We are off in the canyons of Utah around Moab. It was my intention not to write anything this week, giving you all a break. But the knee that was surgered is acting up, so I am grounded. I’ll have time on my hands as the others are off wandering.

Nothing much going on in politics. There’s a Kabuki theater around a supposed financial reform bill, with Republicans and one Democratic senator against it, as I read. Oddly, that’s enough! Funny how that works, that. It’s as if they divvy up votes beforehand – as if the leadership of the parties worked together.

They do. The labels – D and R, are mere perception management devices. There are enough right wingers in the Democratic Party to stop good legislation. Theoretically there were enough votes to stop the wars, pass good health care reform, end the tax cuts, close Gitmo – it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Of course, the interesting thing for me are the psychological aspects, the thought control. It’s like mass hypnosis. With health care, the perception to be sold is that they “got it done.” (“Yes We Did!”) They didn’t, but the leadership of the party will sell it, and the rest of the party will buy in. That’s how groups function, with internal contradictions squashed.

There is no hope for progress on any front via party activities. One cannot change the Democratic Party from within, as the leadership, and the money, is controlled by the conservative wing, which seems to be the majority. And, when candidates do manage to get support from that wing, we have to assume that those candidates are closet conservatives.

That’s why the concept of “gradualism” is a hiding place for losers. The Democratic Party suctions off people who want real change, and renders them useless. Join, disappear and die.

What is the alternative? It’s bleak. With health care, the proper course was to take the massive momentum for reform and channel it at the Democratic Party rather than through it. Reformers were snookered into investing in the party, which duly led them down the garden path.

But how to organize? Door by door, neighborhood by neighborhood, forsaking political leaders. We cannot control legislation in Washington, as the place is corrupt beyond repair.

But, for example, but what if neighborhood activists got together to sponsor free clinics for people to go with ordinary complaints like fevers, wounds and broken bones? They could dredge up volunteer labor, sponsor fund-raisers, charge a membership fee. Most health care, after all, is routine,hardly rocket science.

If an idea is successful, others will copy it. (By the way, if the U.S. health care system was worth a damn, other countries would steal the idea.)

That is a good way to channel energy, locally. It would be real progress in health care. Take that same energy and channel it through Democratic candidates, and you get nothing back but a bumper sticker that says “Yes We Did,” aka perception management.

So the first step in organization is to get people to shed their illusions about party politics. That’s all I do – I continually point out on the blogs that the parties are mirror images of one another in corruption, and that being a Democrat is as wrong as the other alternative.

I will continue to do so. It’s all one person can do from an Internet standpoint. I will join with like-minded people down here IF, and only if, such people are not trying to affect politics on too high a level. It all starts down low.

This, from a link deep in a Glenn Greenwald piece, is a snapshot of news carried by Al Jazeera and CNN

‘Nuff said.

Some on the right have reduced the view of us lefties on “the corporation” to this: We think they are evil. This is much akin to saying that predators are evil when they kill prey. It has to be contextualized to be understood.

The problem is one of accountability. The military is the perfect example. Troops on the ground are given orders to carry out atrocities by distant commanders, and are subject to harsh punishment if they do not obey. Resisting is far harder than obeying, and so the town is destroyed, the bombs dropped, the chemicals sprayed on the jungle. Killing another person is hard for just about everyone, and yet in the military it is done routinely (though, to our credit, we have developed elaborate means by which to do our massacres from great distances, making it easier). It could not be so without the command structure.

The corporation offers us a military-like structure. The reason why the structure itself is rightly criticized is because of lack of accountability. Dave Budge recently gave me a heart-rending account of his corporate experience where managers anguished over the necessity of denying or reducing health care benefits for other employees. That’s kind of like the point. The orders came down from above. It had to be done. There was no accountability – the people above answer only to stockholders, who are even less accountable.

Normal people don’t behave well in the unaccountable environment. Sociopaths present an even greater danger. If Martha Stout is right, and if 4-6% of the male population are sociopaths, and if these people are drawn to the business world out of sheer boredom, then the corporation offers the perfect lair for antisocial behavior.

And that is the problem with the corporation. The behavior of people down the food chain is mandated by people at the top who are not accountable, and are often enough sociopaths.

This is why health insurance companies refuse to cover people with preexisting conditions and rescind policies for sick people. It’s sociopathic behavior, but perfectly normal in the corporate environment. This is why corporations should not be in charge of our health care system.

I am not saying that corporations should not exist or that they are no socially useful. I am only saying that they need to be heavily monitored and regulated, and their executives held accountable for antisocial acts. If the day should ever come when they are in charge of most of our affairs, if they ever manage to take over government, then we are in deep, deep trouble.

I am curious how the “left” is going to react to the latest Obama betrayal, the decision that offshore drilling is, after all, OK. There are no substantive differences between him and the Bushies, only the manner of presentation. Where Cheney might sneer and say he doesn’t care what you think, we’re going to drill, Obama will couch the same policy in different terms … environmentally sensitive places will be avoided, etc. etc. etc.

This is key: Bush could not get away with this. Obama can.

Obama is doing exactly what Bush would have done in Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and now with offshore drilling. Obama did would Bush could not have done in health care – write a monster check to the insurance companies. This gets right to the point that I’ve made repeatedly in other places – that we have one party and two sets of illusions. At this point in time, the Democratic illusion is more effective at achieving elite policy goals than the Republican illusion.

I am deep in the heart of taxes these days. While working, I often have podcasts or radio shows on in the background, but seldom really hear what is going on. However, yesterday Chris Hedges managed to catch my attention.

The subject was whether or not progressives ought to leave the Democratic Party. Hedges says yes, that in fact we should have left in 1994 when Bill Clinton passed NAFTA. The radio hosts were a bit perplexed, as leaving the party seems to cut off the only means by which we can affect positive change – elective office.

As usual, Hedges offered deeper insight. Lefties, he said, cannot hold the reins of power. It is not our role. If we go that route, we simply become the office holders and are bound to carry forth the corporate agenda. That is, after all, the price of attaining office. Those who do buck that system are quickly jettisoned or marginalized.

Those who seek power are not, by definition, progressives. That is not our nature. Our role in this system is to buck this system from the outside. We seek to stop power in its tracks. And in fact a brief glance at our history shows this to be the normal course of events. The movements that ended slavery and child labor, formed unions and started the nascent movement to preserve our habitat – yada yada – none of this came about because we had people in elected office to get things going.

Leaving the Democratic Party is no more foolish or counterproductive that stepping out of a parade. We cannot stop it by being in it. We need to be somewhere else, doing other things, while that pointless march goes forward. Being a Democrat is not a useful activity. We are the parade stoppers – not the marchers.

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.”

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.)

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?

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?

The high absurdity of Citizens United continues to sink in … think about this: If ever there were a place where free speech is suppressed, it is the workplace. I am self-employed. Were I not, I would have to measure every word every said in regards to how it might affect my employment. I would not blog, or would use a fake name, and I would not write letters to newspapers. For-profit corporations are groups of controlled people and naturally take on the character of the people who run them. Some are free and open, but as they get bigger, oppression naturally sets in. Once they go public, and CEO’s have to make those quarterly phone interviews, all freedom is lost, and workers become part of a sweat machine delivering quarterly results.

ExxonMobil is such a company – a vast array of engineers and scientists and accountants and MBA’s and managers managers managers – and none of them are free to speak out against ExxonMobil.

But ExxonMobil is a person with free speech rights.

Utter nonsense. Utter, utter nonsense.