The BIG LIE: Psychological Projection in the Service of Class Warfare

[Time for change]

There are basically two ways to sell a product or an idea. One is to come up with a really excellent one and then explain it to people as honestly as you can. The alternative way – if your idea or product is pretty much worthless or even dangerous – is to lie about it. Of course, if you’re going to lie about it you usually have to have some help – so that the lie can be propagated without discovery by too many people.

The right wing corporate elites of the United States and their bought-and-paid-for politicians have worked out a very effective way of doing that. With their enormous wealth they have bought control of huge portions of the so-called “mainstream” television, radio, and print news media in the United States, while at the same time paying off their politicians to maintain the rules of the game such that they can maintain control of “mainstream” news media. And their huge donations to their lackey politicians have helped to maintain them in power, so that the status quo continues to be protected.

Consequently, legislation is heavily tilted to favor the wealthy. This has caused the wealth gap in our country to rise to unprecedented levels, such that by 2006 the Economic Policy Institute estimated that more than a third of the wealth in the United States was held by the top 1% of households, while less than a fifth was held by the lower 90%. That means that the average top 1% household held almost 200 times as much wealth as the average lower 90% household.

In order to maintain themselves in office, our corporate owned politicians have adopted a technique that is akin to the psychological defense mechanism known as “projection” (more on that later). Because virtually every major legislative policy supported by them harms the vast majority of the American people, in order to continue in office they must lie about their motivations and the consequences of the policies that they support. But they don’t merely lie. Mere lies would make them appear defensive. Instead, they tell us unbelievable whoppers – the precise opposite of the truth. Their corporate masters want them to relax pollution laws to enhance their profits? Call that law “The Clear Skies Initiative”. Is there a need to hide the fact that the corporate news media slants their facts and opinions to benefit the wealthy? Complain incessantly about the “elite liberal media”. Or as George Orwell said in his novel, “1984”, War is peace, Slavery is freedom, and Ignorance is strength.

Under normal conditions it is extraordinarily difficult to get away with such whoppers. But when you and your cronies control the bulk of the means of communication in a society, the job becomes much easier.


THE BIG LIE IN PRACTICE

Getting a psychopath elected and re-elected president of the United States

In 2000 the corporatocracy was salivating at the idea of installing George W. Bush as president of the United States. The problem was not just that he was perhaps the most inexperienced, incompetent and unintelligent major party presidential candidate in U.S. history; but as Governor of Texas he pushed policies that were unlikely to be popular with most Americans.

For one thing, as Governor of Texas he vetoed a patient’s bill of rights. So, when the issue came up in the third presidential debate against Al Gore, he blatantly lied that he had supported a patient’s bill of rights and got it signed into law as Governor of Texas.

He was also quite vulnerable on his plan to cut taxes for the wealthy – which of course was a necessary part of his strategy for gaining the support of the corporatocracy. But most Americans wouldn’t be too pleased about the idea of a massive tax cut that benefited only the wealthy. So Bush had to repeatedly lie about that.

These were major lies – lies that could be easily proven as lies, and which threatened to sink Bush’s bid for the presidency if exposed. So how could the corporate news media protect him? Rather than simply ignore the Bush lies, they went on the offensive and called Al Gore a liar. During one debate, Gore mistakenly said that he had accompanied FEMA Director James Lee Witt on a particular trip to Texas, though he had accompanied Witt on numerous other trips. The corporate media made that into a big lie, though there was no reason for Gore to lie about that. They said that Gore claimed he had invented the Internet, though he never said that. In short, they claimed he was a habitual liar. And all those claims were lies. But they sure did take attention away from Bush’s many real lies.

Then there was the matter of Bush getting into the Air National Guard in order to avoid being sent to fight in the Vietnam War, through the influence of his father. This posed a potentially explosive problem for the Bush campaigns of both 2000 and 2004, since both Al Gore and John Kerry had served in Vietnam. Yet, despite abundant evidence that Bush even avoided fulfilling his commitment to the Air National Guard, the corporate news media gave him a free pass on the whole issue. The importance of this in the 2004 presidential campaign was summed up by Russ Baker in his book, “Family of Secrets”:

The Democratic field included not one but two highly decorated war veterans, John Kerry and Wesley Clark. It would be a disaster if a majority of Americans were to conclude that Bush was a trigger-happy commander in chief who had plunged the United States into a cataclysmic and unnecessary war – after he himself shirked his own service.

But giving Bush a free pass on this issue wasn’t good enough. As with Gore in 2000, the right wingers had to go on the offensive. So the national news media picked up on the bogus claim that the story of Kerry’s heroism was a fraud. CNN, The New York Times, and the Washington Post ran hundreds of articles on the subject between them. The hypocrisy with which the national news media lent legitimacy to the story was shown by an episode of Meet the Press, where Tim Russert innocently challenged a guest, “If the substance of many of the charges … isn’t holding up … why is it resonating so much?” Well, duh. It resonated so much because the corporate news whores resonated it.


The BIG LIES to excuse an illegal war

The Bush administration’s justification for invading Iraq in 2003 was the absurd idea that Iraq posed an “imminent threat” to our country. Forget about the fact that Bush was told by his own intelligence agencies that Iraq had no connection to al Qaeda, or that the only evidence to the contrary came from a “confession” obtained through torture. Forget that Bush claimed that an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report stated Iraq was six months from developing a nuclear weapon – though no such report existed; or that a few days before we invaded Iraq the IAEA stated “After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.” That evidence alone – which comprises a minute fraction of the evidence for the case that the Iraq War was predicated on fraudulent evidence – is enough to convict George W. Bush of war crimes.

But forget all that. The idea that a nation with a military of relatively infinitesimal size could pose any substantial threat at all to the nation with the mightiest military machine the world had ever known is laughable on its face. That the Bush administration could sell that idea to the American people required a huge amount of assistance from our “mainstream” news media. So who posed a threat to whom? The results of the war and subsequent occupation, for anyone who cares to consider them, should answer that question definitively. Less than 5,000 U.S. soldiers have died in that war, while over a million Iraqi civilians have died. Who posed a threat to whom?

Similarly, the idea that our government refers to any Iraqi who kills U.S. soldiers in defense of his homeland as a “terrorist” represents the worst kind of hypocrisy and projection. The definition of a terrorist is one who kills or threatens civilians. Yes, there are Muslim terrorists in Iraq. But the vast majority of Iraqis who fight against the U.S. occupation of their country are fighting to defend their country. The terrorists are the ones who participate in the mass slaughter of Iraqi civilians.

Then there’s the accusation that Americans who protest against the illegal and immoral Iraq War “don’t support the troops” – thus implying that sending young men and women off to fight and die in a fraudulent war-for-profit is tantamount to “supporting the troops”.

And to top it off, those who argued that Bush should have been impeached for his many war crimes and other violations of the U.S. Constitution are accused of being “Bush Haters” – as if the desire to utilize constitutional processes to remove a war criminal from the highest office in our nation requires hate. I could understand calling us “Bush haters” if we suggested removing him from office for something relatively trivial, such as having adulterous sex with a consenting adult.


The BIG LIES to kill universal health care for the American people

The enactment of a government program for providing affordable access to health care for all Americans would be very detrimental… to certain corporate interests. That of course is why they have killed all efforts to accomplish that goal since the first time it received full presidential support, which was during the Truman administration.

