The breakdown of political language is allowing American society to be pushed beyond "crush depth"

[arendt]

Crush depth is the submerged depth at which a submarine's hull will collapse due to the surrounding water pressure. - Wikipedia

We often speak of the Bush White House as being "in a bubble". At a larger scale, we talk of "inside the beltway" thinking. Both phrases are meant to suggest a detachment from reality, a bastion of privilege. But, that situation is not limited to Washington, D.C. The whole of American society today is out of equilibrium with the economic reality of massive, structural deficits and $4/gallon gasoline.

While we say that this is a "watershed" election, the boundaries of elite-sanctioned political debate have been so skewed that Obama touts his University of Chicago-trained economic advisors and pledges his loyalty to free markets - and he is the candidate of "change". You would think Franklin Roosevelt had never been born.

This dangerous situation has come about, in large measure, due to a breakdown in our political language. In a nutshell, the breakdown has occurred because the corporate media and the lobbyist-owned political creatures in Congress have become cheerleaders and enablers of "faith-based" reality - no matter how convincingly "fact-based" reality demonstrates the failure of the fundamentalist approach of violence and coercion. To dust off a 1960's phrase, "What we have here is a failure to communicate." A deliberate failure.

This failure will soon lead to Argentinian levels of middle-class impoverishment in America - worthless money, bank runs, massive job loss and foreclosures - unless intelligent, fact-based action is taken. Over the past seven years, the Bush gang has burned through massive amounts of our money, taking America deeper and deeper into an abyss of debt. The pressure from that debt, in the form of interest payments as a percentage of the national budget, has been steadily growing. Now, added to that pressure, there is a much quicker run-up in the price of gasoline - a run-up that has a substantial component of financial speculation. Adaptation to these unprecedented economic circumstances is prevented by the GOP/DLC lunatics who still press for the same discredited solutions: cutting taxes on the rich, ANWR drilling, subsidies for nuclear plants, and a push for hydrogen fuel cells in twenty years.

The bottom line, for anyone who has read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine", is that a major "shock" will soon shatter American society; and the wolves will be waiting to ram through their third-world-tested program of "austerity" and "free markets". The problem is that until our economy implodes from financial pressure, everything inside our collective "pressure hull" looks relatively normal. Yeah, there are a few creaks and groans, and we seem to have sprung some shockingly powerful leaks. But sports and celebrity worship go on; and most of us can still afford to fill our autos with gas.

So, while the impending "shock"/implosion is obvious to any intelligent observer, there are no intelligent observers left in the corporate media (witness the disgusting, solipsistic spectacle of the Russert coverage), and damned few left in the rest of our TV-addicted country. Rant as those of us to the left of Obama may rant, the hypnotic spell of the corporate media remains unbroken as Crazy George drives the U.S. economy beyond "crush depth" and the Democrats tiptoe around the criminal responsibility of the GOP for this situation. Well before the election, America could face economic implosion.

The only explanation for why the Democrats refuse to directly address something that is on the mind of anyone who owns a car is that there is a complete breakdown of political language in this country. Meanwhile, DU spends its energy debating whether or not Tim Russert was or was not a biased, corporate enabler. The fact that there is any doubt that Russert was highly partisan is proof that political language in this country is truly broken.

arendt

[BlooInBloo]

1. We're doomed! DOOMED!!!!

[arendt]

2. Keep sleeping. If your lucky, the implosion will kill you outright and you won't feel a thing. n/t

[kath]

13. bwah!

there's a whole frickin' platoon of DUers who need to be told the same thing. willfully ignorant.

slumber away, sweeties. :boring: :boring:

[Deja Q]

15. Well, the awake don't treat it as real so I'm going back to sleep.

:boring:

[arendt]

18. Took the blue pill, did we? n/t

[JackRiddler]

39. It's DU tradition to plant a turd as the first response to brilliance. K&R...

Sort of like the monkeys screeching at the Monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey."

But what's this you say about sports, sir? Are you telling me the saga of the 2008 New York Mets is not worth the time I invest? Commie.

[endarkenment]

108. turd planting - a keen insight into one of the idiosyncracies

of message boards. Indeed. Wonderful observation.

[Two Americas]

21. I do not understand that

Mocking a person as you are doing is incomprehensible to me. The OP did not say "we are doomed." Are you contending that there is no cause for alarm? Or perhaps, unlike millions, you are not personally impacted and that is preventing you from having an objective view of this?

The "doom sayers" attacks on left wing critics of the government and the economy are pure right wing propaganda. Why would a Democrat promote that malicious and destructive theme?

[formercia]

102. You may be right

The inertia may do us in no matter what anyone does.


Oh, by the way, go fuck yourself.

[arendt]

103. Its amazing what happens when threads go on long enough. Thanks. :-) n/t

[formercia]

107. My pleasure.

:hi:

[burythehatchet]

3. very well articulated. I often find that my contempt for enablers actually exceeds

that for the perpetrators.

[arendt]

4. Yeah, traitors are worse than honest enemies. Slimy is worse than vile. n/t

[JackRiddler]

40. Admit it: You will miss George W. Bush.

No one before him ever made the issues so obvious.

[ixion]

5. I wrote this a while back... it ties in with your piece

regarding the breakdown of the language. I believe it goes beyond the political to the deep structure of the language itself.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/ixion/21

[arendt]

6. Like your customized journal page! Yes. You wrote what I started to, and gave up on...

I was going to go into Maturana and autopoesis; but I figured no one would care. You have inspired me to write that piece on language.

Regarding what you wrote: thanks for giving me some Aristotle that I never had. Interesting points you make. I completely agree.

arendt

[ixion]

11. thanks, glad I could help out...

I'm looking forward to reading your piece about this. I think it goes to the heart of the problem.

Like you, I was going to go deeper into it and wound up cutting myself short. You've inspired me as well! :hi:

[Tech 9]

25. The truth is this has very little to do with it

Autopoesis is a step in the wrong direction, trying to graft some crude scientism onto serious investigation after the fact. The issue is that autopoesis starts with a premise that the system coherently reproduces itself and the "reason" is autopoesis. I can never decide whether this is a tautology or not, but functionally it is employed as one. If its not a tautology, its a non-statement that serves as nothing but one of many bridges to mystificed excitement about "systems thinking" and "process analysis" and "evolutionary dynamics'

Its not so much that there's anything wrong with those approaches as a methodlogy of study. But they have to be understood as such rather than some quasi-spiritualized "guiding principle". "Emergence" is exactly the same deal and, to be honest, you get rather close to Vitalism in both cases.

Even more to the point of your thread, language itself as the problematic is a smokescreen. There is more at work here than semantic content. Mathematics and logic are more than semantic content. That Aristotle stuff Ixon quoted is fundamentally wrong about social relations -- there is no extreme of each individual that is conceived in a vacuum and then mitigated by some mediating factor be that factor conceptual/Ideal or semantic/linguistic. Actually, I should add that what Ixon attributes to Aristotle here is a large stretch of the moderation/Doctrine of the mean in the first place. A VERY large stretch.

What your bitch inevitably boils down to (and Ixon's article follows the trend) is a stylized form of Chomsky's Manufactured Consent. The problem is, we agree that the capitalists control and govern everything, right? So then why do they have to manufacture consent at all? You walk yourself into a Chinese fingertrap because you are almost obligated to claim the capitalists have complete control of the media and everything else but nevertheless have to subvert the informed, aware opinions of the masses. Whence came such an informed outlook?

The normal copouts to resolve the question are "the internet is a free medium for information" and "they have to do this to prevent a popular revolt". The first is a laugher -- who controls internet content now for all intents and purposes? Yahoo, Google, MSN, Apple..what do you think the Net Neutrality issue is all about??

The "revolution" argument is inane. I think the operative quote is "It takes a lot to convince a man of something that his paycheck depends on not believing". Its not exactly a claim that people are "bought off" that I'm making. People are heavily "invested" in the Empire, they're a part of the Empire and their mindset and thinking/ideology predictably reflects that fact. You can take this idea too far (Cultural Hegemony) but it boils down to economics. People aren't stupid enough to not see that they are in an advantageous position and they will work to defend that position.

Quibbling over buzzwords or phrase-mongering is largely a waste of time. If the question is whether the capitalists have great pitch men..duh. They by definition have the best that money can buy. But don't mistake the pitch men for your target: the men who stand behind their paychecks. Do you honestly believe that anything George Bush ever said had a bearing on whether or not we started a military conflict in Iraq? If you admit that Iraq was going to happen anyway, then its either beside the point or disingenuous to argue that Bush "lied us into War". I don't need the prop that "Bush lied" to know he's a complete bastard who should have a date to meet the guillotine..do you?

