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Brazen Contempt for the Intelligence of the Electorate: An Open Letter to Barack Obama
To: Barack Obama
We all want respect from our fellow man--i.e., we demand it as a right. Yet, respect is a two-way street. Correct? That is, when elected officials dissemble or deceive those who seek honest answers to questions directly affecting the lives of the rank-and-file in America, then those elected officials have, essentially, gone beyond incivility and demonstrated contempt for the intelligence of Americans.
We, the People, no longer feed at the corporate media disinformation trough, i.e., we have reliable, web news resources with substantiated reports and disclosures. For example, OUR news resources:
1) are NOT beholden to AIPAC and neo-Zionists, who wantonly and arrogantly attack the civilian population in Gaza for twenty-two days, with American tax-payer subsidies--OUR dollars--engaging in what amounts to crimes against humanity.
2) are NOT oblivious to the fact that the EFCA Bill will emerge stillborn, having been eviscerated by K Street largesse, i.e., DC legislators having run for political cover when they formerly endorsed a bill which would empower American labor.
3) are NOT unaware of the fact that economists like Nobel-Laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, and Dr. Michael Hudson, e.g., have been purposely disallowed MATERIAL, MEANINGFUL ACCESS to the process of planning and recovery of America's economy. Their protocols prescind from the neo-liberal agenda of playing kowtow to Wall Street and corporate and finance industry interests and prerogatives: hence their conspicuous absence. And, hence, the fact that the remedial protocols of this unprecedented economic crisis are more politicized than reached by an open, non-politically biased review of ALL avenues of recovery.
4) are NOT unmindful of the DOUBLE-STANDARD which inheres by not prosecuting those members of the preceding administration who peremptorily advocated the use of interrogation procedures known by the civilized world to be torture. Not to put too fine a point on this, what do you feel this does to the "rule of law" which you've cited as de rigueur in a functioning democracy? Said another way: we can traffic in terms like "rule of law," "due process," and "habeas corpus" because they possess weight, i.e., gravitas, and therefore, enable us to "manage" the rank-and-file. But, when they are obviated for expedience sake, the terms quickly fall from grace, and we argue in favor, then, not for rule of law or habeas corpus but, rather, our new "forwardlooking" legal ethic. To argue this way, in fact, is a GROSS INSULT to the intelligence of every adult man and woman in America--as well as the global community--both eagerly anticipating the "Change you can believe in" model of US polity.
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As wonderful as it would be to say that ALL Americans aren't feeding at the corporate media disinformation trough because they have ready access to reliable web news resources with substantiated reports and disclosures, that's not always the case.
There's still a large portion of the American population who feed from the corporate media's disinformation trough because they don't have easy access to reliable web news resources with substantiated reports and disclosures, and who are not beholden to corporations, advertisers, special interest groups, political action committees and the like. They are basically unaware that Nobel-Laureate economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, Dr. Michael Hudson, and former Fed Chariman Paul Volcker have been deliberately shut out of the process of crafting a viable economic recovery for the nation, because they've been denied meaningful, material access to the process of planning and implementing America's economic recovery program.
And who's behind the abrupt ouster of these traditional economists from the Obama's economic recovery program? A new breed of "economist" known as the "behavioral economist", and a crop of "behavioral economists", including Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler, Dan Ariely, and Daniel Kahneman, have formed a tight clique surrounding the President, to the exclusion of some of the more well-known and relatively competent economists, originally brought in to the Obama White House, but who have now been cast aside in favor of the Pavlovian/Skinnerian practice of "behavior modification".
It should also be noted that Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler, Dan Ariely, and Daniel Kahneman have cultivated a cult-like following through the publication of such bizarre economic tracts as Freakonomics, Nudge, Predictable Irrationality, The Wisdom of Crowds and Animal Spirits (and it should come as no surprise that these books are "required reading" in the Obama White House).
It's because of the pervasiveness of "behavioral science" in all aspects of American life, that we have a situation in which the American people are steadily becoming impoverished in those areas which are humanizing -- legal matters, economics, spirituality (not necessarily "religion") and politics -- and in the process, are becoming dehumanized to the point where they can be easily distracted, misdirected, lied to with impunity, and emotionally manipulated.
Obama didn't get to the White House because of his intelligence alone; according to an article published in the April 14th issue, Time reported that a stream of frequent written orders or recommendations has long been flowing into the Obama campaign, and later, into the Obama Presidency, from "the Consortium of Behavioral Scientists, a secret advisory group of 29 of the nation's leading behaviorists." However, that's not an entirely accurate description.
In actuality, the group of 29 is known as the Behavioral Economics Roundtable, which is part of the Russell Sage Foundation in Washington, D.C. It is a self-selecting, self-perpetuating group, eerily similar to Cecil Rhodes' Round Table which governed the British Empire for the Fabian Society, and Sunstein, Thaler, Ariely, and Kahneman are members of the Behavioral Economics Roundtable.
But what is the Russell Sage Foundation? It has been an arm of the British Fabian Society ever since its foundation in 1907.
And what is the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation? Mussolini-lover Sloan was chosen as CEO of General Motors in 1923 by the pro-fascists of the J.P. Morgan bank and of DuPont. He founded the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 1934, the same year that he founded the American Liberty League with John J. Raskob. The Liberty League tried to get rid of Roosevelt, while their propaganda favored Mussolini and Hitler. The Alfred P. Sloan foundation represents the London-allied, Hitler and Mussolini-loving titans of Wall Street, and should it come as any surprise that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is one of PBS's most prominent underwiters?
Due to impoverishment on the legal, economic, spirirtual and political levels, the American electorate seems to take each new betrayal committed against them by governmental leaders on the chin, like the good little "victims" they've been programmed to be, and for every one truly intelligent member of the American electorate, there are ten members of the American electorate whose "intelligence" can be insulted again, and again, and again with brazen contempt by the members of the government, secure in the knowledge that the American electorate, with its notoriously short attention span, will keep coming back for more of the same, and this, in itself, is the real tragedy.