In Part I of this thread, I said that one of the factors in the Republican wave of 2010 was how people are responding to the crisis of this 2012 time frame. When you perceive that you’re in a dysfunctional political and economic configuration, any change can seem positive. The Republicans were the other option available. To a great extent, people were acting out against a system they no longer felt was serving them.
Moreover, the relative inability of the Democrats to get their message across to voters in the 2010 midterms was due in no small part to a concerted effort by Republicans to take advantage of the economic crisis to return to power.
My reading is that there is something more sinister at work here than just politics as usual. The Republican gains in the 2010 elections are in no small measure the result of a corporate-conservative conspiracy with an agenda of inciting and manipulating fear and anger for political gain. This is the second major factor in the Republican wave.
To substantiate a conspiracy, we need to define what we mean by this loaded term and then see if there is any real evidence. A conspiracy is “a secret plan or agreement to carry out an illegal or harmful act, especially with political motivations.”
We expect politicians to be a morally challenged group. We expect there to be a certain amount of corruption in our political institutions. However, notwithstanding overt acts of illegality, there is a compelling case for harm resulting from the conspiracy.
To put it simply, those voters who voted for Republicans hoping for a government more supportive of their immediate economic concerns have been scammed. This is harmful to our society because it’s classic sociopathic behavior. You charm people into believing you support their interests and concerns while all the time plotting to take advantage of their gullibility to enrich yourself and your friends at their expense.
The harm I see from the conspiracy comes about through a disconnect between rhetoric and reality. To take just one example, the Republican Party is now on a crusade to make lower tax rates for the richest Americans permanent.
Their first argument was that if the Bush tax rates expire for individuals making over 200,000 per year and their tax rates to go to 39% from the current 35%, this will have a major negative impact on small businesses.
However, only about three percent of small businesses would actually be affected. So the Republican plan doesn’t help the average person. It just puts money in the pockets of already well-off people. This tax break for the upper income people would exacerbate the deficit problem to the tune of 1 trillion dollars over the next ten years.
The Republican leadership has now augmented their argument claiming that this tax break for the wealthy will help the economy because it will ensure stability and reduce uncertainty. The argument is that, if the corporate interests know what their tax rates are going to be, they will then start hiring new workers in an atmosphere of renewed confidence.
However, the big corporations are already sitting on 2 trillion dollars in cash reserves so the issue of employment is clearly not scarcity of money. And if a tax break is denied to them, they would still have certainty about their tax rates in the future.
The beliefs that people form about what’s happening in today’s world are often not grounded in anything like a critical perspective that looks for information from various sources to determine what is really going on.
People’s beliefs are sourced by their perceptions. These perceptions are subject to manipulation by sociopathic elements that have no hesitation to lie, put forth disinformation, and twist and distort the actual facts of any situation to their advantage.
Representative Michele Bachmann, a Tea Party partisan and Minnesota Congresswoman, went on television just before Obama’s Asia trip and said the trip was going to cost tax payers $200 million dollars a day. She was promoting an internet rumor from an anonymous source. This story was picked up and repeated by conservative media personalities Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage.
According to the Government Accountability Office, a similar trip by President Clinton to Africa in 1998 cost just over 5 million dollars a day.
There is compelling evidence that there is indeed a conspiracy to manipulate our perceptions. We see it every day in virtually any exposure to media. It is advertising. We are so accustomed to this on-going assault on our view of reality that we are asleep to its influence and impact. We may think we see through it, but it still affects us.
Corporations invest a lot of resources in behavior modification. They have their own scientists and they conduct secret research. This corporate conspiracy is harmful to the public to the extent that it motivates people to buy products and services that are detrimental to health and well-being. Junk food, cigarettes, and alcohol are the items that come immediately to mind. There are many more.
What keeps corporate greed from going completely out of control are various government regulations which, among other things, require content labeling for food products and warnings on cigarettes. There is on-going polarity between the interests of corporations and the interests of the public as represented by the government.
So when we see the rise of some political phenomenon such as the Tea Party, we have good reason to wonder if some other interest is being served rather than proactive civic responsibility to correct the abuses of government.
Take, for example, one of the chief goals of the Tea Party Movement, limited government. I don’t think they mean they would be happier if we had fewer FBI agents, or soldiers, or fewer people to administer the Social Security Agency. They are talking about, among other things, a rollback of government intervention in economic crises.
The Tea Party Movement originated in protests against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Obama’s stimulus bill, and against a plan by Obama to help homeowners facing foreclosure refinance their mortgages. It was a Seattle blogger, Keli Carender who first organized a protest against the stimulus and an on air commentator for CNBC, Rick Santelli, who famously ranted on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange against Obama’s plan to help people with troubled mortgages.
When I say that there is a conservative-corporate conspiracy at work in today’s politics, I’m referring to a strategy to manipulate people’s perceptions to believe that some political agenda or posturing is something other than what it actually is. The Tea Party and what it advocates is just such a sociopathically tinged political entity.