[arendt]

27. You have no idea where I was going with autopoesis; but you sound intelligent...

I will respond after I dissect this.

arendt

[Tech 9]

28. Its a one way trip down the road to abstraction and mystification

What I'm telling you is there's no good way to "go" with the idea.

I'm assuming you're going to argue that the meaning of words (collectively "language") is constantly reinventing itself. I'm not entirely convinced you can go where you seem to be without finesseing "reproduce" and "reinvent" but that's a minor side issue compared to the larger considerations

[arendt]

35. Actually, no. I was going to argue that...

"culturally different men live in different realities".

My point was basically that the right wing has constructed, through there language, a completely insane worldview in which to live. But they have enough money and power to instantiate that worldview, even in the face of reality. I.e., the autopoesis is the maintenance of the insane worldview.

My thoughts are, as yet, not written out. But, feel free to criticize me before I write anything :sarcasm:.

arendt

[arendt]

33. I have read this, and, for the life of me, I can't tell what you are "for". You are "against" just..

about everything.

> The problem is, we agree that the capitalists control and govern everything, right?
> So then why do they have to manufacture consent at all? You walk yourself into a Chinese
> fingertrap because you are almost obligated to claim the capitalists have complete control
> of the media and everything else but nevertheless have to subvert the informed, aware
> opinions of the masses. Whence came such an informed outlook?

I doubt you have never heard of Grmasci and hegemony. Your entire statement above is totally extreme caricaturization of left wing positions. Capitalists TRY to control everything that is IMPORTANT to them. What isn't important, they don't care about. Sometimes something they ignore turns out to be important. Then, they have to take action to suppress it. That action exposes them; makes them visible; makes it obvious to all what is going on.

Also, different things are important to different factions of the hegemonist parties. Gramsci talks about how it is only fights among the elites that allow the message of the masses to get out (in a highly sanitized manner).

Any objections to that interpretation?

> If its not a tautology, its a non-statement that serves as nothing but one of many bridges
> to mystificed excitement about "systems thinking" and "process analysis" and "evolutionary dynamics'

Again, why do you attribute this extreme position TO ME. I despise Fritjof Capra and all the airy-fairy, new age crapola that has proven to be hopelessly naive.

I could go on in this vein; but I think you get the message. Why don't you give me some space instead of jumping on me for one word? And, you might say what YOU think is going to make any difference; or if you think nothing will, you could tell me why you bother posting here? Just for the fun of bashing anyone trying to solve this mess, by whatever means?

arendt

[Tech 9]

37. Easy

We need our own party and our own propagandizing. By "we" I mean socialists. I'm not at all scared of Big Brother and I'm not at all concerned about what kind of complex inner world a bunch of right wing idiots have devised for themselves.

That seems to cover all of the preoccupations we're discussing here.

I think Brecht was mildly full of it by the way

In the contradiction lies the hope
-Bertolt Brecht

[arendt]

55. Good luck to you. Not my cup of tea. & BTW, a spoonful of sugar doesn't hurt. n/t

[Tech 9]

78. It was time to be blunt

See I was insulted when you said I sound intelligent. Trust me, I'm not intelligent.

The truth is, cutting through the fog of pseudo-intellectualism was never going to be easy with you. Despite what you seem to think, this was exactly what Antonio Gramsci railed against, and at some length.

The corner you've backed into is this: you either have to take the next step (socialism) or you really need to stop criticizing the Dem boosters. Its unbecoming to eat your own.

You might read some of Gramsci's predecessor Amadeo Bordiga.

"The immense river of human history also has its threatening and irresistible floods. When the wave increases, it roars against both dikes that shut it in. On the right hand is the conformist dike, for the conservation of traditional and existent forms - a continuous passage of priests chanting in procession, of cops on patrol, of schoolmasters and charlatans spouting official lies and the class scholastic. On the left hand, the reformist dike: members of "popular" parties, professionals of opportunism, members of parliament and chiefs of progressist trade-unions are crowded in there. Bandying insults on both sides of the current, both processions claim to possess the recipe to see to it that the powerful river continues its suppressed and forced course. But at the great moments of history, the current breaks all hindrances, overflows its banks and "leaps", as the P? at Guastalla and at Volano, towards an unexpected direction, sweeping away both sordid gangs in the
irresistible wave of revolution, reversing dikes of all kinds, and giving to the society, as to the earth, a new face."
Amadeo Bordiga: Humankind and terrestrial crust.

[arendt]

83. If you would stop treating me like a potential Jeffrey Dahlmer, maybe we could have a conversation..

First of all, you have to tell me which flavor of socialism you want. There is a whole spectrum, from authoritarian to anarchist. If you want me to "take the next step", you have to point me in your direction. "Socialism" is simply too vague for me to act on.

Second, I meant "you sound intelligent" as a compliment. You are playing some kind of language game here to say that you are not. Clearly, you are widely read and can make an argument. So, funny how someone playing language games would get upset at someone proposing to talk about language (i.e., the proposed thread on autopoesis).

Third, one man's pseudo-intellectualism is another man's guru. I'm glad you have it all sorted out, and that I'm a psuedo-intellectual, whereas, you wear "not intelligent" as a badge of honor. This tactic sounds a lot like deconstruction and all that POMO shit that I despise.

Fourth, never heard of Bordiga, and I suspect its because he didn't do anything significant.

I'm not sure why I'm trying to have this conversation with someone as hostile to me as you are. It just strikes me that you are well-meaning in a nasty sort of way.

Try not to growl so much

arendt

[Tech 9]

88. Bordiga, along with Gramsci

and a host of others were the founders of the PCI, the Communist Party Of Italy. Unimportant? Not hardly. He was so unimportant that Lenin singled him out by name, although in a (deservedly) negative context.

What I like about Bordiga was that he was a hardcase all the way. Not "democracy" but Party. Not a plurality of views and voices (ie bourgeoisie parliamentarianism) but Party Program.

I forget who said it, someone from the French Revolution:

The first step in revolution is to kill all the landlords

That covers all the questions you've put to me

[arendt]

98. ah -"not democracy, but Party". for you, socialism = stalinism. Good bye. n/t

[Tech 9]

115. So it goes

Stick with the threadbare ideology based on phantasms inside your head..it suits you

ciao

[Gabi Hayes]

133. I urge you resolutely to

bite my anti-imperialist crank.

who said that?

[hfojvt]

82. I don't admit that Iraq was gonna happen anyway

It may be naive, but I still think if we had 10,000 at our war protest in Lawrence, Ks instead of 1,000 that it would have had an impact. One of the reasons there wasn't, was the fact that so many people swallowed the lies. But it goes far beyond just the lies that one Presidential administration was telling. There was also a compliant M$M. There is also the education system and books and magazines that create and perpetuate a conventional wisdom.

Conventional wisdom that is believed by the masses as fervently as any religion. Some of that is probably rock solid - the goodness of America, the freedom and prosperity of America, etc. But some of it changes over time. The taxes = bad belief was not part of the political conversation in the 1970s as far as I know, but since the Reagan "revolution" that concept has been promoted by a variety of rightwing 'think' tanks, compliant talking-heads and editorial writers, and politicians of all stripes. Apparently even to tell a household making $200,000 that we will tax an extra $5 for every $1,000 you make would be political suicide and so everyone races to offer tax cuts to all families making less than $150,000. It's all part of going with the flow instead of being a boat against the current.

[Tech 9]

86. Actually you've got a good jump

on the case for WHY it was going to happen anyway

But it goes far beyond just the lies that one Presidential administration was telling. There was also a compliant M$M. There is also the education system and books and magazines that create and perpetuate a conventional wisdom.

Those factors aren't anamolies, they're the status quo. The media is "compromised"? You realize the media is an organ of the capitalist class, right?

[hfojvt]

94. fine, but they don't always line up like lemmings behind a boneheaded President

They have not managed to privatise social security - yet.

[Tech 9]

96. So..

Is Bush a bonehead or the orchestrator of all these nefarious plots you speak of?

I think Arendt called you a caricature above..

[bean fidhleir]

97. Since I responded about you I should probably also respond *to* you

You ask: "The problem is, we agree that the capitalists control and govern everything, right? So then why do they have to manufacture consent at all? You walk yourself into a Chinese fingertrap because you are almost obligated to claim the capitalists have complete control of the media and everything else but nevertheless have to subvert the informed, aware opinions of the masses. Whence came such an informed outlook?"

