The right wing "mirror image" disinformation technique

This is an excellent discussion of Rovian disinformation tactics by Billmon. Eric Cantor was practicing this tactic when he announced the strange story of the bullet that apparently fell from the sky into a window in a building some of his campaign adviser groups use.

Spock with a Beard: The Sequel
This is the beginning two paragraphs

For some years now, I’ve been morbidly fascinated by the political dark arts -- especially the very dark art of disinformation: the systematic creation and dissemination of false narratives designed to discredit your opponents and/or drive undecided audiences away from their cause.

The difference between disinformation and just plain lying is in the scope of the enterprise: A lie is intended to conceal a specific truth (e.g. "I did not have sex with that woman"). Disinformation, on the other hand, is aimed at constructing an entire alternative reality -- one in which the truth can find no foothold because it conflicts just not with a specific falsehood, but with the entire fabric of the false reality that has been created. It puts the "big" in big lie, in other words.

Rick Perlstein on Why Obama will not be a transformational President

This is about a one hour lecture with half an hour of questions and answers. The sound focuses on Rick so the questions are faint at best.

That said, it is an extremely insightful analysis of the Obama Presidency and the current times.

Rick Perlstein at Vanderbilt, March 22, 2010.

Yes we can; No you can't. Boehner is wrong.

This was too good not to blog.



h/t to Talking Points Memo.

Best short analysis of the recent banking crisis so far

Want a short overview of what all went wrong with Wall Street in 2008? Here is a floor speech by Senator Ted Kaufman that does a superb job of summarizing the set of problems and how they worked out in the crisis.

It's already a summary, so I won't try to summarize it here. Go read it.

What happens if the health care system is NOT overhauled?

The current American health care system simply is not sustainable. It is set for collapse in the near future unless is it overhauled.

Reed Abelson of the New York Times goes over what every health care expert already knows will happen if the current Democratic effort to overhaul system fails:

The unrelenting rise in medical costs is likely to wreak havoc within the system and beyond it, and pretty much everyone will be affected, directly or indirectly.

“People think if we do nothing, we will have what we have now,” said Karen Davis, the president of the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health care research group in New York. “In fact, what we will have is a substantial deterioration in what we have.”

Nearly every mainstream analysis calls for medical costs to continue to climb over the next decade, outpacing the growth in the overall economy and certainly increasing faster than the average paycheck. Those higher costs will translate into higher premiums, which will mean fewer individuals and businesses will be able to afford insurance coverage. More of everyone’s dollar will go to health care, and government programs like Medicare and Medicaid will struggle to find the money to operate.

Here is Steven Benen's take on the current status of health care reform in Congress:

If reform comes up short, costs will soar, budgets will be pushed towards bankruptcy, the ranks of the uninsured will grow, those lacking coverage will die, premiums will get even more unaffordable, and our economic growth and workers' wages will be stunted.

This isn't some wild-eyed speculation; this is simply a reality that no serious person contests.

When I read pieces like this, I sometimes just shake my head at public opposition to reform. We know the system is broken; we know we pay too much and get too little. We know the Republican attacks against reform proposals are wrong. Given the mess we're in, the demand for comprehensive reform should be overwhelming.

And yet, the resistance to sound ideas is fairly intense.

The Senate has already passed health care reform with a 60 vote majority. It only remains for the House to pass the Senate bill and for President Obama to sign it.

No, the Senate bill will not solve all the problems of the deteriorating health care financing system, but it is a solid start at doing that. It puts a framework into place. What remains is for Nancy Pelosi to round up 217 votes to pass the Senate bill in the House and the deed is done.

If it is delayed it will still have to be done, but it will cost a lot more and be an inferior system to the one the Senate bill envisions. The message we should be sending Congress is clear.

Pass.The.Damned.Bill!

Health care summit has clear outcome

Yesterday's health care summit laid out the basic philosophical difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. Steve Benen has written his conclusions this morning, and I agree.

The Republicans do not recognize any major problems in the American health care system, and even if they did they do not believe that government could fix them. The top priority of the Republican Party is that it not regulate business or anyone and that taxes be kept very low. Every government action has to meet those two criteria before anything else. Government action is generally wrong and should not occur.

