This could end up being a very bad post. If you are not reading it, it is because I thought twice and took it down.

There’s a phrase for people like me – many, actually, but the one most often used is conspiracy theorist. There is truth in it – I look around me and see random events like earthquakes and crazy governors like the guy who hit the Appalachian trail that ended in an Argentine valley, and understand that it is random. I see smart and dynamic personalities that cannot be constrained or contained … people like Bryan Schweitzer and Arnold Schwarzenegger are simply destined for high achievement. And then there is stupidity, so much a part of us that it is manifested in every walk of life and every philosophy, from Tom Cruise’s Scientology to Sarah Palin and the Teabaggers.

That is all the natural flow of life, but as I look at it all I sense there is more to it than just random events and bright and stupid people. There is a functioning and powerful intelligence at work as well, kind of a back light to all that we see.

Maybe that is crazy talk, but suppose that we had a mass media owned by wealthy private investors, a powerful weapon in the hands of a few. Given such power, would the collective impulse of those self-interested investors be not to use it? Would they simply step back not choose not to influence events to their own favor?

What we call “NBC”, for example, is people like Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, the parent company and a major weapons contractor. NBC was therefore invested in war, and benefited each time our country entered one.

Jack Welch is but one man, but at one time had considerable influence over the behavior of the news anchors and reporters and photographers who were the face of that network. When our country went into any of its many wars, NBC cheered our country on.

He’s just one example – Roger Ailes another, and Sumner Redstone another.

It’s hard not to be reductionist, as the media is large, and my mind small, so let’s be more general, and say that there are possibly a thousand people who have enough influence over major media outlets to dictate to us what is considered important and what is not. These people are wide and varied, but share one common trait: They are wealthy. They have an interest in preservation of the wealth machine. They feed us a constant stream of words and images, and in so doing exhibit heavy influence over our private thoughts and opinions.

Perhaps the media merely reflects popular opinion, and does not attempt to influence it. That’s possible – it is entirely possible that these thousand people who have this awesome power over us have opted not to use it. But unlikely.

So I point to two phenomena, each treated differently. The first is Sarah Palin. There is no better word for her than “stupid” – she’s classic beauty-queen/cheerleader stock, uneducated, unable to think properly, conditioned to make her way in life by use of her looks and charm. There’s nothing to her beyond surface features. She’s common enough that we all know people like her – shallow but influential just because men imagine themselves riding her bones, while women wish they were as desirable as her. She has power, but it is the kind of power that only works in small circles. Women like her, ‘trophies’, generally marry powerful men and live well, but on their own don’t offer up intellectual force or strategy to make business or politics. Often enough, they outlive their men, and become forceful actors on their own, destructive and crazy. Think … Marge Schott,

Here’s the other phenomenon: Howard Dean. He’s a smart man, a doctor, former governor, intelligent strategist who ran a groundbreaking campaign using the Internet for fund raising, thereby avoiding the corporate bundlers. He made his way in politics by shrewdness and calculation, and furthermore seemed driven by ideological impulses of a progressive nature.

Dean was a formidable candidate for president in 2004, and the media destroyed him. They took a speech he gave to exhort his campaign workers to keep on working, typical fare, and magnified it, repeated it and hounded us with it. They used it to destroy him. It appeared to be a conscious effort dictated by that backlight that this ‘conspiracy theorist’ sees as conscious manipulation of public opinion by media corporations.

Contrary to popular illusion, the vast majority of us don’t form our opinions based on reasoning, but rather by means of the food chain. Each of us looks above us to formulate an appropriate opinion about serious events. If all of the talking heads and serious people thought that Howard Dean had committed a “gaffe”, had done something terribly wrong, then Howard Dean must not be credible. Proper thinking people came to that conclusion all by themselves, and Dean had to quit his campaign. He was destroyed.

I see an overarching intelligence at work there. A decision was made high up the command structure of the news media, and the eerie part is that it was carried out not by one news outlet, but by all of them, as if they were lemmings with but one CEO. The on-air faces we see are mostly friendly idiots reading teleprompters, but the people who sign their paychecks are not. As Spock would say … “fascinating!”

