In Defense of Nellie Oleson

Bullying has been making headlines in recent months and as loathsome as practice as it is, we should not forget that the worst bully of all is the system itself. Both the education system and the industrial capitalist system which it is preparing worker drones for is more fearsome by far than anything a single individual can do. To illustrate my point, I’d like to reference an iconic bully from literature and TV, Nellie Oleson.

When Laura Ingalls Wilder, mother to Libertarian icon Rose Wilder Lane, wrote her series of books based on her experiences growing up in Walnut Grove, she used a composite character Nellie Oleson to represent 3 girls with whom she had rivalries as a child. Nellie Owens, who was the daughter of the local merchant, Genevieve Masters who was tall blonde and spoiled with beautifully tailored clothes, and Stella Gilbert who was Laura’s rival for Almanzo Wilder’s affections were combined to form Nellie Oleson-the bully of Walnut Grove and nemesis of young Laura Ingalls.

The schoolhouse of Walnut Grove is very different from the windowless halls of education we call our schools today. For starters, Laura learned and taught in an area that preceded “The Education Trust”, a group of people who took it upon themselves to organize most educational administrative jobs in the U.S. around 1917. With representatives from Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association, their chief end, according to British evolutionist Benjamin Kidd, “was to impose on the young the ideal of subordination.”

So you see, as reprehensible as Nellie Oleson’s actions were, they were just small potatoes. The Education Trust was looking to impose a subordination on generations youngsters far in excess of anything that Nellie Oleson or her 3 real life counterparts could ever dream of in their most sadistic fantasies. And as we look into the large scale bullying of a system that has it’s stated purpose of preventing the “problem of overproduction” we see that this group wanted to create the next generation of workers competing for favor of management. This could only be accomplished with the systemic mass psychological campaign that billed itself as mass schooling.

The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project was a top down bureaucratic effort to reform schooling after 1967. Consider that this is the world a great many of today’s adults (your humble author included) were born into, and consider that this document was anti-democratic monstrosity, which would focus on undermining anything productive that students would do with their school time (pointless busywork from your least favorite teacher had it’s origin here) while simultaneously changing the system of discipline to one where the teacher was virtually powerless to maintain order.

So, of course, when a heartbreaking video of a young girl showing cards stating how miserable she is when going in for her daily torment at the place where she goes for education goes viral we feel a need to do something. And therein lies a dilemma. What has been done so far as top-down bureaucratic solutions to educational problems does not have a good record!
If the current system is able to create bullies by keeping schoolwork irrelevant and preventing classroom discipline, it can reverse it’s own actions and policies if it truly wishes to do something about bullies!

And it is very important to keep in mind that bullying is not limited to schoolyards. You can be bullyed as an adult. I recently read an article in randi.org (the James Randi Educational Foundation’s website) that accurately labeled the characteristics which makes a bully as a combination of narcissism and entitlement. I’ve had quite a few skirmishes as an adult with people who are best described as entitled narcissists.

Wonderful things happen when adults stand up to entitled narcissists!

What better description of Hosni Mubarek or any tyrant other than a very entitled narcissist. The people of Egypt stood up for themselves at no small cost of life and limb and deserve our support as do the people of Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan!

The brave people of Wisconsin just had a bout with an entitled narcissist who found his way to the Governor’s mansion. To their credit, the people stood up and Scott Walker recently had to admit to Congress that his plan was to give away public resources to cronies while using a balanced budget as an excuse to break the backs of unions.

If you have not stood up to a bully as a child, you will find doing it as an adult very difficult. Would Laura Ingalls have written what she did if she did not go through the crucible of confronting Nellie Olson as a child?

Do not forget that today’s bully is tomorrow’s victim and vice versa. I know of a case where a young relative’s acquaintance, a drug dealer, star athlete and all around bully, had overturned his car while intoxicated and was now a quadriplegic. That was five years ago. She (my young relative) was hard hearted towards him at the time. She felt that he deserved that fate and was relieved that he was no longer a malevolent force at her school.

Over time, the kid has probably developed some humility. Over the course of his life, he will probably run into a nurse or caregiver that has a feeling of narcissism and entitlement. Then it will be his turn to be on the receiving end of bullying. None of his victims from year before will be around to witness it, but they will have moved on to a point where yesterday’s bullies are of no consequence.

And rest assured, it does feel like crap to be bullied. But in the process to do something about bullying, let us keep in mind that we don’t want to empower the biggest bully of them all. It is a system that has nothing but contempt for the individual. And it has stated in its origins that they “…shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science.” In Arthur Calhoun’s 1919 “Social History of the Family”, he anticipated a point where the child passes from its family and into a “community of experts”. He also voiced hope that in time we’d see public education designed “to check the mating of the unfit”.

Is high school’s structure making more sense to you now? Is the lack of success when it comes to increasing our educational standards a surprise? The Educational system itself was put forward and advanced by entitled narcissists who were way more malevolent than Nellie Oleson or her 3 real life counterparts. In the process of protecting small children from bullies, there is a danger that we cave into the worst bully of them all.

Any sabre rattling about the state “doing something” about bullying should go be met with extreme skepticism! As much as I feel for the children on the receiving end, they are often twice victimized. Victimized by bullies whom the teachers can’t control because the teachers hands have been tied and by the underfunded understaffed system itself. After all, when it comes to subjugating children, breaking their will and making their lives miserable, I’m sure the people whose policy it is to do just that hate competition!