Real life. The informed outlook comes from everyday life. People aren't stupid, intellectual-manqué sneers to the contrary notwithstanding. People don't need a PhD to notice when there's always more month than money, or that they can't do things that a truly free people *can* do, but the ruling class can keep people from taking action by mystifying the sitution with FUD. And they've had a pervasive program to do exactly that ever since the first culture coalesced that had class ascription.

[Tech 9]

113. Bizarro World

Your explanation is so far into Bizarro World, I actually *agree* with it. But how does that experience born of everyday life stop the occupation of Iraq? How does it stop Enron? How does it stop the subprime mortgage crisis? If your answer is, as above, more people at the (state sanctioned) anti-war rally, then that begs more questions than it answers.

As an example, Bush and Cheney are at -- what? -- 20% approval? Is that significant in any material way other than at the margins? If its not, then we are obligated to ask why, wouldn't you agree?

[bean fidhleir]

117. "Bizarro World"? Hardly.

"But how does that experience born of everyday life stop the occupation of Iraq? How does it stop Enron? How does it stop the subprime mortgage crisis? If your answer is, as above, more people at the (state sanctioned) anti-war rally, then that begs more questions than it answers."

Why would you expect it to do any of those things? Just because people can recognize that they're getting screwed doesn't mean they know anything else about the situation or can take effective action.

BushCo's ratings indicate that enough people have finally seen through another part of the mystification. Trying to reconcile the contraditions has pegged their bogometers. So once again we have evidence that it takes *non-stop* saturation of all communications channels with integrated, expensive BS to keep people baffled and milling around directionlessly. And even then it only works for awhile (which Lincoln pointed out 150 years ago). I find that *very* significant.

[Tech 9]

127. But in the end it seems like

most of the people who say the same thing as you also argue that the people have an "epiphany" and then they..elect Barack Obama. Not saying thats your contention, but it is pretty lame.

[bean fidhleir]

137. Are there alternatives? I don't see any real ones.

How many times have you found a socialist site that doesn't sound like a parody?

How many groups do you know of that have a *believable*, *practical* plan of *any* kind?

I've watched the so-called "concerned political activists" at DU do nothing but talk about how awful the situation is. Practical action? Nothing.

So why would it be surprizing that people vote for Obama? What's the alternative? The guys running things don't care whether people *don't* vote. The system doesn't even count the dropouts. One vote per election is enough for them to declare success. Oh sure, every few years for the look of the thing some hack at the NYT spends a few seconds bewailing low voter turnout - but the best proof that it's all hot air is that they never *do* anything about it.

So I'm not surprized when people vote for Obama. They're doing the best they can with what they've got which ain't much.

[sicksicksick_N_tired]

121. Capitalists have to manipulate/lie/bribe/defraud in order to maintain control/governance.

Indeed, you are correct. Individuals within a social setting STILL differ. However, the pressures within any social structure have repeatedly PROVEN to be oppressive on ANY individual's ability to reason.

When there is an elite lot HOLDING ITSELF OUT as a mirror reflection of society (with the power to do so), it not only oppresses individuals' freedom to reason but also social structures.

That said,..."quibbling over buzzwords or phrase-mongering" is NOT a waste of time when LANGUAGE is intentionally used to manipulate/lie/bribe/defraud not only the individual but also an entire nation. As a matter of fact, I consider the INTENTIONAL MISREPRESENTATION of words/language in order to INTENTIONALLY MANIPULATE others into doing what they would not otherwise do WITHOUT THAT INTENTIONAL MISREPRESENTATION,...criminal fraud,...MASS FRAUD!

Language matters.

You are using words to try and convince others that,...words don't matter. That's a lie.

[arendt]

123. Thanks for a clear statement; but I don't think you will have an impact with...

Tech 9. He seems to be a hard core Stalinist with post-modern patter. The utter contradiction of using language to disparage the use of language is lost on him.

I thought party-line Stalinists were extinct, but I was wrong. Learn something every day. Only question is: who's giving out the party line?

arendt

[sicksicksick_N_tired]

126. I doubt his real ideology. I think he just likes to play mind games with people,...

,...as all incredibly intelligent, bored, financially secure, incredibly DETACHED tend to do.


I imagine,...the neocons would have fun playing the same kind of semantic game,...having more time on their hands, and all that.

[Tech 9]

129. I came here to see if

I could slap a bit of sense into Arendt. She wanted to play 20 questions but it amounts to more a strategy of running out the clock by exhausting people's patience. The truth is that she wants to criticize your average garden variety liberal while basically towing the same line herself.

What does socialism mean to you? Are you an anarchist or a statist? You believe in "freedom", "peace", "radical democracy", "decentralization", "anti-authoritarianism" "smashing hierarchies" right? Don't you agree we need a new way forward rather than the "totalitarianism" of dictators like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao? You're "for" something and not just against capitalism aren't you?

Those aren't genuine questions, it's a finely crafted loyalty oath at a masquerade ball.

The truth is its time to drop the hippy dippy stuff, no matter how tarted up in techno-sophistry, and its time to stop blaming boogiemen like the omnipresent Big Brother or the malicious MSM. You guys use the fact that you can generate a "left" critique of anything as a tactic to support nothing but the most tepid and least dangerous of political agendas. You guys are slinging insults at a guy who's been dead for over 50 years for chrissakes and seem to reserve more enmity for him than the people who are symbols of capitalist enslavement and oppression.

Your version of "freedom" is only available to those who make enough money to provide for their sustenance. Your "freedom" is contingent on the 2 billion people living on less than $2/day. Your version of "democracy" is a wide open system that allows the needs and demands of the working class (the vast majority of human beings) to be suverted and thwarted at every turn because, hey, the owners deserve a voice to y'know.

This is weighty shit, not the info-tainment that passes for "politics" on places like DU. If you ever want to serious, let me know.

[arendt]

131. nothing but Po-mo bs. you are tedious and insulting. I am putting you on ignore. n/t

[Tech 9]

128. Words matter a great deal

of course cheating/lying/bribing/coercion/muscle/bulltets/bombs/economic sanctions/etc are the capitalist MO. That's the way the system operates..what else is it BUT those things?

Look, people in the United States, including most Democrats, are pretty hard right even by bourgeoisie standards, although mayhap the gap be closing in Western Europe. My point is only to say that it's not a phenomenon solely attributable to slick pitchmen and silver-tongued wordsmiths.

I mean a lot of people on Democratic Underground, if you read just read whats at the top at any given time, you'd think they have a TV tuner implanted in their frontal lobe. Is this because they're 'sheeple' or because of their social standing and economic conditions? Anyone can turn the TV off and read a book, remember. So I don't think identifying a nifty turn of a phrase (like say "War on Terror) strikes to the heart of the beast. It's a glancing blow at best.

[electropop]

65. Great analysis. The hijacking of vocabulary forces us to avoid using the redefined words.

It's difficult I know, because their creeping destruction of our language leaves us fewer and fewer untainted words we can use. But we can turn this around by very careful use of language. We must completely avoid their memes and substitute our own.

[kenny blankenship]

7. "witness the disgusting, solipsistic spectacle of the Russert coverage"

OH NO YOU DIDN'T!!!

[arendt]

8. I wouldn't go near a TV set these days. Stopped watching "news" a decade ago. n/t

[kenny blankenship]

26. Well in point of fact I'm not actually witnessing it either -

except vicariously here at DU, which is more than enough, but that's not what I meant.

[elleng]

9. Have you looked into

manner in which public relations developed, that is, by Republicans attaching themselves to psychology?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

[arendt]

10. Sure have. Sent someone to the Bernay's link myself, a few weeks ago.

I am trying to write something about language right this minute. But its been a busy weekend, and I'm tired. Writing intelligently on that topic is hard. But, stay tuned.

arendt

[elleng]

12. GOOD LUCK!

Thanks

[annabanana]

14. Make sure you "Journal " this piece.

(It makes it easier to find, and I don't want to miss it.)

[arendt]

17. Done. n/t

[sicksicksick_N_tired]

124. Well, Republicans attached to PURE capitalists who utilized what was learned from Nazi Germany.

Honestly, shouldn't a MAJOR education campaign/action be taken on how individuals' freedom are being stolen/oppressed through what has become "acceptable" marketing techniques based ENTIRELY upon proven methods of psychologically manipulating people?

:shrug:

It's really effin' sick,...when you take a few steps away and look at how corporacrats have been given UNLEASHED POWER to wage psychological war against the minds of American people.

[bonito]

16. Kicking for futher reading, tks, n/t

[starroute]

19. "Free markets" in itself should not be a swear word

At least in theory, I'll take a self-organizing system over centralized planning any day. Excessive faith in centralized planning led to the downfall of communism and the discrediting of socialism, and in this Internet-driven era of distributed networks we're not going to retrace that path.