And my question then is this: Why does that same intelligent force not destroy Sarah Palin? It could be done this afternoon, what with her incoherent babble, illegitimate offspring, flimsy education and inability to even read newspapers. Most recently she was caught by our real news media, the comedy shows, referring to the palm of her hand for crib notes in a friendly interview. That could easily destroy any other politician if given proper attention.

Howards Dean’s “I have a scream” speech could have passed without notice, but a decision was made to use that speech to destroy him. No such decision has been made about Sarah Palin.

Why?

I wrote the following letter that appeared in the Denver Post. I was a little bit annoyed (moi?) that they were all over JD Salinger’s death, giving him front page and a big story inside, but only gave Howard Zinn brief mention on page 11. They did take the trouble to note in the headline that Zinn’s book was “leftist.”

Re: “Author Salinger a legend, recluse,” and “Author Zinn wrote leftist ‘A People’s History,’ ” Jan. 29 obituaries.

Two authors of note passed on last week: J.D. Salinger and Howard Zinn.

Holden Caulfield, Salinger’s creation in “The Catcher in the Rye,” is a bright but misdirected young man, searching, confused and in clueless rebellion. People often use Caulfield as an archetype to reflect on their own youthful years before responsibilities took over. Salinger’s passing ignited widespread fits of self-indulgence.

Zinn was given brief note on page 11 of The Post, and dutifully identified as a “leftist.” (Just curious: On passing, were Milton Freidman or Ronald Reagan identified as a “right wingers” for Post readers?) Zinn was a fighter pilot in World War II, among the first to use napalm. Then he did the unusual: he self-reflected and changed course, thereafter leading an uncompromised life.

What ever happened to young Holden Caulfield? Did he choose the road not taken? Salinger never let on.

Mark Tokarski, Boulder

The sentence in boldface was deleted by the Post, but heck, it’s a big deal to me to have a letter published in a big city newspaper, and they improved it a bit, as the comment was off-track.

Newspaper editors unconsciously reveal their bias in the headlines they tag on stories, as in compulsively labeling Zinn a “leftist.” Those who write the stories do the same as they hang tags on the people they write about. Generally I see a tendency to follow official state propaganda – so and so is a “terrorist” while someone else is a “strongman” or “warlord,” those terms reserved for official enemies. People on ‘our’ side who engage in the same behaviors (Israelis savaging Palestinians or Americans launching drone attacks on Afghan weddings) are not given such labels. (Has any newspaper ever referred to American attackers as “militants”?)

In politics, it is rare to see someone labeled as a “right winger”, even as so many in the news are just that. But it is not unusual to label people leftists or terrorists for benefit of the readers. It helps us think for ourselves.

And I say “unconsciously” as I know that to maintain sanity in this crazy world, we all have to buy in to what we are doing. We cannot live comfortably doing things we do not believe in. It helps to buy in, so those of us who work for others subconsciously adopt the mindsets of those who control our work behaviors. Newspaper editors will indignantly tell us that no one ever tells them what to write. But if they were not housebroken, they would not be editors.

President Obama appeared before congressional members and made a stunning show of it, impressing even the right-wing commentator Jon Stewart. Now, David Corn tells us, “A bipartisan group of bloggers, techies, and consultants is now demanding they do it again. And again.”

It’s important to note here that there has been no substantive change in policy emanating from the White House, that Rahm Emanuel still regards Senate liberals as “fucking retarded”.

Here’s how to connect the dots: President Obama has brought back David Plouffe, his campaign manager. He is doing some image management.

As the inimitable Rusty Shackleford would say, “That is all.”

The New Yorker recently ran an article on Boulder/Austin resident John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods. (Food Fighter, Jan 4, 2010.) I found in it common ground between socialists and capitalists, where each of us must give up something to get something.

First, the down side. Whole Foods is a very expensive place to shop. Consequently, there is no reach-out to people of ordinary means. When they scout locations for new stores, they count the number of college graduates within ten miles of the store. Score one for the capitalists.