The Democrats believe that America has a broadly dysfunctional health care system that leaves out too many people and that offers suboptimal outcomes for many others. Too many Americans get sicker than they should and many die unnecessarily. In addition the system itself costs too much and the cost is increasing too rapidly. Looking at other wealthy industrial nations around the world these are problems which can be controlled, but it requires government action.

Yesterday' health care summit laid out those two positions along with the proposals the Democrats have developed over the recent year. The Democrats then asked the Republicans to join them in developing an appropriate set of activities to deal with America's health care problems. The Republicans replied "Not just no but Hell no!" and demanded that the Democrats abandon the effort to fix the system.

Since the Democrats are the majority party, they are now left to pass health care reform on their own. They have to. They were elected on the promise that they would.

That's where we are this morning, the day after the health care summit. The next step has to be for the Democrats to by-pass the filibuster in the Senate.

Anthem should be thanked for making the case for universal health care coverage

Why did Anthem (California Blue Cross/Blue shield) raise rates up to 39% on 80,000 individual policies in California?

They call it a recessionary death spiral. As more people become unemployed and lose income, the healthy people often drop individual health insurance and gamble on not becoming ill. That leaves only the unhealthy high-cost individuals left in the insurance pool the plan covers, so the costs increase rapidly.

Without healthy people in the plan to cover the increase costs, more will make the same decision to drop out or will be forced out by the increased cost of the plan itself. But it will also increase the costs to health care providers as they treat uninsured patients, and that will jack up costs to the employer group plans. The providers will raise prices on all medical services so that the payments made by those who still have insurance will also cover the bad debts that result from treating those without insurance.

Result? All health care costs rise (faster than inflation) and all health insurance costs rise. But the healthy uninsured and the very wealthy who don't need insurance to pay their medical bills win economically. The various levels of government will end up paying even more of the health care costs in America than they presently do.

The only long-term solution for this is to provide universal coverage to all Americans. With such very large insurance pools the costs of health coverage become much more predictable. It is, among other things, a major cost control measure on heath care expenses.

That's what both the Senate and the House health care reform bills provides. What do the Republicans offer? Continue the current failed system with tax cuts for the wealthy.

Republicans have panicked over Democratic control of Congress and the White House

The Republican party has stepped away from civility and tradition in Congress and gone to the extreme. They are the minority party now and they are doing whatever it takes to regain control of the federal government. Because of this they are subverting the traditional rules and civility of Congress and desperately trying to stop the Democrats from doing what they were elected to do. You have to wonder why they have become so obviously desperate. First, look at how they have been acting in Congress. No minority party has acted this desperate since the Southern States before teh Civil War felt their "peculiar institution" (slavery) was under direct attack. First look at what are some examples of Republican desperation, then look at why might they feel so desperate.

Jonathon Cohn at The New Republic points out the extreme and unusual ways the Republicans have been working to stop the majority party from doing what it was elected to do. There has been a history in Congress that certain rules were used sparingly and only in rare circumstances. No more.

1. The Senate minority always could filibuster every vote and kill anything that did not have a supermajority. But before now this has never been done. Now the Republicans are setting records for the number of filibusters they conduct.
   
2. The Senate hold has always been a tool that the minority party could use to shut down the process of the Senate, but it was used only in rare cases when a Senator had a really important issue he or she wanted the Senate to attend to. Never before has a Senator used a blanket hold on all appointments to demand $billions in ransom be given to his state as Sen. Richard Shelby is now doing.
   
3. It has always been possible for Senators and Representatives to pass a bill through both bodies, then take it into conference add completely new provisions to the bill in conference. This was frequently done when the Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate under the Bush regime.

These are not politics as usual. These are the actions of a political party that feels under pressure, afraid and powerless. Because they feel powerless they are willing to reach out at use any tool they can find, and because of their fear and lack of trust they feel justified in using those tools even when they are being applied in an extreme way.

So what indications are there that the Republicans feel attacked and afraid? Marcos Moulitsas commissioned a Daily Kos/Research 2000 Poll to answer some of those questions. It was conducted January 20, 2011, so it provides the latest information. The results are illuminating.

Mises libertarian economics doesn't work.

There is a good reason why modern economists don't believe in the Austrian school of economics. It can't be verified by data. Here is a brief description.