That said, however, freedom from central planning is very different from the kind of "freedom" that the Gingrich's of this world seem intent on -- freedom from every kind of regulation, from labor standards and minimum wages, from environmental accountability, from any kind of redistribution to keep the rich from eternally getting richer and the poor poorer.

I think the central arguments of the next couple of decades are not going to be for or against free markets but about what kind of free markets we want. In some areas, you are going to see even the left argue for more freedom -- for example, when it comes to intellectual property -- and in other areas for more regulation.

Among other things, government action to break up monopolies -- or the control of, say, the broadcast media by a small number of closely aligned companies -- needs to be recognized as promoting the free market, although right-wing free market ideologues seem to have somehow convinced themselves that even the most bloated of monopolies ought to be sacrosanct.

The public/private issue is also going to be crucial. My own sense of things is that free markets work best for innovative, entrepreneurial, highly diverse and competitive situations -- while strict governmental control may be essential for the necessities of life, especially those which are scarce or lean towards natural monopolies.

Reaganism somehow managed to take over the heart of the national discourse in the 80's, while the left wasn't looking -- most likely because of its lingering fixation on the solutions of the early 20th century. If we are going to avoid a shock doctrine dystopia, we have to recapture that discourse -- and that means not rejecting free markets, but possessing them and humanizing them and making them our own.

Markets are just people, after all -- people interacting peer-to-peer with other people. That's a hell of a lot more human than corporations, which are soulless monsters that eat people for lunch. And that difference is where we need to focus our attention as the US economy totters on the edge of the abyss.

[arendt]

20. Neither should "organized labor". But both are "codewords". There meaning is more political than...

linguistic.

The problem is that its not a "free" market when Joe's corner store has to compete head on with all the government subsidies and political muscle of WalMart. I am all for honest small and medium sized businesses. But, to accomplish that, I am for a regulated free market - a place that has an honest referee and rules, instead of the greedfest that has been going on for the last 30 years. The current economy has been, as Kevin Phillips puts it, "financialized". Parasitical speculation is more important than actual production; and the regulations to prevent this have been gutted.

Based on how you expanded the title of your thread, I think we are in agreement, although your emphasis is different than mine.

arendt

[JackRiddler]

41. Yes, but the financialization had a pre-history too.

"Parasitical speculation is more important than actual production; and the regulations to prevent this have been gutted."

This was a reaction to the upheaval conventionally called the 1960s, but even more so to the end of golden-age capitalism in the early 1970s. That in turn came from the western economies reaching the first limits to their growth since the world wars. Under capitalism nothing works without profit, and profits in a developed market become ever harder to reach; necessitating a variety of strategies such as re-shuffling and warring over the various covert subsidies, new enclosure (slay the forests, patent the genome), imperialism (it's gotten a lot harder with each decade as the rest of the world catches up militarily, hence the bizarre naked end-stage exertions we now see), gangsterism/monopoly/concentration tending to cannibalism (the forced-profit industries of war, drugs, energy, prison-industrial complex and debt as financial heroin), monetization of traditionally unmonetized activity around sex and the household (McDonalds replaces Mom), and what you with Philips choose to call financialization of the economy. From the eternal-growth perspective it's a very logical move, once profits stall and Vietnam informs the Empire that not every province can be pacified by force, to start virtualizing and casino-izing the entire game, and multiplying into derivatives; they didn't resort to it simply out of greed, though because of greed they'll never surrender it now without a fight. But my larger point is that the free-market system as it's been defined over the last 200 years, with a growth imperative, is inherently unstable with a powerful tendency to destroy every other institution and burn the planet before it eats itself. (And it's never really existed, truth to tell, from Manchester forward the free market has been PR about a system predicated on state power first and last, except the state is owned - indirectly - by the wealthiest citizens rather than a king.)

PS - I'm not going to tolerate that nonsense upthread (not from you) about how a Stalinist dictatorship set up in a still-feudal society and besieged from the first by literal invasions from the west proves that rational collaborative planning based on utilitarian principles can never work.

[arendt]

46. Well spoken. You should generate more OPs. This is concise...

I agree that the natural progression is: capitalism, imperialism, financialization.

Hannah Arendt put the first two steps together fifty years ago. The financialization step, I'm not sure who first articulated that; but I first read it from Phillips. If you have an earlier reference, I would appreciate it.

arendt

P.S. thanks for the many useful comments to this thread.

[EVDebs]

93. See Kevin Phillip's Wealth And Democracy

Whenever the richest 1 percent get that much power the entire economic system, and reigning empire du jour, goes under. Redistribution of wealth becomes necessary in order to preserve that empire, but the wealthiest few prevent that from happening.

We would have gone that route if FDR hadn't saved capitalism from itself when he did....Now we're at a similar place, and Obama is going to HAVE TO become a new FDR. Let's hope and pray he's up to the task.

[bertman]

104. This is a fantasic post. Thank you. I'm not smart enough to get into the debate

but I did have a decent grammar school education, so in the interest of using language correctly, may I ask: Did you mean "Their meaning is more political . . ." or "There meaning is more political. . ."

One of my pet peeves.

Sorry for the interruption.

[arendt]

112. I meant "their". Typo that I never caught. Thanks for participating. n/t

[scarletwoman]

22. Thank you, Arendt, for always posting such intelligent and thought-provoking essays.

Your clear-eyed analysis is invaluable.

I was away from my computer for most of this weekend; upon my return I was utterly shocked to find DUers actually adulating and defending Tim Russert, one of the most high profile paid propagandists for the MIC and the Ruling Class in the corporate media.

If even DUers are this stupid and addled, what hope is there?

sw

[arendt]

23. DU keeps getting more and more "mainstream"...

I personally watched Russert demolish the Democratic candidate for MA governor with a bullshit hit-job interview. Timmy gave me Mitt the Shit Romney. That anyone at DU would defend such an obvious partisan hack is beyond me.

But, the right wing smear machine is out in full force - trash Timmy and you are trashing America. That's why I left him for my last sentence. Just a throwaway line. No sense getting dragged into a barroom brawl.

Thanks for your readership. Hope all is well.

arendt

[scarletwoman]

30. There are so few on DU who have any sort of grasp of "deep politics", as Peter Dale Scott has so

ably defined it.

The TV generation so easily accepts simulcra and simulation as "reality", and has no clue that they are being utterly mislead.

When DU first started, those that understood deep politics comprised a larger percentage of posters. As the years have gone on, that percentage has declined precipitously. Critical thinking seems to be more and more a lost art.

It's saddening, maddening, and unspeakably frustrating. Still, while there remain a few like you who can articulate the truth of our situation so skillfully, I cling to some faint hope.

Personally, I am fine. Since I removed myself from the "mainstream" over four decades ago, I know I have all the skills necessary to survive no matter what happens in the world of illusion and delusion.

My thanks again,
sw

[JackRiddler]

42. Thanks scarlet - and this thread is a welcome oasis...

The TV generation so easily accepts simulcra and simulation as "reality", and has no clue that they are being utterly mislead.

Yes, but at this point, the TV generation is all of us. And those who came before must have been going the wrong way with simulacra of their own, or how do you explain how they arrived here?

[arendt]

47. The pre-TV generation had the movies...

a mass of immigrants learned how to "act American" by watching Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, et al. They learned about how superior the rich were from Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. They learned their jingoistic patriotism from Walter Winchell and the original publicity-hound, J. Edgar Hoover.

The movies distracted people during the Depression, kept the pot of revolution from boiling over. Screwball comedies, many mocking the rich; Busby Berkeley musical numbers, spectacles like "Gone with the Wind". The whole culture of Hollywood and celebrity was a hothouse anomaly, back then. California was lotus land; and William Randolph Hearst invited the stars to his castle, San Simeon.

But, all that was still just a daydream to the average American, a peripheral moment in an otherwise hard-scrabble life. The problem is that today, the daydream has completely displaced reality in America.

Just my opinion,

arendt

[JackRiddler]

56. Yup.

There's much to be said for and against the age before television, when there was a real working class movement because no one in the class had the delusion they belonged to another one, but when the KKK also had millions of active members. No reason for nostalgia or rejection; one led to another. (Don't forget radio, though - it was omnipresent and potent.) But if television had not been and invited the dream world into the home, (which then became an addictive nightmare of 24-hour advertising as entertainment) it's hard to say how things might have gone.

I certainly understand your point about the loss of reality. You remember that movie, Natural Born Killers? It wasn't about mass murder. It was about the assault of television on society.