John Mackey is a very conservative man who is pursuing a business model that embraces lefties, in a sense manipulating us. He caters to our tastes and fetishes with granola food and aisle upon aisle of cultural abundance, much of it shipped in daily from hundreds, if not thousands of miles away.

Mackey also made an untimely remark about national health care in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. He’s against it. This sparked the usual left-wing uprising and calls for the usual futile gesture, a boycott.

Mackey is anti-union. This again flies in the face of his constituency. He is a believer in free markets, and believes that workers are amply rewarded without unions. China aside, I will leave that alone today.

But here is the upside: Whole Foods pays its help well and gives them good benefits, thereby marginalizing unionization efforts. It’s a nice compromise.

Whole Foods tries, as best it is able, to buy locally and pay fair prices for its products. There is a natural clash in this philosophy simply because of its success. It has to feed many mouths, and to do that must operate on a large scale. Consequently, we have the phenomenon of mass-market “organic” food, which pushes the line towards compromise to achieve efficiency.

So if you buy a dozen brown eggs from Whole Foods, it is probably wise not to go too far back down the food chain to see if those chickens really were allowed to wander freely and pick and peck at bugs, their favorite activity.

But Whole Foods is sincere about its ethics. Organic food may not be more nutritious than processed food, but it takes less toll on the land, introduces less petroleum and insecticides into the growing process. Organic cows have better lives before slaughter, actually getting time to enjoy being cows. Organic pigs are not docked or kept in miserable pens prior to slaughter.

Paying extra at Whole Foods may be a conscience-salving exercise for we of the gray pony tail set, but it has real benefits for hired help, animals, the land. and the farmers who raise our food.

In Whole Foods I find that not all is good or wholesome, that we are making compromises. But unlike a Democratic Party “compromise”, Whole Foods does not demand that we give up all our values, and I shop there willingly knowing that both the right and the left have gained something in the process.

And, we can afford it. That’s a stickler.

This recently came in the mail (I am a on the Bozeman,Montana Tea Party list):——————————————-

How the Supreme Court Decision on Citizens United Changed the Political Landscape

Dear Tea Party Patriot,

Here at the Bozeman Tea Party, we are fortunate to have a number of organizations. One of them is Western Tradition Partnership, (WTP) a grassroots organization dedicated to “Rediscovering the Treasures of the West”through rational, responsible natural resource development and land use policy, while free-market oriented solutions are developed for future needs.

WTP is providing easy access to a webinar conducted by Cleta Mitchell, attorney for one of the most respected law firms serving non-profit organizations nationwide. Read below for details.

Find out why President Obama, in an unprecedented move, slammed the U.S. Supreme Court during his State of Union message, for its decision on the Citizens United case.

WTP Invites You: Webinar with Top Conservative D.C. Lawyer on “Citizens United” 1st Amendment Supreme Court Decision

Don’t miss this opportunity to participate in this top-level conference call February 3rd with nationally recognized campaign finance expert Cleta Mitchell, of Foley & Lardner LLP, on what the Citizens United decision really means to you, to non-profits, and to businesses

Is the ruling, as the radical Left claims, “the end of Democracy”, or does the Citizens United vs. FEC Case decision restore fundamental rights that have been stripped away by incumbent politicians who desperately want to control the flow of information?

Western Tradition Partnership invites you to get the real story from one of the nation’s foremost experts, attorney Cleta Mitchell, on what this will mean to our political future.

Earlier this week, WTP’s Jacob Leis hailed the Court’s decision and declared that, “This ruling levels the playing field for smaller grassroots organizations and companies who – unlike unions and mega-corporations – cannot afford a platoon of lawyers every time they want to express their opinion on policy or political candidates.”

To get a FREE invitation to this exclusive conference call on Wednesday, February 3rd, 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM Mountain Time, click the link below and WTP will take you right to the registration page.

BONUS: Register now and you’ll instantly receive the Foley & Lardner LLP “quick facts” memo on Citizens United case – free to all WTP registrants!

