Author: Mark Tokarski

Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.

They actually know what they want and how to get it …

Liberals and progressives fail to understand two things: 1) The Administration and the Democratic leadership is not “weak.” It is simply compromised and corporate. The apparent weakness is simply a perception management tool to avoid giving progressives and liberals what they want; and 2) the nature of power.

The health care bill is a horrible bill, a massive gift to the greed and avarice set that run the health insurance industry. Republicans could not pass such a bill, as Democratic opposition would gel and prevent passage. Because the bill is being pushed by Democrats, liberals and progressives are frozen in their footsteps, their herd instincts overriding their intellects.

This from Eric Massa, D-NY, who will now step down from office, clearing the way for passage of the bill:

“Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill, and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me and it will pass. You connect the dots.”

Thoughts from 20,000 feet above …

Has this ever happened to you? You have some habit, some peccadillo, that you think makes you different from other people. And then you are reading this or that and find out that it isn’t just you … it’s everyone. Like me wearing the same shirt three or four days in a row to cut down on laundry. What a nice guy I am! What a good husband!

And then I find out that almost all married guys do that.

Advertisers know this about us. They know that we like to think we are unique. Hell, they know everything about us. That’s why advertising works. They know more about us than we know about ourselves.

So here is what is unique about me: I am self-employed. The people I do work for don’t own me. So I am free.

This happened in 1986, when I was 36. I’m almost 60 now. I didn’t plan it – my boss, Mary Alice Fortin, could not stand me almost as much as I could not stand her. I had five kids to feed, so she did me a favor – she cut me loose, but she gave me a big client to get me over the hump, the Mayo Clinic. They are big and sophisticated, and they surely did not need a land grant BS like me, but they allowed me to oversee the oil and gas properties that she had given them. This allowed me to pay the bills while I developed a practice of my own. I owe my freedom to that lady who disliked me so much, and before she left Montana, I told her so and thanked her. We never spoke again, and continued to dislike each other.

I didn’t know what I had. I didn’t understand anything. My very first day of self-employment, April 1, 1986, I got up, showered, shaved, put on a jacket and tie and went to my little office and just sat there. I had a computer, I had a client, and I had time. I thought that I must still behave as an employed person would, punching a time clock, being diligent … work work work.

It did not go smoothly, I depended far too much on Mayo, but did manage to find other clients, one big, most small. In essence, I was simply lucky. There were many times when I scoured the want ads looking for a suitable job. But the truth was that I had been cut loose. I was no longer part of the employment world. The thought of employment – the security of a paycheck and health insurance, was alluring and depressing all at once.

In short order after April 1, 1986, I lost my political bearings, abandoning the right wing. My wife divorced me, and hard as that was, it had to happen. And I left the Catholic Church, taking my kids with me.

I won’t bore you further. The question is, am I unique? If all of my other experiences in life are any gauge, the answer is no. I am more like everyone than everyone. Anyone in my shoes, give anyone that kind of freedom, would finally develop into a fuller, richer, happier person.

So I write stuff here that is kind of a meandering and long shot across the bow of people who are still mired in employment, and, as with the post below, it can be harsh. I criticize people who behave exactly as I behaved as an employed person. I was harder to get along with than most, but I do not kid myself. I had my mind right. They broke me, as Luke would say. I believed as I must believe to maintain my existence.

So, after the nasty exchange below, I say to Mr. Kemmick, and from long ago, Mr. Crisp, that I don’t envy you your position. I know how hard it is. I know what it is to be bought. That sounds, I know, like a resounding backhanded slap. It is, and it isn’t. It just is. That’s the way most of us live.

Anyway, I’m done for the week, and we have fun stuff to do, and dammit it, if it keeps on being fun, we’ll just keep right on doing it through Monday … Tuesday …. here’s something I didn’t realize when I was employed. We don’t need to work so long and hard as we do. That too is a control mechanism. Too much free time is not a good thing for the servant of wealth …

My final thought on passage into yet more delightful freedom:

By the way, if there is such a thing as karma, now would be the time.

The perception game

I only rarely watch the news networks, and never the regular news broadcasts. The primary reason is that I don’t like advertising, and watching CNN is total immersion in ads. But I get a whiff of what’s going on by watching Jon Stewart and visiting Crooks and Liars.

In avoiding television news, I have the advantage of being better-informed than the average viewer. But maybe that’s just fantasy, and maybe my take on it is wrong.