Perhaps the most audacious talking point against current efforts towards universal health care is the claim that “the government will ration your health care”. What planet are those people living on? How could a person living on this planet, in this country, fail to recognize that HEALTH CARE IS CURRENTLY RATIONED throughout the United States? In fact, it is worse than rationed. Private health insurance companies in our country go well beyond rationing health care. In their search for profits, they aggressively search for any excuse they can find to deny legitimate health care claims from clients who have paid them health insurance premiums for years. A recent study found that from 2002 to June 20, 2009, private health insurance companies in California alone rejected 45.7 million claims – 22 percent of all claims made during that period. That’s not health care rationing? The only possible explanation for their audacity in claiming that proposed government health care plans “will ration health care” is that by so doing they hope to take the focus their own health care rationing.

The “Public Option” is a type of health care reform in which Americans would be given the option of choosing a government run health insurance plan or any available private health insurance plan. The opposite of this “Public Option” plan is a system where only private health insurance plans are available to most Americans. Yet continual incessant insurance company propaganda has convinced many Americans that once a public option is available Americans will have to drop their current health plans and find a different doctor. Essentially, they have made the public option into a public mandate. And not only that, but they are led to believe that the public option will contain “death panels” that will have the power of life and death over them.

Consequently, they whine that the Public Option will destroy freedom in the United States. The preference of the insurance industry is that the American people be given a choice only of private health insurance plans to meet their health care needs. And not only that, but they also approve of plans that would make it mandatory that Americans purchase private health care insurance. That’s their idea of “freedom”.


The BIG LIES about ACORN

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, more popularly known as ACORN, has long been a bogeyman for right wingers. ACORN is an advocate organization for low- and moderate-income families that helps people register to vote, provides advice on obtaining health care or affordable housing and filling out tax returns, and provides a variety of other social services. Among reasons why right wingers attack ACORN are that most of the people whom they register to vote are Democrats (because most poor people are Democrats) and that they advocate for progressive social policies, such as a mandatory livable minimum wage.

Over the years, the most frequent right wing accusation against ACORN is that they routinely engage in “voter fraud”. The reality is quite different. ACORN employees have occasionally been charged with misconduct, such as submitting fraudulent voter registrations. When that has happened, ACORN has cooperated with government officials to prosecute the misconduct. Perhaps the most notorious case occurred in Kings County, Washington, when 7 temporary ACORN employees were charged with submitting fraudulent voter registrations. Even in that case the prosecutor acknowledged that the motivation for the misconduct was “an easy way to get paid (by ACORN), not as an attempt to influence the outcome of elections”.

The fact is that “voter fraud” is a rare phenomenon, and furthermore, ACORN has never been convicted of that or any other criminal activity. As an example of how rare voter fraud is, David Iglesias was fired from his U.S. Attorney job in the Bush administration for failing to prosecute ACORN on voter fraud charges, though he could find no evidence to substantiate those charges. By contrast, Republican operatives (not in their role as voters) were involved in illegally purging tens of thousands of mostly Democratic voters in Florida in 2000 and hundreds of thousands in Ohio in 2004. In both cases, the illegal purging of voters was responsible for George W. Bush’s “victories”. Yet, the “mainstream” news media hardly covered these attacks on American democracy.

The latest ACORN “scandal” involved a sting operation conducted by right wingers who accumulated video footage of ACORN employees, which was used to allege improper or illegal conduct with respect to tax advice that they gave. Amidst a flurry of publicity, both Houses of Congress voted by large margins to defund ACORN for being “charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency.”

The problem, other than the fact that ACORN was neither tried nor convicted of anything connected with the recent “scandal”, is that the above wording would apply to a multitude of other organizations. For example:

The bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex… Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) picked up on the legislative overreach and asked the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to sift through its database to find which contractors might be caught in the ACORN net. Lockheed Martin and Northrop Gumman both popped up quickly, with 20 fraud cases between them, and the longer list is a Who's Who of weapons manufacturers and defense contractors.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROJECTION IN THE SERVICE OF CLASS WARFARE

The Evils of psychological projection

Psychological projection is the process whereby a person “projects” unflattering, unwanted, or reprehensible characteristics of their own onto other people. It is a psychological defense mechanism. The idea is that by projecting the characteristic onto someone else, one can feel that they do not “own” that characteristic. Presumably the process takes place unconsciously.

Most important, it can lead to highly socially destructive and dangerous behavior. A simple example is former U.S. Senator Larry Craig’s (R-ID) frequent support of anti-gay legislation, though he was quite obviously gay. A much worse example is Adolf Hitler’s demonization of Jews and several other genetically defined groups of people as the incarnation of all evil. That is not to say that Hitler was a Jew. But his demonization of various races and ethnic groups as evil most certainly represented a projection of his own perceived character traits onto those various groups of people. Indeed, it is likely that most genocides have a strong element, if not the primary motivation of psychological projection at their root.

The examples of blatant lies provided in this post would not appear on the surface to be rooted in peoples’ subconscious minds. It is very difficult to believe that the people who propagate these lies actually believe them – that these “lies” take place in their subconscious minds. But then, it’s also difficult to believe that Larry Craig is not aware that he is gay, or that Adolf Hitler really believed what he said about the Jews. I’ve read several books on the subject, and I’ve never been able to determine with the least bit of confidence whether or not he really believed it. I’ve concluded that there is a very thin line – or no line at all – between a person subconsciously projecting his/her unwanted characteristics onto another person through his/her subconscious mind vs. consciously lying about it. In all likelihood, among Nazis who demonized and killed Jews there was a continuum between how much of their beliefs and actions were motivated by subconscious vs. conscious thoughts. It does not seem possible for another person to pinpoint these motivations with any accuracy.

But then, does it really matter? If Hitler really believed, by means of subconscious psychological projection, that Jews were evil, would that excuse his actions? Not in my mind it wouldn’t. For all practical purposes, I just don’t see any substantive difference between psychological projection and outright lying. Call it what you want. The end result is the same.


Consequences for our current political climate

The BIG LIES discussed in this post – whether the result of psychological projection or not – are just a small sampling of the total. The bottom line consequence is that our whole political discourse moves way to the right. Republicans and other right wingers can lie with virtual impunity. Progressives, on the other hand, risk political annihilation if they publicly tell a lie, no matter how minute – that is, if their lie leans to the left. Progressives too can lie with impunity as long as their lies advance the cause of the corporatocracy. But if they do that with any frequency, then they aren’t really progressives, are they?

But progressives also risk being lambasted by the corporate media for telling the truth – especially for telling the truth. Indeed, any time they say something that challenges the interests of the corporatocracy they risk political annihilation – which explains why the 2008 presidential candidacies of Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards never gained much traction.

The Congressional votes to defund ACORN are a perfect case in point. Senators Feingold, Boxer, and Kerry are certainly no corporate shills. Nor (in my opinion) did any of them really want to vote to defund ACORN. Yet they all voted to do so. I can only believe that they did so under substantial pressure that signified risk to their political viability. Even the best of us sometimes bow to political realities.

Similarly, I have often been quite disappointed in President Obama for his veer to the right since being elected President. But then at other times I think about what he might face if he challenged the corporatocracy a lot more than he has. And I think about how much more difficult it is for him by virtue of the unprecedented (for U.S. presidents) racism directed against him. By that I don’t mean to make excuses for him. I believe that we must all criticize him when we disagree with his words or actions. But still, the extraordinary challenges that he faces are something to think about.

