Shameless Propaganda

Greetings good citizen,

There’s a lot of primal screams and finger pointing going on over Glen Beck’s Lincoln Memorial event. It seems a whole 2,500 ‘Tea Partiers’ attended…

With ‘grassroots’ like that it’s no wonder they regularly win elections…

So what are we looking at, really? (Why are they showing us this?)

Even the ‘zombies’ that attended know they’re being painted as ‘mindless morons’.

Propaganda is intended to work on a number of levels.

What does the ‘low turnout’ tell us? That those who made the trip were ‘party operatives’, following orders. (Hell, most of them were probably having their expenses picked up by corporate!)

The level of publicity this ‘faux’ movement enjoys also tells us it is a ‘front’, a ‘distraction’.

While the main focus comes from one of the founders/backers of the…er, ‘movement’, the rest of the MSM obligingly follows along, making us wonder if there isn’t a serious deficiency in the people who decide what is and isn’t ‘newsworthy’.

(Alas! We know that they too are simply ‘following orders’…)

Which leads us to the disturbing issue of when a ‘grassroots movement’ stops being ‘populist’? Would the Tea Partiers even exist without their corporate parent(s)?

From the looks of the much publicized (albeit lightly attended) ‘rally’, I don’t think so.

What can we take away from this?

‘They’ want you to think there is a groundswell of outrage attacking ‘government overreach’.

What do conservatives ‘fear’ most?

Conservatives fear higher taxes and closer scrutiny/more government regulation.

Um, 2,500 people is hardly a ‘groundswell’…

Funny how ‘anti-tax’ California has become the poster child for ‘failed government’.

Which is to say those who were originally outraged over ‘out of control’ government spending sort of got a wake up call when the local firehouse was left unattended every other day.

Bear with me as we shift mental gears here from ‘shameless propaganda’ to ‘economic reality check’

The latest ‘outrage’ to come under assault by conservative forces is the ‘comparatively generous’ benefits paid to public sector employees.

Naturally, this is the Union’s fault.

Employers would keep prices ‘in check’ by keeping wages, er, ‘stable’…

Well, that’s the theory anyway. When the guy down the street starts raking it in ‘hand over fist’ all bets are off!

Wouldn’t do to be left in the dust! What’s the point of being rich if you can’t get richer?

Naturally, ‘somebody’s’ going to have to ‘pay’ for that…

Yeah, they’re looking at you…

But once again I digress…

What should be lost on no one is the thirty years of ‘wage stagnation’ the laboring class/paycheck peasants have suffered.

This is why the comparatively modest gains made by the public sector appear ‘outrageous’.

It is NOT a case of the public sector being ‘overpaid’ as much as the private sector has been severely ‘underpaid’…and who is responsible for that?

The very same people that brought you the “Party of No!”

NO taxes, NO regulations (NO raises and NO job security…worse, thanks to their ‘anti-tax’ bias, there’s NO-body watching your back anymore either!)

But you were down with that, right?

That’s why there were hundreds of thousands of people at the heavily advertised ‘Tea Party’ event…NOT.

But, naturally, this isn’t the half of it when it comes to ‘propaganda’…

How do you feel good citizen when, after spending trillions (that YOU are on the hook for) to ‘bail out’ the banking sector from their own cupidity, the rest of the economy is still a disaster looking for a place to happen.

We just passed the three-year mark of the event that brought the housing market to its knees. Flipper’s default on the mortgages he couldn’t find suckers to rent/take off his hands for double what he paid. This caused all MBS to become ‘suspect’, crashing the market virtually overnight…

This also (amazingly enough) caused a 4 point drop in GDP, bringing to the fore the issue of what, precisely, the GDP tells us. Obviously not what we want to know…

So, after nearly a year and a half of ‘Green Shoots’ and a truly amazing (albeit nonsensical) ‘rally’ in the stock markets, we are once again being told that the rising tide won’t lift all boats…like the last two ‘jobless recoveries.’

If you haven’t been keeping track, this is the third jobless recovery…and you understand that without jobs THERE IS NO RECOVERY!

Why has the ‘stimulus’ done zero good (unless you work for a paving contractor and even then…a few people with money in their pockets does not an economy make.

What’s wrong with this picture good citizen?

You don’t suppose we are getting FUCKED by globalization?

What you need is an accurate picture of what’s going down.

The (flaming) asshole who owns a particular segment of the market for a given product decides to move production to a low wage nation because that is what his competitors are doing.

He fires everyone that worked for him here the second his new facility is up to speed…but he doesn’t drop his prices, not here anyway…people are already used to paying what he was charging. He uses this additional profit to subsidize the penetration of new markets…

Anyway, you no longer have a job, you can still buy the product and what you notice is the price remains the same…it doesn’t go up but it doesn’t go down either.

So you have to take a ‘new’ job…but guess what? The new job doesn’t pay what the old job did so you have to, er, ‘adjust’ your spending accordingly.

Since the Eighties, you’ve been forced to repeat this process several times, losing ground each time.

If you’ve been lucky enough to secure employment (again.)

What you DON’T see is the huge ‘shrinkage’ in overall payrolls (mostly because this ‘slack’ has been taken up by ‘bonuses’ in the financial sector.)

Some of these ‘slackers’ are pulling down 10 digit bonus checks…and we aren’t including ‘cents’ here!

Does anyone still wonder why the economy is sucking pond water?

What should blow all of your minds is two years down-range and the 2009 ‘bonus pool’ was LARGER than the 2007 pool was!

How the HELL did they manage that?

Worse, everybody and their Uncle was being foreclosed upon…so where did the money come from?

It, like so many other things in our propagandized info-sphere, remains a ‘mystery’…

Is the sad truth here as simple as ‘because they could?’

So, how will the housing market ‘recover’ if the pool of qualified buyers continues to shrink?

You don’t dare pay too much for a home because the odds of ever seeing the money again are diminishing rapidly…and who’s ‘the greater fool’ now?

Same applies to our outrageously over-valued ‘equities market’. What will happen to ‘social cohesion’ when everybody learns they’ve been played for ‘chumps’?

When you have traders pulling down billion dollar bonus checks, you can see how investment involves ‘risk’…

Where do you think your money went?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner