Tags: Why Americans Make the Wrong Choices, Corporate controlled Press/Media Propaganda (public relations, PR), Wealth & Power, Incompetent Democratic elites, and Uncooperative Democrats, Luntz, Corporate propagandist, Who is Luntz?, Edward Bernays Father of PR Industry, Thomas Frank "Whats the Matter with Kansas," Republicans Good Liars, Human Healthcare Profits plus 44% last quarter, psychologist Drew Weston, Sam Stein Huffington Post on GOP Propaganda, MSNBC Changing?, Luntz continued: "Ordinarily, calling for a new government program 'to protect consumers' would be extraordinary popular. ,
MUST SEE! Also the Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann two hour comments on President Obama taking on the House Republicans was not listed on the website of Maddow who considered it the most important event by Obama since he became President. Olbermann had it under a deceptive title. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#35153362 Olbermann notes that the corporate Press/Media has virtually ignored what was said this great event including the New York Times! Obama kills the Repubs about saying that the Stimulus package was a rip off and did not work. Yes, the Repubs lied! One of the first thing covered by video. Jim
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I really don't know for sure why Americans makes these life choices, but here are some expert studies and opinions about why we vote against our interests in all aspects of our lives, make life decisions that make us miserable. Democrats don't know how to come together to get the message out in a genuine honest way with all the good things and warts upfront so it is hard to get more of the Independents on their side.
I suspect that is why the Republican won in Massachusetts. Also when voters are ignored as the Dems did until the end, voters resent that immensely. Because I talk to common folks more than most well educated folks, I do know they are intelligent enough to understand when politicians are looking down on them. Keep it Simple and Honest, Stupid!
And the ultimate sin in modern politics is appearing to take the voters for granted.
This is a culture war but it is not simply being driven by differences over abortion, or religion, or patriotism. And it is not simply Red states vs. Blue states any more. It is a war on the entire political culture, on the arrogance of politicians, on their slipperiness and lack of principle, on their endless deal making and compromises.
Republicans are good liars, but Dems are not because they read from a script. That is why everything is scripted by TV producers behind the curtain so the announcers don't say the wrong thing.
I always ask a lot more questions and listen carefully than I do trying to impose my ideas on people I meet in Eugene at the stores, in offices, and even cashiers at stores. Listen to their views and don't interrupt! You will be surprised.
When the Media supported Obama, I knew the same thing was happening as happened when they supported Carter, both inexperienced in the ways of Washington DC. Wealth and Power hoped they would make mistakes and lose the next election after they fix the problems that the corporate Republicans and Supreme Court Justices, SEC, and the Bush Administration Gang of Crooks caused. Not mentioned very often is that the public voted essentially the way they always voted in 2008. Only the new voters, mostly young made the difference. Independents need to change just a little to change the election when the young do not vote. Even in 2008, relatively few voted. Obama promised too much when he knew he could not deliver.
Obama should first try to pass bills that help those who already have insurance and let the Republicans carry on a long filibuster so it would be well publicized. Pre-existing questions and preventing insurance companies from dropping your coverage when you get expensively sick for any minor infraction such as not remembering that you went to treat acne with a doctor. They even have the balls of calling cancer a pre-existing condition even now before it was diagnosed! Humana Heath Insurance company had record profits of 44 percent last quarter!
Propaganda by the corporate Press/Media plays a major role in influencing how we think via Advertising and being selective on news that they repeat over and over no matter how trivia. Comcast has already started changing MSNBC. They are more Right Wing than General Electric's control over NBC/MSNBC.
I had to turn off MSNBC's Ratigan Show which use to be quite good until he has made a major change after being off several weeks to get "trained" for a new time slot where he seemed to attack Obama from the Left too much and thereby distorting the truth. I took him off my record list. The number of guests on MSNBC was reduced so those who speak their mind has decreased.
MUST SEE! Also the Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann two hour comments on President Obama taking on the House Republicans was not listed on the website of Maddow who considered it the most important event by Obama since he became President. Olbermann had it under a deceptive title. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#35153362
Republicans have the advantage of behaving as one or else they lose elections if they spoke the truth about what they want to do. So when Luntz gives them a message to repeat very often by everyone, word for word. Emotional propaganda by-passes our thinking process, but still affects the gut voting of Americans. They understand much more on what is going on than elites think they do.
Read "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays, 1928, the nephew of Freud, because it is only 168 pages, easy to read, and written by the founder of the PR industry here who was born in the late 19th century and died in 1995 while writing another book. He gave us the hardy breakfast using a doctor as the propagandist, Lucky Strike cigarettes to get women to smoke, and consulted with corporations to enhance their message for almost all of the 20th century! His book which Hitler read in prison worked very well to get many Europeans to ignore the murder and imprisonment of at least six million Jews and others in Europe and Eastern Europe.
The White Farmers Alliance in the western United States very effectively got the Roosevelt administration to send the Japanese-Americans who largely immigrated to the USA in the early 1900s to prisons to acquire their farming lands which yielded 90 percent of the truck farming fruits and vegetables in the Western USA.
German and Italian Americans committed many acts of sabotage here while the Japanese-Americans committed none according to the FBI and Naval Intelligence. Even German officers who were prisoners were treated better than Black Americans and Japanese-Americans.
Nine months after he penned a memo laying out the arguments for health care legislation's destruction, Republican message guru Frank Luntz has put together a playbook to help derail financial regulatory reform. In a 17-page memo titled, "The Language of Financial Reform," Luntz urged opponents of reform to frame the final product as filled with bank bailouts, lobbyist loopholes, and additional layers of complicated government bureaucracy.