Many of we progressives were very happy in 2006 when Democrats won control of Congress, and again in 2008 when Democratic control of Congress was consolidated and a Democratic President was elected as well. But many of us have been very disappointed at what the Democratic Party has failed to accomplish with this advantage. The problem of course is that the corporatocracy is one step ahead of us. As the American people recognized the moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party they voted large numbers of them out of office – so that the Republican Party now appears to be in danger of extinction. But with that, the corporatocracy has begun transferring their financial support to certain Democrats – with unseemly results. Consequently, it appears that even the complete extinction of the Republican Party may not constitute a victory for progressives or for the American people. The American people now have a tougher job ahead of them. Having recognized the moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party, they now must learn to recognize the same for corporate shills with a Democratic label.


A light at the end of the tunnel?

What chance is there for the American people? Our Congress is filled with corporate whores and psychopaths. This is largely the result of a system that accepts the bribery of public officials as a necessary fact of political life. The system has showered special privileges on corporations while simultaneously giving them the rights of personhood. Having equated money with speech, our Supreme Court has deemed corporate bribery of public officials to be the equivalent of exercising their First Amendment rights of free speech. This ultimately resulted in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the disappearance of the Fairness Doctrine, which led to consolidation of our national news media into corporate hands to an extent never before seen in our country.

The retired psychology professor Bob Altemeyer described what he called right wing authoritarian leaders – or “social dominators” – in his book, “The Authoritarians”. His description of “social dominators” is almost identical to what psychologists have long called psychopaths. He described them as:

inclined to be intimidating, ruthless, and vengeful. They scorn such noble acts as helping others, and being kind, charitable, and forgiving. Instead they would rather be feared than loved, and be viewed as mean, pitiless, and vengeful. They love power, including the power to hurt in their drive to the top….

Social dominators thus admit, anonymously, to striving to manipulate others, and to being dishonest, two-faced, treacherous, and amoral. It’s as if someone took the Scout Law (“A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, ...”) and turned it completely upside down…

They tend to concentrate in certain places – such as the U.S. Congress under our present system. Yet decent people vastly outnumber them – and that is a main source of hope for the future. History has shown that no tyrannical system lasts indefinitely. Abuse of power by the elite classes eventually gives rise to enough public outrage to topple the system.

Of great potential for the future of our nation, in my opinion, is the rise of the Internet as a means of spreading information. A Pew Research Center poll showed that between 2001 and 2008 the percentage of Americans who received their news primarily from the Internet rose from 13% to 40%. That is a tremendous rise in just 7 years. Furthermore, by 2008 the percent of voters under the age of 30 whose primary source of news was the Internet equaled that of television. Though the quality of news obtained through the Internet varies a great deal, the best thing about it is that the corporatocracy (currently) exercises much less control over it than it does over TV, radio, or print journalism. Consequently, corporate control over the information Americans receive has loosened considerably since 2001. And that may largely explain the misfortune of the corporate controlled Republican Party. Who knows how far this trend will continue into the future?

So I think that Americans are wising up. Information is power, and I believe we are much better informed than we were just a few years ago. Now it’s about time that our elected politicians stop bowing down to the corporatocracy. In order to make that happen, we the people need to show them that they will face dire consequences for continuing to do so.

[RandomThoughts]

1. Excelent article.

There is another dynamic in play. Most of the people in the media, in government, and in the private sector are good people. That is a very important fact. Sure they have faults everyone does, but for the most part most of them want to be on the better side of how things work out.

Many people in power sometimes do not do what they can, they do not reach their capabilities because they don't know how powerful they actually are. People can right the coarse of corrupt mechanisms, people in the bottom, middle, and top all can do things to make things better.

Your article is correct in pointing out how many become their own enemies by not seeing their own flaws and projecting them outward, but there are billions of people that do see where things can improve and want things to be better, and they can make a difference before the road leads to the worse ways that unjust societies end up facing.

The billions that do care can fix things, and I agree with you that knowing how deception has been used is important. Also knowing how they can overcome those deceptions is a big part in fixing the problems.


You make a comment about weather people realize they are projecting and weather they know they are acting being hypocritical. People can actually build enough walls in their own mind to not even realize that. For example a violent person can defend it and actually believe that violence is peace. It is possible to construct an argument for anything, and many times people create delusions of fantasy in their own mind when cognitive dissonance forces them to handle a contradiction. Some people actually get further and further from reality as they are faced with having to face a dynamic where what they thought was correct does not match their own actions. A verbose delusion can actually supplement the lack of connectivity between the contradictions and is one of the reasons that people go crazy when they have to face thinking about how there actions do not match their claimed thoughts. For some people it is easier to hold a delusion then accept the challenge of ego that thinking on things creates.

I was talking to a guy that pretty much just repeats talking points of right wing media. When I brought up points he would fall into rants of repeating things I have heard on many channels. I could not get through to get him to actually think on what he was saying because he had an ego protection mechanism, any time I hit a nerve that pointed out a possible truth, contradicting one of his position, a rant would fire off in his mind to protect him from thinking on what I said. It should be noted that most people including people of a variety of economic and political thoughts have those same defense mechanism.

At the end of the conversation I asked him what would happen if everything he thought was wrong, something I personally spent a long time thinking on. When I asked him that, his response was very revealing to the source of the contention that defended him from thinking. He said that if he found out what he thought was wrong, it would feel like he was lost in a black hole with nothing to hang on to. He can not let go of his mechanism that keep him from thinking or he would have to face feelings he can not handle.

Another time I was talking to someone, I made a point that consisted of one sentence. It addressed the conversation and answered the question, or contradiction, that was the topic. The guy went into a rant, I asked him to repeat the sentence I had said. He could not. This went on for about 15 minutes, where I would say the one sentence, he would rant, and he could not repeat the one sentence I had said. He was not actually having a conversation, he was not hearing what I was saying, he was all in his own mind. Literally what seemed like a conversation was not, because what I was saying was not being registered by his mind to protect him from the contradiction. After many times of me asking him to repeat what I said, he realized he was not even listening to anything, and did listen to the one point I made. That stopped the conversation and he sat thinking about it awhile.

My point is the mechanism or things that keep people from being able to think are very deep and many people are captured by them. It literally can take hours of one on one talking just to get someone to even realize they are mostly living only in their own thoughts.

And of coarse I do that on topics also, everyone does at one time or another.

[pundaint]

4. Man, I wish teabaggers could read at this grade level!

[Orsino]

50. Catch-22.

Teabaggers offer their loyalty in exchange for the promise that they will never have to read again.

[Time for change]

12. Thank you -- It sounds like you have quite a talent for getting people to think about things

Our world would be a lot better off is people thought more about why they believe what they believe and do what they do. Indeed, it is a very complicated issue.

[Jackpine Radical]

13. The authoritarian continuum

The defensive phenomena you describe are indeed prevalent among the rank & file of the right wing. Your description of how some of those defenses work is very much on target. But, as Altemeyer points out in his book, there are two kinds of authoritarians: the leaders and the followers. The leaders (wolves) are psychopaths, just as T4C describes them. The followers, the sheep, are the angry, frightened creatures whom you describe. I do think that the sheep exist on one end of a continuum and the wolves on the other, with many gradations in between. For example, some politicians may start out as sheep with some latent wolfish traits and then evolve more toward wolfdom as they rise in the ranks. Joe "Liar" Wilson strikes me as one such. His original outburst may have been largely driven by sheepish defense mechanisms (he "can't handle the truth"), but then as he gets an influx of donor cash and the resultant positive strokes from his peers, he also gets a valuable lesson on the instrumental value of authoritarian-toned behavior, which pushes him a bit further down the track to wolfdom. To summarize, the sheep are misguided emotional reactives, bound up in pathological defense mechanism structures, and the wolves are conscienceless, utilitarian game-players who have discovered the utility of authoritarianism in controlling others and bending them to their will. It's Archie Bunker on one end and Dick Cheney on the other.

