The Peristaltic Testator

I don't feel like thinking too hard today, so instead I'll make and defend a simple observation: Today's conservative politicians rely overly-much on visceral topics instead of intellectual arguments in order to attract the undying support of those who hold those emotional trip wires tautly. In other words, modern conservative activists and many of the elected representatives that respond to them have developed a vocabulary of dog-whistle scare tactics to simultaneously frighten their base and thus shore up support by promising to, if elected, curb the scary and icky.

( Ooga booga! Scary ahead! )

X-Posted to talk_politics.

I recently tripped on yet another rhetorical caltrop in an online discussion thread, a seemingly off-handed observation that sought to quiet the Sturm und Drang of yet another whiner (this whiner being myself); it was the notion that "advertising has . . . been the fuel for art and entertainment for decades, if not centuries." And while yes, this is technically true, there are reasons—some worth considering, others so powerful that not considering them puts people at peril—obviating the seeming simplicity of this observation.

In a nutshell, I am here proposing that there are good reasons to create ad-free multi-media space, and that those reasons have to do with the negative and deforming effect of advertising itself. This has been a hobby horse of mine for some time, and I thought it might be interesting to introduce this concept with those who might not have considered these issues before. ( So, riders, saddle up! )

X-Posted to talk_politics.

Just a bit ago, badlydrawnjeff brought up priming, the concept that preparing people can affect perceptions, especially of ambiguous or even non-sense material. Fair enough, that.

I think we should, however, pursue this concept just a bit farther. Consider the following graphic:



Just about everyone who took intro courses in psychology knows this is the chief image used in the famous Asch conformity experiments. In a nutshell, if you want a significant number of people to say that the line in the left-most box is the same length as lines A or B in the right-most box, all you have to do is have four people agree that this is the case. It doesn't matter that C is clearly of equal length; a significant amount of social persuasion will make a significant number of people conform.

The Asch study simply had a single study participant in a study group of 5 to 7 other people, all confederates in on the study, confederates told to give either right or wrong answers. When the single non-confederate was asked to answer which line was the same after the confederates all agreed on the wrong answer, 41% of them would agree with the wrong answer.

41% would say something just about everyone could see wasn't true.

With a little help from our friend technology, the Asch results ( become clearer, but a tad scarier. )

X-posted to talk_politics.

It looks like AdBusters planned to protest Wall Street like an American Arab Spring, but no one really showed up.

Back in July, Adbusters began promoting a move to occupy Wall Street in protest of the rampant corruption, market manipulation and out of control greed that is destroying our nation today.

Adbusters was hoping for a turnout of some 20,000 angry Americans who would occupy Wall Street for months.

Unfortunately, it appears that the number was less than 1/20th of their goal, or less than 1,000 activists, according to AFP.

I do agree about some of their anger. No, I do not support the so-called "free speech zones". As the article noted, "It is not free speech if you have to get permission to speak, plain and simple."

But I do have to question the validity of their entire enterprise. After all, yes, Wall St. did fuck things up on a grand scale, but exactly how many lost lives can be blamed on this enormous cock-up? Allow me to elucidate: I lost my bank, Washington Mutual, in the cluster-fuck; but did I suffer anything other than irritation? Not at all. Even though The Wife and I had quite a bit in that bank to lose, thanks to the FDIC we lost not a penny. Sorry, but the Wall St. shenanigans simply do not compare to the torture squads and corrupt police tactics in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, et cetera ad infinitum ad nauseum.

( In reading the article, though. . . . )

Here's a video. You've probably seen it already.

I tripped across it some time ago and dismissed it as, well, wrong. When you base your criticisms on elements that are factually inaccurate, you fail. It's as simple as that. Sadly, last night I caught up a bit with my podcast list and heard kmo chatting with Jim Kunstler about the current failings our economy is suffering, and heard once again that video, now spliced as audio into the middle of the podcast. I think Mr. Kunstler understands far better than most why that video is factually inaccurate, but he chose not to address the inconsistencies and instead shared a hearty chuckle.

