Manipulation

During this insane election cycle I have been thinking about how easily people can be manipulated.  Hitler learned that fact over 70 years ago and it is still very effective.

It isn't just politics.  Religious leaders have been doing it since religion first became part of human equation.  Logic, common sense, or facts never enter into the thinking of the general populace.  It saddens me that in my 85 years on earth I see no improvement.  In many ways, we have regressed.  History should teach us why some things work and some things don't.  But history's lessons, too, are ignored. 

The common belief is that the House will be lost by the Democrats in the mid-term elections.  I am constantly bewildered by how the general public and be so easily mislead by lies and disinformation.  Is it a right-brain, left-brain thing?  

Some people just don't want to think for themselves.   If the Pope says the world is flat, they accept his statement without question.  If a fundamentalist preacher claims that anything that is fun is a sin, people believe him.  If a Jehovah's Witness claims that the Bible says that a blood transfusion is a sin they will refuse one, even though it might cause their death.  I simply don't understand why they accept the words of a book written by ignorant men thousands of years ago over modern scientific facts.  Do they want to be duped?  When words are taken out of context, or out of the time frame in which they were written, or without taking into account the lack of knowledge of the time period,  I cannot fathom  why individuals are so blindly accepting.

Being easily led to accept a fact when still children, the pattern is set.  That makes it so simple  for people like Rush Limbaugh,  Glenn Beck,  Bill O'Reilly,  Sarah Palin, and others to convince them that black is white, Obama is a Muslim, and so many outright lies and distortions that spew from their deceitful mouths.  Their followers never question.  Is it because they were taught to never question their elders or their religious leaders?  Or are they genetically disposed to believe in a right leaning way?  Are some people predisposed to think with their emotions instead of their brains?  I wish someone could clarify this for me.  Not only do they accept some patently idiotic statements, but many of the things they accept as dogma are clearly against their own best interest.

Along these lines Frank Rich wrote an Op-ed piece published in the NYT.   Following are some excerpts:

What Happened to Change We Can Believe In?

By FRANK RICH

PRESIDENT Obama, the Rodney Dangerfield of 2010, gets no respect for averting another Great Depression, for saving 3.3 million jobs with stimulus spending, or for salvaging GM and Chrysler from the junkyard. And none of these good deeds, no matter how substantial, will go unpunished if the projected Democratic bloodbath materializes on Election Day. Some are even going unremembered. For Obama, the ultimate indignity is the Times/CBS News poll in September showing that only 8 percent of Americans know that he gave 95 percent of American taxpayers a tax cut.


The reasons for his failure to reap credit for any economic accomplishments are a catechism by now: the dark cloud cast by undiminished unemployment, the relentless disinformation campaign of his political opponents, and the White House’s surprising ineptitude at selling its own achievements. But the most relentless drag on a chief executive who promised change we can believe in is even more ominous. It’s the country’s fatalistic sense that the stacked economic order that gave us the Great Recession remains not just in place but more entrenched and powerful than ever.


No matter how much Obama talks about his “tough” new financial regulatory reforms or offers rote condemnations of Wall Street greed, few believe there’s been real change. That’s not just because so many have lost their jobs, their savings and their homes. It’s also because so many know that the loftiest perpetrators of this national devastation got get-out-of-jail-free cards, that too-big-to-fail banks have grown bigger and that the rich are still the only Americans getting richer.


Clearly, financial institutions have learned nothing in the few years since their contempt for fiscal and legal niceties led them to peddle these predatory mortgages (and the reckless financial “products” concocted from them) in the first place. And why should they have learned anything? They’ve often been rewarded, not punished, for bad behavior.

Asked in “Inside Job” why there’s been no systematic investigation of the 2008 crash, Roubini answers: “Because then you’d find the culprits.” With the aid of the “Manhattan Madam” (and current stunt New York gubernatorial candidate) Kristin Davis, the film also asks why federal prosecutors who were “perfectly happy to use Eliot Spitzer’s personal vices to force him to resign in 2008” have not used rampant sex-and-drug trade on Wall Street as a tool for flipping witnesses to pursue the culprits behind the financial crimes that devastated the nation. 

The Obama administration seems not to have a prosecutorial gene. It’s shy about calling a fraud a fraud when it occurs in high finance.  

 In our new banking scandal, as in those before it, attorneys general in the states, where many pension funds were decimated by Wall Street Ponzi schemes, are pursuing the crimes Washington has not. The largest bill of reparations paid out by Bank of America for Countrywide’s deceptive mortgage practices — $8.4 billion — was to settle a suit by 11 state attorneys general on the warpath. 

Since Obama has neither aggressively pursued the crash’s con men nor compellingly explained how they gamed the system, he sometimes looks as if he’s fronting for the industry even if he’s not.

Voters are not only failing to give the White House credit for its economic successes but finding it guilty of transgressions it didn’t commit. The opposition is more than happy to pump up that confusion. When Mitch McConnell appeared on ABC’s “This Week” last month, he typically railed against the “extreme” government of “the last year and a half,” citing its takeover of banks as his first example. That this was utter fiction — the takeover took place two years ago, before Obama was president, with McConnell voting for it — went unchallenged by his questioner, Christiane Amanpour, and probably by many viewers inured to this big lie.

 

The real tragedy here, though, is not whatever happens in midterm elections. It’s the long-term prognosis for America. The obscene income inequality bequeathed by the three-decade rise of the financial industry has societal consequences graver than even the fundamental economic unfairness. When we reward financial engineers infinitely more than actual engineers, we “lure our most talented graduates to the largely unproductive chase” for Wall Street riches, as the economist Robert H. Frank wrote in The Times last weekend. Worse, Frank added, the continued squeeze on the middle class leads to a wholesale decline in the quality of American life — from more bankruptcy filings and divorces to a collapse in public services, whether road repair or education, that taxpayers will no longer support. 

Even as the G.O.P. benefits from unlimited corporate campaign money, it’s pulling off the remarkable feat of persuading a large swath of anxious voters that it will lead a populist charge against the rulers of our economic pyramid — the banks, energy companies, insurance giants and other special interests underwriting its own candidates. Should those forces prevail, an America that still hasn’t remotely recovered from the worst hard times in 70 years will end up handing over even more me mpower to those who greased the skids. 

We can blauch of this turn of events on the deep pockets of oil billionaires like the Koch brothers and on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which freed corporations to try to buy any election they choose. But the Obama White House is hardly innocent. Its failure to hold the bust’s malefactors accountable has helped turn what should have been a clear-cut choice on Nov. 2 into a blurry contest between the party of big corporations and the party of business as usual. 

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you want to read the entire editorial click on the link.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/opinion/24rich.html?ref=frankrich