Here is the Krugman article. The key quote:

Recessions are not necessary consequences of booms. They can and should be fought, not with austerity but with liberality—with policies that encourage people to spend more, not less. Nor is this merely an academic argument: The hangover theory can do real harm. Liquidationist views played an important role in the spread of the Great Depression—with Austrian theorists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter strenuously arguing, in the very depths of that depression, against any attempt to restore "sham" prosperity by expanding credit and the money supply. And these same views are doing their bit to inhibit recovery in the world's depressed economies at this very moment.

Go read the detailed explanation. Pay special attention to the problem of why the Austrian School cannot explain unemployment and also to what the solution to the Depression has to be (hint: It's government spending, stupid!)

It's nice to have a competent President who tells the Repubs they are liars - to their faces!

Jon Stewart gets this one very well. Well, so does Barack Obama. He had something to do with the success of the moment also.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Q & O
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

FOX, in the meantime, fails as both a news organization and as a right-wing propaganda outlet. They knew it and abandoned the field to competent news organizations. Wouldn't want to contaminate the minds of their audience with facts - or with the additional fact that Barack Obama can do something that Bush never could. Deal with questions successfully while speaking competent English.

The National Democrats have to get their act together - Now!

The time for improving the health care reform bill is over. The Democrats have to pass what they have spent all of last year squabbling over as the Republicans have sat on the side trying to destroy the bill (and President Obama) totally. Steve Benen describes the political imperatives now facing the national Democratic Party.

"President Obama is still the most popular political figure in Washington, and enjoys more support than either political party and either congressional delegation.

For Republicans, this creates a strong incentive to block any and all progress -- the more they can destroy American politics, the more the president appears ineffective. Undermining Obama's presidency improves their chances of winning additional power.

For Democrats, this should create the opposite incentive -- the more successful Obama is, the better off they'll be. The more they argue amongst themselves, or delay (or deliberately kill) key parts of the party's agenda, the more they drag Obama's support down.

Dems' success is inextricably tied to Obama's standing. As Ezra noted last week, this should point Democratic lawmakers in the right direction on health care, though the message isn't getting through.

If health-care reform dies, the media will try and explain the Democrats' failure. That means they'll spend a lot of time talking about what Obama has done wrong. If Democrats had simply refused to freak out and moved quickly to pass the Senate bill, there would be endless stories on what Obama did right, and how the Democrats finally passed this longtime priority.

Even putting aside all the moral arguments for passing this bill -- all the lives and homes it will save -- a crassly political calculation should have left Democrats rushing towards passage."

Right now it doesn't look like the federal government works any more. At the same time, the problems facing America - including the health care insurance crisis - are building up and in the great Neo-Hoover non-action and incompetence tradition of the Republican Bush administration are not being addressed.

The trouble is, the Democrats are an undisciplined and selfish lot who would rather squabble and run to give interviews to the media (to demonstrate how important each of the leakers is) than actually get any legislation accomplished. They are in their little Washington D.C. bubble where their status is determined by how many times they appear on the TV talk shows rather than what legislation they join the herd to vote for and pass.

Out here in the hinterlands the politicians really don't matter, but the legislation does. It's too late now to make any changes in the bill that is the only possible one to pass both houses - the Senate bill. So it's time.

Pass.The.Damned.Bill!

Even the Chinese are following the NBC night show disaster

Who cares about the Jay Leno - Conan O'Brien - NBC fiasco? Let's just say that if it really matters to you it's time to get a life. But it's a symptom of a major cultural change that America is going through. It's not just a political argument between NBC, Leno and O'Brien. It's another step in the collapse of broadcast TV. Writer's strike. Reality shows. Decline in quality scripted shows. Switch to the clearly inferior HD TV. Newspapers aren't the only media suffering from a sharp decline in advertising revenue. It looks to me like broadcast TV is going the way of daily newspapers.

First though, consider the NBC - late night TV crisis from the Chinese point of view.

Huh? Chinese? How did they get involved? Who knows, but they have posted this very entertaining U-Tube video cartoon that explains it all. As is appropriate to the unimportance of the subject, it's in Chinese. Don't worry. That doesn't matter because the cartoonist or cartoonists have captured the story beautifully.



