We were lucky enough while out in San Francsco this spring to catch an exhibit by photographer Annie Liebovitz. I can’t begin to describe it. But here are two of her more powerful images – Willie Shoemaker and Wilt Chamberlain, and Mick Jagger.

I’m no amateur, dammit. I know my politics, and when it comes to elections, I put up many worthy comments and ideas. Here’s just one from a post I put up here last month: “Bob Kelleher is a force to be reconciled. He could sneak up and win if Republicans are not careful.” Can’t find the link right now.

It’s kind of funny now to watch as the blog and newspaper pundits try to make sense of it all. What are the voters telling us? What wisdom can we glean from this?

I thought I would share my experience from running for office in 1996. I ran against Peggy Arnott and got trounced, and stubbornly did everything wrong. The problem was that to do all the right things, I would have had to have been a different person.

Just one example: All of the Democratic candidates in Billings were marching and holding signs at a Republican event on First Avenue South to generate some publicity, and I was handed a script and told to read it for the TV cameras. It talked about the wonders of the fearless leader, Bill Clinton. It talked about how he was putting more cops on the street to fight crime, among other right wing ideals. I couldn’t read it. I just couldn’t. I handed it back to the organizer and said have someone else do it. And someone else did it.

I just can’t be a party boy. It’s not in my makeup. But to win that election I needed to soften up my stances, say things I didn’t believe, and play ball. Peg was a smart politician (and a nice lady of integrity too). I talked to people who voted for her of various stripes after the election. I asked them if, when she came to the door, she left the impression that she agreed with them on the issues of importance. Without fail, liberals and conservatives alike, Peg was there for them. Except on the abortion issue. She stood her ground there.

And that was the key. Let people validate their emotions through you, the candidate. If they are upset about Iraq, you’re concerned too. If they are behind the invasion, so are you. If they are upset about gas prices, you pay them too and want to bring them down. If they want clean air, so do you, and if they want jobs that cost us clean air, you want that too. No matter the issue, you can forge a position to support them. After all, once the election is over, the public loses interest, and you’re free to do as you wish. Peg knew this. I was naive.

But I knocked on doors for months on end, tracking every household, revisiting the ones I thought would vote for me. (People lie! If all those people who said they were going to vote for me did, I would have won.) I talked to thousands of people. In the beginning, I was carrying petitions for raising the minimum wage and Clean Water initiatives, and using them to put a friendly foot in the door. There was natural support for both these issues, people were warm and accepting, and I thought the strategy was a good one. But along about October, television campaigns against these initiatives came out. Neither initiative had much financial backing – only grassroots support.

In the wake of the TV ad campaigns, the doors turned ugly – I stopped talking about clean water and minimum wage. It just made people mad. But I had hitched my wagon. Both initiatives, which enjoyed huge early support, went down to defeat. This is when I learned that no matter your reasonable stance on an issue, no matter your literature or talking points, TV rules. And it’s not a rational medium. It’s a visual one. The Clean Water initiative went down because a mining company shill pretended to drink water from a stream below a mine near Cardwell. It was phony, but a powerful visual image, and that is all it took to defeat months of door knocking and signature gathering.

That’s politics. One vote is not very much, won’t change the outcome, and people are busy. They are not stupid, and are not going to invest any time in studying issues. There’s no reward. They want quick and dirty, and TV fits the bill. Candidates are free to say anything they want on any issue, and to do anything they want once elected. That’s why our campaigns are so shallow and the results so confusing.

(Just don’t make the mistake of giving the television people a bad image, like Mike Lange did. People remember stuff like that.)

This particular election featured some neophytes. Jim Hunt thought he could skip the primary, and focused on beating Rehberg in the fall. But he hadn’t built name recognition, and went down. The Republicans took a pass on running against Baucus, and Bob Kelleher snuck in the back door. Now they are saddled with a cantankerous 85 year progressive parliamentarian.

This is bonehead stuff. Manage your base. It’s about images, TV exposure, and name recognition. The parties right now, Republicans especially, appear to be run by amateurs. The old hands are gone, and the new ones don’t know what they are doing.