But understanding the video's failings proves key, for me, to understanding our economy's failings well enough to even attempt thinking about ways to improve things for the future. ( To the failings! )

NPR, you've done it again.

Just this morning, Morning Edition ran two stories back to back. The first examined Democrats in the electoral cross hairs because the President wants to roll let Bush's tax cut expire only for the richest payers:

A full-blown congressional debate on the expiring 2001 and 2003 tax cuts is expected this fall, but some lawmakers have already weighed in on the most controversial issue: whether it makes sense, at a time of huge budget deficits, to extend those tax cuts for household income that exceeds $250,000.

Excuse me, "makes sense"? Here we are facing an unprecedented deficit, a crushing and growing debt, and turning down revenue from the only Americans who can afford it doesn't make sense?!? Oh, and just to top off the craptastic reporting with a cherry and a heaping dollop of Fuck You, they follow that bit of pandering treacle by adding up exactly how much in taxes a wealthy couple spends. "Milkove is one of those people who carefully tracks just about every dollar spent, so we're able to get a good picture of how much sales tax they pay in a year." Well, la-de-fucking-da. Then the story leaves the yuppies for a moment to get a quote from one of those think tank flunkies, this one from something called The Tax Foundation:

"People get very frustrated at taxes that are relatively small compared to big taxes," says Gerald Prante, an economist at the Tax Foundation, a Washington-based tax-tracking think tank.

"I mean, if you look at this list," he says, looking at the tax tally that Milkove came up with, "everything is chump change compared to the federal income tax.

I decided after something happened to look into this foundation. Look what I found on their "About Us" page:

The year was 1937, the heart of the Great Depression. During the previous decade, first under Herbert Hoover, then under Franklin Roosevelt, federal spending had climbed 170 percent; over the previous five years internal revenue collections had risen 198 percent.

Concerned about the effect such expansion might have on private sector growth, a small group of business executives gathered in New York City to discuss how they could monitor fiscal activities at all levels of government and convey the information to the general public. They decided to launch an organization which, through research and analysis, could inform and educate Americans using objective, reliable data on government finance.

In the subsequent seven decades, the Tax Foundation has been a national leader in promoting a sense of "tax consciousness" in the public.

(Yeah, I emphasized.)

On the surface, this dissemination of "tax consciousness" seems laudable, right? Who could argue about that? Ah, but let's remember what happens when the news is too one-sided. If the only news about taxes comes from those with a direct financial interest in lower taxes, no one gets the whole story. Furthermore, this kind of foundation is one of those whose funding could fuel itself. The more they prove able to lower taxes through "education," the more they will undoubtedly receive from people who, well, saved when taxes were lowered.

I digress, though. What was it that prompted my trip into Rage Town? After these stories, two of those "enhanced sponsorships" popped up near the 6:30 mark, just before the 5 minute national and local news recaps. One (IIRC) was for Progressive Insurance . . . and the other . . . (drum roll, please) . . . was for The Tax Foundation!!!* Here, they described themselves as a group dedicated to lowering the size of government.

Motherfuckers. No, not you, Tax Foundation. You're only doing what everyone would expect from a scorpion. It's your nature, after all, to lie, lie, lie. I'm looking right at the turtle carrying you across this pond, those Nice Polite Republicans who have hijacked what used to be Public Radio.

Hey, NPR: Somewhere in your reporting, why don't you mention that income taxes today are lower than they have been in eighty years?!? Really. And don't just take my word for it. Look it up. It used to be that the top tax rate was 91%. I remember those times. They were pretty okay. Now, there's debate in raising the top tax to less than half of its historic high, and people can only talk on the radio about how high taxes are? How about a little historical perspective?

For shame. Really, for shame. NPR could report on taxes fairly. Their Planet Money thing noted that most people in Denmark believed taxes are a good thing. Don't bother following the link to the podcast, though. Only the first minute seems to be there. I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose. It seems the entire NPR agency is bent on squelching any data that would support increased taxes, as per apparent marching orders from their supporters like The Tax Foundation and their Koch overlords.