Yellow Journalism, yellowcake, and yellow-bellied cowards.

The coverage of the Japanese Nuclear crisis was a journalistic disgrace for the most part. The most sensationalistic elements ruled the headlines as day after day passed and heroic progress in averting a meltdown was being made. When the Press behaves like this it shoots itself in the foot along with the public it supposedly serves! The Right is unforgiving once the story is settled and then they don’t have to make things up about a liberal bias!

One of the pivotal events in bringing about the Spanish American War was the behavior of William Randolph Hearst and the New York Journal. A routine inspection of a cabin that was carrying an actual spy, Senorita Clemencia Arango, (who was carrying secret papers) turned into an officially sanctioned sexual assault on an American woman that needed to be avenged by military intervention in Cuba when it was reported on by Hearst’s New York Journal! When the Maine was destroyed on top of this, Hearst needed no actual evidence to accuse the Spanish of firing on one of our battleships. The result of this Yellow Journalism was War.

Of course, decades later, in 1976 US Admiral Hyman Rickover concluded publicly that the fire on the Maine was caused by spontaneous combustion of a coal bunker, a common occurrence in the Ironclads of that time. Thus a long tradition of Yellow Journalism in the lead up to any military action by the US was ushered into by William Randolph Hearst and the New York Journal.

All of this was decades before the same formula was applied with Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction and the exploitation of 9-11 for huge military contractor profits! There was actually a long history of this manufactured consent in the twentieth century. It is only recently it has reached monstrous perfection in both the spheres of the mainstream news media and the Right Wing opinion echo chambers.

During that time a CIA agent named Valerie Plame was outed as such in retaliation for her husband's acts in exposing a supposed sale of yellowcake uranium to Saddam Hussein in Niger as a forgery! The press at the time never made a priority of discovering just who forged these documents and why. Instead, it vilified Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame. It was a member of the Right Wing opinion factory, Robert Novack, who ultimately was shown to be responsible along with I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for this cowardly petty act.

Also in the run up to the war where New York Times journalist Judith Miller was reporting that Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, vouched for the existence of Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. She used circular logic in verifying facts that came from the same source, Ahmed Chalabi, with the Pentagon. Mr. Chalabi was paid over $2 million dollars of our tax money for intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein during the 90’s and not one piece of information he gave was ever shown to be true.

The poor journalistic standards would be funny to watch at a distance if innocent servicemen and civilians did not pay for these grotesque bungles in the both the Spanish American War and the Iraq War!

Which brings us to the poor news coverage in today’s headlines! Specifically I wish to address the sensationalistic coverage of the Japanese Nuclear Crisis! When we have been in urgent need of information on what has been going on at the reactors themselves, we’ve been given worst-case scenario headlines. And rest assured the subject of potential meltdowns is very serious. When we are given headlines designed to manipulate us with fear it does a disservice to this extremely serious subject!

The pattern that has emerged is an apocalyptic headline or series of headlines, but information in the story itself and from the various international atomic agencies monitoring the situation indicating that the situation is in fact under control although the risk of having a nuclear wasteland on the northeast coast of Japan for the next dozen decades or so is actually very real and needs to be treated as such.

Japanese workers on the ground doing their very best to restore power despite the dangers to themselves personally deserve to have the world know their names and stories. For all the press I’ve seen regarding this incident, I still don’t know one name.

But contrast the headline of this story-“High Radiation in Food,” (http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=178438 Tap Water) with the information actually inside the article- “government spokesman Yukio Edano noted that even if a consumer were to drink the contaminated milk for a year, the radiation level would be the equivalent of one hospital CT scan.”

And contrast the headline- Japan Nuclear Accident Poses Crisis for Worker Safety (http://www.latimes.com/health/la-sci-quake-radiation-workers-20110318,0,5659183.story) with the words “That level of exposure raises the chances that workers will eventually die of cancer by 1 percentage point, according to John Boice, a cancer epidemiologist at Vanderbilt University and radiation safety expert.” Although the text of the article rightly gives credit to the men who are spent their time drilling and training for such an emergency, you wouldn’t know it from the headlines. Even in the article itself they admit –“Experts are focusing their concern on nuclear workers because the general population's exposure to radiation around the Fukushima Daiichi plant has so far been minimal.”

They don’t specify who the “experts” in question are. It smacks of the sleazy “some say” technique at Fox News. That technique is a shortcut for the editor to insert his own opinion into the story when they use words like that and don’t come clean about just who the experts are and who the Some is in “some say”!

And this is the Mainstream News media! The hacks who infest marginal information outlets have been much worse. For example, this website, economiccollapse.com (http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/27-signs-that-the-nuclear-crisis-in-japan-is-much-worse-than-either-the-mainstream-media-or-the-japanese-government-have-been-telling-us) citing no direct sources says that “We are not just talking about a repeat of Chernobyl.We are possibly talking about "many Chernobyls". The author then proceeds to link to every panicking news story he can find.

It is the exact opposite of the approach taken by Voice of America’s non sensational but nonetheless accurate story-
(http://www.voanews.com/english/news/Japan-Continues-Efforts-to-Cool-Quake-Damaged-Reactors-at-Nuclear-Plant-118226759.html)
Those people in the hack story’s links that where evacuating by air where actually exposing themselves to more radiation than if they were staying put! Last paragraph of the article says..."observers call the radiation fears by those in Tokyo an overreaction, noting those returning home overseas would be exposed to higher levels during the high-altitude flights than if they stayed put."