[RandomThoughts]

21. You make a good point.

There is a group that knows they are manipulating people and using fear and deception, they just don't care because it seems effective in the short term.

The equation for successful manipulation by deceptive means is based on the timeline of usage, if the deception can be used over enough years that old deceptions are forgotten by limited societal memory, then those authoritative methods can be successful, one of the reasons that so much work is put into keeping people not having memories, rotating in a new news story every 24 hours without connecting to past events, and rewrites of history, are to support what you call the authoritarian wolf.

Even the authoritarian sheep have limits, and at some point the lies and deception create a situation where they break from manipulation. If the leaders are shown to be against them enough of the time, they can change their delusion, or for some, face the difficult parts of reality that shield them from thinking.

So the propaganda methods of deception include a slowness to it to keep people within the cycle without knowing it. If a person is subjected to deception that makes them not trust either governmental governance, or private sector governance, and that deception makes them want to figure it out, then the authoritarians went to far. So the basic goals of societal control become not allowing the building of cascade waves that wake people up.

It is almost the same as shock doctrine, although not used to make people weak and timid, but to make them think. If a little goes wrong each year, while the wrongs of the year before are forgotten, people can be conditioned to accept more and more wrong. But if a cascade wave of showing people what is being done is built then people can be shocked into thinking. A shock can lead to timidness if fear or pain. But if a shock is knowledge, or thought, it can get people to snap out of sleep and pay attention to what is going on.

From a temporal context this is the real meaning of the dominoes. Over many years each domino is set up, each one is placed in sequence, then when the cascade wave starts, the knowledge from millions of people over many years is focused on the thoughts of people all at once. Such cascade waves are a way to get people out of the slump of not thinking or caring about what is being done to make society worse.

From the movie V for Vendetta. Note that this video also discusses what other writers have called holding the time vortex in ones mind. However the discussion of pattern, and labeling of chaos, are contradictions, it is anarchy in one perception, and structure in another.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxQX9fYf2aI

[havocmom]

2. yep. If the media won't serve the people, the people will be the media

And expose the pawn pols every time it's possible.

[Senator]

3. K&+R

[slay]

5. Great analysis TFC - K&R

I noticed during the last presidential race that the republicans did the SAME THING! My parents even mentioned it - how most every bad thing the republicans say about the democrats is actually not true about the dems, but IS true about the republicans themselves. It was so obvious to an intelligent person that it was sickening. Thanks for putting it into a more thought-out, better written article than I could.

[Time for change]

18. Thank you -- And the sad thing is that they can always be pretty confident that they'll

get away with it -- because they know that the corporate media has their back.

Disempowering the corporate media is perhaps our most important task if we hope to get our democracy heading in the right direction.

[dotymed]

48. THE FAIRNESS DOCTRINE

was repealed by Reagan. It allowed the media to sell the truth
to the highest bidder. We need to reinstate it. Sadly,
President Obama has already refused to reinstate the fairness
doctrine. If we can accomplish that, along with publicly
financed elections, we can change our country. 

[voc]

6. kick

Excellent article and response #1. Thanks.

[EFerrari]

7. Projection is a lie you don't have to own.

Nice job!

[Time for change]

26. Thank you -- That's about as good a summary of projection as I've ever heard

[mojowork_n]

8. Ideas?

RE:

"...In order to make that happen, we the people need to show them that they will face dire consequences for continuing to do so."

What did you have in mind?

I'm afraid that it's an inherently unweighted, off balance, "lose either way" situation. The politicians and corporate propandists will be paid even more, to come out with even more outrageous lies. They've been screwing over the population, so arrogantly, for so long, a normal person would think it might have begun to give pause. But they lose nothing by cranking up the volume on the one-channel, 'All-Republican-talking points-all-the-time' Noise Machine -- and continuing to make the roles of idiots like Glen Beck ever more prominent. As though he spoke for any but the most pathological and opportunistic among the hard-line Right.

[Time for change]

16. For one thing:

Progressives have been taken for granted, and it's getting sickening. Our Democratic leaders feel that they can move way to the right and still take our votes and our support for granted. We should show them that they can't. We can support progressive/liberal candidates in the primaries (and that includes for president). And we can make it clear to them that if they go too far towards supporting the corporatist agenda we will not vote for them even if they win the Democratic nomination. It just isn't enough to have a "D" label.

[mojowork_n]

25. That's a good point...

...but...

Our elected leaders (on both sides of the aisle, not just the folks labelled "D") are fully aware of the choice we're left with -- "not so good" and "absolutely horrifying" -- when election day rolls around.

There's still no one left to lead the charge. (Assuming the vote's not rigged, anyway, to pre-empt the democratic process.) Gore won in 2000. Kerry won in 2004*. Obama's "in" right now, but what are the choices and options he really has?

* There was a great post the other day -- Debunking election myths -- with all sorts of visual, statistical data. The bottom line is they keep moving the goal posts.

[hfojvt]

9. unfortunately this line jumps out at me

"But most Americans wouldn’t be too pleased about the idea of a massive tax cut that benefited only the wealthy. So Bush had to repeatedly lie about that."


It is not correct to say "only". It's a little trickier than that, and that was Bush's selling point. The Bush tax cuts did benefit most people to the tune of $300 - $1500 a year depending on their income and other factors. Part of it was the per child credit. That went from $500 to $1000 per child. So if you had two children that netted you $1,000.

There also was a new tax bracket of 10% on the first $6,000 of taxable income. That netted most people about $300 which were the infamous rebate checks of 2001.

The trouble is that these benefits for lower income people were tied to things that gave huge benefits to upper income people. Things like - reduction of the top rates, and slashing the tax rate on dividends and capital gains. Well if you have an income of $10,000,000 then reducing the top rate from 39% to 33% nets you about $540,000. If you are a Wal-mart heir, or Bill Gates (and coincidentally Microsoft announced it's first-ever dividend shortly after the passage of the Bush tax cuts in 2003. What a co-inky-dink, eh?) and you make $10,000,000 a year (or more) in dividend income, then cutting that rate from 39% to just 15% nets you a cool $2,400,000 in tax savings.

So MOST or TOO MUCH of the benefits of the Bush tax cuts went to the wealthy, but ONLY is not accurate.

[Time for change]

10. When we consider benefits we need to consider more than just federal income tax

I do believe it's accurate to say that the Bush tax cuts benefited only the wealthy. As a result of the massive tax cuts to the wealthy, social services, aid to the states, and money put into our infrastructure suffered massive cuts. Consequently, state and local taxes were raised, and the American people went without social services that had long been available to them. We also suffered a huge budget deficit, which affects us all. When compared against the minute federal income tax cuts that were given to people of modest means, the net result was a large loss for everyone but the wealthy.

[Jackpine Radical]

23. Yes, you're right.

I remember seeing some old wreck of a car driving around with the back bumper held on by right-wing bumper stickers, one of which read, "Like your tax rebate? Thank Bush" or something like that. I remember the wave of sadness that swept over me when I read it, and the accompanying thought" "You poor sap!"

[hfojvt]

33. that's a hard case to make

For one thing, not all of us get social services. For another, in my study of the Kansas budget I did not find a huge cut in Federal payments. Nor have I seen huge state tax increases, not even now when so many states are coming up short. Property taxes gemerally always go up, and the impact of the deficit on the average family is not clear. What is clear that many ordinary people did get some benefit from the Bush tax cuts. To deny that looks dishonest.