Does this really matter? No. But it's the car wreck on the freeway we all slow down and look across the media at as we pass it. But for those of us who have watched broadcast TV go from a rich family's toy in the 50% to the required utility in every room that it has been for more than the last generation, this is broadcast TV's death rattle.

It became obvious several years ago when "reality" TV replaced one of the three hours of night time scripted dramas. It was disgusting, but the networks were desperate for broadcast air fillers which were CHEAP and could survive on the reduced advertising revenue that the networks finally realized were all they could get. But reality TV has gone as far as it could. Where could NBC (especially) get more low cost schlock to fill prime time air with? Well, they had Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien at night and both were doing well. They each cost about 1/3rd what a scripted show costs per hour. Conan apparently forced the issue five years ago when he threatened to jump networks to FOX and compete head-to-head with Jay Leno.

NBC delayed his move by promising Conan the Tonight show in five years. They bought Leno's agreement by telling him he could have five hours per weeknight in prime time instead. NBC kept both shows with their audiences and it had the advantage of sharply lower production costs for for one of the three prime time weeknight hours. The number I have seen quoted is that Leno costs about $100 million to produce five nights a week for a season where a scripted drama to fill those hours costs about $300 million.

Did replacing a scripted drama the last night of prime time lose audience? Apparently. But NBC decided that the loss of audience could be accepted because it brought the production costs in under the level of the revenue they were getting from advertisers for that time period.

Only - Gack! - the affiliate stations make a lot of their money from the advertisers paying for the night time news, and the Jay Leno show did not feed as big an audience into those late night news shows. The affiliates were losing a lot of money so that NBC could bring their third hour of prime time production costs in under what the advertising revenue covered. Translation - NBC profited in part by lowering the audience and revenue to the affiliates who followed that last prime time hour. The affiliates looked at the results of NBC's brilliant strategy and revolted. They determine what actually appears on the local TV screen, so they threatened to pull prime time Leno and replace it with - I don't know. Star Trek reruns? I love Lucy? More reality shows? Whatever. It wouldn't be revenue to NBC. It would be revenue to the affiliate stations. They are the actual owners of your TV screen in broadcast TV. Prime time Jay Leno was fired.

I knew something was wrong when so-called reality TV crap replaced quality scripted shows. Prime time was reduced from three hours a night to two hours on weeknights with reruns on Saturdays and some Sundays. That was not the result of a writer's strike. It was clearly caused by declining advertising revenue. The networks wanted to shift some of the production costs to writers and the writer's guild objected. The networks then took the opportunity to blame the writers for the collapse of the industry.

The NBC - Jay Leno - Conan O'Brien has been a bunch of sturm und drang about damned little that matters. Except for one thing. The sturm und drang is at it's base all about the death of broadcast TV. Leno and O'Brien just put familiar faces on the end of the industry.

One last thing I had wondered about. Broadcast TV made the shift from a technologically stable long-term broadcast technology to High Definition last year. Some customers may have made the switch OK, but in my experience it has been a disaster. I've completely lost half the channels I used to watch and the remaining ones flicker on and off erratically, often freezing for several words. Was the switch to Hi-Def a plot to force broadcast customers to buy overpriced subscription TV instead? That's still my best bet. Someone apparently thought it was a good idea, and the FCC is captive to the industry so they forced it through. Trust the Republicans to get the government to screw the customers so that the business persons can blame the government for the economic disaster they caused instead of taking responsibility themselves for what they did.

---

DISCLAIMER
I am not an expert on the media. This is just what I have observed in recent years watching broadcast TV and I am trying to find an explanation for the degradation of the medium. So far this makes some sense of it to me.

TV political news "reporting" has failed.

It's long been clear that there is little political news being presented to the American public through television. It's a bit of a surprise to realize just how simple the problem is, but it is explained easily and briefly by Steve Benen at the Political Animal.

In recent years, the media has created a truly bizarre dynamic -- news consumers who want to hear a bunch of politicians make a lot of claims can watch television news interviews, and news consumers who want to know if those claims are accurate can go online.

At that point, television news stops informing the public, and simply becomes literally nothing more than a conduit for talking points and pretty pictures. Viewers who want to learn accurate information about current events are told they must go elsewhere -- it's not CNN's job to tell you the facts; it's CNN's job to tell you what "both sides" think about the facts.

