading, or any of their other scheister actions. Gollum Sacks paid only a 1% effective tax rate, thanks to its manipulations. Warren Buffet brags openly that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Wall Street seems to have had its best year ever, even while the real economy has tanked horribly. Of course, we’re led to believe this had nothing to do with the billions they get loaned at 0%, which they then sell back to the government at 4%.
But that’s OK, Captain Misdirection is at their service! What better way to distract the people from this bank robbery than to convince them, hook + line + sinker, that their less-fortunate fellow citizens are lazing around enjoying lower taxes than they are? Face it, everyone thinks s/he pays too much in taxes .. and it burns up him/her to think that someone else is getting a lower rate. But poor people are visually familiar to all of us, while rich corporations are faceless far-away entities that most people can’t even name specifically, don’t know the chief officers of, and never deal with directly. When it comes to finding a scapegoat, everyone always goes for the familiar instead of the hidden stuff they don’t know and have never seen.
Another BS line you may hear someone repeating is something like “Oh, all those people on unlimited employment have given up because they’d rather not work at all, and it’s easier to laze around and enjoy the fruits of MY TAXES!” (usually ends in a shriek)
This is another beautiful piece of misdirection. The emotional anger induced by this bit o’ propaganda is enough to overwhelm recognition of the oft-circulated fact that there are six (and now perhaps seven or more) unemployed people for every job out there. Instead of feeling sympathy for our fellow citizens, many of whom have been financially uprooted because their former employers have now outsourced work to cheaper places, we’re induced to feel that they’re a bunch of lazy, freeloading slackers who are just sitting around eating watermelon and pizza all day long in between SUV-trips to the beach and the cinemaplex.
Another line you may hear is “Those people on food stamps are just abusing the program to buy cigarettes and beer”.
Notice how this BS gets ratcheted up every time the new numbers come out saying that one in X citizens is now on food stamps, and that more than a quarter of our nation’s children are now served by the program? Uh-huh. What your outrage is supposed to obscure from you is the fact that the companies most profiting from this arrangement (the same Big Agriculture interests responsible for putting high-fructose corn syrup into so many lower-cost prepared foods) are extremely pleased with this arrangement.
Yes, dear sheeple, instead of noticing how the bank is being robbed by – hey, look, it’s the Goodyear blimp!
Not long ago, after it first became necessary for him to show at least some public antipathy toward BP in light of the horrible oil spill it caused, president Obama said that cozy and long-running relationship between the government and the oil industry has got to end. It is by now reasonably common knowledge that most (if not all) of the people working in the government regulatory agencies that are supposed to monitor and control and limit the oil industry’s excesses are themselves former oil business employees, and that good awl-bidness jobs await them after their “successful performance” (at least to the oil companies) in those regulatory agencies. Many former state and federal representatives are presently in the employ of the oil industry, primarily at firms lobbying the government on behalf of the industry.
What our president unfortunately did not say was that the exact same kind of “cozy and long-running relationship” exists between the government and any industry or party that’s rich enough to lobby it. In each case, the regulatory agencies are staffed by ex-employees of the firms they’re supposed to be regulating. A fine example of what ensues can be found at the SEC, where the staffers found no wrongdoing on Wall Street and instead surfed pr0n from their offices. None of them flagged Madoff’s classic ponzi scheme, or AIG’s disastrously-obscure derivative plays, or Moody’s labeling of dogsh*t-toxic assets as AAA, or Goldman Sach’s high-frequency trading cheats, or more.
Everyone familiar with this blog knows how we got here .. the subject has been amply discussed in the past. I won’t hog bandwidth by repeating it. Suffice it to say, when something you hear or read makes you distrust or dislike or resent any of your fellow citizens (and it’s not something any of them did to you personally), it warrants being /extremely/ curious about who’s going to benefit most from you getting bent out of shape.
The basic problem is that you need to keep a decently-sized fabric stash handy for when mood or inspiration strikes, and you want to try something new. Or on the days when the creative lightning doesn’t strike, well, you can work toward your goal of having the same garment done in a dozen different colors and with minor stylistic changes.
September 4, 2010
inverse relationships?
Posted by nudged under commentary, economy[23] Comments
As XER said, this is a great time to be alive.
One of the many funky things we can witness in the present is the evidence of badly-structured relationships between this and that. Now that the economy is no longer engaged in continuous, steady, predictable growth on a mass scale, all kinds of previously-hidden positive-feedback mechanisms are coming to light. The standard motor vehicular analogy might be like taking your foot off the gas in a real “lead sled” of Detroit pig iron, only to realize that it can’t idle smoothly and the brakes/steering don’t work right.
Take for example the issue of government revenues here in the soon-to-be former USA. Tax revenues are headed off a cliff due to decreased economic activity. Governments foolishly assume the present troubles are just a rough spot we’re passing through, insist they budgeted X dollars for this coming year’s needs plus payment on debts from before, and then they raise the tax rates to meet those projected revenue needs. For the businesses still paying taxes here, for the people still paying taxes, for property owners of all kinds paying taxes, etc, this could not come at a worse possible time: right as things are the most tight for them, the government is actually /raising/ tax rates.
Another such positive-feedback mechanism exists in the relationship between employers and employees here. Due to revenues going down, most businesses are quite-naturally attempted to keep shedding their least-useful employees while also reducing wages for the remaining employees while also piling more work duties onto the remaining employees. It goes without saying that with each person taken out of the workforce, there is that much less domestic purchasing power loose out there. Furthermore, employers who pare their workforces down to only their best people, cut wages while shuffling more work onto the remaining employees, keep cutting benefits, etc, risk the ire of those same people if the economy ever improves to the point where job mobility is not just a theoretical possibility as it is now.
Here in the former land o’ plenty, a similar positive-feedback relationship exists in intentional communities. When the economy is horrible in general, those communities are usually having a bad time themselves since their export trade goes way down. Not coincidentally, these same hard times produce a record flow of new people showing up to apply for membership to said communities, right when they’re least-able to take on new people. Likewise, when the general economy is doing very well, the communities have a harder time keeping their more entrepreneurial members who can do far better for themselves outside the community.
It seems that life in the western nations is going to be an annoying, unending series of ups and downs until we get a little more clueful about our priorities so that we can design for better societal and organizational stability.