[Time for change]

34. From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Data in the Administration’s own Mid-Session Budget Review indicates that the tax cuts have played a larger role than all other legislation enacted since the start of 2001 in the emergence of the current sizable budget deficit, and that the tax cuts account for the majority of the current deficit... The tax cuts have accounted for 57 percent of the cost of all legislation enacted since the Administration took office. The tax cuts thus have contributed more to the worsening fiscal picture than all other new government policies combined...

The Center jointly released a report with the UrbanInstitute-BrookingsInstitutionTaxPolicyCenter finding the tax cuts ultimately are likely to make most households worse off...

The assertion has been made that the CBO data show all taxpayers benefit from the tax cuts since all income groups are shown to receive at least some tax cuts. Such assertions, however, rest on the assumption that the tax cuts will never be paid for. This assumption is erroneous; eventually, the government must cover its bills, either by raising taxes or by cutting spending. Financial markets will not tolerate persistent large and unsustainable deficits....

The Tax Policy Center/CBPP study found that under the two scenarios it considered for offsetting the costs of the tax cuts, more than three-quarters of American households ultimately would be made worse off. They will lose more from the financing measures than they would gain from the tax cuts.

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2116

You seem to be saying that any time someone receives an income tax cut, that makes them better off and thus provides them a benefit. I don't see how you can say that. If that was the case, our government should cut all of our taxes to zero. Why shouldn't we take into account the damage that the tax cuts did to the economy -- balanced against the minute gains that people of moderate means accrued by virtue of paying less income tax?

[hfojvt]

51. the key word there is ultimately

and there seems to be another assumption there that all households receive equal benefits from government spending, and I don't believe that is true.

I also do not see the need for the slippery slope in my argument. If the Bush tax cuts save me $300 a year in taxes, then that is clearly a benefit to me. There's no need for me to have to make the argument that tax cuts are ALWAYS a benefit. But there are many scenarios where spending can be cut without directly affecting me. Suppose, for example, that Congressional pay was cut by 1/3 and military pay for officers was cut by 10%. (The second option might not fly politically but it is an example of a spending cut that only affects part of the US population rather than somehow hurting all of us. Nor am I trying to say that those two cuts would cover a significant portion of the deficit.)

The reason we cannot take into account the 'damage that the tax cuts did to the economy' is because it is not clear how to quantify such a number. On the one side you have the check for $300 and on the other side there is you trying to argue that the person getting $300 is really not better off. Why? Because the deficit increased by $1,000 for every $300 that they got?

So what? According to Obama, the deficit is gonna be paid back without ever raising taxes for anybody making less than $250,000. It seems to me the case could just as easily be made that ULTIMATELY the rich are the only ones who will NOT benefit from the Bush tax cuts. Because they are gonna have to pay back those tax cuts plus interest while those of us below the median income get even more tax cuts.

[Time for change]

54. I totally disagree

You say "The reason we cannot take into account the 'damage that the tax cuts did to the economy' is because it is not clear how to quantify such a number."

That's almost like saying that it is not clear how to quantify deaths that occurred during the holocaust, so we can't take it into account when assessing the damage done by the Nazis. Surely, you don't really believe that?

[hfojvt]

60. economics is not an exact science

I think counting people is a little bit clearer and uncontroversial.

I am not even sure why we are having this argument though, that it is somehow so important for you to not change "only" to "mostly". Isn't it enough to use the figure that Al Franken used in "Lying Liars"? That "the bottom 60% got 14.7% of the tax cut". 14.7% is pretty small compared to 85.3%, but it's not nothing. Of course, another problem comes because many in the top 40 percent are not THAT wealthy, and they got some benefits too.

[Time for change]

66. No, that's not enough

The word I used, which you told me was wrong, was "benefit", not "tax cut". You quote Franken using the word "tax cut". There is one hell of a lot of difference, regardless of how precisely it can be quantified.

Your whole argument is predicated on the assumption that tax cut = benefit. That is wrong, and I can't believe that you believe that. If that was true, we should say the hell with any other function of government -- let's just reduce taxes to near zero.

[Overseas]

49. Thom Hartmann has a great chapter in "Threshold" on taxes.

It is called "Denmark: A Modern Beacon" that examines what Danes get for their much higher tax rates (freedom from a lot of the financial worries of our "middle"/Lower 90% class) and the relationship between taxes and wages during different periods of recent US history. When taxes were much higher on the top 10%, the quality of life for the rest of us was much higher, and increasing. Wages for the average worker increased. Since the tax slashing and its attendant intense propagandizing stepped up in the Reagan era, real wages have declined for the average worker. He shows how here, too, tax cuts had the most impact on the Top 10, vastly increasing their wealth, thus the "taxes are evil" meme is another projection foisted onto the majority.

But, I wondered, while deficits do matter for American working families, is it possible that for working people taxes don't matter?

I laid out my theory to Peter Morgensen, along lines somewhat like this:If a person is working for (just to pull a nice round number out of the air) a $100,000-a-year base salary, and is paying a 25 percent tax rate, that person has $75,000 to take home every year. In effect, he's really working for $75,000. And his employer knows that he's willing to do his job for $75,000 in his pocket every year--that's enough to cover his lifestyle, raise his family, cover medical and housing expenses and transportation, take a vacation, or pay for whatever else may be part of the overall costs of his life.

So if his taxes are dropped to 10 percent (to use a radical but again round-number example), he's now taking home $90,000 a year from his $100,000 annual salary. Most workers in America think this means they'd then end up with $90,000 a year in their pockets--in effect a substantial raise--and are therefore all gung-ho to have their taxes cut.

But the employer knows that this particular employee is both willing to live and capable of living on $75,000 a year take-home. So if taxes are cut to where take-home becomes $90,000 a year, why wouldn't the employer simply cut wages down to the point where the after-tax take-home income to the worker was still $75,000?

In fact, this is exactly what has happened in the United States. Ronald Reagan and Bush Jr. both slightly cut taxes on the middle class, and the result is that the middle-class worker today is earning a before-tax wage that is less than it was in 1980, the year before Reagan became president.

Because the techniques used by employers to cut wages mostly took the form of attrition (waiting for higher-wage workers to quit or retire, laying them off, or busting unions and replacing them wholesale-- then replacing these various types of workers with lower-wage employees doing the same jobs), there was no big single announcement to (or realization by) the American workers that their pay was being cut in large part because their taxes had been cut.

For Americans (and working people around the world), when tax rates are cut, wages over time will be cut as well.

The flip side of this is what happens when taxes are raised on the working class, as is the case in Denmark. As government there took on many of the services that in the United States are provided by for-profit companies--from higher education to health care to retirement--they increased taxes to pay for them. Government is generally able to provide such public-sector or "commons" services at a lower cost than private industry because it doesn't have to skim 10 percent or more as profit to pay dividends to stockholders, it doesn't have multimillion-dollar salaries and compensation packages to pay senior executives, and it doesn't have the costs of marketing and competition with other companies (and the attendant costs from advertising to fancy headquarters to corporate jets). Danes are getting more services for their dollars (actually kroner), but those services must still be paid for.

To use our hypothetical $100,000-a-year worker, if his taxes went from 25 percent up to 50 percent, his take-home income would drop from $75,000 a year to $50,000 a year. On the other hand, he would no longer be paying $10,000 a year into his employer-provided or private health plan (the low end of average in the United States; and even when companies pay part of the cost, they simply lower wages by the rest of the cost); he would no longer have to set aside money to educate his children; he would no longer have to pile up large savings to survive old age, and so on. But, still, that $50,000 may not be enough to maintain the same standard of living. So what will happen? Wages will go up.