"If there is one thing we can all agree on, it's that the bad decisions and harmful policies by Washington bureaucrats that in many ways led to the economic crash must never be repeated," Luntz wrote. "This is your critical advantage. Washington's incompetence is the common ground on which you can build support."
Luntz continued: "Ordinarily, calling for a new government program 'to protect consumers' would be extraordinary popular. But these are not ordinary times. The American people are not just saying 'no.' They are saying 'hell no' to more government agencies, more bureaucrats, and more legislation crafted by special interests." ... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/01/frank-luntz-pens-memo-to_n_444332.html
... As Mr Frank "What's the Matter with Kansas," sees it, authenticity has replaced economics as the driving force of modern politics. The authentic politicians are the ones who sound like they are speaking from the gut, not the cerebral cortex. Of course, they might be faking it, but it is no joke to say that in contemporary politics, if you can fake sincerity, you have got it made. ...
For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: "One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious. ...
"Obama's administration made a tremendous mistake by not immediately branding the economic collapse that we had just had as the Republicans' Depression, caused by the Bush administration's ideology of unregulated greed. The result is that now people blame him." ...
In his book The Political Brain, psychologist Drew Westen, an exasperated Democrat, tried to show why the Right often wins the argument even when the Left is confident that it has the facts on its side. ...
And the ultimate sin in modern politics is appearing to take the voters for granted.
This is a culture war but it is not simply being driven by differences over abortion, or religion, or patriotism. And it is not simply Red states vs. Blue states any more. It is a war on the entire political culture, on the arrogance of politicians, on their slipperiness and lack of principle, on their endless deal making and compromises.
[Obama in a rally, he said turn off your TV. MSNBC immediately switched away from Obama instantly and they have been cutting away much more often. Fox Cable turned off Obama as soon as it was apparent that Obama was so superbly effective in destroying all the poll tested by Luntz questions and speeches made by the Republican House members and their wives and children. Here is a quote from the transcript of the Obama/Repub House Question/Answer Session. I switched to C-Span after Obama's speech to see how the Republican House members talked and greeted him after the debate. I was shocked that they behaved just like Democratic audiences where everyone wanted to take his picture with their kids, they smiled a lot, and he even went into the crowd to shake hands with everyone. Only a few were frowning! One of the best comments he made was that by playing hard politics on everything Democrats and Obama do, they are now not able to compromise on anything! Jim]
President Obama Released Republican House Debate Transcript Jan 29, 2010
... So I mean, I think we can score political points on the basis of the fact that we underestimated how severe the job losses were going to be. But those job losses took place before any stimulus, whether it was the ones that you guys have proposed or the ones that we proposed, could have ever taken into effect. Now, that's just the fact, Mike, and I don't think anybody would dispute that. You could not find an economist who would dispute that.
Now, at the same time, as I mentioned, most economists -- Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative -- would say that had it not been for the stimulus package that we passed, things would be much worse. Now, they didn't fill a 7 million hole in the number of people who were unemployed. They probably account for about 2 million, which means we still have 5 million folks in there that we've still got to deal with. That's a lot of people.
The package that we put together at the beginning of the year, the truth is, should have reflected -- and I believe reflected what most of you would say are common sense things. This notion that this was a radical package is just not true. A third of them were tax cuts, and they weren't -- when you say they were "boutique" tax cuts, Mike, 95 percent of working Americans got tax cuts, small businesses got tax cuts, large businesses got help in terms of their depreciation schedules. I mean, it was a pretty conventional list of tax cuts. A third of it was stabilizing state budgets.
There is not a single person in here who, had it not been for what was in the stimulus package, wouldn't be going home to more teachers laid off, more firefighters laid off, more cops laid off. A big chunk of it was unemployment insurance and COBRA, just making sure that people had some floor beneath them, and, by the way, making sure that there was enough money in their pockets that businesses had some customers.
You take those two things out, that accounts for the majority of the stimulus package. Are there people in this room who think that was a bad idea? A portion of it was dealing with the AMT, the alternative minimum tax -- not a proposal of mine; that's not a consequence of my policies that we have a tax system where we keep on putting off a potential tax hike that is embedded in the budget that we have to fix each year. That cost about $70 billion.
And then the last portion of it was infrastructure which, as I said, a lot of you have gone to appear at ribbon-cuttings for the same projects that you voted against.
Now, I say all this not to re-litigate the past, but it's simply to state that the component parts of the Recovery Act are consistent with what many of you say are important things to do -- rebuilding our infrastructure, tax cuts for families and businesses, and making sure that we were providing states and individuals some support when the roof was caving in.
And the notion that I would somehow resist doing something that cost half as much but would produce twice as many jobs -- why would I resist that? I wouldn't. I mean, that's my point, is that -- I am not an ideologue. I'm not. It doesn't make sense if somebody could tell me you could do this cheaper and get increased results that I wouldn't say, great. The problem is, I couldn't find credible economists who would back up the claims that you just made.
Now, we can -- here's what I know going forward, though. I mean, we're talking -- we were talking about the past. We can talk about this going forward. I have looked at every idea out there in terms of accelerating job growth to match the economic growth that's already taken place. The jobs credit that I'm discussing right now is one that a lot of people think would be the most cost-effective way for encouraging people to pick up their hiring.
There may be other ideas that you guys have; I am happy to look at them and I'm happy to embrace them. I suspect I will embrace some of them. Some of them I've already embraced.
But the question I think we're going to have to ask ourselves is, as we move forward, are we going to be examining each of these issues based on what's good for the country, what the evidence tells us, or are we going to be trying to position ourselves so that come November we're able to say, "The other party, it's their fault." If we take the latter approach then we're probably not going to get much agreement. If we take the former, I suspect there's going to be a lot of overlap. All right? ... http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-gop-house-issues-conference