The same people and resources that are routinely used to achieve behavior modification in the area of consumer behavior are hired by political groups to sway public opinion through emotional and symbolic appeals that are often wildly unrelated to the substantive issues at stake in the campaign. The corporate conspiracy to make up our minds for us outside the range of critical perspective becomes a political conspiracy to do the same.
The term “tea party” is synonymous with protest by ordinary citizens against perceived governmental abuse. This certainly makes it seem like an honorable and even patriotic endeavor.
But when you take something that people have positive symbolic resonance with and link something else to it that undermines the very basis of the original positive elements, this is just the detrimental sociopathic aspect at work. People are going to be drawn in and scammed without quite realizing what is going on.
In the advertising world, this identification scam is reflected in products like the cowboy ads for Marlboro cigarettes. You show the brand with some well constructed romantic scene of cowboys and the open range and then the mind will form a link between the product and the good feelings you get from the image.
The goal of well-managed image of the Tea Party is to link their super conservative political brand with ideas like liberty, fiscal responsibility, and grass roots push back against power elites.
But the Tea Party people are not reformists, they are reactionaries who are trying to preserve some status quo situation which benefits them to the detriment of everyone else. They are trying to protect power and privilege not make our society more just, more democratic, or even more prosperous for everyone.
Their stated purpose is not to improve government but as they state explicitly to take back government. Their real goal is to engineer a complete takeover by the most conservative political elements.
As mentioned in Part I, there are genuine concerns about the moves the Democratic majority Congress and President have untaken to attempt to head off a total economic meltdown. The government became a major share holder in banks, automobile companies, and AIG with bailouts. The federal deficit has ballooned to a frightening and unsustainable level.
We certainly need a consideration of these concerns that brings in viewpoints from across the political spectrum and that welcomes all economic philosophical perspectives into rational debate.
However, the Tea Party movement actions have actually been detrimental to this debate because they have somewhat successfully engaged in a political power grab in the guise of genuine social protest. They have been about as useful to solving the real issues we face as road rage is to traffic congestion.
You would think that if the Tea Party were a legitimate populist movement of economic and political reform, it would attract people of all races, ages, political affiliation, and economic status. But what we find is that the Tea Partiers are almost all white, 45 years of age and older, have greater financial prosperity than the average American, and are, almost without except, all conservative Republicans.
You would think that if they had sleepless nights about what the government was doing, they would have mobilized themselves into action when President Bush first proposed TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, that bailed out the big banks. But the Tea Party was nowhere to be seen until February, 2009, shortly after Obama was inaugurated as President.
TARP has been retrospectively condemned by the Tea Party Movement, but this was not the case when it was proposed by Bush and passed through the Congress in 2008. Sarah Palin was in favor of it in those days. John Boehner shed tears in the House of Representatives pleading for its passage.
I am not suggesting here that Carender and Santelli were taking orders from some secret back room group to throw their matches into the gasoline of public discontent about economic issues. My reading is that this is not the way the Tea Party came into being. The Tea Party people are not, at least for the most part, explicit conspirators.
However, they are enablers, and they are subject to outside influence through Fox News and the conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
The Tea Party people are implicit conspirators. They are the sometimes willing and often unwitting dupes of the explicit conspirators. Many of the Tea Party people are sincere individuals with a passion for pushing back against what they see as economic and governmental dysfunction.
But, whatever honorable motivations they may have had in the beginning, they have largely allowed their movement to be co-opted by the more explicit conspirators. The latter would be the leadership of the Republican Party in collusion with various moneyed interests, the Plutocracy.
The Tea Party came into being as a consequence of the economic meltdown. Its rationale was to do something to respond to the circumstances that lead to the destabilization of the economy they perceived was threatening their way of life. However, their energies got misdirected at the response to the crisis from Congress and the White House.
They could have been protesting the actions of the banks, trading companies, rating agencies, and predatory lenders that caused the crisis. Instead, they’ve been instrumental in moving the Republican political agenda forward. Now we have as the new speaker of the House, John Boehner, who is more connected with lobbyists than anyone else in the entire Congress.
Without fully realizing it, the Tea Party is empowering the very individuals that bought us to the very edge of total economic disaster.
Some Tea Party identified political figures apparently see their economic philosophy in alignment with what the explicit conspirators are about. For example, Rand Paul, the newly elected Tea Party Senator from Kentucky seems to have been inspired by the character Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street. Gekko’s famous line from that movie was “greed is good.”
“What is greed?” Paul asked. “Greed is an excess of self-interest, but what drives capitalism? Self-interest and profit. They are good things.”
But when you have free markets and limited government to the extent that government controls are taken away, the consequence is always the same. Corporate greed goes out of control and crashes the economic system for everyone.
It’s not hard to understand how the passions of the Tea Party people came to be an instrument of the corporate-conservative conspiracy. What brings the Tea Party folks and the explicit conspirators into pragmatic alignment is the prospect of electing conservative politicians. The Tea Party is trying to take over the Republican Party for that purpose and to elect politicians more to the right than the establishment Republicans.