Oh and if you are actually concerned about nuclear plants and radiation here stateside to the point where you are using this crisis to reevaluate our existing nuclear plants pleas keep in mind that coal ash produces more radioactivity than nuclear plants! http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste . Not to worry, If Massey Energy’s Don Blankenship can get away with safety violations and a mine collapse he’s going to continue to fill our skies with more radiation than this Japanese crisis produced for years to come!

Although as of this writing the crisis seems to be under control, it does seem worth noting that these were 40 year old reactors due for decommission and they endured a 8.9 earthquake, a tsunami, hydrogen explosions without a meltdown. And that was in no small part due to the courage and sacrifice of the well-trained workers who risked an early death in order to avoid that meltdown!

When news editors follow the motto “If it bleeds, it leads” or even worse have an axe to grind, they shame their profession and scare the public needlessly. In the case of the Spanish American and Iraqi Wars, it cost servicemen their lives. In this case we are right on the verge of another military action (we don’t follow the Constitution and have Congress declare war anymore!) Whether or not you agree with our participation in this UN action against Ghaddafi, you must admit that it serves the purpose of diverting our attention from the sensationalist panicking coverage of a serious event in Japan.

Personally I find it to be a cowardly maneuver to scare us while misinforming us and then change the subject!

Hitler once said, “The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.” It is similar with that tool of the state and industry, propaganda. In an age where Yellow Journalism is the norm, too many otherwise good journalists and editors give in to the temptation to-“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” (Another Hitler quote which we see the modern proof of nightly in Beltway Talking Points on Fox News and AM Talk radio)

The mainstream media’s recent coverage of the Japanese Nuke Crisis has proved itself to be no better. But it need not stay this way!

William R. Hearst’s main rival, Joseph Pulitzer, indulged in Yellow Journalism as well. But he eventually renounced it and turned his New York World into a model standard for journalistic excellence.

Come back to us Joseph Pulitzer, we need you! At the very least, the standards you inspired need to return!

Scott Adams’ “Noprivacyville”, Anarcho Capitalism’s Utopian Dream or Blueprint for Hell on Earth?

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert recently put forth a thought experiment regarding a society where no one enjoys privacy. He puts forward a number of anti-individual ideas and it can be argued that we are trending towards them already. But it is an utopist notion doomed to failure because it fails to take into account human nature.

I heartily urge everyone to read “noprivacyville” http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/noprivacyville/ by Scott Adams. He puts forward the idea of a city with everything tracked and zero privacy. He starts with an idea an insurance company has to install GPS tracking devices on cars in exchange for lower insurance rates. He extrapolates the concept to envision an entire society run in this manner, which unfortunately, looks as if some unlucky city, country or society will experience sometime in the not too distant future.

Among the utopist notions that he can see are lower crime since no criminal would dare defy the omniscient masters, less police needed to catch speeders since the car reports its own violations, a more efficient health care system because guesswork has been removed, cheap public transportation since the inefficient routes could be eliminated fast, and an end to “confusopolies” (pricing plans which rely on confusing the customer would not be tolerated).

And in all fairness to Mr. Adams, he does admit that this is a thought experiment. He is not advocating it. He is using his thought experiment to contemplate the price we pay for our privacy and concluding that it is expensive.

But when I look at another utopist concept, “Anarcho Capitalist” concept put forward by many Libertarians, it seems that this “noprivacyville” might put that in the grasp of a collection of oligarchy minded societal engineers who wish to create a perfect city. A society with no government but which everything is owned by private entities, is possible only if we get rid of personal privacy.

Allow me to explain further with a modern example. Take a casino floor, everything is owned by a private entity. There is no expectation of personal privacy. The expectation is the opposite. People know they are being watched. And if you don’t like being watched, you are welcome to leave. And it functions in many ways as a government. It has its own currency (chips), it’s own police force (Security), it’s own economy, housing, shops and it’s own factories (Slots, Games, Hotel, Restaurants and kitchens). And it is privately owned and subject to the whims of the marketplace. Every one of these functions would still need to be performed in a society. But if these are done by corporations en masse, these functions are going to be run in a manner that is in the corporations best interests. That means your personal privacy goes bye-bye!

And it is exactly because it is privately owned; there is no expectation of privacy! In a casino, if you are causing trouble, you get taken to a Holding Room and asked to leave (if you are really being a problem, then you wait for the police). And is exactly here that the Anarcho Capitalist Utopian Dream of an entirely privatized society starts falling apart!

It gets down to what are know as externalities! An externality is a fee or penalty that exists outside of the economic equation. A good example is when Bechtel privatized the water rights for Bolivia, the thirst and misery of the Bolivian people who couldn’t even save rainwater for their own use was an externality as was the revolution that ensued because of this policy.

Taking the casino Holding Room example. As it stands now, whatever happens to the person who is detained by Casino Security and then arrested by the police is external to the equation. The fellow is off property and that’s all that matters. Scott Adams admits to a similar dynamic in his piece. He says “Bad workers would end up voluntarily moving out of the city to find work. Imagine a world where your coworkers are competent.”

And where is he to go if there is nothing but similar private entities that do not want him on their property because they believe he is an incompetent troublemaker? If he lives in Noprivacyville other entities know his past and can want nothing to do with him once the information is shared. What’s more, since it is their property and there are no courts to appeal the matter, he can be arbitrarily evicted, have his job terminated, have liens put against him all before he gets home! All of this is external to the precious equation of a perfect Anarcho Capitalist society.