[bean fidhleir]

60. I'm of the pre-tv generation, and have a very clear sense of the problem

Namely atomization.

When you live in a world where people hardly travel outside a 25-mile radius from birth to death, and all information comes from local newspapers and local radio, you're atomized. Even if there are insights being developed elsewhere, you're not likely to find out about them.

There was a fair amount of diversity of view expressed by those local papers and radio stations, but it was a trivial diversity. It was the diversity Chomsky talks about: there's a lot of active discussion, but it never gets outside narrow boundaries. There's a whole world of possibility that remains invisible because anyone who wants to bring it into the light is immediately labeled as crazy, subversive, criminal, stupid, or all of the above.

Tech9, above, asks why does a system that controls everything need to manufacture consent. Presumably it was a rhetorical question even though it didn't read like one, because it's obvious -surely it's obvious- that it's far, FAR safer to have 200M people hoodwinked and passive than to have them wondering out loud to one another why the hell is life so tough in the richest country in the world and shouldn't we do something about it.

Huey Long's "Share The Wealth" program must have had the plutocrats changing their undies every hour. It's really funny, in an un-funny way, to read the insulting comments by the elite talking heads of the day...their fear of him comes through almost palpably, even today.

[arendt]

61. Actually, Walter Lippman (the ur-pundit) coined "manufacturing consent" back in the 1920s...

in his book "Public Opinion". For him, it was obvious that democracy was "too slow" to respond to the modern world; and that opinion leaders (like himself) needed to package the news in a way that led voters to the conclusion/action that the elites had already decided.

I found Tech 9's posts to be a blanket denunciation of the concept, not a rhetorical question. He seems to be committed to socialism and fed up with capitalism. But, methinks he throws out the baby with the bathwater on the subject of manufacturing consent. From Lippman and Bernays, to the present day, advertising has been used effectively to keep the masses deluded and to ignite various witch-hunts of things left of center.

----

Your take on how stifling pre-mass communications small town life was is valuable. This is the same vein that the famous book about a typical small town was mining. I forget the title. Middletown? Pleasantville? Anyway, it was a scathing rip on conformity, boosterism, Babbitry. We forget that TV and radio did widen SOME people's horizons.

arendt

[bean fidhleir]

79. Doesn't surprize me. Chomsky has often made clear that he's not inventing anything, merely

distilling what's available to anyone who has sufficient time, energy, and research skills.

My comments on media reflect life in general before tv. I grew up for the most part in medium-size cities; life in small towns was more atomic than mine by a factor of 3 at least. We had good-sized libraries, tertiary schools, morning and evening papers that were nominally different politically, and an array of radio stations.

But the same truncated spectrum informed them all. Capitalism is good, business owners are heroes, hate the Nazis and Nips, America is the best country in the world, "the coloreds" have their place, salute the flag, yadda yadda.

On radio the only national programs were overt fiction (Fibber McGee, Amos & Andy, The Shadow, etc.) and covert fiction labelled news (capitalism is the only proven system, business owners are the bedrock of our way of life, hate the Krauts and Japs, Americans are the most-free people in the world, be careful what you say, remember to vote, yadda yadda).

It was very hard to find anything unusual being treated dispassionately, never mind sympathetically.

[Dr.Phool]

51. I forget which book I was reading a couple of years ago.

But the author was talking about the huge op-research operation being run out of the RNC. The person leading the author around was bragging, that that guy at the desk, talking on the phone, was talking with Tim Russert. "He calls in every day to see what we've got".

[kath]

136. Dr. Phool -- I read that too, and I've been racking my brain trying to figure out what book it was

in. Can anybody help us here?
I've been wanting to track it down for a while and it would give some written back-up to tom_paine's excellent OP in a (oh gawd, I hate to say the words, Tim Russert) thread he started on Sunday: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3455657

I thought it was in Palast's "Best Democracy..." but can't find it in there.
Mark Crispin Miller maybe?

[Raksha]

24. K & R -bookmarked. Great discussion and very important. n/t

[nadinbrzezinski]

29. Kick and recommended

and to me not only the defense of the Tim is disturbing, but also the defense of that very public wake

It is yet one more sing of how the me culture has replaced the we culture

There is little hope left that even the less addled will wake up in time

[scarletwoman]

31. "Addled" is the perfect word for so much of what we see posted here. (nt)

[stillcool]

32. I am not at all sure..

we are witnessing anything new. I don't think there is any golden age of 'media'. I grew up on television and the Daily News, and the saying "Believe nothing that you read, and half of what you see". Until the internet came along, I was immersed in my own little world, and had no idea what was going on outside of it. Not only did I not know, but I wouldn't know where to begin to look for information. There have been many books written, but I'd never heard of them before. What you don't know isn't real. The age of the internet has certainly changed my awareness, and I have to think that I am not alone.
The book that truly changed my perception of 'Democracy' in the United States is "The Rich and the Super Rich" by Ferdinand Lundberg which is available for free down-load due to it's copyright expiration at this link:
http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/0303socialcriticism.html
There are lots of other gems available there as well.
And every time I visit Third World Traveler, I am reminded of how many journalists have been ringing the alarm bell for years.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/

[arendt]

34. Lunberg is free? Cool. I lost my copy decades ago. Strange site for his book.

It may not be new, but it is relevant. Harry Truman (small-bore politician though he was) said one memorable thing:

(paraphrase) All that's new is the history that you don't know.

He meant that human nature hasn't changed. So, you see the same power struggles; but its still important who wins them.

arendt

[stillcool]

36. they've got some other good stuff there too..

I stumbled upon the site and it was like I struck gold! I don't remember who first turned me on to Lundberg, but I think it must have been somebody here. Liked it so much, I bought a couple for gifts dirt cheap at Amazon.

[slipslidingaway]

38. Excellent and thanks...

"What we have here is a failure to communicate." A deliberate failure."


:applause:

[earth mom]

43. You would think after 8 years of this hell people around DU would be smart enough

to see through the propaganda.

No, instead they buy into the Obama rethuglicanesque hype and cry in their beers over Russert who sold the country on * & Co and Iraq.


It's looking more and more like the U.S.A. is doomed.

[Jim Sagle]

44. I dreaded this moment, and yet I knew that I would have to post the last word on Timmeh.

Tim Russert wuzn't nuthin' but shit when he wuz alive, and he ain't nuthin' but shit now that he's dead.

So it was, and so it shall be known - forever.

[arendt]

48. William Allen White's obit for Frank Munsey (an important, but venal publisher, circa 1925)

"Frank Munsey, the great publisher, is dead.

Frank Munsey contributed to the journalism of his day the talent of a meatpacker, the morals of a money changer, and the manners of an undertaker. He and his kind have about succeeded in transforming a once-noble profession into an eight percent security.

May he rest in trust."

I miss literacy.

arendt

[indepat]

45. The conclusions reached are evident upon any reasoned reading of the tea leaves

:D

[bread_and_roses]

49. "Taking the Risk Out of Democracy"

The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy. Alex Carey

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.cgi?path=104241082357595

In Carey’s view, U.S. corporate propaganda emerged because of the growth of democracy (specifically, increased popular franchise and the union movement) and the growth of corporate power, which clashed to create a climate where business leaders perceived a need to protect
corporate power against democracy. Thus they developed both internal and external programs that
identified free enterprise with cherished values, and government and unions with tyranny and
oppression--a Manichean juxtaposition he refers to as the Sacred and the Satanic

Corporate propaganda has succeeded to the point that it is now the only frame of reference in which the MSM and most of our fellow citizens operate. To the point that even in this thread - as in virtually any thread in DU that brings a critical eye to the dominant cultural/economic matrix - we must have a defense of the "free-market."

And we will now see it at work as Obama's choice of the "Chicago Boys" will be defended, as HRC's cluster bombs and Iraq slaughter were defended, because: http://www.lewrockwell.com/pilger/pilger27.html

In the middle of the election campaign, Dr. Les Roberts gave a special lecture at the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London. It was all but ignored. Yet this is the extraordinary man who led an American-Iraqi research team in the first comprehensive investigation of civilian deaths in Iraq. Published in the Lancet, the most highly regarded medical journal in the world with the tightest peer-review procedures, the study found that "at least" 100,000 civilians had died violently, the great majority of them at the hands of the "coalition": women, children, the elderly. He also described how American military doctors had found that 14 per cent of soldiers and 28 per cent of marines had killed a civilian: a huge, unreported massacre.