So the so-called "political news" from television is nothing more than a Jerry Springer show consisting of "He said. She said" presented without context or history that would provide any perspective.

The Journalism schools apparently love this failed system, and so do the lying politicians. No one else does.

2010 is going to be another bad year economically

I have doubted that the current so-called good news about the American economy have meant much more than that the inadequate stimulus funds supported by the feds lowered interest rates and expanded money supply was working. The trouble is, there has not been any real expansion of the consumer market. There won't be until somehow the number of jobs starts increasing.

So now Paul Krugman agrees with me.

During the good years of the last decade, such as they were, growth was driven by a housing boom and a consumer spending surge. Neither is coming back. There can’t be a new housing boom while the nation is still strewn with vacant houses and apartments left behind by the previous boom, and consumers — who are $11 trillion poorer than they were before the housing bust — are in no position to return to the buy-now-save-never habits of yore.

What’s left? A boom in business investment would be really helpful right now. But it’s hard to see where such a boom would come from: industry is awash in excess capacity, and commercial rents are plunging in the face of a huge oversupply of office space.

Can exports come to the rescue? For a while, a falling U.S. trade deficit helped cushion the economic slump. But the deficit is widening again, in part because China and other surplus countries are refusing to let their currencies adjust.

So the odds are that any good economic news you hear in the near future will be a blip, not an indication that we’re on our way to sustained recovery. But will policy makers misinterpret the news and repeat the mistakes of 1937? Actually, they already are.

The Obama fiscal stimulus plan is expected to have its peak effect on G.D.P. and jobs around the middle of this year, then start fading out. That’s far too early: why withdraw support in the face of continuing mass unemployment? Congress should have enacted a second round of stimulus months ago, when it became clear that the slump was going to be deeper and longer than originally expected. But nothing was done — and the illusory good numbers we’re about to see will probably head off any further possibility of action.

Meanwhile, all the talk at the Fed is about the need for an “exit strategy” from its efforts to support the economy. One of those efforts, purchases of long-term U.S. government debt, has already come to an end. It’s widely expected that another, purchases of mortgage-backed securities, will end in a few months. This amounts to a monetary tightening, even if the Fed doesn’t raise interest rates directly — and there’s a lot of pressure on Mr. Bernanke to do that too.

Will the Fed realize, before it’s too late, that the job of fighting the slump isn’t finished? Will Congress do the same? If they don’t, 2010 will be a year that began in false economic hope and ended in grief.

That's not good news. I hope Krugman is wrong, but if he is I don't see where it comes from.

A non-discrimanatory solution to air flight security

Matt Yglesias writes today about the question that is greatly exercising the minds at the national review. That question? It's "Why shouldn't we formally discriminate against Muslims (i.e., “profiling”) who are flying on American airlines?"

Matt offers some good arguments why we shouldn't do it.

...the strategic costs of becoming a country that engages in systematic formal discrimination against Muslims are rather high. I would like to live in a country where if a teenage American Muslim reads on a message board somewhere that the United States is a racist country hell-bent on persecuting Islam that he thinks “no it isn’t” not “that’s why I got singled out for strip searches when we went on vacation last winter.” Nor do I want the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority to come under political pressure at home to divest from US firms because Emirati citizens who visit the US are being treated unfairly. Right now if a talented Bangladeshi scientist is weighing offers between an American and a European university, I can honestly tell him he’ll find the US a more welcoming place—that’s a strength we have as a society and as a country, and not something we should be eager to give up.

The United States is a gigantic, diverse country that does business and policy all around the world. Air travel in this country is as safe as it’s ever been. Taking reasonable steps to make it safer would be nice, but cutting ourselves off from a huge swathe of the world and poisoning relations with 1.5 billion Muslims is going to be much worse than an exploding airplane. We could enhance security by making everyone fly naked, but common sense is that it wouldn’t be worth it.

But let me suggest that the throwaway line there "We could enhance security by making everyone fly naked, but common sense is that it wouldn’t be worth it." does suggest a solution.