But the fellow in question still needs food, water, housing, sex, and warmth during winter wherever he winds up. Getting rid of privacy did him no good whatsoever!

Time and time again, whether it is Bechtel’s causing a revolution in Bolivia, Enron’s causing rolling blackouts while joking about senior citizen’s eating cat food, or Banks selling CDOs to themselves and causing the Great Recession, we find that externalities upset the precious equations which free market advocates passionately swear by.

Engineers make mistakes. Things often work very different in reality compared to the drawing board and the lab. When confronted with the mistakes and catastrophes, the response is invariably some version of “Er, it’s not supposed to work like that!” And utopias are very difficult to engineer!

I work in casino surveillance, so I have a unique personal perspective on all of this. I can say from personal experience, on the casino floor people know that they are being watched and commit crimes anyway. “Who would try it?” Scott Adams asks, given that the “few criminals who make that mistake would be easy to round up”. The answer is anyone who thinks that they had a reasonable chance of getting away with it. That’s one of the reasons that the Death Penalty is a bad joke as a deterrent. Prisons are not filled with people who thought they would get caught. They are filled with people who thought they had the system aced and could get away with whatever they’re in there for.

And there is the other dynamic regarding security and surveillance departments, they never turn a profit! Any benefit they have to a corporation is measured negatively in what was prevented or deterred. And when budget time comes around, it’s those departments that never turn a direct profit like Engineering, Security, and Surveillance that are first on the chopping block.

Gathering all of this data does no one any good if the staff isn’t there which can interpret it and act on it. I’ve already witnessed expensive slot monitoring systems installed and people who should be acting on the data just pretending to look at it. Or maybe they where never trained to interpret it. The creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams is well aware of the lack of competence issues in the workplace. That’s why he stopped with the concept as a mere thought experiment. As of this date, March 20 2011 http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-03-20/ , he had the insight to say in today’s strip the “a deep understanding of reality is the same thing as laziness” and backed it up with “You ever see a statue of Buddah jogging?” And he had one of the characters falsify data on reliability statistics by randomly typing numbers on a spreadsheet!

There once was a little girl in Russia named Alissa Rosenbaum whose family owned a pharmacy. A bunch of utopist nasty people took her family pharmacy away and made it state property because they had a vision of a utopia. Well, to make a long story short she never forgot that, moved to Paris, started writing, then moved to Hollywood, then hit it big with her work. So big that she eventually started a philosophy circle in NYC whose protégés included the future Federal Reserve Chair whose dedication to deregulation helped bring on the current financial crisis! Just as the utopian collectivist dunderheads who stole the Rosenbaum family pharmacy wound up creating Ayn Rand, so too would their Libertarian counterparts wind up creating monsters we can not forsee if Noprivacyville ever becomes a reality!

Based on my personal experience invading people’s perceived yet nonexistent privacy, I don’t think that an Anarcho Capitalist Noprivacyville would keep its promises. I don’t think that Scott Adams does either. The sacrificing of privacy would neither deliver on nor be worth the supposed benefits of lower crime, health care efficiency, increased workplace competence, and an end to confusopolies.

Promises to make the “trains run on time” should be viewed with extreme skepticism no matter who stated them!

What if they threw an Election Year smear campaign and nobody watched?

The campaigns for the 2012 contest to see which part of the Republican/Democrat Uniparty will pocket the most bribes as they sell out their fellow citizens had begun. The thing that will be different this time is the effect of the horrid Citizen’s United decision on a General Election. But how does the public fight back against that much Manufactured Consent?

In January 2010, Chief Justice John Roberts directly violated his promise to the Senate and the people not to engage in judicial activism and excreted the Citizen’s United Decision on the American Electorate. This resulted in the funds being spent to influence elections by outside groups, meaning not directly by campaigns, being increased to a ridiculous extreme. The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that the top 10 Special Interest Groups in the 2010 Election Cycle, 8 of which are Conservative (Chamber of Commerce, Club for Growth, NRA and American Future Fund among them), spent 160 Million on this Mid Term Election. The total amount for all groups was over $481 million spent on running ads, making phone calls, distributing literature and other activities.

I’m writing this from Nevada, one of the worst hit states during the recession. Outside groups spent $1,659,583 to support Democrats (mainly Harry Reid) and $6,573,603 to defeat Democrats in the 2010 mid terms.

And the ads coming directly from the campaigns were horrendous enough to begin with. You know the ones, they start with “ I’m a bought and paid for stooge of corporate interests and I approved this message”. Indeed, Sharon Angle looked a camera in the eye and claimed that she never said there was a need to “phase Medicare and Social Security out” when we could look at a clip of her saying exactly that 2 commercials later. The irony of living in a society which claims to have to cut state’s budgets for misguided notions of austerity but can still spend over 8 million dollars to influence an election in a single state while real unemployment is at Depression era levels and direct lies are being flung around is not lost on me.

And there was another relevant issue regarding these horrible outside campaigns. In no small sense they are really outside campaigns! Foreign corporations are being allowed influence in our elections because of the Citizen’s United decisions. Although there is a section of the law 2 US Code 441e that prohibits foreign nationals from contributing to election efforts, there is also a loophole in the law. There is nothing stopping a foreign national from coming here and starting a corporation (which because it was organized in the US is a domestic corporation) and using his financial power against the interests of the American people in our own elections.