But here’s what I get from it all: There appears to be a mighty partisan debate going on. Republicans are all over Democrats for their left-wing extremism, Obama being a socialist and all. It’s a highly energetic debate done in quick sound bursts between advertisements – if it can’t be said in thirty seconds, it can’t be said. Fast talkers dominate the airwaves, people face off and talk over and past one another for hours on end.

It’s like that old story about elephants making love – there’s a whole lot of shaking here on the ground, but the real action is higher up.

This media show leaves us with the impression that we have a two-party system. Maybe that is intentional. But we don’t have any such thing. Because Republicans and talk radio hosts attack Democrats as they do, it leaves us with the impression that there is a real leftist alternative to right wing nuttery.

It’s deceiving. Democrats are nothing like they are portrayed on TV and radio. They are the only refuge for liberals and progressives, but the party is run by corporatists, and only corporatists are christened as “viable” when elections roll around. Anyone with an ounce of fight in him is marginalized.

So we have this amazing spectacle of the Obama Administration carrying forth with just about every Bush policy (who carried forth with every Clinton policy after Clinton had carried forth with every Bush policy), and at the same time the widespread perception that something new and different is going on, that we had a change in governance.

I can think of no other way to phrase it: It is perception management, aka “thought control.”

My cell phone shopping experience

We have become dependent on our cell phones – my wife and I, and I have been resenting the cell phone companies and looking for an alternative to their very expensive product. Here’s what I have found out: There are none. They have done the capitalist thing, and narrowed the choices down to a few competitors offering the same product on the same terms. While they are locked in this business model, the basic phone itself is crappy and over-hyped, much like the days when we were stuck with two phones from AT&T: The desk model, and the amazing Princess phone.

It took government action to break up Ma Bell, but these days corporations are our government, so there won’t be any anti-trust actions soon forthcoming.

Oh, I see all of the gimmicks and gadgets, the cameras and music players and directional devices (a government-provided service). But the basic service advantage is the ability to receive a call while away from home.

It reminds me of Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that every advance in technology carries with it a corresponding loss of freedom. (McLuhan gave the example of the telegraph – when eastern companies had branches in the frontier west, they had little control over their employees. With the new telegraph technology, employees had to be in the office to answer the tweet.)

Anyway, I’ve shopped around now. I thought the best alternative was the prepaid phone, as it carries no two-year contract, the industry version of the Model-T (any color you want, so long as it’s black.). Verizon offers prepaid alternatives, but get this – they want not only purchase of advance minutes, but also a daily charge for use – that is, your first call each day will cost you $1.00 or $1.95 (aka “$2.00”). Our local food store offers prepaid phones and minutes, but it’s only a little but cheaper and there’s uncertainty about the network. T-Mobile had the best deal – a reasonably priced phone and the ability to buy a large chunk of minutes that don’t expire at month’s end. But their coverage is limited, and if you are roaming, your phone simply doesn’t work. If we were to go to Montana, we’d have to find T-Mobile “hot spots.” It’s the modern version of the pay phone.

And here’s the catch – for so long as you do normal use – 4-500 minutes a month, prepaid phones are no bargain. Here’s why: With the exception of T-Mobile, the carriers all expire your minutes at month’s end. Given that scenario, where they actually take back the product you bought and paid for, there is still that monthly rent. And that’s all they really want from you – monthly cash flow. (Imagine that we bought cookies with the proviso that if we didn’t eat them by the end of the week, we had to give them back and buy new ones. Is this the best they can do?)

And, of course, we all wait for the wonderful bounteous free market to work its magic on another aspect of the cell phone business – the fact that whenever a call is made, two carriers are being paid for the same signal. C’mon, free market … someone, some competitive carrier – make the move – wait for it …. wait for it … drop the charge for incoming calls. Not happening.

Here’s my solution: I am taking my cell phone number off my letterhead. I am simply going out of reach. I managed before, and will manage now. What is so important that it cannot wait for me to check messages? Life and death matters? Very rare, and certainly not worth the price of dealing with the cell phone oligarchs.

(I experienced but one single life-or-death incident in the last twenty years. Two of our aunts died in a two-day period. My brother, the priest, needed to be on the scene, as the family was in need and he was the logical go-to guy for funerals. I could not reach him. He was in the mountains.)

Come back, Jaybird! Make the Cowgirl go away!