I delight to see that John Driscoll and Bob Kelleher won. This race lacked glitzy names and ad campaigns, and voters put up a picture that looks like a monkey throwing paint at a canvas. The parties failed to manage the voting public. Heads oughtta roll.

One thing people have noticed about Hillary is that she suffers from a sense of entitlement. She felt she deserved the Democratic nomination simply because she was a Clinton. Never mind that Bill only served for eight years due to the good graces of Ross Perot, that he never got even 50% of the vote, that he more resembled a Republican than a Democrat, that under his rule the Democrats lost control of Congress – never mind any of that. And screw issues. Hillary was supposed to be it, and we were not to expect more.

But it’s not just Hillary. Democrats in general feel that sense of entitlement. They presume to represent progressives without offering truly progressive alternatives. And they go postal if true progressives challenge them.

Well, Hillary’s gone now, and it’s time to take a closer look at this Obama character. For this I turn to Ralph Nader, Mr. Spoiler, and an interview by Tunku Varadarajan published in the Wall Street Journal last weekend, “Don’t Call Him Spoiler“. His insight, per usual, is cutting edge.

Varadarajan: Mr. Obama has opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement, and said that he wants it renegotiated; he’s chastised the Big Three in Detroit for opposing higher CAFE standards; he emphasizes at every opportunity that he takes no money from lobbyists. What [do you] think of that?

Nader: You see, that’s all permissible populist rhetoric that the corporations understand and wink at. Look at who gets the corporate money. Six out of seven industries giving money, through PACs and individual executives, etc., are giving more money to the Democrats than to the Republicans. I mean, John McCain’s having trouble raising money, even now.

Obama’s taking large money from the securities industry, the health insurance industry . . . I’ve gotten used to this ritual where the companies give Democrats this leeway, and say, ‘Well, Obama’s gotta say that stuff, but he’ll come around. There’s no way he’ll touch Nafta or touch the WTO.'”

Varadarajan: So is it all just a charade?

Nader: Yes, a charade. His health-insurance plan lets the health insurance companies continue their redundant, wasteful, often corrupt – in terms of billing fraud – ways, ripping off Medicare.

I think he’s on to something. We do have the semblance of a two-party system. It just never works out that we are offered two substantially differing policies on issues. But people would not put up with a one-party system in a representative democracy, and we do have different temperaments. (Temperamental differences are really the essence of the two-party structure.) So corporations tolerate Democrats, like the Clintons and Obama, so long as they don’t go too far. In the meantime, progressives are ignored, ridiculed, demeaned. Even by Democrats.

So is Obama a corporate shill?

“He’s not an agent,” Mr. Nader grants, “but he moves in an environment that’s conditioned by corporate power. If he wins, you’ll see his appointments in the Defense department, the Treasury and so on, they’ll be pretty much what the lobbies and PACs want.”

All is not lost with Obama, says Nader, and I take slight comfort:

Mr. Nader is clear that he prefers Mr. Obama to Hillary Clinton. “With her, we’ll just get what Bill gave us. I think she’s like Bill Clinton. With Obama, there’s the possibility of some fresh start, just like Kennedy did the Peace Corps. You see, when Obama got out of Harvard Law School, he went to work for a short period with a group I started in New York, the New York Public Interest Research Group. Then he went and did neighborhood work in Chicago, so it’s not like he’s coming off some corporate mountain.

“But he’s made up his mind to be a very conciliatory, concessionary, adaptive politician to the reality of corporate power. And people like him are told, ‘Look, if you don’t adhere to certain parameters and expectations, you’re going to have a hard time winning any nomination or election.’ And Obama’s made his peace with that.”

Perhaps this is why Obama manages to inspire so many people without every really saying much … people are hungry for change, and Obama is smart enough and sly enough to know he’s got to appease the corporations who finance the parties and own the media. He’s learned the system.

He’s not a transforming leader. He was not a transforming senator. He was not a challenging senator, the way [the late Paul] Wellstone was.