And if you think that this ownership and influence from outside the US is a trivial matter please consider that not only is the BP oil spill still a recent memory we are not over, but…

The embarrassment to the state of Wisconsin we all know as Scott Walker recently had a cozy relationship with a foreign security firm, Wackenhut. Wackenhut, by the way is the same company that was caught red handed with homosexual hazing while guarding our embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. While in charge of the Milwaukee County Court House, Scott Walker decided to fire the public employees represented by a union and replace them with UK owned Wakenhut non-union employees (one supervisor was an ex-felon) because of a “budget emergency”. The whole thing was a mess which cost the taxpayers more money after the decision was reversed and the guards replaced and it didn’t save the taxpayer anywhere near what was being claimed. It actually cost them $430,000!

And if we allow this trend to continue, things will only get worse. The 2012 estimates for continuing this trend are enough to make any US Citizen/Voter/Taxpayer nauseous. The lowball estimates are close to $500 million. What can do in the face of this evil? What course of action do We, the People have against $500 million dollars spent to usurp our elections and extract the wealth of this country legally and legitimately by domestic and foreign corporations?

The answer I would like to propose is easier than we might think. It is along the lines of something we are doing naturally. It involves avoiding advertising. Think of how natural it is to switch channels during an election when you hear the words “I’m a pawn of private tyrants and I approved this message.” Specifically, I’m talking about BOYCOTTING not only as many lying political advertisements but all advertisements (as much as humanly possible).

What advertisers do whether it is a good product, bad product, or sleazy politician is try to expose them to as many eyeballs as possible. If we were to just simply not look at these ads, they don’t get our eyeballs. But if we punish the regular advertisers who are right beside the sleazy campaign liars, we could possibly bring market pressure to ending the monstrous political status quo which has been evolving since Jan 24,2010. It’s like the holy wraiths at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. If we refuse to look at them, they can’t hurt us!

Now to be sure, the candidate or side that spends the most does not always win. Although these outside groups spent $2.8 million to defeat Blanche Lincoln and she lost, they spent $6.7 million to defeat Harry Reid and he won. Although it can be demonstrated that the spending does not cause the win (This has been demonstrated by Freakanomics Stephen Levitt http://liberation.typepad.com/liberation/2007/05/freakonomics_th.html) candidates that spend the most often do win. One of the bigger reasons that accusations of Obama being a Socialist are laughable is the large amount of corporate donors whom contributed to Obama for America http://www.nndb.com/org/684/000167183/. Scroll down that list and see how many CEOs and CFOs you find. The main reason that he needs to solicit their help is the cost of running a Presidential campaign! And rest assured, they expect payback for their investment!

And campaigns are indeed expensive. Here in Nevada, Sue Lowden, the woman whom Sharon Angle defeated to win the Republican nomination, is still trying to pay for her failed campaign. She has debts in excess of $1,000,000. http://www.lvrj.com/news/campaign-debts-dogging-lowden-117390293.html?ref=293 She is worth somewhere between $50 and $200 million, but is hoping the people she owes money to will accept one of her chickens in barter. Had she won and was a sworn in as a Senator right now, do you think she would have any trouble finding some organization in Washington that would take care of those campaign debts for her? If some corporation, foreign owned or not, would donate towards American Action Networks $26 million dollar financing of sleazy attack ads, then they would cough up some money to help out a new Senator.

I think that it would be a great thing if all of it was wasted money and an educated informed citizenry capable of critical thinking decided elections!

The beauty of a boycott of advertisement until the General Election is over is that it can turn all of that into wasted money. And the purveyors of this harmful intellectual sludge are often the same people responsible for stuff like “Where’s the Beef?”, the Old Spice Guy, and Geico Caveman. If we can bring down the percentage of eyeballs that turn into customers, then those advertisers are naturally going to put pressure on their sleazier peers to stay out of our elections.

The fact that so many candidates require a hard sell to convince the electorate that they are not bought and paid for cronies of behind-the-scenes well-financed power players is very telling in and of itself. Whether it is a cruddy used car, a heart clogging fast food meal, or a politician who is a prostitute to tyrannical private power, the crappier the product the harder the sell is required to get people to buy it. All we need to do to thwart this is turn the TV off, switch the channel, leave the room or in the case of internet video, shrink the window and turn the sound off until the commercial is over!

But we also have let advertisers know that these merchants attempting to sell us a foul and putrid product are costing them and the good products our eyeballs!

Couch Potatoes of the World Unite, we have nothing to lose but the Old Spice Guy!

Until Boehner and Cantor will cut the F-35, everything they utter is manipulative drivel!

As long as it is a US taxpayer/citizen that has been victimized by a big insurance company, Boehner and Cantor are nonstop in their deficit hawk Red-Baiting rhetoric. When it comes to Social Security and Medicare they are sadistic with glee at worsening the lot of their impoverished fellow citizens. But, when it comes to a $382 Billion airplane that the Defense Department does not want, but is made by big employers in their districts, they are not only just as “tax and spend” as any Democrat, but they do so at the expense of our National Security.