Haven't heard about the Koch brothers, have you? Well, do some reading. That Charles especially has his paws in everything, including NPR and PBS. In fact, quoted in the article is a man who knows the brothers Koch personally, a Bruce Bartlett, an economist . . . who has been featured on Planet Money. More and more, my letter to Adam Davidson reveals not how much he needs to learn about finance and monetary policy, but how much he knows about these topics, but is probably paid to obfuscate them.

I am simultaneously enraged and deflated. Enraged, because of the obvious shenanigans someone is playing at NPR headquarters. Deflated, because I feel I can do nothing about it. I am watching fascism in its literal form, and know that crying out about it, if only to warn others, will do nothing. It's like watching an oncoming train while tied to the tracks.

No, that's not it. More accurately, it's like watching a beautiful house burn, and noting that a group dressed as firefighters are squirting the flames with a hose charged with gasoline. NPR is part of that process, but instead of delivering the propellant through a hose, they are merely part of the gasoline bucket brigade. They don't fuel the fire as much as Fox and others, since they aren't heard by nearly as many and their spin isn't nearly as obvious; but fuel the fire of lies they do.

I can't do this anymore. I can't in good conscious give money to an organization seemingly bent not only on infusing commercial advertising into supposedly public radio, but furthermore does so while being nakedly brazen about the editorial control this advertising has on its news content. This has to stop, but I fear the edifice of our constitutional democracy will burn beyond recognition before it does.

*Oops. It was another group, not The Tax Foundation, but still one whose motives I would question. See addenda after the cut for more details, or this post for even more. Even though I got the name of the organization wrong, I kept the Tax Foundation rant in simply because both organizations, I'm quite sure, exist for the same reason. There are many different subspecies of scorpion.

( This is turning out to be an ongoing investigation. Click here for continuing updates! )

Unhappily for us all, we are surrounded by corporate accomplices willing to influence our hearts and minds. I gave you a taste of this in Part II. In at least three of the four examples I provided we find a strong fiduciary incentive to warrant the noted shenanigans, obvious reasons why the participants would go to such misinformation extremes. Toyota wanted to squelch as much of the criticism of its cars as it could. The Canadian recording industry stands to gain millions, perhaps billions, if it can in the future prevent even fair use infringements on its copyrights. Never mind the ideological victory it would prove; dismantling the social safety net might prove an enormous boon to private health care providers simply by impeding government efforts to reduce the current cost of health care (which is, compared to the rest of the world, a tad expensive).

In Part I, I said early on that I wanted to focus primarily on how this swarm swatting, this manipulation of the crowd for fun and/or profit, deflects from our society's ability to make rational decisions regarding the economy. I'll stick to that aspect of society not to simply discount other, perhaps more pressing avenues of public controversy, but because the economy has, as bleaknemesis notes, a relatively weak moral component. Struck by Part I of this series, he said two weeks ago in an email:

I am thinking though that the ox situation and your own rent adjustment story may only work under certain conditions to validate the crowd wisdom and that under other conditions a less than wise outcome may occur. For this I am thinking of Nazi Germany or segregationist South US. Now I am aware that I might be  trying to impose our current moral standards on the past which may not be fair. Actually as I was writing this and reading it over it occurred to me that maybe the reason the ox story works as an example for crowd wisdom is that there is no moral component to the weight guessing. Kind of the same with the rent story for the most part.

Mr. Nemesis, from all the reading I've done on this topic, you are absolutely correct on all points. Furthermore, you also mentioned a book I had either never heard of (or, more likely had forgotten about), James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. I got the book from the library, and oh, boy, am I glad I did. Along with Steven Johnson's Emergence (which I've gushed about before), Wisdom proves one of the best synopses of crowd wisdom I've ever read. In fact, in the end notes Surowiecki mentions Emergence and notes how his direction with Wisdom differed from Johnson's:

There are obvious resonances between Johnson's book and my own, although in his model local influence is important and generally beneficial, while I see independence as essential and see influence as, on the whole, inimical to good cognitive judgments. On the other hand, local influence is clearly a good thing when it comes to coordination problems. More to the point, Emergence is only tangentially concerned with decision making, and is more interested in, as the title suggests, self-organization and the emergence of order.