So what exactly does Nader want? It is at this point that most Democrats fall on the rejoinder that we should settle for incremental progress, and that Nader is just feeding his ego. But Nader offers up a host of policy suggestions that few Democrats would even recognize, much less advocate:

Labor reform, repealing Taft-Hartley. You see, the labor unions line up in favor of the Democrat Party and they get nothing. For heaven’s sake, they went ‘x’ number of years without even adjusting the minimum wage to inflation. I’ve never seen a less demanding organized labor movement, but what have the Democrats given them? … lip service on [ending] Nafta and the WTO, and better protection of individual investors’ rights, rights that corporate capitalism violates repeatedly.

On health care, “we believe in single-payer health, full Medicare for all.”

He is also “opposed unalterably to nuclear power. We think the country should go solar, in all of its different manifestations, including passive solar architecture.”

Mr. Nader wants to slash “the bloated, wasteful military budget. This thing is so out of control that it’s unauditable. But Obama wants to increase the military budget, which is currently distorted away from soldiers and towards these giant weapons systems, and keeping troops in Korea and Japan.”

And as for the tax system, Mr. Nader wishes that the Democrats would adhere to his philosophy, which is that “we should first tax things that we like the least, or dislike the most, as a society, before we tax human labor, and necessities . . . through a sales tax. “So we should tax securities speculation first, before we tax labor. If you go to a store and buy $1,000 worth of products, you pay a sales tax. You buy $1 million worth of derivatives, you pay no sales tax!”

I hear the scurrying of little feet, Democrats running for cover. Don’t even think of asking them to be advocates for such policies.

No matter. The Nader effect is gone, he’ll have no impact on elections ever again. Democrats will sue to keep him off the ballot (the DNC filed 24 lawsuits in 18 states in 12 weeks to prevent choice in 2004). And he’ll get no media coverage, save from FOX, and the Wall Street Journal, who rejoice in his candidacy, feeling it will help Republicans.

Since I announced my run, I can’t get on Charlie Rose. Or Diane Rehm or Terry Gross [of NPR]. I haven’t been on Jim Lehrer yet. I got on Wolf Blitzer twice, on CNN. Fox News calls me more than anybody. They have the same attitude, of course – ‘Here comes the spoiler!’ But how can you spoil something that’s spoiled already?

“I don’t complain much publicly. I’ve been told by a lot of the television bookers around the country, ‘Ralph, they don’t like you.’ So the door is shut.

Which goes to reinforce the notion that the media, which is owned by giant corporations with an interest in almost all policy issues, runs these campaigns, decides who is viable, who is not, and who will be allowed to have access to the public mind. And it is clear that anyone who advocates for progressive causes such as those set forth by Nader above need not bother.

But I say to myself, ‘Should we close down and go to Monterey and watch the whales?’ No. Better to fight when you have a small chance, than to fight later when you have no chance at all.”

Indeed. Fight on, Ralph. Things must get much worse before they get better, but things will get better. Too bad you won’t be around to enjoy it.

I hope I’m not too late! I take this inopportune moment to overrule your judgment with mine. Election races depend on it!

President of the United States of America: I was going to vote for Obama, but then Anna convinced me that Hillary was a woman, and Wulfy made it clear that we are not to oppose Democrats, so I voted for Hillary, who is a Democrat woman. You should too.

Senator from the Great State of Montana Isn’t it amazing that a podunk outpost like this, with less than a million people, has 1/50th of the voting power in the senate? That’s a deal. People take us for simpletons who can be bought with glitzy TV campaigns, and we prove it by sending filberts like Burns there for eighteen years.

Representative to the U.S. Congress from the Great State of Montana: This Rehberg character is a tough nut to crack – you think because he’s a trust baby and has never held a job in the private sector, that he’s kind of a Burnsian character. But he’s not. He’s formidable. It’s nice the Democrats put up people to oppose him now and then.