Meet the F-35 joint strike fighter. Not only does it come with a $382 Billion price tag, but part of that is $450 million dollars for a spare engine for each plane! And the Pentagon does not want it!
Per Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “…American taxpayers are spending $28 Million dollars a month, for an excessive and unjustified program that is slated for termination.”
Production of this fighter has already been plagued with cost overruns and delays. Indeed, details of this new Stealth fighter have already been hacked and thus might be obsolete. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124027491029837401.html
So why is Boehner forcing them to take it anyway? It could have something to do with the fact that most of the spare engines are slated to be built just outside of John Boehner’s district in Ohio! And Rolls Royce, who gets another huge piece of making this unwanted expensive engine, just built a giant factory in Cantor’s district in Virginia.
This blatant brazen hypocrisy would be funny if Boehner and Cantor weren’t proposing budget cuts that negatively impact food inspection, NOAA (our weather service), and NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration).
The NNSA is important because the deliberate logical fallacy that Elitist Inside-the-Beltway Conventional Wisdom would throw back in our face is an Appeal to Fear. Appealing to Fear is a very powerful tool when it comes to manipulating the gullible and manufacturing consent. It has been used often lately; the fact that there are jihadist terrorists and Muslim extremists who want to kill us and are hiding among various civilian populations is used to justify blind subservience to the military-industrial complex.
When the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, it didn’t just force Japan into a surrender that they were desperately seeking anyway. The advent of atomic energy as an offensive weapon changed the nature of warfare forever. Understand that the leaders of nations back through ancient history would periodically invent a reason (sacred honor, broken treaties, holy mandate, etc.) to wage war and rearrange the boundaries on a map at the expense of human life and suffering. When the bomb dropped in 1945 and we were looking at Mutually Assured Destruction, the nature of warfare changed. The planners of these wars realized that if nations challenged each other in the old conventional way the next time might just be the last.
The F-35 is designed to replace the F-16, A-10, F/A-18 and AV-8B. But our enemies are not building aircraft and engaging in dogfights. They are living in civilian populations and waging warfare from the shadows of those populations. If the Pentagon is saying that it’s already obsolete and they want to go with other options for a fighter why make them take something expensive and unwanted?
The mission of the NNSA is to monitor nuclear fuel and keep it out of the hands of any terrorists. A small cell of 19 jihadists willing to kill themselves for their religious beliefs was able to inflict a historic wound on this country almost 10 years ago. You can imagine what an organized larger band might do if it had access to nuclear fuel.
So even if the Appeal to Fear was valid, Boehner and Cantor take money away from the most effective method of dealing with the threat we face from jihadist enemies and give it to something designed to replace aging aircraft whose details have already been leaked.
John Boehner is currently getting predictable mileage for his stand against Social Security and Medicare in the name of “fiscal responsibility” at the same time he is attempting to get away with this con job. He as declared that cuts to Social Security and Medicare the table when it comes to coming budget cuts. Eric Cantor does feel entitled to keep a pork barrel Defense project for Rolls Royce, but he is silent on the subject of making the US citizen/taxpayer stay in the workforce for more years before claiming benefits for which they have paid into their entire lives.
The incompetence and corruption of the Bush Administration ultimately had no other use than political capitol for Barack Obama. Just as he got into power and used that capitol to back up Wall Street’s worst gamblers, so are Boehner and Cantor using the political capitol they got from the Tea Party to continue to tax and spend and make sure poor working citizen/taxpayers have to make due with less.
They are hypocrites. They are liars.
There is no reason to believe a word that Boehner or Cantor says!

Orwellian Doublethink Part 3-Asshole Economics

In this final installment on modern Orwellian Doublethink, we examine the acceleration of the Price Gouging, Low Wage paying “Asshole Economics”. This new school has benefited by the actions of Obama, Summers, Gietner, and Rubin. One has to have Orwellian Doublethink blinders on to believe the Conventional Wisdom that this new stage of Asshole Economics is indeed Free Market Capitalism.

When I say Asshole Economics, I mean things like using Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) to artificially prop up housing prices as was done from 2004 until the Real Estate Bubble burst in 2007-2009. The main buyer of these CDOs was not the government. It was Banks using their own money to rig the marketplace by buying the middle portion of Mortgage backed Securities and turning them into new CDOs. It has a direct link to the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act, which Larry Summers and Robert Rubin helped to get rid of in the Clinton Administration (with huge bipartisan support!).

In George Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Truth (the Propaganda machine that lies to the people of Oceania) regularly rewrites history. Eurasia is an ally and Eastasia is an enemy in this world. Suddenly Eastasia is the enemy of Oceania and always has been and Eurasia is the ally of Oceania and always has been. Doublethink fits the ideology. The ministry of Truth says so. And if the evidence of your own eyes and ears is telling you otherwise, you need to work on your Doublethink!

Now, we have people using major news outlets to tell us that the evidence of my own eyes and ears is not to be trusted regarding recent history. According to them, the market’s implosion was not the fault of Bankers creating fake demand in a huge historically pooch screwing moment of hubris. Nor was it the fault of people being suckered en masse into 3/1 or 5/1 ARM interest only loans that they needed in order to afford the artificially inflated properties. It was the fault of the Community Reinvestment Act. In order to buy this one, you need to indulge in Doublethink! After all, if it fits the ideology, then it must be true. If evidence is pointing towards CDOs, Credit Default Swaps, and 5/1 ARMs as the culprit, that evidence must be ignored. If only 1 in 4 higher priced 1st mortgage loans were made by CRA covered banks and the rest made by independent private mortgage companies and large banks, then that needs to be ignored as well.http://www.fdic.gov/news/news/speeches/archives/2008/chairman/spdec1708.html

This was recent history that is being rewritten for ideological purposes. The result of Asshole Economics was devastating consequences for homeowners, the banks themselves and ultimately, the global economy. And if it happens again, you can thank the people who are rewriting history right now!