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

If you’d like to learn more about Western Tradition Partnership, visit their website at http://www.westerntradition.org. Check out their free speech updates or, if you are affiliated with another Tea Party organization, invite one of their representatives to speak at your next Tea Party gathering by contacting Tim Ravndl at 406-266-5212 or Karolin Loendorf at 406-544-5639.

Sincerely,
Ken Champion, Chairman
Henry Kriegel, Director

P.S. We’ll update you on latest developments and activities of the Bozeman Tea Party and some of the many excellent organizations affiliated with us so stay tuned for more.

———————————————————————-

Western Traditions Partnership is an advocacy group that was founded by Former U.S. Congressman Ron Marlinee and Montana State Representative John Sinrud. I joined the group this morning, and was not asked for contributions or dues, nor does the web site offer up anything on funding or founders. Apparently, the group gets all of its money from industry and business executives, at least according to The Union News.

In other words, it is a classic astroturf outfit.

It is interesting that WTP is taking time and trouble to sell Citizens United, a ruling that favors wealth and power more than any in United States history. Tea baggers are ordinary Joes, only able to have any voice at all because they banded together (even if they are being manipulated). The effect of C/U will be to drown out the voices of anyone lacking the money to be able to buy air time. Since the Tea Baggers in theory rely on news coverage to spread their message, they will be among those of us drowned out.

Yet here is anonymous money and power taking time and trouble to sell them on this awful ruling.

All very interesting …

Footnote: “Tea-bagging” is a form of mass cohesion among various alienated elements within our society, and conscious manipulation by higher and unseen elements. It is but a more base form of what Obama did in facing Congress – giving voice to grievances without actually addressing them. It’s fulfilling and has the effect of muting opposition to ruling forces by redirecting energy at contrived enemies.

And, it is conscious – that is, those who are manipulating this movement (not Marlinee or Sinrud, who are only a step above the common tea bagger) are very much aware of what they are doing and why they are doing it. In a sense, they are preventing a revolution by neutering the anger of those who have the most cause to rebel. Konrad Kellen and Jacques Ellul would be awash in substance for further investigations into the art of propaganda were they to come back and observe our world today. Here’s Kellen:

Cast out of the disintegrating microgroups of the past, such as family, church of village, the individual is plunged into mass society and thrown back up on his own inadequate resources, his isolation, his loneliness, his ineffectuality. Propaganda then hands him in veritable abundance what he needs: a raison d’etre, personal involvement and participation in important events, and outlet and excuse for some of his more doubtful impulses, righteousness – all factitious, to be sure, all more or less spurious; but he drinks it all in and asks for more. Without this intense collaboration by the propagandee, the propagandist would be helpless.

Covert Action Quarterly was a magazine founded in 1978 by Philip Agee. Its original purpose was to monitor CIA activities. It named names, and annoyed the powerful. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 probably owes its existence to that magazine. It is now reduced to a web site. But while it was running, it was fun.

This is from the summer of 1997 Issue, “Playing by the Rules”:

Washington Rules — the unspoken handbook of rules for survival in the capital city:

• If it’s worth fighting for, it’s worth fighting dirty for.
• Don’t lie, cheat or steal unnecessarily.
• There’s always one more son of a bitch than you counted on.
• An honest answer could get you in a whole lot of trouble.
• The facts, although interesting, are irrelevant.
• Chicken Little only has to be right once.
• “No” is only an interim response
• You can’t kill a bad idea.
• If at first you don’t succeed, kill all the evidence that you ever tried.
• The truth is variable.
• A porcupine with his quills down is just another fat rodent.
• You can agree with any concept or notional future option in principle, but fight implementation every step of the way.
• A promise is not a guarantee.
• If you can’t counter the argument, leave the meeting.

I’ve run these words before, and keep coming back to them because they turn out so often to ne prophetic of official behaviors.

In Obama’s SOTU last night, one line (among others) struck me as disingenuous:

“Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests- including foreign corporations- to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that’s why I’m urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong.”