The explicit conspiracy, though, directs their energies and co-opts them to the extent that their “protests” totally avoid any hint of criticism of the Plutocracy and its shadowy influence on our politicians and government.
The conservative political media shapes the agenda and effectively recruits implicit conspirators. Fox News is a twenty-four hour propaganda machine in total lockstep with the explicit conspiracy.
My reading is Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and other conservative media figures are not sitting in on the strategy meetings of the explicit conspirators. They maintain the illusion of being independent commentators. Yet they are in close touch with the heart beat of the conservative-corporate conspiracy in indirect ways. They are willing servants. Feed them rumors and that’s what they will talk about.
They are professional rabble rousers who actively stoke the anger and fear of their listeners. They knew this will boost their ratings and make them rich and successful. There is no accountability to tell the truth because they see themselves as entertainers.
But exactly who are the explicit conspirators? The answer to this question confronts us with the shadow of American politics. They are the leadership of the Republican Party and various members of the Plutocracy. These plutocrats are the extremely wealthy, managers and executives of the biggest corporations and financial institutions plus a vast army of lobbyists.
One of their recent meetings was a Republican strategy session sponsored by Koch industries in the fall of 2009. The billionaire Koch brothers are leaders in the explicit conspiracy. Among the attendees were Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media billionaire, and owner of Fox news and other media sources like the Wall Street Journal, also hosts Republican planning meetings.
What the plutocrats believe in is government of the rich people, by the rich people, for the rich people. Their agenda is complete control of all levels of government in order to protect their wealth and privilege. For some this is just naked self-interest. However, for others the rationale is that plutocratic control is actually beneficial for society as a whole. My reading is that this is what John Boehner believes.
This reasoning can be put in the form of a syllogism. Whatever is good for the economy is good for the nation. Whatever is good for the rich people is good for the economy. So whatever is good for the rich people is good for the country.
The first premise is suspect on ecological grounds. For example, drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge might be good for the economy but bad for the country. However, it’s an idea that most voters in the 2010 elections accepted without question.
The second premise is an economic theory sometimes called “trickle down” economics. The idea is that as the richest people prosper their money oils the wheels of capitalism and industry and there is more employment and prosperity for everyone.
However, the last 30 years or so of American experience offers stark disproof of this theory. For in that time frame, the richest people have steadily increased their wealth and their percentage of total wealth whereas everyone else has either lost ground economically or stayed the same. The average income in the United States went from $30,941 in 1980 to $31,244 in 2008. That a gain of $303 in twenty-eight years. And then there was the economic crash.
What the people with the most money do has a tremendous impact, of course, but it doesn’t automatically translate into economy prosperity for the country. The rich people are mostly investing their money in financial assets not spending it or using it to grow the economy. It’s the consumer demand generated by the middle and lower classes that actually drives the economic engine.
What we’re seeing in today financial reality is a growing gulf between Wall Street and Main Street, between wealth management and business in the ordinary sense of what generates goods and services.
Today the wealthiest 20% own 85% of the total wealth. The bottom 40% own practically 0%. If we extrapolate this trend into the future, it is indeed a dark picture. This increasing economic polarity between the very rich and everyone else threatens to undermine the very founding principles of our democracy. The Plutocracy’s control and influence over our election process and the actions of the elected officials seems sure to increase.
Consider, for example, the increasing cost of running for elected office. It now costs tens of millions of dollars to run for the Senate. With the recent Supreme Court ruling giving corporations the right to make direct unlimited contributions to campaigns and political parties, we can see that campaign reform is rapidly devolving. This is especially so since the Republicans have filibustered any attempts to pass campaign reform legislation.
You could make a case that the Plutocracy already is in control of our government and elected officials and has been for quite some time. Even President Obama, for example, picked Erskin Bowles to be the Democratic co-chair of his bipartisan federal deficit commission. Bowles is currently on the board of Morgan Stanley, one of the biggest investment firms.
Certainly, it’s true that the Plutocracy has been bipartisan is its efforts to influence both Democratic as well as Republican politicians. President Clinton will have to shoulder some of the blame for decisions that weakened governmental regulations and sowed the seeds for our present economic impasse.
However, this political season was the perfect storm for Republicans. The unreasonable expectations that Obama’s presidency would make everything in our political and economic landscape suddenly better were bound to lead to disappointment and a decline in his approval.
The desperate economic conditions he faced as he took office were the legacy of past presidents. This saddled him with a virtually impossible task if the assessment of his effectiveness was going to be the few months between January 2009 and November 2010.
The emergency measures he undertook, such as the federal stimulus bill, set him up for criticism that he was going down a path of governmental overreach and fiscal irresponsibility.
So with this picture in mind, what is coming up in 2012? This will be Part III of this thread.
Interdimensional Times 