This great crime, together with the destruction of the city of Fallujah and the 40 known victims of torture and unlawful killings at the hands of the British army, and the biggest demonstration by Iraqis demanding the invaders get out, was not allowed to intrude on a campaign that "never really caught fire." The airbrushing requires no conspiracy. "The thought," wrote Arthur Miller, "that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable, and so the evidence has to be internally denied."

Except, of course, the State has not "lost its mind" but is acting quite consciously in the service of our Corporate Masters. Yet, as you point out, much of DU, in its ever-more dominant mainstream incarnation, spends its time participating lock-step in the apotheosis of another corporate shill.

A K&R here for the OP - I couldn't believe it when, after starting to read it last night and being interupted, I came back this AM and had to search off the front page for it.

edited for a misplaced quote box

[arendt]

58. Good reference. I saved the review you linked to. Will check it out. n/t

[leveymg]

50. KNR - You're onto something truly important here. Well stated.

The political culture is so skewed to the Right that it prevents open, honest discussion of solutions.

[Dr.Phool]

52. Kicked, Recommended and Bookmarked!

[JCMach1]

53. As usual, good post Arendt- Shock is exactly what the Repugs

continue to hope for...

Their wet dream is to abolish/privatize Social Security and Medicare.

[riderinthestorm]

54. Bookmarking for another read later today. Great piece. nt

[sojourner]

57. k & r -- n/t

[El Pinko]

59. The reason democrats don't address it is because they're millionaires too.

When I hear them mouth their outrage at how the price of gas is impacting working people (or whatever else it is), it always rings hollow for me.

Honestly, $4.50 per gallon must seem like total chump change to the average congressperson.

Then they propose some watered-down progressive-seeming legislation with little chance of passing.

I'm honestly impressed as hell that they even got the minimum-wage increase passed, even if it was about 8 years late.

It's been a long time since the democrats for, by, and of the working class.


At least they're not openly hostile to working people like the other party...

[Echo In Light]

63. "America has one political party with two right wings." Gore Vidal

[electropop]

62. The RW takeover of both parties is nearly complete.

When Dems voted unanimously to dump Kucinich's impeachment resolution, they forced me out.

I'm voting for Nader.

[arendt]

64. I read that Kucinich wanted it to go the Judiciary Cmte...

he wasn't going to get a straight up/down vote on the floor without a committee referral.

Yes, Pelosi is sabotaging this/threatening Conyers; and Conyers has gone wobbly on this; but I think your contention that the resolution is DEAD is premature.

arendt

[electropop]

67. Thanks for the encouragement. One other possibility is intriguing, but unlikely...

What if they are lulling W into a false sense of security, so he doesn't bother to pardon all his cronies and make a quick escape? After the inauguration, he can simply be arrested without the messy impeachment process.

[LSdemocrat]

66. I blame the journalistic shift from fact-checking/actual reporting to merely reporting "both sides"

Where as up through the 1980s journalists actually fact-checked politician's statements and did their own investigating to find out what was really going on, now journalistic thinking has shifted to the point where journalists think they are doing their job if they are just reporting "both sides" of the issue. So what if one side is lying through their teeth and the other side naively hopes that the people will see through the lies?

Is it any wonder that the media in this country is so poorly regarded?

[Echo In Light]

68. All by design

[arendt]

70. There is a difference between "objective" and "balanced"...

facts are objective; but spin is balanced.

Reporters have gotten the message (lots of good ones fired (Robert Parry) or hounded to death (Gary Webb):

"Facts are only of importance insofar as they support someone's agenda." (paraphrase of something Matt Miller wrote.)

The only media we have is corporate media; and they are not on our side.

arendt

[windoe]

69. Your mention of faith based and fact based realities

reminded me of Quantum Mind by Arnold Mindell, who wrote about consensus vs. non-consensus realities. We all have a private individual experience of this world and only choose to share a very small slice of that when interacting.

The suppression of individual thought is what an excessive amount (or any in my case) of TV watching does. There is a subtle difference, practically invisible to most, between being entertained by art, discussion and good journalism, and the high art of group manipulation. There seems to be endless ways people can be manipulated, but really it is a short list that is rotated through in a way that creates the illusion of novelty.

So the 'consensus' reality is being limited by a deterioration of the language and distorted forms of discourse, while non-consensus reality is being suppressed. Creative individuals are being described as being eccentric, strange and crazy, while people who conform to the mainstream groupthink are revered and given a voice.

I see faith based reality being derailed from a path to enlightenment, which is an open minded state that transcends personal ego, to a cult reality that is designed against individual thought (and will), and replaced by an ego of another. Fact based reality has been nearly absent in order to suppress reason.

It is my hope that by encouraging individual discourse and thought by alternative means we can open ourselves up individually and create a life that is again in pursuit of liberty and happiness, but first we have to free our minds.

[arendt]

71. Interesting. Can you provide "the short list that is rotated through"? n/t

[windoe]

89. I am working on it-

the truth is, my non-consensus reality tells me there is a pattern, the list is a bit longer than expected, but not endless:

1-shock and awe-large events presented in a way that promotes helplessness, fear and paralysis
2- Stories of violence framed in a individual predator/prey scenario, again inducing fear, paralysis and suspicion of strangers
3-Stories about addiction and overindulgence made to induce shame and guilt for the pursuit of pleasure
4-stories of children, pets and relationships framed in a way that induces grief, loss and tears
5-Stories about new crowd control weapons, and violent arrests, to suppress dissent by any group
6- Examples of leadership displaying deafness to public opinion, creating a feeling of helplessness
7- Movies that contrast super power and helpless victims which distort ideas of power to all or none paradigm, instead of distributed or shared power
8-Thought stopping techniques of sound bites, fast changing subjects, interrupting stories with other stories, flashing visual effects
9- Subliminal techniques using symbols and words in the background, music to induce emotion (and I wonder about subliminal sounds)
10- Encouraging cult like reverence for the most shallow of personalities, the acceptance of cults
11- Enabling mass consumption of corporate products that has created addictions rather than health on all levels
12-Presented beauty as a virtue in and of itself- making most people feel inadequate
13- Presenting wild nature as something outside of us, and something to fight and conquer and feel above, disconnecting us from our planet.

I attempted to work through all the emotions and main issues, fear, guilt, shame, grief, lies and illusion, since this seems to be the intended result, to induce powerlessness.. It is through the loss of personal safety and disconnection with the greater good that we lose our individual power.
Again, I love art and music and entertainment and good reading and journalism, fiction and non--but the screens have gotten bigger and the speakers more sensitive to sound, it is good to just be *aware*

[arendt]

100. OH, thanks for your effort. I thought it was written in the ref you cited. n/t

[Echo In Light]

73. Kudos! Well put. Always question the consensus reality

I will check out Quantum Mind. Thanks for the heads up. Have you ever read One Dimensional Man, by Herbert Marcuse?

http://igw.tuwien.ac.at/christian/marcuse/odm.html

[windoe]

92. Whoa thanks for that link

will bookmark it for later, it has to be digested sloooowly :)

[juno jones]

72. Thank you, Arendt

This thread is an island of sanity, a bastion of vocabulary, and a pillar of intelligence.

This is the education I look to DU for. As Scarlet Woman said, we've lost many people here that can deal with the realities of deep politics. Sometimes it seems, we are just skidding along the surface of 'he said/she said' level topics anymore. The Russert flap being a case in point. Some have compared it to the flap after Princess Di's death, and it reminds me of that almost useless outpouring. I have never said here, but I lost my first business to Princess Di's funeral. My 'partner' holed up in her room in media-regulated 'mourning' for almost two months, refused to come out and set up events and attend them and sank all our plans over a media-generated 'happening'. At least ol' Di campaigned against cluster bombs, which is more than I can say for many pols and reporters since. I watch as little TV as possible for exactly these reasons and I agree the Washington beltway has developed it's own doublespeak with which to trap us, especially those who watch such things and believe their insidious 'truth'.

Ignore the naysayers on this one, you've nailed it.

[arendt]

74. That's the first instance of TV addiction ruining someone else's life I've ever heard...

it is so scary to watch addicts. They come into a room, and the first place their eyes go is to the TV screen. No matter what is going on, the TV is the focus for them. I can't decide if sports spectator/addicts are different than TV addicts.

TV has ruined this society.

arendt

[juno jones]

80. To be fair,

She had a few well-hidden flaws (like an addiction to painkillers) that I only found out later, mostly as a consequence of her behavior during that time. In the long run, I am glad that I am not legally nor karmically stuck with her, and that is a really, really good thing. I saw a few people do nearly as she did during that time (they always managed to get to work, tho) and there are still a few websites like 'Diana Queen of Heaven' (not linking) that continue to gush somnambulently. I've never understood the phenomenon, other than to wonder what is currently in the news that they need to drown out with this most opportune DEATH. What was going on in Aug(?), 1997? What is going on now?