Supreme Court Justice: What you say? It’s non-partisan? Still, it’s never too soon to make this point: Mike McGrath does not belong on a bench of any kind except a park.

Governor of the Great State of Montana: This one’s easy. Pogreba, for openness in government. Never, ever let your motives be hidden.

My Local Representative: Roger Koopman is not running. I’m not voting in protest. What am I to do for material for this blog?

There you have it. Now, as a good American, follow my lead. Always look up for advice before you look down on your ballot. Your thoughts are good. But mine are better.

On Jan. 19, 1992 Bill Clinton said,

“I want to make it very clear that this middle-class tax cut, in my view, is central to any attempt we’re going to make to have a short-term economic strategy.”

On Jan. 14, 1993 at a press conference, Bill Clinton said,

“From New Hampshire forward, for reasons that absolutely mystified me, the press thought the most important issue in the race was the middle-class tax cut. I never did meet any voter who thought that.”

Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign was the last time he ever talked about a middle class tax cut. Ever. I notice now that Hillary Clinton is promising a middle class tax cut. Two possibilities: 1) she means to make good on her husband’s broken promise, or 2) she’s merely borrowing his strategy.

Will Hillary pull a Lieberman on us and run a third party ticket? At first blush, the answer is obviously no, but as I thought about it, about her rabid supporters who don’t know squat about her stands on issues, about her own quixotic refusal to bow to reality, about her flaming ambition, I thought maybe … just maybe.

She’s a Clinton. She’ll do anything.

This brings up the obvious question – I supported Ralph Nader in 2000 against conservative Democrats Al Gore and Joe Lieberman. Isn’t it the same? Wasn’t Ralph just an egotist?

Well, no, not quite. Ralph was doing something that Democrats just don’t seem to understand – he was trying to bargain with the right wing of his party, to take his small cadre of supporters and leverage them to force the hand of Gore – to make him take leadership on liberal causes. Nader had ten planks in his platform – had Gore chosen to take leadership on just one … Gore was stubborn to then end. I think it was his ego made him so …

Hillary is different. She’s not about principled stands on issues. She and Obama differ very little on anything – a fact overlooked my most Democrats. (They could be triangulatin’ on us again.) What is Hillary’s ’cause’? What does she believe in? She’s taken more money from the health care sector than any candidate of either party, so she ain’t about fixing health care. She voted for the war in Iraq, even as contrary facts were available to her … if only she could listen to dissent. She now claims it was a mistake … what else is she going to say when the public says it was a mistake? But does she mean it? She was very much behind NAFTA when she was First Lady, now says she opposed it. Convenience store politics, anyone? Her support of NAFTA has been marked down! A sale! A sale!

Oh, I know the Democratic mantra – I’ll chant along with you. Yeah, she’s not all that, but ‘marginally’, she’s better…’marginally’, hummmmmm …she’s better…hummmm … ‘marginally’, she’s better…’marginally’ …. Some have said to me that I just don’t understand politics – that you have to work in increments, take small victories. You can’t win big. Oh, I get all of that, and I would vote for Hillary for one reason only – she would likely appoint pro-abortion judges. That’s a marginal point.

Point is, I don’t trust her. I know I’m conflating two personalities, but I don’t trust her husband either. I’ll never forget that he wanted to privatize Social Security, that he was working behind the scenes to make that happen. I’ll never forget his starving of 500,000 Iraqi kids, of his eight years of bombardment and harassment of people in that country.

I was deeply involved in environmental causes back when he was president. There was a bill before the congress called “salvage logging” (since renamed “Healthy Forests”). It was an attempt by the logging barons to get into roadless lands they previously had not been able to access. It was bad policy run through a public relations firm, as most initiatives are. Clinton was against it. He unified us, he had us all in one place … “not gonna sign it….not gonna sign it … not gonna sign it …” – the bastard signed it. The environmental community was up in arms – I think it was this, and his sellout on northern spotted owl lands (done incrementally … step by step…) and the sellout to Charles Hurwitz in California (with critical support from Diane Feinstein) that convinced Clinton that he had better do something glitzy to pacify environmentalists, who were not trusting him anymore.