This place is getting interesting. This place is getting boring. This place is alive with writers and wit and wisdom and hackery, but always worth a visit.

Our place here never changes. We have 150-250 readers daily, and I have no idea what a “reader” is. I am told I don’t know how to “market” this blog. Since I don’t even know what that means, I assume it is true.

So tell me dear reader, how does one “market” a blog?

Mr. Pig, hold still! Mr. Obama has some lipstick for you. Mr. Citizen, hold still! Mr. Obama has some Vaseline™ for you.

I listened to a discussion yesterday on NPR, Brian Lehrer, I think. Who really cares? (Contrary to popular belief, NPR is not “liberal”, but rather “mainstream”, i.e., “corporate.”) In this discussion, a representative of either the health insurance industry or the Obama Administration (a distinction without a difference) launched into a common-sense discussion about the coming mandate that we all carry insurance.

The mandate is misunderstood, we were told, because we don’t really understand insurance. It only really works as intended when there is full participation. When we have full participation, costs will go down.

I suppose in a perfect world, that would be true. But it is not a perfect world, and this is the United States of America, where only one set of opinions gets an airing on “mainstream” media. So I did an on-the-spot translation: The health insurance industry wants the government to mandate that we all buy their crappy products.

In return for the mandate, they will take the clients they currently reject, who are the poor and working class, by subsidizing the insurance industry to offer them crappy coverage. They will also agree to stop refusing coverage to potentially unprofitable clients (preexisting conditions), and will allow them to go to insurance exchanges to buy extremely expensive crappy coverage. If they can’t afford it, again, the government will subsidize the insurance companies. (Many state exchanges currently offer such coverage to insurance industry castoffs – it hardly qualifies as a Band-aid.)

There will be no cost controls. It’s win-win. For them.

The encirclement is almost complete now. Single payer is long gone, as is a public option. “Cadillac” policies, known in other countries as “basic coverage”, will be taxed out of existence. We will all be faced with higher premiums and lower coverage. (We citizens are, I am told, tempted by a “moral hazard” of demanding too much care, while insurance companies, who profit by exactly $1.00 by denying exactly $1.00 in coverage, suffer no such hazards. We are tempted towards immorality, and so they are protected from us. We are offered no such protection from them.)

In a final insult, I presume that Obama will “compromise”, and allow the Republicans two of their cherished “solutions” to the problem. One, he will allow tort reform, thereby curbing an important disciplinary tool often used against insurance companies. He will also knock down state barriers, allowing insurers to gravitate towards the states with the lowest thresholds for coverage.

Obama yesterday did his professorial thing, lecturing recalcitrant Republicans and knocking down some of their more lame talking points. But let’s not be fooled here. Obama is now an insurance salesman, and appears to be trying to put lipstick on a pig. He’s also a Republican. Or a Democrat. One or the other. I’m not sure. And it doesn’t seem to matter. Buy one, get one free.

Lies of our times … like “bipartisanship”

Glenn Greenwald offers up a well-linked piece to an action that ought to set all party Democrats back on their heels – the Senate’s passage by voice vote of extension of key provisions of the Patriot Act. There was no debate, no threatened filibuster, no nonsense. They just got it done.

Contrast this with a list put out by Nancy Pelosi’s office” 290 pieces of legislation passed by the House that have stalled in the Senate. The reason? The filibuster rule, intransigence, and, of course, the blah blah blah.

The paralysis is indeed institutional in nature, but the key institution is not the House or Senate. (The House appears to be functioning quite well, but don’t be fooled – they have ease of action knowing that most of what they do does not matter). The key institution is The Party, our lone political party, the essential feature of our “democratic” society, and the fact that it is financed by one source, corporate America. We have two nominal parties, but when called upon to do anything of importance for the general public, such as regulation of Wall Street and banks or repair of our health care system, they are lost in procedural constipation. When called up to re-up one of the most totalitarian laws since Alien and Sedition, a simple voice vote gets it done.

As Casey Stengel would say, “Amazin.'”

When the Republican wing of The Party holds power, there is no talk of bipartisanship, and filibusters rarely happen. Legislation is rammed through – dammit, they just somehow find a way. When Democrats take power, the wheels grind to a halt. Nothing can be done, they tell us. The votes just aren’t there. (They really aren’t – that is, there are not enough progressives or liberals in the Democrat Party to pass an even mildly aggressive agenda.) The leadership of the Democratic Party (starting at the very top), and the punditry, cry out for bipartisanship. As Greenwald notes, some of the worst and most damaging legislation of the past decades was done on a bipartisan basis. When The Party wants to stick it to us, its two wings agree and move forward.