We should have everyone who is going to get on a plane enter a room before boarding and remove all their clothes. Then they step into the next room where they are issued an airline-approved passenger's uniform with flight slippers for the flight. Their clothes and all carry-on baggage would then be packaged together and shipped (separately on non-passenger aircraft) to their destinations where they could pick it up upon arrival. That way everyone is discriminated against equally.

That might work, although it would give a whole new set of meanings to the announcement by the airline "I'm sorry, but we cannot find your luggage."

A prediction for 2010

Jon Taplin offers an interesting prediction for the election in 2010. It's based on what FDR did in 1934.

Since Obama prides himself on taking the long view I'll bet he has had similar advice. Go read it.

Health care, the Republican Party and the non-functional Senate

We are seeing groundbreaking Legislation finally drag through the Senate. Because of the nature of the Senate, it's far from an ideal bill, but considering how dysfunctional the Senate is, this is the best we'll get.

Lindsay Graham complained to NPR about how Nebraska was getting the federal government to cover the state portion of Medicaid while South Carolina was not. Somehow that seems unfair to Sen. Graham, but he could have worked his own deal by agreeing to vote for the bill and replace Sen. Nelson. Really, all Graham and the Republicans want to do is complain. The irrational aspects of the Senate bill are the responsibility of the Republicans.

That's because the Republicans have created the dysfunctional Senate using its small state bias (which magnifies the numbers of Republicans elected), its arcane rules, and the tradition of the filibuster.

The Republicans lost control of the Senate because they can't govern. Now they are making the Senate itself unworkable because they believe that short-sighted voters and the conservative media will blame the Democrats for the results of the Republican scorched earth policies and refusal to deal with the deep problems America currently faced. The Republican effort to Filibuster the defense appropriations bill in hopes they can delay passage of health care is unacceptable and irresponsible.

Consider what the Republicans have done to the Senate. They are demanding a 60 vote super majority in order to pass any significant legislation, and they are refusing to even present legislative actions to work with. The Republican Senators have abdicated their duty to the American nation in favor of somehow damaging the Democrats. The result it that the Senate now can only function by unanimous vote of all 60 Democrats. That's the reason for all the political deals to pass health care. With the requirement of a unanimous vote each Democratic Senator can block all Senate legislation unless he or she is effectively bought off.

The Republicans could stop this overnight. They just need a few Republican Senators to vote for the health care bill and replace the Democratic Senators who are holding up the Democratic Party. But the Republicans refuse to do anything for the American nation because they want to political advantage.

If the Democrats do not hang this action around the necks of the Republicans running for election in 2010 then they deserve to be voted out of office. Only the American people do not deserve the return of the Republican Party to Senate power.

In the meantime we get maybe half the health care bill that we could have if the Republicans had the interests of the American public in mind instead of the hope for return to power.

America as the new land of media-centered scams

Time Magazine has chosen Ben Bernanke to be its "Man of the Year" this year. Frank Rich of the New York Times disagrees.. Rich is on to something, I think. Tiger is more representative of what America has become over the last half century than Ben Bernanke is. We live in a new, media-created America that has gotten out of control.

Here's Rich's argument, followed by what I think the Tiger Woods scandal tells us about America today:

If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy).

America today is a creation of a mostly centralized and homogeneous media. This has been obvious since about 1960. That year was when TV first was blamed for influencing who was elected President. Since TV has become central to who we as Americans think we are. Regionalism is now a thing of the past. People who have become adults since 1960 will not understand just how central being from the South or from the Midwest or from New York or from Texas used to be. Go back and watch some WW II movies, and take note of how much the characters are dominated by where they came from. New York. Texas. The Midwest. Wyoming. The name of the regions was central to establishing the nature of the character and the regional accent built much of the rest. No more. TV, and especially color TV, changed that perception. Now we are all pretty much the same kinds of Americans. I emphasize TV because TV is the central media which sets the media agenda. All Americans are pretty much in the same media pool now. There is very little regionalism left, even less as the big city newspapers cease to be influential. Instead of regional Americans like we had in WW II, we now have a new media-created America.