He came up with some form to hide his ugly substance – he decided to take some marginal issues and make them his cause celebre – we got monuments. Gutted forests, and monuments on marginal lands. Oh, and before he left office, he lowered the arsenic standard for drinking water, probably knowing full well that Bush would reverse him. (He did.) And he attempted to protect roadless lands, knowing full well that Bush would reverse him. (He did.) He had eight years to do these things, and decided to cram it all into his last few months. Symbolism, anyone? False leadership? Manipulation?

That’s how Democrats work. They need our support, but they can’t give us substance. But they are clever. They know how to manipulate. Clinton was at best, at best, a moderate Republican. I look at his Iraq record, his unprovoked attack on Serbia, and I say he was a rabid right winger on foreign policy. But give him the benefit. A moderate Republican.

Now comes Hillary. What’s different? Has she led on any progressive issues? Well, one thing – she wants to corporatize the health care system and expand private insurance which is at the heart of the problem, and this is passing for reform. When we needed her on Iraq, where was she? When we needed leadership to block bad judges, did she do more than vote? Did she rally her fellows, form a voting bloc, put up stiff resistance? Did she lead? She could have stopped Alito – dynamic leaders do ths – they make deals, inspire, form coalitions. They do more than cast symbolic votes.

Nah – she voted no, made a nice little speech – she totally Baucused on us.

And that’s my problem with Hillary. She’s not about coalitions, or organizing, or taking public opinion and making it into a political force. She’s about Hillary. Period. And if she’s anything like her husband, there will be that incremental progress that Democrats love to brag about. The only problem is that it will be for the other side. She’s not one of us. She’s a faux-liberal, a crypto-conservative.

Will she run a third party candidacy? Not likely, but I wouldn’t put it past her. I wouldn’t put anything past her.

Paranoia strikes deep… into your life it will creep. It starts when you’re always afraid. Step out of line the men come and take you away. (Stephen Stills, “For What It’s Worth”)

I am a limited observer of current events and recent history. I suspect that what is going on now has always been going on. Americans have since our country’s founding made evil demons out of ordinary people. They do this to inflame our population. Demons are a convenient cover for our often mendacious and business-oriented foreign and domestic policies.

The lyrics above were written in the 1960’s, when police were breathing down the necks of protesters, who, of course, wanted to overthrow our government and bring in the North Vietnamese. In the 1950’s through 1989, Russia was on everyone’s mind. They were an evil empire. No matter who we attacked, it was because of the Russians.

Before we could attack Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003, we had to paint an archtypical demon, Saddam Hussein, in our collective subconscious. Likewise, in 1999 when we attacked Serbia, Slobodan Milosevik was set up to take a fall. That dude was really evil. Really, really evil.

I read of panic over France getting ready to invade in the early Republic, and of riots over fear of Germans in the early 20th century. In the 19th century ordinary plains Indians became bloodthirsty savages as we set out to steal their land.

And then there was Ronald Reagan’s 1986 warning that Nicaragua was only a two day march from Brownsville, Texas – this as we prepared to invade Central America and crush indigenous independence movements. In the early 1990’s, after the Soviet Union had gone away, conservatives were warning us of Libyans patrolling the high seas. And former communists became drug runners. They were grasping. As John Stockwell said, we are a country constantly in search of enemies.

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, on the op-ed page, there’s a piece by Amir Taheri called “The Problem with Talking to Iran“. The premise is that there are two Iran’s – the nation state, and the place run by revolutionary fanatics. Taheri is critical of Barack Obama for saying we can talk to enemies, this one in particular. He says there’s quite a difference between Iran and other countries:

Iran is gripped by a typical crisis of identity that afflicts most nations that pass through a revolutionary experience. The Islamic Republic does not know how to behave: as a nation-state, or as the embodiment of a revolution with universal messianic pretensions. Is it a country or a cause?

A revolution, he says, “doesn’t want anything in particular because it wants everything.”