When something of importance is on the agenda, like health care, The Party splits into two factions, and nothing gets done. And we then get frustrated, and to vent our frustration, we replace one branch of The Party with the other branch of The Party. And we get screwed that way too.

As should be a commonplace, there is essentially one political party, the business party, and two factions. Shifting coalitions of investors account for a large part of political history. Unions or other popular organizations that might offer a way for the general public to play some role in developing programs and influencing policy choices scarcely function. The ideological system is bounded by the consensus of the privileged. In congressional elections, virtually all incumbents are returned to office. There is scarcely a pretense that substantive issues arise in presidential campaigns. Articulated programs are hardly more than a device to garner votes, and it is considered quite natural for candidates to adjust messages to audiences as public relations tacticians advise, another reflection of the vacuity of the political system and the cynicism of those who participate in it. Political commentators ponder such questions as whether Obama is too dependent on his teleprompter, or whether McCain looks too angry, or whether Obama can duck the slime flung at him by speech writers and pundits of the right wing. In the 2008 elections, the two factions virtually exchanged traditional stands, the Democrats presenting themselves as the party of Keynesian growth and state intervention in the economy, the Republicans as the advocates of fiscal conservatism; few even noticed. Half the population does not bother to push the levers, and those who take the trouble often consciously vote against their own interest.

Those are actually words taken from a letter by Noam Chomsky to a now-defunct publication, Lies of Our Times. The letter was dated December 30, 1990. These are not unusual times we live in. Here’s what he actually wrote, picking up where the names of the actors are used:

…Political commentators ponder such questions as whether Reagan will remember his lines, or whether Mondale looks too gloomy, or whether Dukakis can duck the slime flung at him by George Bush’s speech writers. In the 1984 elections, the two factions virtually exchanged traditional stands, the Republicans presenting themselves as the party of Keynesian growth and state intervention in the economy, the Democrats as the advocates of fiscal conservatism; few even noticed. Half the population does not bother to push the levers, and those who take the trouble often consciously vote against their own interest.

Our choices? Join The Party, and enjoy the stage presentation, or leave The Party, and be marginalized.

Public opinion …

I ran across a footnote this morning that referenced an out-of-print publication and an article published in 1954: Saturday Review, “Who Tells the Storytellers”, by Elmo Roper. I vaguely remember a thing called a”Roper Poll.” Elmo Roper was a leader in the field of market research and public opinion polling. The article is not available, and (maybe a comment on modern culture) the rights to it and all of the old Saturday Review articles is owned by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione.

The footnote caught my eye because it was an observation about American society from 56 years ago:

Elmo Roper’s classification of influential groups in the United States is well known: about 90% of the population is “politically inert”; they become active only accidentally, when they are set into motion, but they are normally “inactive, inattentive, manipulable, and without critical faculty.”

In other words, only about ten percent of us are paying attention. Once every two years the 90% are shaken awake and inoculated with intense agitation propaganda otherwise known as the “political ad” – sound and image-bytes meant to appeal to prejudice and emotion, constructed to manipulate, carrying no substance, and made with the understanding that the viewer is clueless but will soon vote. We then head in masse to the polls and present our views to our leaders, and our media dutifully analyze what the public “thinks.”

Let’s be honest – we can talk freely here, as that 90% of public will not be found reading political blogs. I noticed this as I went door-to-door night after night in 1996 in my run for state legislature – the faces were vapid, the “issues” meaningless, and the arbiter of all that was going to happen on election day was the television, always in the background. That 90% is a whale on the beach, breathing but unable to move.

The “public mind” is a joke – it “thinks” in the same manner as a voice recorder. It plays back the opinions of leaders (with a great deal of background interference). The methods by which opinions spread are subtle and covert. Only rarely does a voice on television say something meant for the value of its content. Virtually all news and commentary is meant for subtle effect. (Thus we have the apparent contradiction wherein most of the American public, and virtually all of the Fox News viewership, thought that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks. It was no accident – that message was sent out in subterfuge and coded clues, very deliberately. That is how public opinion is formed. There is virtually no useful information dispersed by television.)