A hard sell by AM radio Newstalk stations, right wing think tanks and Fox News does not magically make the CRA the culprit in the Housing crisis any more than it made WMDs magically appear in Iraq.

Am I being too harsh using the term “Asshole Economics”? Given the fact that I am paying taxes to support these Bankers and their bonuses, I don’t think so. Nearly 9 Billion man hours were worked to pay the taxes that composed AIG’s $182 Billion Bailout, which flowed through banks such as Citigroup, Merril Lynch, and Goldman Sachs to help them out of trouble they caused by using CDOs to create false demand. And last time I looked, I still had Freedom of Speech. My calling this behavior “Asshole Economics” is me being polite.

And that’s just the beginning; Asshole Economic is an accurate description of –

· One half of US agribusiness being subsidized by corporate welfare when cheaper crops are available abroad.
· Pharmaceutical companies preventing the largest buyer of their products, the US Govt., from negotiating prices thereby growing the deficit and increasing revenues at the expense of the US taxpayer.
· Endless giveaways of natural resources to corporations- wars fought for energy companies, free spectrum provided to broadcasters with no restraint on balanced commentary, low royalties levied on mining companies, subsidies of lumber companies.
Asshole Economics can not survive with a large amount of Orwellian Doublethink. In order for people to allow this parasitic behavior, they need to believe that this is not parasitic behavior. They need to believe that people like Ken Lewis of Bank of America, Lloyd Blankfien of Goldman Sachs, John Mack of Morgan Stanley, are job producers as they siphon off the wealth of this country. These men and 10 other Bankers firmly believe that they are entitled to a system were profits are privatized and costs are socialized. If they succeed, they will make us go through this all over again only worse.
http://13bankers.com/title/

The last time they succeeded in bleeding their banks and clients dry and stand before us with economy held hostage, we were staring at two options. We could have used taxpayer funds to buy the worthless assets (which they caused by selling CDOs to themselves) or we could have bought the banks and held them temporarily. It would have been much more cost effective to buy the banks outright. And I’m not alone. Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan (who bears a huge responsibility for this…but that’s another column) is a well-known acolyte of Ayn Rand. He said, “It may be necessary to temporarily nationalize some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring.” Conservative Senator Lindsay Graham, said “If nationalization is what works, then we should do it. It doesn’t matter what you call it, but we can’t keep on funding these zombie banks [without gaining public control]. That’s what the Japanese did. In limited circumstances the Swedish model makes sense for the US.” http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewarticle/articleid/3049965
And what happened? Both parties took money from the banking lobby and we wound up going with the most expensive option.
George Orwell got so much right about modern politics when he wrote 1984. In the tradition of Doublethink, Obama goes for the most expensive option (at the advice of people like Summers, Geitner, and Rubin-the same people who set us all up for this in the 1990’s with getting rid of Glass-Steagall) and then creates a Deficit commission. In the tradition of Doublethink, the Bush Tax Cuts to the wealthy were not allowed to expire (cost to the US Citizen taxpayers-$860 Billion) which is regarded in Washington Elite circles as good for the economy and the unpopular TARP was only $700 Billion initially (and has been downgraded to a cost of $50 Billion) and has been used by those Washington Elites to push us towards Austerity measures. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/treasury-total-cost-of-tarp-will-be-50-billion-2010-10-05-164330. And then of course there’s the money pit that is the Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghan Wars. In addition to the 876 Billion in Current Military and $522 Billion in Past Military outlays, there is an additional $159 billion that is currently off the books to fight these Wars. George Orwell predicted wars that are not meant to be won, only continued. We don’t have exit strategies for any of these wars, so a state of Orwellian Doublethink is needed to rationalize the state we are currently in.
Asshole Economics is not only the abuse of Capitalism-http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Asshole%20Economics , it is the financial model used to drain riches from an empire before it’s collapse. Orwellian Doublethink is the tool that Washington Elites use to rationalize that what they are doing.
Asshole Economics is draining us and they couldn’t do it without Orwellian Doublethink.

Orwellian Doublethink Part 2-Our Bloodthirsty Leadership’s Response to Wikileaks

In Part 2 of my Orwellian Doublethink series, let’s examine how you can be in a leadership position of a free democratic republic and still make remarks that are not only anti-democratic and anti-constitutional, but which are bloodthirsty and tyrannical regarding Wikileaks. AND let’s give credit where credit is due to Ron Paul for speaking common sense to power on the House floor.

On the subject of Wikileaks recent revelations, Ron Paul rose to the floor of the House on December 9, 2010 and uttered the following…
“WikiLeaks release of classified information has generated a lot of attention in the past few weeks. The hysterical reaction makes one wonder if this is not an example of killing the messenger for the bad news. Despite what is claimed, the information that has been so far released, though classified, has caused no known harm to any individual, but it has caused plenty of embarrassment to our government. Losing our grip on our empire is not welcomed by the neoconservatives in charge.
There is now more information confirming that Saudi Arabia is a principal supporter and financier of al Qaeda, and that this should set off alarm bells since we guarantee its Sharia-run government…”

Because of Wikileaks, the prevailing atmosphere of neo-conservative Orwellian Doublethink in Washington has been challenged and stands exposed as the hypocritical mode of thought and behavior it is. Ron Paul’s voice of reason regarding this matter should be applauded.