So … what does he want them to do? Write a nasty letter? Is he not aware that our campaigns, including his own, are already bankrolled by our most powerful interests? Why does he urge both parties to “pass a bill” when it only takes one party, his own? Surely he knows that one of those parties likely supports the ruling. Are these just words?

We have seen Obama mouth good words before. The man gives heady speech. With health care and banking reform, he has spoken mightily and undercut his own words behind the scenes. He leads a party that in public comes off as a porcupine with its quills down – a fat rodent.

Citizens United is more than just a bad ruling. It is an organizational opportunity. If my theory that the Democrats exist to prevent organizing, they will gather up all of the steam that is forming around this ruling, all of the energy, and see that it dissipates into air. People will come to them for leadership, and they will gather it up, introduce bills that go nowhere, and in the end throw up their hands, as if powerless. That’s their job, and contrary to belief, they are not weak, not wimps, and are in fact very good at their job.

“Whenever they talk about bipartisanship, I know that we are in for a royal screwing.”
(Someone really smart said this back a while ago, but I don’t remember who it was.)

From Obama’s SOTU Address:

Now, even after paying for what we spent on my watch, we will still face the massive deficit we had when I took office. More importantly, the cost of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will continue to skyrocket. That’s why I’ve called for a bipartisan, Fiscal Commission, modeled on a proposal by Republican Judd Gregg and Democrat Kent Conrad. This can’t be one of those Washington gimmicks that lets us pretend we solved a problem. The Commission will have to provide a specific set of solutions by a certain deadline. Yesterday, the Senate blocked a bill that would have created this commission. So I will issue an executive order that will allow us to go forward, because I refuse to pass this problem on to another generation of Americans. And when the vote comes tomorrow, the Senate should restore the pay-as-you-go law that was a big reason why we had record surpluses in the 1990s.

Do you want to know the real reason why we had a surplus in the late 1990’s? It was a total fricking accident. No one saw it coming – a bubble that yielded a huge tax windfall. Surpluses are considered dangerous by our ruling elite, as they create the perception that money is avialable for things like education, health care, infrastructure. Bush’s first action as president was to eliminate the surpluses for the foreseeable future. No doubt a term-three Clinton would have done the same.

Here’s how absurd this president is – here’s what’s causing the “problem”:

President Obama is carrying forward the right wing strategy of running up massive deficits by means of tax cuts, military spending, and his particular charm, subsidies to Wall Street, and then turning to the American public and pleading for cuts in social programs to ease those deficits. It’s called bipartisanship. On the on the Republican right wing, courtesy of Grover Norquist, we know it is a conscious strategy. On the Democratic right wing, they are usually a bit more subtle – that is, Clinton ended “welfare as we know it” and had in place a real and dangerous plan to privatize Social Security, only to be thwarted by a need to bolster his public standing during the Monica scandal. (In one of the most cynical maneuvers that vile and ugly man ever engaged in, he became Social Security’s most stalwart defender to save his worthless political ass.)

No doubt the presidential commission that Obama advocates will call for privatization of Social Security (which actually runs a surplus) and huge cutbacks in the Medicas, while ignoring the effect of military spending and tax cuts. It’s a right wing wet dream, and if anything is clear to me after one year of this clown, it is that he is a closet right winger.

Scratch that. Scratch the word “closet.” He’s not even trying. He is openly taunting us with his right wing agenda, deliberately rubbing Democratic faces in it, knowing they will follow him to hell and back.

President Obama has announced a spending freeze on that portion of the budget that the business sector (Wall Street) does not like – social programs that in total are contributing about 6% in total to the budget deficit. The deficits themselves are probably not a great concern, as putting people back to work will ease future burdens. But this is the ethos of Washington DC.

Obama, it seems, has changed nothing, and is now acting out the Grover Norquist scenario. The dishonesty is so revealing – there not one hint of the supposed man of progressive leanings who ran for office in 2008. He has completely turned his back on us.

At a time when Massachusetts told him quite bluntly that he was singing the wrong song, he has moved right on to the second verse. This is not Clinton2. It is Bush3.