We have no TV right now, but if we did, my husband would be watching the 'cutting-edge' cop shows all day. I can't really blame him, he grew up with it, his mother has TV's in every room all tuned to different stations. her damn trailer is a freakin' Babel! I can't stand going to visit her even tho she's nice and has the sweetest, oldest cat in the world.

My parents never watched TV much. When they did it was PBS or very select shows on commercial TV. I spent my childhood mostly outdoors with friends, or reading in my room. I was really freaked out to come back to IL to help out my dying mother to find that she kept the TV on 24/7, generally on some news channel like CNN or Faux. She told me that she had started doing that right after certain day in September (don't want the mere whiff to dungeonize you) and just never turned the damn thing off after. Seems it made her feel 'safer'. This shocked me, she had always been a pretty liberal lady. She was a child during WW2. She had a tendency to fall for WW2 style messages and propaganda. This wasn't ALL bad. My depression/WW2 folks were heavily into recycling, having done it when they were kids and passed the habit on in the 60's and 70's to their young. However, it also made phrases like 'Pearl Harbor' very easy to trigger and play upon.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

85. My mom has turned into a CNN addict in her old age as well

But she has always been a fairly passive person.

[ananda]

75. One thing you're forgetting..

.. is the willingness to listen to and believe
anything that promotes your group, or say your
whiteness, over the "other."

The corporate rightwing media knows what to say
in order to divide and conquer. They got the
racist code language and the religious patriotic
feel good memes down to a T.

People full of hate and fear want and expect the
language of the media to give them language they
can use to make themselves sound OK.

Sue

[Lydia Leftcoast]

76. Thank you, arendt

Sometimes I feel that we "awake" people are trying to warn the inhabitants of an apartment building that their building is on fire. But the inhabitants are all on various mind-altering drugs, so they respond with either hostility, indifference, or delusional thinking to both our warnings and our attempts to drag them out of their apartments. So we awake ones try to save ourselves, knowing that the remaining residents who don't burn to death will slowly succumb to smoke inhalation before they know it.

People imagine that dictatorship always destroys freedom as noticeably and as instantly as a massive fire bomb, but it's more like creeping toxic smoke asphyxiating freedom while freedom sleeps. It's not as if you wake up one morning and all of a sudden armed troops are patrolling the streets, dragging people out of their homes never to be seen again, and making you swear allegiance to Big Brother. It's more like what Eastern Europeans call "the sausage slicing method." You take away one little freedom, ostensibly to protect the general public, or you oppress one little group of people that the majority doesn't like anyway. When the public has accepted that, you take another little slice.

As I look around my community, everything seems so normal on the surface, except that a close look reveals infrastructure that hasn't been repaired, young people without jobs, businesses closing or trying to survive with suicidally low prices, and people who have jobs having to choose which essentials to skip this month. I've seen every incremental change, every sector of the economy deteriorating in turn, but few others seem to care. Sure, the corporate media push the party line as insistently, although more subtly, than Pravda ever did, but unlike Soviet citizens, we can easily learn the truth if we boycott broadcast news and take to the Internet to read the alternative and foreign press. People who spend hours playing games on their computers and further hours watching mediocre singers compete against one another singing bland music claim that they're too busy to do anything more than to lie back and let the wave of commercial sludge wash over them.

It is no coincidence that the few mega corporations that own our dozens of cable stations have all decided to dumb down their content at the same time. Twenty years ago, I had no trouble finding something interesting to watch on TV. Now it stays off for days except for watching DVDs. My memory goes back a long way, and there have always been stupid programs on TV, but these days, it's hard to find a program that isn't either stupid or subtly supportive of a right-wing agenda.

[area51]

84. Great post.

:thumbsup:

[SidneyCarton]

77. A Fascinating Post, It Gives One Much To Consider...

I accept that the Right has created its own reality, an echo-chamber in which it sees and hears only what it wants to. To some degree it reminds me of the fate of some dwarfs at the end of C.S. Lewis' "The Last Battle." Despite being transported to a paradisaical world, they were convinced that they were still in a darkened stable and no amount of reasoning or evidence could convince them otherwise. I also fear that you are right regarding the nation as a whole. We live in a massive echo-chamber, in which we are constantly given the alternate messages that "all is well" and "be afraid." The problem is that our national infrastructure has been left to rot, leaving us in a state equivalent to lotus-eating in a burning house.

One problem: If all hands are turned against us, then all we have left may be faith, we can act, hope, fail and die, or gripe, not act and die anyway. I don't expect Senator Obama to save the country, but at the very least he may retard the descent.

[arendt]

81. Yes. The infrastructure rot is massive, long-standing, and getting worse...

they just don't fix up after calamities anymore - Katrina, now Iowa. We are all on our own, but the war funding goes on and on.

I think that this rot, which is visible on a local level throughout the country, offers a great opportunity to point out the priorities of the GOP. It is definitely a case of "who are you going to believe, the GOP or your own lying eyes?"

And, yes, we must vote for Obama; and pray he does not nominate some Lieberman-like saboteur as his V-P.

arendt

[SidneyCarton]

87. Agreed.

Thanks again for the post, best thread I've read yet on DU.

[Pooka Fey]

90. Excellent essay, Arendt. Really top-notch writing.

Spot-on analysis. I agree completely. I'm often left absolutely speechless that some subjects of debate can even BE debated on a supposedly left-wing blog, taking for instance my favorite recent example: the value of defending the lawful and constitutional government of the U.S. by launching impeachment proceedings against * . The left-wing has been so slandered and neutralized by slick Madison Avenue corporate media, that nobody who wants to be considered "normal" will be caught in public demanding things that workers & regular people SHOULD want - i.e. decent wages that rise along with the cost of living, access to health care regardless of employment status, a retirement at some point in their old age, a government that doesn't steal their tax dollars and bankrupt their country...

There is in reality - no "left" left in American politics (except for Kucinich and a few other bright lights). We get to choose between Fascism, rabid free-market ultra-liberal capitalism without limits, and a weak watered-down center that always cow-tows to those "free markets" ('free' except for when they need unlimited government loans to bail them out for their reckless and stupid risks).

Look how efficiently the corporate media buried Michael Moore's documentary "Sicko" and 'we the people' all just obediently "forget" the idea that a Universal Health System similar to what they have in Europe would be a nice and useful thing of value for Americans to have here.

:-(

[EVDebs]

91. It starts with control of the language, Newt's 1996 Memo to GOPAC 'how-to'

Language: A Key Mechanism of Control, Newt Gingrich's seminal 1996 GOPAC memo:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4443.htm

follow up reading George Lakoff's work on the subject,

Framing The Issues
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10/27_lakoff.shtml

and you end up with

Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power: The Rise and Risks of the New Conservative Hate Culture, a new book by Gerry Spence
http://www.buzzflash.com/store/reviews/500

[EVDebs]

95. Governing words from Newt's 1996 article. Use them ...

""Optimistic Positive Governing Words:

Use the list below to help define your campaign and your vision of public service. These words can help give extra power to your message. In addition, these words help develop the positive side of the contrast you should create with your opponent, giving your community something to vote for!

* active(ly)
* activist
* building
* candid(ly)
* care(ing)
* challenge
* change
* children
* choice/choose
* citizen
* commitment
* common sense
* compete
* confident
* conflict
* control
* courage
* crusade
* debate
* dream
* duty
* eliminate good-time in prison
* empower(ment)
* fair
* family
* freedom
* hard work
* help
* humane
* incentive
* initiative
* lead



* learn
* legacy
* liberty
* light
* listen
* mobilize
* moral
* movement
* opportunity
* passionate
* peace
* pioneer
* precious
* premise
* preserve
* principle(d)
* pristine
* pro- (issue): flag, children, environment, reform
* prosperity
* protect
* proud/pride
* provide
* reform
* rights
* share
* strength
* success
* tough
* truth
* unique
* vision
* we/us/our

Contrasting Words:

Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.

