Tuesday, October 2, 2012


VOTER STUPIDITY - THE GOOD OLD STANDBY FANTASY
   
             by Neville Raymond


Let me count the ways in which they stick it to the voter.

First they engage in this fantastic charade that the fate of presidents and the destiny of free nations hangs upon a phantom species called the 'swing voter' - that is, a voter who is a victim of the paralysis of analysis and suffers from a difficulty of Hamlet-like proportions in making up his mind.  

Then they raise tampering with computerized voting into an art form, quietly using GOP operatives to flip the official vote count in order to put unpopular candidates into office.

Then they make-believe that there is such a thing as voter fraud and go around putting up all kinds of niggling roadblocks in the path of people exercising their democratic right to vote.

And when all else fails, there is this fantasy called Voter Stupidity.   
And that is the cruelest pretense of all - the pretense that the voter is just too downright dumb to make any intelligent choices.

Enter the Howard Stern gang to make the case for the blockhead American voter. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeJbOU4nmHQ 

I don't know if Howard Stern was crass enough to come up with this all on his own.  
Or if some well-funded dollar right wing think tank put him up to it.  
But there he is, peddling the brazen lie that the American voter does not know his rear orifice from a hole in the ground.  

And how does the Schlock Jock do it?  
By supposedly having one of his lapdogs run around collecting a series of gaffes and blunders from the proverbial man on the street.  

Is any of this for real?
For all I know, Stern could have hired actors to play the role of herculean know-nothings.  
Or his interviewer could gone through 99 voters who were relatively well-informed, or at least quite angrily articulate and crystal-clear about kitchen-table issues, in order to find that one special case who shows off to the greatest effect the efficacy of an education system that is determined to dumb down the American electorate.  
Nobody can say for sure.     

But here’s something we can be 100% sure about.
Voters by and large are not a stupid group.  
Right-wing oligarchs can pray and wish all day long that that were not true.  
It would certainly save them a heap of time and trouble.  

Come to think of it, it would save them a monumental bundle of money.  
They wouldn’t have to sink millions of millions of untraceable dollars trying to talk voters out of their unerring gut instincts. 

They wouldn’t have to mount thousands of slanted political ads trying to distort and befuddle the mind of voters until they no longer know which end is up and wind up voting against their own best interests. 

They wouldn’t have to put on an elaborate media show to get the voter to believe that he has a choice between two candidates who, to one degree or another, faithfully hew to a party line which is to strip  99% of Americans of their jobs, their homes, their right to affordable health care, a college education for their kids and a decent life, in order to boost welfare payments to a corporate state that enables the fortunate 1% to just keep on buying up more and more of the world.

No, the problem is not that the voter is stupid. 
It is that the voter is too smart for his own good.  
It is that he knows what he wants all too well.  

He knows that he wants to restore America's manufacturing base.  
He knows that he wants collective bargaining for workers.  
He knows that he wants to put the regulatory cop back on the Wall Street beat.  
He knows that he wants to stop the corruption of politics by big money. 
He knows that he doesn’t want to be bankrupted by the cost of health care and college tuition for his kids. 
He knows that he wants women to have control of their bodies.  
He knows...he knows....he knows.....

But the whole political establishment pretty much conspires against him.
The power structure engages in a massive collusion to cheat him out of what he knows he wants. 
If the truth were not so firmly embedded in the heads of American voters, the GOP spinmeisters wouldn’t have to turn on their water cannons to flood the airwaves with their lies in a vain attempt to dislodge the truths that most voters hold self-evident and sweep them down an Orwellian memory hole.  

That is why you have a Romney pollster confessing in a flash of candor, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”  
That is why you have GOP operatives working behind the scenes to flip the vote numbers.  
That is why they have to trump up a non-issue like voter fraud to suppress the vote.

And that is why, when all else fails, they resort to the unkindest cut of all. 
They pretend that the voter is unfit to vote, not because he lacks an ID, but because he lacks an IQ.


Sunday, February 26, 2012



STALLED REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE

by Neville Raymond
We’ve all been there. Our blood pressure rising. Our pulse beating hard. Our tempers flaring. Wedged in by lines of cars, in front, in back, on either side. Our daily hopes, dreams, goals put on hold as we inch along by fits and starts to our destination.

Have you noticed how many of us cope with this? Better still, have you noticed how we are told to cope? What do the experts advise us to do, as our 100 mph cars sit stalled in 1 mph traffic, and our nervous systems, designed to drive in an easy-going state of calm alertness, run at full tilt on frustration, irritation, impatience, and rage?
Get comfy. Make use of that adjustable lumbar support in the driver’s seat.
Breathe slowly, deeply, inhaling and exhaling from the diaphragm.
Put on soothing piece of classic music. Be transported by the latest audio book.
 