Fine – there’s some value to this piece, though it is steeped in typical conservative historical amnesia. Taheri likely thinks that Iranian history began in 1979. He probably regards pre-revolutionary Iran, living under a fascistic ruler, Shah Reza Pahlavi and his bloody secret police (SAVAK), as part of the good old days. You could talk to the Shah. Taheri probably doesn’t know anything about 1953, when the U.S. overthrew the democratic government of Iran, or of the 26 years of oppression that followed.

That’s rote for the right wing. They suffer from tunnel vision – it’s proscribed by their ideology, which is so often at odds with reality. But here’s the kicker from Taheri’s piece:

The problem that the world, including the U.S., has today is not with Iran as a nation-state but with the Islamic Republic as a revolutionary cause bent on world conquest under the guidance of the “Hidden Imam.”

How far is it from Tehran to Brownsville?

Iran is a nation-state, but unfortunately, one caught in a reactionary cycle. 26 years of oppression (1953-1979) created a vacuum, and when the Shah abdicated, it was filled by clerics. That’s not a good thing, but not something we can change without destroying the place. It will have to undo itself. And it will if we just leave it alone.

But no – conservatives are not content to allow events to follow a natural course. They have to stoke the fires and threaten war. They have raised Iran to the dimensions of the old Soviet Union. It’s only making matters worse, cementing the rule of the clerics (Ahmadinejad is only a figurehead, much like the queen). We’re not helping, the 7th Fleet is not the answer.

Iran is a country in transition. They react as normal humans react when threatened with military attack – they are buying weapons, digging trenches. If they are not developing nuclear weapons, they ought to start. For our sake, for theirs, we ought to ease up on the ratchet. The best way to do that is to talk.

Honest, guys, Brownsville is safe.

From The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution Against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos, by Ravi Batra:

The salient feature of the era of intellectual acquisitors is that the ruling elite amass wealth but make people believe that such an endeavor is good for society. For instance, they cut taxes for themselves while raising taxes for other classes, and yet are able to convince the public that such economic policies are in society’s best interest. Or they may persuade you that God has blessed them with opulence so that they can take care of the indigent. They have the intellect to make you feel better even as they hit you, at least for a while. Dogmas proliferate at this point, and the laborer bears the maximum burden of exploitation.

Once the majority of intellectuals become acquisitive, materialism degenerates into supermaterialism. There are no more religious or ethical restrains on the avarice of the elite, and the public follows its leaders, everything gets commercialized.

There comes a time when intellectual acquisitors are virtually unchallenged; that’s when the process of wealth concentration runs full throttle, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer at incredible speeds. The boundless greed and hypocrisy of acquisitive intellectuals ultimately torments the majority of people. Salaries go down, and the bulk of society is forced to devote much of its time to making money. Warriors and intellectuals then have to become laborers because they have little time left for the finer pursuits of life. They have to labor hard to support themselves and their children. The intellectual’s love for art, music, painting and philosophy give way to routine work all day long to provide the means for family survival. The warrior’s innate predilection for adventure and sport is replaced by overtime work to make ends meet. The vast majority of society comes to adopt the laborers’ way of living and thinking.

Only two classes then remain – acquisitors and laborers, or the haves and have-nots. The age of acquisitors eventually turns into the age of laborers, which may now be called the acquisitive-cum-labor age, in which the acquisitive intellectual is dominant. But many traits of the era of laborers come to afflict society, which essentially gets divided into two groups, one consisting of wealthy acquisitors, the other comprising the destitute and the middle class. The poor include the physical workers, and the middle class includes those erstwhile warriors and intellectuals now forced into toiling long hours for their survival.

For a while, people suffer through the deceit and exploitation of the reigning class. They maintain their lifestyle by increasingly getting into debt. Acquisitors now have a field day. They make money left and right. They enrich themselves through their control over businesses, farms and factories, and through lending money to the other classes.

This is the time that creates a group of disgruntled laborers from the former warriors and intellectuals. New leaders emerge from this group. Fed up with the status quo, one day they overthrow the ruling elite with the help of the masses, culminating in a social revolution of workers. It is through this process that the social cycle starts anew.