(James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, Doubleday, 2004, p. 282.)

( We should discuss what he means by independence. )

I have for several weeks now been contemplating subjects, as the phrase goes, way above my pay grade, specifically why today's economic woes might be far more severe than even a press known for glorying in maim and gore is willing to investigate. It's been difficult, to say the least. There is so much I simply don't know. Hey, don't believe me? Go back to an old entry, Understanding the Economic Clusterfuck, and read the new prefixed addendum and disclaimer I recently added:

Disclaimer, June 16, 2010: Much of the information you read below is wrong. I wrote this before I read ellenbrown's Web of Debt. Therefore, I missed details extremely important to the thrust of this post.

For example, below I state that interest is created through loans. This is incorrect. The money issued at the time the loan is finalized is the money actually created. Money is literally loaned into existence by banks, not printed by the Federal Government as everyone seems to assume.

I'm sure I'll post an update soon. For now, though, I intend to leave the post below intact. It will give me a chance to review what I've learned over the years by showing me what I believed in the past to be true. I apologize for the mis-information.

With that kind of track record, I should just quit while I'm far, far, far behind. Ah, but that's the danger of learning new stuff and wanting to share it. Try as I may to make declarations of firm substance and indisputable truth, I find myself constantly learning something else that's new to me and needing to correct the record. Yes, if I just shut up and said nothing I would say nothing wrong. But if I were that kind of person, I wouldn't be much of a blogger, now would I?

For that reason, I have decided to lay as much as I have on the table and see what newly acquired items of factual interest in the future obviates the table's heap into a steaming pile of poo. Let's start with the reason I think markets work -- ( Sir Francis Galton. )

I'd like to introduce everyone to David Brock, author of Blinded by the Right and The Republican Noise Machine. In Blinded, he introduces himself as a progressive and idealistic young lad who had a rude awakening during his college days in Berkeley. He went to cover Jeane Kirkpatrick's speech to the college, and was deeply disturbed when protesters interrupted her until she was forced to leave the stage:

The scene shook me deeply: Was the harassment of an unpopular speaker the legacy of the Berkeley-campus Free Speech Movement, when students demanded the right to canvass for any and all political causes on the campus's Sproul Plaza? Wasn't free speech a liberal value? How, I wondered, could this thought police call itself liberal?. . . . The few outspoken conservatives on the faculty, and the Reagan regents, raised their voices in support of Kirkpatrick's free speech rights. The liberals seemed to me to be defending censorship.

(David Brock, Blinded by the Right, Three Rivers Press, 2002, p. 4.)

This and other incidents burned in his mind, Brock turned from liberal and progressive issues and became a cheerleader for the Other Side. ( He rose in prominence, changing the course of American history as he ascended. )

The industry has always tried to make Americans think that government-run systems are the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, that if you even consider that, you're heading down on the slippery slope towards socialism. So they have used scare tactics for years and years and years, to keep that from happening. If there were a broader program like our Medicare program, it could potentially reduce the profits of these big companies. So that is their biggest concern.

That's a quote from Wendell Potter interviewed by Bill Moyer. Wendell worked as an executive at Cigna, a big health care insurance company. He was assigned to discredit Michael Moore's Sicko, a movie he said "hit the nail on the head." Why? "They (insurer executives) were afraid that people would believe Michael Moore." Wendell started to see problems in the way his company did business, and has decided to join the push towards national coverage by exposing the industry shenanigans.

Why?

One of the books I read as I was trying to make up my mind here was President Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage."

And in the forward, Robert Kennedy said that one of the president's, one of his favorite quotes was a Dante quote that, "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain a neutrality." And when I read that, I said, "Oh, jeez, I-- you know. I'm headed for that hottest place in hell, unless I say something." (Emphasis mine.)

Watch or read the entire interview. Then grab a pitchfork. Grab a torch. Listen for and join the nearest mob.

I hope it's time.