And sure enough, that's the case in Denmark. When I asked Peter Morgensen what the minimum wage was in Denmark, he did a quick back-of-the-envelope currency exchange calculation and said, "About fifteen to fifteen and a half dollars an hour."
...
Although half of that goes to taxes, the bottom line for the average worker remains the same regardless of the tax rate, at least over time. From 1940 to 1980, when taxes went up on workers, wages went up, too.

...If this is true...then why is it that so many Americans are so hysterical about taxes?
The answer is simple. While higher or lower tax rates have very little effect on the ultimate lifestyle and take-home pay of working Americans, who spend most of their income every year on the necessities of life, they do have a huge impact on the very wealthy. And most of the commentators on radio and TV, and the most famous columnists in our newspapers, are either millionaires, or like the New York Times' Thomas Friedman or TV gadfly commentator Mort Zuckerman, billionaires.

The same is true of members of the United States Senate, who are almost all at least multimillionaires... And our TV stars, movie stars, and even many of the people who program and produce our daily entertainment and infotainment fare are usually among the wealthy to very wealthy in America.

So American workers are treated daily to a steady diet of the concerns of the very wealthy, with almost never a mention of the concerns of average workers. And at the top of the list of concerns of the very wealthy: taxes.

[bertman]

11. Recced after reading the first several hundred words. Back later for the complete read.

[Echo In Light]

14. Great post! And this: Official Culture - A Natural State of Psychopathy?

http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/official_culture.htm

Additional food for thought

[Time for change]

39. Thank you -- I quoted from Laura Knight-Jadczyk about a year and a half ago

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

From her editor's preface to “Political Ponerology – A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes” by Andrew M. Lobaczewski, speaking of psychopaths:

They can imitate feelings, but the only real feelings they seem to have… is a sort of “predatorial hunger” for what they want. All else – all activity – is subsumed to this drive. In short, the psychopath is a predator. If we think about the interactions of predators with their prey in the animal kingdom, we can come to some idea of what is behind the “mask of sanity” of the psychopath.

This leads us to an important question: what does the psychopath really get from their victims? It’s easy to see what they are after when they lie and manipulate for money or material goods or power. But in many instances… we can only say that it seems to be that the psychopath enjoys making others suffer.

[Echo In Light]

64. I sourced her here once and it garnered some hostile reactions if I recall

[Greyhound]

15. Auto K&R.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

17. Thanks for your insights, TFC

[inna]

19. bravo!

You touched upon a very interesting topic, which is covered in great detail in the book by Andre Lobaczewski called "Political Ponerology, A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes". It's a really fascinating book, and the take-home message is something like this:

This world is sick because about 6% of the population -- across all groups -- is conscienceless and psychopathological. Unfortunately, psychopathy (i.e., LACK of CONSCIENCE and compassion) is an adaptive trait and an extremely successful life strategy - it offers great evolutionary/survival advantages (in darwinian terms). Psychopaths - who lack morals completely, only care about their own self-interest, and are preoccupied with lying, screwing other people over, and seeking power/control of others - are extremely successful under many social systems such as unregulated, predatory capitalism, or stalinist-style communism, or fascism - in fact, such systems themselves are a PRODUCT of their function.

Unfortunately, normal people (i.e., non-psychopaths) are at a disadvantage here - while normal people are preoccupied with "silly notions like morals-shmorals" and/or their daily routines, the psychological deviants have been busy grabbing power and control.

What do we get? We get a PATHOCRACY - essentially, a government staffed by psychological deviants. ...

[Ironman3476]

37. Whuuf- what a kick in the guts!

I guess it's because it has rhe ring of truth-as near as I can remember what truth means.

[inna]

41. welcome to DU, dear.

we need good people.

[Time for change]

38. Thank you -- Yes, I've read that

Larry Ogg recommended it to me. There's a lot of very important stuff there. Here's something I wrote about it some time ago:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

[hfojvt]

20. unfortunately I gotta call foul on the Iraq statements too

A quick google search reveals this

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE58R1TB2...

Iraq bus bomb kills six 28 Sep 2009

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/0909/...

Eight killed in Iraq car bomb 9 Sep 2009

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/06/20/iraq.kirkuk.s...

"A suicide truck bombing near a Shiite mosque killed at least 67 people and wounded at least 200 Saturday in a city close to Kirkuk, Iraq, an official with Kirkuk police said." 20 Jun 2009

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/08/20...

"The blasts on Tuesday raised the death toll from five days of attacks to 115 in the worst spasm of violence the country has suffered since ..." 11 Aug 2009


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/articl...
"A double suicide bombing at Baghdad’s most revered Shia shrine has left at least 60 people dead, the latest in a bombing blitz that has killed and maimed up to 140 people in just 24 hours." 24 Apr 2009


Yet, you seem to imply that it is our soldiers who are the terrorists.


"Similarly, the idea that our government refers to any Iraqi who kills U.S. soldiers in defense of his homeland as a “terrorist” represents the worst kind of hypocrisy and projection. The definition of a terrorist is one who kills or threatens civilians. Yes, there are Muslim terrorists in Iraq. But the vast majority of Iraqis who fight against the U.S. occupation of their country are fighting to defend their country. The terrorists are the ones who participate in the mass slaughter of Iraqi civilians."


There are stories like the ones I compiled going back to 2003 and they have several things in common.
1. They are not done by our troops, they are done by the people our troops are fighting.
2. They kill Iraqi civilians - lots of them, and they injure and scare lots more
3. They are not even attacks against our troops. Their target is either other Iraqis or our puppet Iraq government.

Our troops are not perfect and war can bring out the worst in anybody, but I will definitely back them against our enemies who are killing civilians ON PURPOSE.

It also looks bad that you followed a paragraph implying that our troops are terrorists with this

"Then there’s the accusation that Americans who protest against the illegal and immoral Iraq War “don’t support the troops” – thus implying that sending young men and women off to fight and die in a fraudulent war-for-profit is tantamount to “supporting the troops”."

It's kinda hard to say it's a lie that you "don't support the troops" when you just got done implying that they are terrorists.

"Less than 5,000 U.S. soldiers have died in that war, while over a million Iraqi civilians have died. Who posed a threat to whom?"

"The terrorists are the ones who participate in the mass slaughter of Iraqi civilians."

[Time for change]

24. I don't get your point

I didn't say that there aren't Muslim terrorists in Iraq. I said that there are. But I'm also saying that the good majority of the more than a million Iraqis killed in Iraq have been killed by US military actions. That doesn't mean that all of our soldiers are terrorists, or even most of them. But there have been a lot of atrocities committed there by U.S. troops, and those who participate in those atrocities are terrorists. Here are some more specific things I've written about it:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

There is lots more. You don't find much of this stuff in corporate news sources, but there have been lots of books written about it.

[hfojvt]

31. it looks like the other way around to me

that a good majority of the civilians being killed have been killed by our enemies rather than by our troops.

I have not seen any count that tried to divide the blame instead of giving it all to Bush.

[Time for change]

35. The Iraqis should know better than anyone

Polls of ordinary Iraqis show show not just that more than 90% of them want us to leave, but that over 60% approve of violence against U.S. military forces. Ordinary people don't ordinarily approve of violence, unless there's a compelling reason to do so.

Several books have documented widespread atrocities against the the Iraqi people by U.S. military forces in Iraq -- and have made the case that the U.S. military accounts for far more Iraqi deaths than anything else.