 Well, I don’t know about you, but these new-age coping gems leave me cold in a traffic jam. “Whenever you start cursing the traffic,” says one pop psychologist, the author of Urban Mindfulness, “remember you are the traffic. You have to recognize the situation is everybody’s fault – and nobody’s fault.”

Truth is, I have to do no such thing. The traffic is not my fault – my fault is that I have to be some place in a city with a monumentally irrational and absurd system of public transportation. 

If we are going to talk fault, why don’t we start with those criminal conspirators who hijacked our national transportation policy from under us in the mid-1930s and 1940s and plotted behind our backs to buy out our then state-of-the-art system of mass transit in city after city (along with the priceless rights of way that went with it) and toss it on the junk heap? 

Am I not totally within my rights to curse a sick, ineffectual and toxically wasteful system of crony capitalism that is happy to waste billions of man-hours and billions of gallons of fuel, decade after decade after decade, as long as it adds billions of dollars to the corporate bottom-line?

After all, who doesn't know by now that mass transit did not die a natural death? It was ambushed and brutally murdered for financial gain. Big Oil and Big Auto put their heads together and conspired to rip up all the light rail systems that had already been installed in cities like Los Angeles. 

A federal jury convicted them of it in Chicago in 1949. And we are still paying the terrible price. Imagine how we would be zipping along if we had used that incredibly valuable real estate to build up a high-speed mass transit system over the years, instead of allowing General Motors and Standard Oil to reduce us to a nation of vehicular basketcases by fostering our overdependence on the internal combustion engine.

Did the city fathers who rolled over for them give a bug’s whisker about the consequences? 

According to the latest Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, the longer your commute, the greater your risk of recurrent neck or back pain.  Not to mention high cholesterol and obesity. 

Did the city fathers who sold off our common wealth think about what a giant pain in the public back or the neck it would be, if they kowtowed to the interests of corporate America, instead of looking out for millions of their citizens?

Swedish researchers at Umea University found that a daily commute of 45 minutes or more increases the likelihood of divorce by 40%, with the highest risk during the first few years of marriage.  As the greedy oil executives ripped the heart out of mass transit, forcing us to sit in gridlock for the next half century and beyond, did they think about the strain that they would be putting on families – on marital relationships – on all the time that parents never got to spend with their children, because their could not use a swift, dependable form of transport from home to work and back again?

Of course not. They were too busy gloating over their sky-high future profits. Because of the inevitable congestion that built up over the years from smashing the nucleus of what could have turned into a high-tech world-class system of mass transit, idling California drivers waste the most gas of any state – 38 million gallons in one year alone – and put $160 million in the coffers of the oil companies.

And what about the corporate lobbyists who forced Congress to pass trade legislation allowing agribusiness to swamp Mexico with cheap exports of grain.  Maybe you don’t want to spare a dime for a homeless man. But can you spare a thought for how the forces of 'globalization' drove hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers off their land, forcing them to declare bankruptcy and head for parts in North America to survive – and how this flood of immigration brings our freeways to a grinding halt morning, noon and night?

What about how the U.S. national security state’s appetite for tyrannical regimes in Central and South America, and Asia widens the gap between the rich and the poor and savages the livability quotient of countries around the world? Where are all these poor people supposed to go when their countries are sold out from under them? 

Not to worry. Corporate America will gladly hire these immigrants at bargain-basement prices and pack our cities and factories with cheap labor. That way the corporatocracy can drive down our living standards to Third World levels, instead of working to lift up the rest of the world to First World standards.

And finally, what about the runaway capitalism of the U.S. automobile industry. At a time when our highways are clogged to death, what do you see when you switch on your TV? A commercial for another car. A car that has the magnificent backdrop of the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls all to itself, instead of sharing the roads with millions of tried, bored, frustrated and irritable drivers.

So here we are, choking on our own exhausts, unable to budge for all the automobiles that lay siege to our quality of life. And capitalism takes pride in ramming yet one more brand-new spanking model car down our throats with all the latest electronic gizmos! 

Is gridlock the surest sign of capitalism run amok or what? Given that there are too many cars on the road, at what point does it cross our minds that perhaps we should rein in the untrammeled mass marketing of automobiles? Or should the rest of us continue to be resigned to losing another minute, another hour, another week, another year out of our lives so that GM or Chrysler make another buck?

If these culprits don’t turn your stomach – and goad you in turning your car into a rolling command post for economic revolution - don’t bother doing any breathing exercises or listening to audio books. You are probably so brain dead or heart dead that you may as well just lie back and accept your car as your mobile coffin.