* abuse of power
* anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs
* betray
* bizarre
* bosses
* bureaucracy
* cheat
* coercion
* "compassion" is not enough
* collapse(ing)
* consequences
* corrupt
* corruption
* criminal rights
* crisis
* cynicism
* decay
* deeper
* destroy
* destructive
* devour
* disgrace
* endanger
* excuses
* failure (fail)
* greed
* hypocrisy
* ideological
* impose
* incompetent
* insecure
* insensitive



* intolerant
* liberal
* lie
* limit(s)
* machine
* mandate(s)
* obsolete
* pathetic
* patronage
* permissive attitude
* pessimistic
* punish (poor ...)
* radical
* red tape
* self-serving
* selfish
* sensationalists
* shallow
* shame
* sick
* spend(ing)
* stagnation
* status quo
* steal
* taxes
* they/them
* threaten
* traitors
* unionized
* urgent (cy)
* waste
* welfare""

If I were working for Obama's inner circle, I'd be following every word of McCain's and pointing out how his language doesn't follow his actions. I particularly like McCain's corruption during the 'Keating Five' investigations that seemed to have been ignored by the media.

[arendt]

99. Thanks for contributing references to the thread. I know them, but others may not. n/t

[EVDebs]

101. Right back at 'ya for giving us a wonderful thread to begin with ! nt

[BrklynLib at work]

105. BushCo could not have done a better job of ruining the US if they were paid foreign agents.

[Prophet 451]

106. Problem is, people like it this way

The truest statement I ever read about politics came from the satirist Terry Pratchett: "People will say they want truth and justice for all. What they really want is an assurance that life will go on, much as it did before, and tomorrow will be very much like today".

Given time, humans can adapt to pretty much anything. Given long enough, they may even get to like it but we don't handle sudden change very well. Remember that old story about the frog in the pan of boiling water? Little bit like that. If you ask the people, they'll tell you that they want fairness and equality and economic justice and all that jazz but they won't actually do anything to achieve it, they'll just lull themselves to sleep over American Idol.

I don't say this much but I think we've passed tipping point now. The addiction to failed economic and social policies has gone too far, become too locked in, for us to struggle back from and in truth and on the broad scale, that may be a good thing. When a society has become as sick as ours has, perhaps the only solution is to tear it all down and start again. Have you ever read Fight Club? Profoundly depressing book but there's a scene right at the end (long after the film finishes) when one of the Fight Clubers says they will build something better out of the ruins of society. Out of destruction comes change and from change, growth. I doubt our society can be saved from itself and, more to the point, I'm starting to doubt it should be. We can manage the fall, make it as painless as possible but do we really want to preserve a socity so divided against itself, so dominated by corporatism, so breathtakingly stupid? I'm honestly not sure anymore.

[blindpig]

109. don't sweat the small stuff

That of which you speak is just one item in the Man's tool box, I don't see much point in getting whipped up about disinformation, it is expected from these people. There's not much point in complaining about an enemy's tactics in a war. To a great degree the 'left' in this country, such as it is, is massively guilty of aiding just what you rail against, as it studiously avoids mention of class.I'm not talking about the MSM, you can't expect them to bite the hand that feeds them, but among the so-called alternative media class might get some lip service before we move on to more important stuff, like impeachment or the Supremes. But nothing is more important than class analysis for explaining our dilemma.

And the same might be said of Klien, she identifies one aspect of the Man's game and calls it the whole show. It ain't no shock or aberration, it's a logical end game.

Let me add that this disinformation is not aimed at the 'sheeple', as some elitists around here would have it, but rather the middle 'commissar' class, the people who hold it all together for the capitalist. And even though they're being lied to, many are smart enough to realize it but choose to ignore the lies, as to do otherwise might upset the applecart of their happy little petite bourgeois world, and to hell with everything else.

[Tech 9]

111. Great post BP

you've hit the nub of it

[leftstreet]

132. "the people who hold it all together for the capitalist" Well said

Although I would argue that while the MSM TeeVee doesn't ever use the word "class," it's programming is completely devoted to illustrating class distinctions. Prison porn, COPS, home improvement shows, What Not to Wear, etc. It's all about showing the wannabe middles how to distinguish themselves from the lessers. It's gross!

[kineneb]

110. good essay, as always

And thanks for saying what many of us think. I am back to DU, after taking a sanity break. Hubby died at the end of Mar. and I just could not deal with the primaries.

I am going to have to agree with Prophet 451; I think we have already passed the tipping point. I don't listen to the M$M, but stream BBC and other foreign stations.

Two of my favorite commentary websites deal with the economy, and from their perspective (and others on the topic) we are hosed. The impact of the financial mess is just starting to hit, and we are at no where near the end.

For your reading,
http://elainemeinelsupkis.typepad.com/culture_of_life_news/

and listening pleasure:
http://www.karmabanqueradio.com/

[sasquatch]

114. Well its the Boomers that legitamized these Chicago University maniacs

So I blame them like always.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

130. Hey, not all of us

I never voted for Reagan or either Bush, and I did my share of protesting. In fact, a lot of us were horrified at the little fascists who started coming up through the colleges in the 1980s and 1990s.

[Gabi Hayes]

134. really...what a toad

I was there man

I was there when Abbie and Renny stormed the barricades at Stonewall!

I was there when Fred Hampton got offed by the oinkers at Kent State

I was there, really!

Aaaaa Tick UH!

Aaaaa Tick UH!!

Aaaaa Tick UH!

Free Baby Huey!

Clean up Armenia, get a harelip!

[Fovea]

116. It is one reason I decided to support Obama

Because I think that when the hull finally starts collapsing, Obama will will react appropriately.

At that point, someone will have to stand up and tell the nation that the party that has gone on since the 1950's is over. Cheap energy is gone, the dollar is in the crapper, China and the EU have decoupled and we are on our own with little oil and no manufacturing base to speak of. Oh, and your thirty mile one way commute to work in an automobile? So 20th Century.

We will need someone who can translate
"the long emergency" into a speech, and not have the whole nation
start practicing 9mm relay races.

In short, we need someone who can stand like Roosevelt stood, like Churchill stood, and rallied their respective nation to a heroic struggle, and a hard won victory.

I believe Barack Obama is that person. And I believe that time may be before November.

[bertman]

118. Wow. I love your optimism, Realpolitik.

But, Obama cannot save us, nor can any other politician. He can only inspire us to become active members of our (supposedly) representative government--meaning informed citizens who recognize toadies and toss them out while electing thinkers of the progressive ilk. That starts at the local and state levels.

One side note: This corporate agenda has been operating for a lot longer than most of us know (well maybe not the contributors on this thread, but Americans in general). Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States opened my eyes to the manipulation of political thought by the moneyed classes even at the earliest days of nationhood. Americans used to read the printed word--newspapers, pamphlets, treatises, books--to get their information. And when those media were co-opted by the capitalists, the people organized at the grassroots level group by group, city by city and often regionally. This resulted in the populist uprisings that had to be violently suppressed by the government of the industrialists, by the industrialists, and for the industrialists. This was going on throughout the 18th and 19th centuries even though it's never mentioned in our history books--the government -approved versions that is.

The current sophistication with which we are manipulated is simply a more modern version of the propaganda machine that brought the Nazis to power. Some of the very people who implemented Hitler's mass media campaigns were saved by the Allies at the war's end and brought to the U.S. to teach our government/corporate masters how to do their work better. They have done their work well.

It's going to be interesting to see IF Obama can be elected despite the RW death-grip on the election apparatus and the MSM. Then, if he is, we'll see what this country's really made of.

Let's not give up just yet.

[Gabi Hayes]

135. bet you didn't see this.....

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080630/klein

Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC, “Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.”

that said, he did fine with Jimmy Kimmel, and that's really what matters, yes?

[The Sand Rine]

119. The debt.....

The american debt is a little more than 67% of the PIB. some countries have a really bigger ratio. Just think of Japan with his 177,60 %...The problem happens when big institutions feel that a country will not be able to face his debts...that"s what happen to Argentina with his 45%. But the United State is not on that position. And the fact is that even if the Iraq War was based on lied, the debt in itself is not a crime, for the moment.

[arendt]

120. Welcome to DU, Sand Rine...

I did not say the debt was a crime. I said that our current social arrangements cannot support the price of petroleum. It is also true that our financial institutions have speculated to the point where they are technically bankrupt, and are only being kept in business by free money from the Federal Reserve (some "window" or another).

arendt

[BeHereNow]

122. Arendt, I nominate you as THE Treasure of DU.

You've outdone yourself with this thread; once again...
Just when I think you can't possibly get better, you do.

BHN:hug:

[arendt]

125. I'm uncomfortable with that. Thanks for the encouragement, but there are many great threads here...

I don't have the insider info of a McCamy Taylor or a Will Pitt. I'm not a mover or a shaker, like David Swanson. I'm just a small fish in a big pond here.

Thanks for your loyalty and your support. But, I'm just doing what I can. As we all are. You are tireless.

arendt

[LWolf]

138. Too late to recommend,

but I'll give this one a well-deserved :kick:


I haven't heard the current reality described so accurately. I wish more people were paying attention.