Did you read the links that I posted in post 24? Here's a sample:

A recent report by a coalition of non-governmental groups called the Global Policy Forum shed a lot of light on some of the reasons for the tragedies that so many Iraqis have suffered under the U.S. occupation. The report explains that U.S. forces:

have held a large number of Iraqi citizens in 'security detention' without charge or trial, in direct violation of international law. No Iraqi is safe from arbitrary arrest and the number of prisoners has risen greatly since 2003 (when the US-led war began)…

U.S. military commanders have established permissive rules of engagement, allowing troops to use deadly force against virtually any perceived threat. As a consequence, the US and its allies regularly kill Iraqi civilians at checkpoints and during military operations, on the basis of the merest suspicion…abusing and torturing large numbers of Iraqi prisoners… torture increasingly takes place in Iraqi prisons, apparently with US awareness and complicity…In addition to combat deaths, coalition forces have killed many Iraqi civilians.

The United States has established broad legal immunity in Iraq for its forces, for private security personnel, for foreign military and civilian contractors, and even for the oil companies doing business in Iraq…

This kind of stuff has been documented over and over again.

[hfojvt]

52. you are mixing atrocities with deaths

I am arguing about deaths, and the one link seems to back me up

"Gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of violent deaths, with car bombs and other explosions causing 14 percent, according to the survey results. Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31 percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the respondents said."

From a link in the first link about Iraq casualties

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...

If only 31% of those casulties are caused by coalition forces, then more than twice as many, 69%, are caused by non-coalition forces. Of the almost 600,000 deaths mentioned there, that is over 400,000 caused by the 'insurgents' and 186,000 caused by the coalition. The vast majority is on the heads of the insurgents, and we have been trying, supposedly, since May 2003 to shut them down and stop the killing.

[Time for change]

53. You're implying that coalition airstrikes were the only deaths caused by the coalition

That is very far from the truth. Many of the documented atrocities did not involve air strikes. And I'm not confusing atrocities with deaths. Atrocities, as I'm sure you know, cause many deaths. And from what I've read, the good majority of gunshot deaths of Iraqi civilians were caused by coalition forces. And the 650,000 figure was a very early estimate. Later similar surveys put the number at over a million, and later ones still but it at around two million. That's a hell of a lot of deaths. To claim that the US military is not acting as a terrorist organization in Iraq, even with your very low estimate, is quite a stretch.

[hfojvt]

59. the quote said 'coalition forces or airstrikes'

when I said 'atrocity' I was talking about false imprisonment and torture, not the firebombing of a city ro some such.

Although in one sense, I am surprised the total does not include more from disease and heat exhaustion. Without proper infrastructure how do they keep from being poisoned by a combination of unsafe water and sewage?

Since June 2003 though it has been the insurgents disrupting the infrastructure that we are trying to rebuild.

[Time for change]

65. Gunshot wounds and other means of death on the survey doesn't specify who did the killing

As I said, I've read several books on the subject that dealt with statements by Iraqis on how family members were killed. They talk about gunshot wounds and other means of death, and coalition forces are mentioned far more often than Muslims.

[bertman]

57. hfojvt, am I correct in assuming that your intent in the post above is to lay the blame

of the 400,000 deaths on the Iraqis, as opposed to the U.S.? If so, your argument may be true in terms of who exactly pulled the trigger but it does not deal at all with why the trigger was pulled and what mechanism initiated the trigger-pulling in the first place. Undeniably the responsibility for setting the murderous civil war into motion was our invasion and deposing of the dictator Saddam Hussein. Now, the so-called-by-the-American media "insurgents" are fighting each other for historical, political, religious, ethnic, and whatever other grievances and scores they have to settle since there is no longer a central authority that keeps a lid on the boiling pot. That's why we now need 125,000 American troops plus another 100,000 "contractors" in Iraq just to keep the place from coming apart at the seams. And, of course, we are also spending billions of dollars placating the Iraqi combatants with bribes of cash and weapons so they don't continue the murderous attacks that were aimed at OUR troops and their indigenous foes.

Yes, we have been trying, supposedly, since May 2003 to shut them down and stop the killing. But it was we Americans who brought this slaughter to full fruition with our invasion to protect America from the scourge of Weapons of Mass Destruction that never were.

[hfojvt]

61. pulling the trigger (or setting the bomb) is pretty important

the people who do so have blood on their hands. They certainly are more culpable than our troops, if not more culpable than the Bushs, Rumsfelds, Cheneys, Schultzes, Matthewses, and Rathers who worked so hard beating the drums of war.

[bertman]

62. If you throw in the Hannity's, O'Reilly's, Limbaugh's, Wallace's I'll agree 100%.

[Blue_Tires]

22. kick for later reading...

[Overseas]

27. K&R

I was waiting for your next essay.

Lots to comment about but I've got to dash. Will check in later.

[McCamy Taylor]

28. Great post. Well said. We need a BBC style true publiic network.

And public funded elections, too.

[Time for change]

42. Thank you

Public funded elections would make a world of difference to our country. Right wingers would have to find a different line of work.

[zeemike]

29. I think there is a difference between physiological projection

And projection as a strategy.
And this seems more like a stratigy....to divert attention from what they are doing.
And I would guess it stems from people like Rove who studied how to best frame every message with psychological means....I am sure he learned the value of projection, as well as using Orwell's book as his play book.
And with the media behind him to repeat every lie he could not fail.

[Uncle Joe]

32. Perhaps it's a combination of both, the top layer or level overtly uses projection

as strategy and as a result empowers people with like minds that subconsciously carry out those desires.

Maybe Murdoch knows that to accomplish what he wants, he needs unsavory people; that naturally subconsciously project their vices on to others.

This is not to say that Beck is subconsciously projecting his racism, it may be deliberate with him as well.

[Uncle Joe]

30. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Time for change.

[midnight]

36. Lies to big to Jail! Keep this idea in mind as we approach a very

emotional argument over the rush to vaccinate on information clumsily packaged.

[anonymous171]

40. Love it. K&R. nt

[rhett o rick]

43. CorpAmerica is spending huge sums of money to get the internet under their control. They realize the

danger in free and open information. They own the media and are aiming for the internet.

[earth mom]

44. The biggest lie of all was that Obama was bringing "Hope & Change" to the people.

The second biggest lie was that average people were gonna be "RICH, RICH I TELL YA!" if they invested their life savings in that humongous pyramid scheme called "The Stock Market".

The third biggest lie is that Social Security is broken.

And once Obama allows the corporate fuckers in charge to get a hold of Social Security and destroy it-it will be ALL OVER for 95% of us.

Welcome to 3rd World USA.

[rhett o rick]

45. One trouble is that the willfully ignorant can vote. nt

[colsohlibgal]

46. Most Excellent Work

Great job in presenting the big picture, the sweeping scope of what's going on, how it all ties together, while also detailing specific instances.

This whole sham has been so successful because of the unquestioning pliability of a huge chuck of the public. The oblivious crowd is a much bigger problem then the right wingers, there are a lot more folks zoned out of all this.

The Bush dodging the war lie was the most unreal. Kerry was a war hero, Bush obviously dodged Vietnam because his powerful dad pulled strings to get him into a nice safe stateside National Guard gig - and he even mostly blew that off, yet the press runs with the bogus was Kerry really a hero story. I still have a hard time believing the MSN pulled that off.

Or the simple fact that the first person who approved calling the 2000 election for Bush was a Bush relative. I bet 90 or so per cent of Americans do not know this.