This media-created America created room for Public Relations experts and Advertising experts to create what we think we are. Both our cultural and our political life are now dominated by media celebrities. These people - media celebrities - are the images after which we shape much of our lives and personal images. We as individuals are now influenced and manipulated en mass by a mixture of celebrity and sloganeering through this massive media-created American image. Think about the advertisements for Viagra by retired Senator Bob Dole. Before he was paid to go on TV with those advertisements most Americans did not discuss sex the same way. Today we get advertisements for K-Y Jelly on TV. This really is not what America used to be like. And who benefits? Obviously, the people paying to manipulate the attitudes of the new, modern media-created America.

Our personal reality is shaped by those images and by the experts who manipulate those images. Public relations - Advertising - Propaganda - those are all different names for the body of techniques used to manipulate the media-created reality.

It doesn't seem to be recognized how much we are systematically manipulated by the media, though the constant influence is certainly obvious. One of the propaganda memes that is threaded through the media onslaught is that we are each individuals making our own individual decisions and that we are not members of a manipulated group. The selling of this meme makes much of the rest of the manipulation more effective. It's an easy meme to buy because if we can believe that these techniques do not work on each of us then we do not have to feel helpless before the onslaught. It's much easier to believe what we want to believe instead of fighting to find the real truth behind the media propaganda.
Rich points out that Enron was a media-created scam inflicted on America. It was not caught by the media. " That energy company convinced financial titans, the press and countless investors that it was a business deity. It did so even though very few of its worshipers knew what its business was. Enron is the template for the decade of successful ruses that followed, Tiger’s included.
[…]
Fortune magazine named Enron as America’s 'most innovative company” 'six years in a row."

Tiger Woods is another media-created scam on America. He has become the first ever billion dollar athlete by creation of an image in that media-created America.

The War in Iraq was a creation of that propaganda effort in politics through the TV-created America. But Bush, Cheney and the Neocons used that new, media-created America to start a war for their own purposes. Tiger Woods has used that same media-crated America to build his fortune out of chasing a tiny white ball with a stick. The celebrity-creation propaganda techniques are different only in the end goals, power or personal wealth.

That's my argument, based on what Frank Rich wrote. M. J. Rosenberg disagrees with Rich. He states that the problem isn't Tiger Woods. Rosenberg writes that although Tiger is another fraud, he isn't to blame for America's current mess. This far I agree with Rosenberg. But I disagree when he goes on to say

"The kid has pretty broad shoulders for a golfer, but they won't carry the weight of America's current mess. Nor should they. Not even as metaphor."

Tiger does work as a metaphor, I think, because the only way to look at the new media-created America with its pantheon of celebrities and its constant behavior-changing slogans is through metaphors like Tiger Woods, Enron, Bernie Maddox, and the many representatives of evangelical religion like Pat Roberts and Mark Sanford.

This is the new form America has taken. It is only about 50 years old and it is a wild and woolly frontier, mostly unexplored and inhabited by heroes and villains. Perhaps World of Warcraft or the movie The Matrix might be more accurate metaphors but they are not constantly inflicted on us all through every form of media the way the image of Tiger Woods has been.

One last point to consider. This takeover of the American image by a single media-created America and the submerging of regional American identities is very likely a source of the distress that has created the modern American conservative movement. That is a problem for a lot of people as their old regional identities are down graded and considered less important. But that's not the big problem. The big problem is that there seems to be little understanding of this new media-created America, and so we are subject to a series of scams and frauds by various tricksters who gain control of parts of it and use it against the rest of us for their own personal gain.

For a man like Tiger Woods to somehow convert chasing a tiny white ball with a stick into a billion dollar media image that is bit of a problem. For men like Bush, Cheney and the Neocons to use that same ability to manipulate the media and drive America into a senseless war in Iraq, then run that war as a form of media manipulation to build their party power while ignoring the real problems in Afghanistan and letting them fester to be solved by someone else is a real problem. But it does come back to the fact that we do not yet understand or have control of this new wild frontier that is America in the media.

Health care reform: Maybe it'll look better in hindsight

I am very dissatisfied with the compromise piece of garbage the Senate has created and tried to call health care reform. I am also highly dissatisfied with the behavior of the White House and President Obama during the last six months. Howard Dean's recent announcement that the bill has gotten so bad that we should just kill it and come back for another try frankly resonates strongly with me.

Only, I recall the effort in 1993, and now 2009 is the next try. Sixteen years delay. That's a lot of insurance company unearned profits and quite a few Americans dead, sicker than they should be for much longer than they should be and many, many unnecessary bankruptcies.