The particular genius of the United States has been to replace emergent leaders in this natural cycle with timid Democrats. They steal the thunder and lead the exploited masses into a brick wall. We are told that our only avenue of change is through the Democratic Party. That party then does all in its power, through dissembling and inertia, to block that change. Welcome, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton.

The question is, does Barack Obama represent real change, or is he merely another Democrat poised to thwart change and preserve the reign of the acquisitors. I wish I knew.

We made a trip to Safeway today. On the bullshit part of the receipt, where they tell you how much you supposedly saved by shopping there, plain as day was my name. This shouldn’t be, as the “value” card we use is registered to Joseph P. Schmeau. How do they know who I am?

Many people resent Safeway asking personal questions that are none of their business so they can track our shopping habits. So they give them false names or trade the loyalty cards with other people. It never occurs to Safeway that they are invading our private space. They are marketers, after all. Privacy means nothing to them.

To be fair, Safeway does try to make it seem like they are giving up something in return for our personal information. We don’t have to pay their regular prices, which are at the level of convenience stores. Some deal.

How did they get my real name? That question was answered here, down in the comments. An employee of one of these chains actually brags they they wait for you to use a credit or debit card, and then they match the information on the credit card to your “value” card. There’s no hiding from them unless you deal strictly in cash.

Of course, a better way is simply not to shop at Safeway, or any other store that uses loyalty cards to glean your private information from you. David Crisp wonders if it is OK to lie to them. I have to confess, it never occurred to me to tell them the truth. No more than if someone asked me about my bank balance or cocaine habits. Lying is OK when one is dealing with information pirates. It’s almost a patriotic duty. The very idea that we owe our private information to a marketer is almost an insult. Feeling an obligation to be honest with them is what is weird.

Anyway, we are stuck away from home today, and Safeway was the only option available. When at home we never darken their doors. A nice little store down the street sells us groceries at a reasonable price without the prying eyes. They only seem to care that we pay at the register. And they are easily the most popular store in Bozeman.

“Numbers Racket” is an interesting article by Kevin Phillips, originally published in Harpers. He maintains that the way we measure the deficit, inflation, unemployment and GDP (formerly “GNP”) has changed over the years in kind of a “Pollyanna creep”.

Phillips says that if we measured these things the way we did during the Carter Administration, that we would have a completely different notion of how well our economy is doing today. For example, had economists not changed the way the consumer price index is calculated, Social Security recipients would today receive 77% more in benefits than they do.

Here are some key statistics:

1: The deficit would be $200 billion higher than they admit to. This is due to the fact that they count excess payroll tax collections against general fund debt. Social Security is being used to hide much of the real deficit. This change was made under Lyndon Johnson to hide the true cost of the Vietnam War.

2. Inflation today would be at 12% based on pre-1983 criteria. (That’s more in line with my personal impression as I do our monthly budget.)

3. Unemployment would be at 9% had they not arbitrarily elected to exclude (1) part-time workers who are looking for full time employment, (2) “marginally attached” workers (those not looking for a job but who say they want one), and (3) “discouraged workers – those who could not find work and quit looking. (What would the rate be if they also counted those who joined the military as a last resort?)

4. In 1991 the concept of Gross National Product (GNP) was replaced by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to eliminate rising U.S. international debt costs, which had become unpalatable. In addition, they “impute” certain aspects of our growth in GDP, such as the rental value of our homes and the value of a free checking account. Imputed income accounts for 15% of GDP. Growth under the old measurement and factoring in higher inflation would be closer to 1% during the Bush years, as opposed to the 3-4% they tout. That’s significant.

The majority of these changes happened under Reagan, Bush I and II, and Bill Clinton. While Phillips says there’s no conspiracy involved, that people from one administration to the next are merely serving their own ends, the net result has been to make things appear to be better than they are and to reinforce policies (and keep politicians in office) that are bad for our general well being.