Also kudos for naming what lobbying really is, legal bribery. If I bribed an official to give me a handicapped sticker for my car (which I don't at all need) and we got caught we'd both be in trouble with the law. But corporations buy off legislators all the time, Baucus is making a fortune from the insurance folks for stalling and watering down his health care bill.

I would hope that sooner or later enough people will care enough to force the change we need, but I'm not overly optimistic that will happen anytime soon.

[Time for change]

55. Thank you...

My biggest hope is that corporate control of the media will be hugely eroded via the Internet. We see it happening already. Once public knowledge of what is happening to us passes a certain tipping point, the corporatocracy as we now know it may be done for. That is my hope.

[Overseas]

47. This essay is a joy to read. So comprehensive.

And apropos in this sea of vicious projections the right wingers are tossing around this time. This One More Time we try a bit of Democratic leadership again; we're less than a year in and the Right has already dumped truckloads of incendiary slander on our president. So I loved your expressing reservations about adding more critiques into the mix, while still wanting to respond to our president's request that we make our voices heard too.

The whole projection thing-- methods of catapulting the propaganda, shall we say-- that's been rolling around in my brain for a while too. But I've thought of it more as deliberate lying. I can see that some sociopaths have been driven by deep-rooted toxic narcissism. But there are thousands more who go along to stay ahead and use projection as a handy weapon. And I appreciate the care you took in enumerating the many ways that habit is hurtful to us in the Lower-90% Class.

I've been calling them the Gingrich Projections, although you've shown me that these techniques are nothing new. (And I recently learned about the Powell Memo of 1971.) Gingrich really took ownership of weaponized projection. He reminded the GOP to blame the other guy for what you are doing yourselves before they get around to blaming you for it. He circulated a helpful memo in 1996, on "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control" - http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4443.ht... after his infamous Contract On America. (sic) He has shared his techniques with lots of others by now. Heck, we now have a 24/7 news channel sloshing around vicious projections day after day.
-- Recipients of corporate welfare are protecting their turf with a vengeance. Industries protected with billions of our tax dollars are calling our Democratic President a socialist.
-- Better yet, the fascists themselves are accusing President Obama of resembling Hitler.
-- Those who are prepared to allow 45,000,000 of their fellow citizens to suffer without medical insurance are comparing our president to a heartless mass murderer.
-- Maybe they even started the whole birth certificate projection because their dear McCain was born in Panama.
-- Or the lingering guilt for foisting the dangerously incompetent Dubya upon us is driving them subconsciously to de-legitimate our president? (That would require a shred of conscience.)
-- Intimating that the Obama Administration is propagandizing people because they have paid millions to do so themselves.

Luckily, as you note, we have the internet now. And the GOP forgets about video tape. Or are so confident in their ownership of so much of our mass media, that they don't fear a clip from last week in direct contradiction with their poses of today. Confident enough in their power to allow a few liberal shows and comedies to highlight those contradictions and still persist in repeating their lies and "free market" dogma.

But thank goodness we have The Daily Show too. Thought of this essay when watching tonight's show (9/28). They ribbed a whole slew of the GOP's latest slanderous projections. The Daily Show's zany anger about the technique was a great complement to your thoughtful analysis. Hope you get a chance to see it.

Thank you TFC. You explain what I have been living through so well. I really love this essay and will read it again.

[Time for change]

56. Thank you Overseas -- especially for comparing my essay to the Daily Show -- I love Jon Stewart

You added a lot of examples that would have been good for me to include in this OP:

Fascists comparing Obama to Hitler

Repients of some of the biggest welfare checks in the history of the world calling Obama a socialist

Those who want their fellow Americans to go without health care charging Obama with plans for murder

Accusing Obama of propagandizing after supporting Bush for 8 years

Yep. These people know no limits.

[Overseas]

63. Rachel Maddow had a chilling segment on "The next target

for right wing smear machine" -- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#33080922

After all we've seen, you'd think I wouldn't be as naive as I seem to be-- I didn't realize that the right wing GOP would be moving right along from their successful ACORN smearing to trashing SEIU. And there's a chilling video clip of a GOP operative coldly discussing those plans on the fly in the hallway, followed by a bright-as-day GOP legislator with a big chart presenting to congress the "many ties" between the big bad community organizers and the big bad service employees' union.

The GOP is proceeding blithely from attacking the organization that registers poor people to vote and helps them navigate our leaky social safety nets, to the organization that represents janitors and other service employees and engages them in the political process, largely supporting Democrats.

She had Peter Dreier on to give the "first they came for ACORN...then they came for SEIU..." sequence, which he also wrote a quick column on at the Huff Po. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/first-they-c...

It was really disappointing seeing our legislators who let the Bush Gang push the "few bad apples" theory to minimize the horrors of Abu Ghraib, make such a major move against ACORN when it was stung with its few bad apples. Few bad apples at ACORN = defund the whole group. Fake "few bad apples" in the Bush military = put those few in jail and carry on with policies and practices that damaged our national security very severely.

One would hope the Democrats would leap at the chance to redeem themselves for falling for the grandstanding anti-ACORN vote. They could broaden the bat swung at ACORN and take up the anti-fraud cause in a big way then, following Grayson's lead, as you referenced above. That would be a great way to redeem themselves from picking on a group that has helped the poor for 40 years and registered millions of Democrats. A group that has not been convicted of fraud. I was naively shocked to be reminded of news that has flashed by us piecemeal about the many instances of actual convictions for government contract fraud, to the tune of millions of dollars, committed by some of our biggest established defense contractors like Northrup Grummond and Lockheed Martin. I don't remember the "Defund Lockheed!" vote. We focused on the abuses by Halliburton, KBR and the chilling Xe.

Democrats look so foolish and weak when they don't jump to the defense of Van Jones and ACORN and others. And it really empowers the GOP in their pro-corporate crusade. It must seem like shooting fish in a barrel to them. Stir up a scandal, trumpet it on our now conservative-dominated broadcast media and the Dems will roll over and join the chorus against those "horrible, scandalous" people that make up their own activist base. I can easily picture Rove chuckling away at the dumb Democrats who fall for his crap. He must be proud of himself for getting Democrats to shoot themselves in the foot time and time again.

Thank goodness that the GOP is so arrogant about its control of our national dialogue as to be unconcerned about the token liberal shows like Rachel Maddow and The Daily Show that highlight the hypocritical campaigns of the very active right wing spin machine and the millions it spends to topple Democrats' best hopes of achieving the "change we can believe in." Hey, they got the Green Jobs guy, Van Jones. That'll help sow doubt about all that darn green stuff that cuts into Big Oil's profits and gives those damn individual citizens more control of their power sources.

[bertman]

58. More excellent editorializing on your part, Time for change. Thanks again for an

astute analysis.

What is most bothersome to me now is that even if we oust the most obvious of the corporate shills in the upcoming election cycles they will likely be replaced by others who are equally as opportunistic as their predecessors. Nowadays it seems that the corporations provide such lucrative financing and post-government employment opportunities with one of their subsidiaries that the only penalty for a one or two term Senator or Representative would be a lack of political prestige.

I fear that our society has been conditioned to greed and obsession with material wealth to the point that there will be an endless supply of psychopathic personalities from all points of the political compass, for decades to come.

The public financing of elections would greatly alter the course of that river of sewage, but we can't get enough honest men and women in the Congress at once to make that dream come true. And with the Democratic capitulation to the concept of computerized voting with no paper trail, well we may be too screwn to reverse this ominous trend of The Big Lie.

I'm holding out hope that Michael Moore's "Captitalism, A Love Story" is going to provide the spark that lights the fire.