I've got a list of some of the flaws in the Senate HCR bill as it was last night which I won't even bother to post. But the big one that I hear is the problem of the mandates demanding that people pay up to 17% of their annual income to private insurers for health insurance that will still stick them with annual and lifetime caps and shift a lot of the expense from the insurance to the sick people. But of the 47 million estimated uninsured, this bill still insured 31 million more.

It's a step. A big one. And while is has a lot of flaws, it moves the correct direction in a large jump and in a reasonable (if slow) period of time. This needs to be done regardless of how bad the bill is. Get this done now, and then fix what doesn't work, because this is still fixing a whole lot of what does not work today. Except for the piece of crap that was Part D of Medicare (the unfinanced drug bill with the doughnut hole to save money) there has been no major positive improvement in the health care system since the Medicare bill in 1965.

So for anyone who thinks that Howard Dean's call to kill the bill and start over, take a look at the history of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation as presented by TPM Reader PT.

This health care reform bill is massively significant for the nation. It can be moved towards right now, or it can be killed now, to someday in the far future be again resurrected - at massive cost to the nation. The really big flaws in the current bill and feeding the massive egos of Senators Nelson and Lieberman notwithstanding, it is still time to pass the damned bill they allow us. It will be fixed afterwards. It will have to be. But that will be much easier than this initial restructuring of the system.

Dredd discusses dementia, personal and social

Is America suffering through a period of social dementia? Have we all lost contact with reality as a group? That is an implication of Max Blumenthal's discussion of Secular Salvation Narratives. Dredd discusses this. Dredd's discussion goes further than Blumenthal's by suggesting that America as a society has culturally lost contact with reality. If that's true, then it goes to the very core of our culture, and that hinges on the nature of narratives. So first let's briefly look at what Dredd suggests.

Dredd is describing America as a society in which certain elites wanted to take control of the population, but instead of using the brute force techniques of government (which they concluded would not work) they developed a set of propaganda narratives to control how Americans think. Go read Dredd's article. Propaganda that works does so by creating a preferred narrative that shifts the culture. "Preferred?" Well, "Propaganda" naturally means that the narrative desired by the propagandists is the goal.

The psychologists say that the human memory is physically laid down in a narrative framework. That, it seems to me, is the basis for the way culture is passed on from one generation to another and probably the way information used to be transmitted between families and communities before humans developed technologies to transmit information. In other words, we learn what is important about how society is ordered through the stories we are told.

So exactly what is a narrative? Well, it's a story. That is, it is a set of characters who undergo a series of events, and the events are connected through the means of cause-and-effect. Narratives fit into an overall pattern of beginning, middle and end, and each of those categories has different characteristics and different purposes. I speculate that the human capacity to think in narrative may be the origin of the human ability to recognize time. (The discipline of General Semantics calls this Time Binding.)

The difference between history and a fable is that when one is telling history the details of the events are verified by sources other than just trust in the veracity, memory and accuracy of the story-teller. The tales told by minstrels when they passed from one community to another were generally dependent on the memory of the minstrel. Minstrels seem to have developed poetic techniques as memory aids so that they could remember the details well enough so that when they told the same tale several times, they actually did tell roughly the same story. Remember those poetic techniques. They were methods of using quirks of the brain to better remember details.

Those same narrative techniques that transmit culture also transmit propaganda. The two American business disciplines most closely associated with creating propaganda are Public Relations and Advertising. Both say to the public that they don't change anything, and yet they both sell their services to many businesses and individuals who are investing good money in what they do with the intent of making a profit. Is it reasonable to believe that those businesses exist but do nothing effective? Nope.

I wouldn't dismiss Dredd's description of modern America as a culture that has lost contact with reality. His proposal regarding how it might have happened is missing only a good description of who the culprits who did it are. The social mechanics are certainly in place, and the evidence for the sanity of American culture is weak at best.

Max Blumenthal's description of a secular narrative built up by Obama in order to win the election as President and now dashed in the chaos of the health care reform legislation in the Senate looks like a good explanation for the mass depression currently being felt by disappointed liberals and progressives.

Anyway, these are my current thoughts on the subject.