Information has also been revealed that our “ally” in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is a paranoid corrupt individual who is as up to his eyeballs in drug connections as is his brother. It is an act of Doublethink to see this as acceptable and yet permit the arrest of Willie Nelson for possessing marijuana! As a matter of fact, DynCorp, the same defense contractor whom Wikileaks exposed for pimping small boys to Afghan police recruits-http://www.globalwhisperer.com/2010/12/wikileaks-cable-reveals-dyncorp-funding-child-sex-slavery-in-afghanistan/
has a long history of violent tyrannical mercenary “counter-narcotic” operations (all at our tax expense) in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/10921/dyncorp_in_colombia:_outsourcing_the_drug_war/?page=3
So, Drugs are okay if you are Afghanistan’s corrupt leadership but worth millions of taxpayer dollars to fight in Colombia. And an elderly and respected Country musician has to go jail if he is smoking marijuana and not harming anyone? This is pure Orwellian Doublethink.

Not only that, but Wikileaks revealed that the DEA is now a huge foreign intelligence eavesdropping service-
http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_16943340
The hypocrites stand exposed and what is the reaction of the leadership towards this newly revealed information? Is it to cut off funds to Saudi Arabia? Is it to suspend the War on Drugs and launch an investigation into DEA and DynCorps’ activities in Afghanistan and Colombia on the taxpayer dime? No. The hypocrites in charge of leading our country turn immediately to betraying the ideals of the US Constitution and start spouting the most heinous tyrannical venom at Mr. Assange and Wikileaks.

We’ve had Vice-President Joe Biden publicly call Mr. Assange a “high tech terrorist”. I personally subscribe to the US Army’s definition of terrorism as the “use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals, which are political in nature”. Mr. Biden’s statement is laughable and a disgrace to all victims of real violent terrorism. Ron Paul is right when he said that so far, Wikileaks release of information has harmed no one. To use the label terrorist when no violence has been committed is an act of Doublethink!

And Chairman of Homeland Security Committee Congressman Peter King joins Biden in this hypocritical Doublethink. He has said, “WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.” Not only that, he labels Wikileaks “foreign terrorist organization”!

And it’s not just Democrats, as witnessed by Newt Gingrich’s non-existent commitment to the Constitution! The former Speaker of the House said, ““Information warfare is warfare, and Julian Assange is engaged in warfare. Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed, is terrorism, and Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism. He should be treated as an enemy combatant.” This from a man who rationalized that outed CIA agent Valerie Plame was “fair game”.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said, “I think the man is a high-tech terrorist, He's done enormous damage to our country, and I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law.” That last part is so insidious that it bears repeating-in regards to Freedom of the Press-“…if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law.” Mitch McConnell 12/5/10-
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/132043-mcconnell-wikileaks-founder-a-high-tech-terrorist

And in the true spirit of Orwellian Doublethink, at the same time that these statements were being made, the US Government announces that it will host UNESCO’s “World Press Freedom Day” event from May 1-May 3!
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2010/12/152465.htm

Call it a triple whammy for libertarians- Ron Paul looks like a rock star being the only one to defy Washington’s Conventional Wisdom in this manner AND the government is exposed as having a chilling hostility to a Free Press at the same time it announces that it is holding a Free Press Seminar! And I say triple whammy because a truly efficient institution would never allow such an embarrassing contradiction as the US Government just did. So the US Government looks like a chump for dropping the ball with the timing of the seminar on top of being exposed as corrupt and hypocritical on numerous fronts by Wikileaks and our leadership’s chilling lack of commitment to the 1st amendment stands naked for everyone to see!

And the Orwellian Doublethink hits just keep coming. Remember Judy Miller? She is the “journalist” responsible for bleeding Ahmed Chalabi’s manipulative drivel about Saddam hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction directly into the New York Times. Ahmed Chalabi received over 2 million dollars of our tax money from the time he was head of the Iraqi National Congress until the Start of the Iraq War for intelligence on Saddam Hussein. Not one piece of evidence he ever was paid for turned out to be true! Heroic soldiers who signed up to avenge 9/11 paid for this error with their lives and property. Judy Miller didn’t care. She said regarding this, “…My job isn’t to assess the government’s information, and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell the readers of the New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.” And in true journalistic Orwellian Doublethink, she criticized Julian Assange for not verifying his sources!
That’s how dangerous Doublethink is. This government is responsible for breaking every single treaty ever signed with every Indian Nation, the Palmer Raids, the murders/executions of Sacco and Vincetti, Prohibition, the Bonus March Massacre, the Japanese relocation camps, the Dresden and Japanese firebombings, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Red Scare witchhunts of the 1950’s, lying about the Gulf of Tonkin in order to get us into VietNam, Agent Orange, the War on Drugs, sponsoring the terrorist army the Contras in the 1980’s, sponsoring Manuel Noriega in Panama, the largest per capita Prison Population in the world, funding Osama Bin Laden and the current Afghan and Iraqi quagmires.
Doublethink is how they operate because the people who are a part of these atrocities need to be told that they are not doing the obvious. They need to think that they are engaged in something noble and ignore the evidence of their eyes ears and conscience.

If you are not chilled by the governments response to Wikileaks let me reiterate-

(regarding Freedom of the Press)“…if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law.” Mitch McConnell 12/5/10-

“…were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Thomas Jefferson-1787

“ …If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
…Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
…Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?” Ron Paul 12/9/10