There is manipulation going on right now – agitprop and an angry segment of the voting public being activated – to what purpose I do not know. But the “Teabaggers” are about as spontaneous as a prom dance. They are interesting not for the content of their message, which is typically muddled and incoherent. They are interesting because some group, some moneyed interest, plans to use them for some nefarious purpose. Stay tuned.

The Citizens United decision tosses another spice into our stew. It is based on the premise that “advertising” and “speech” are synonymous. That is a ludicrous notion. Advertising is subversion of the individual, psychological manipulation. It has power because it is effective to the exact degree that we think it is not. If we think ourselves immune to advertising, we are its slaves.

Now given the power to spread their message with virtually unlimited funds on a population that is “politically inert, inactive, inattentive, manipulable, and without critical faculty,” we are pretty much screwed. Public opinion is now owned by corporate masters, and by extension, so are all virtually politicians (with the exception of odd and out-of-the-way places like Boulder, Missoula, and Vermont).

Citizens United is a master stroke, a calculated pandering to power masked as reasoned jurisprudence. It will plunge us into darkness.

Where is hope, oh gloomy one? Certainly it is not in that 90%. C/U merely formalized the ownership of them and electoral politics by the corporations.

But we are still left with the 10%.

But who are “we”? We are intellectually alive, diverse, and stuck in the mud. Assume that every living is ideology expressed to some degree within our numbers. What is the mainstream of thought among the thoughtful? Right now it is “free markets,” but that cannot last as it relies on the fictional man as its mainstay. We are not the simple economic beings they think us to be. Soon to return is the community man, the generous and caring citizen, the man willing to give of himself in return for the good of his family and friends and community. That is our better nature. These are indeed dark times, but that nature does not change. We have been sidetracked by free market economics, but will get back on track after another economic disaster or two. Takes time …

In the long run we are all dead, and yet, in the long run, there has always been progress towards a better society.

American marketing 101

A friend of my daughter’s has two W-2’s and some student loan interest. She went to H&R Block to get her tax return done, and they wanted $150. She shopped around a bit more and found that the tax preparation business is pretty much like the cell phone business or health insurance … there’s very little competition, and a whole lot of gouging going on.

We have a couple of cell phones … one of them is functional. When they were both working, I got lured into a Verizon store by their Internet promotion of their Druid device. As I read it, the phone would cost $150, and the monthly service fee would be $70. That’s what we were paying for two phones, and I thought it would be worth it to have one phone with Internet access. So I went there – maybe I misunderstood, but the price of the phone was $250, and monthly service $100. That monthly service fee just happens to be exactly, to the penny, what Apple/AT&T wants for an IPhone.

As long as I was there anyway, we dropped one of our phones, saving us $30 a month. That was the best deal Verizon offered that day.

There are basically three cell phone carriers now – Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T. Their price structures are virtually identical. We are crazy to pay full price for a phone, as we pay the same monthly service fee whether we are under contract or not, and there is no incentive to switch from one carrier to another. They all want two year contracts.

Their phones cannot be used with any competitor’s signal. There has been very little innovation in recent years, and they do not allow applications on most devices. Every little extra service – music, email – costs extra. Accessories are made in Switzerland by the same people who make Rolex’s -that’s all I can figure. Why else would a $1.95 wall charger cost $35? And nothing works with anything else – each phone has it’s own unique little plug-in hole, and they keep changing them.

But that’s basically the marketing game in a nutshell – they must teach it at Harvard and community colleges alike – segment the market into low and high end, never undercut a competitor’s price, annuitize, and never cut a customer a break – Apple works as hard at monopolizing their customers as it does at innovating. The only way they try to distinguish themselves from competition is by advertising. Each has its own pitch for the same product.

It’s really boring, this American consumer capitalism. If it really worked like they say it does, we would be able to buy a phone at Target, and we would be able to switch from one carrier to another and add apps and make them earn our business. This is not competition.

Anyway, I did my daughter’s friend’s return – it took about 15 minutes. She offered me $50, but I did it for $15 – the cost of an e-file. I try not to be in the tax preparation business, but cannot avoid it. If I were in it for serious, I’d be doing those W-2 returns for $50, and clearing $35. It’s tempting.

But it brought to mind one other thought – those W-2 returns are so easy that a child could do them – why do these kids not learn something about it in school?

PS: I keep hoping that this strange un-American company, Google, will break some china here soon, both in cell phones and Internet service. Is the Google phone a new concept, or are they just trying to enter the market without disrupting the price structure?