Rushkoff on Daily Beast

I’ve been writing some Life Inc-related pieces for Daily Beast this week.

Here’s one on Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, or How Google Trained Your Brain

And here’s another on Obama’s CyberDefense Czar, and the failure of Command and Control on a distributed battlefield.

Life Inc: The Movie

Bigger version and more info at http://LifeIncorporated.net

Vimeo version for sharing on social networks Life Inc. The Movie

Subtitled in Spanish Life Inc. The Movie

Stimulus, Ass-Backwards

I just published this essay on Arthur:

I’ve been trying to figure out exactly why President Obama’s approach to the economic crisis upsets me so much, so regularly, and I think I figured it out.

His impulse—perhaps as someone with more faith in the power of centralized, top-down decision-making than I have—is to fix our economic problems by supporting existing institutions. In the president’s view, the best approach now is to pump some necessary short-term assets into flagging institutions to help them make it through the rough patches in the economic road, and then get them to pay it back to the government once times are better. That’s the approach he’s taken to the banks, the automotive industry, and even the insurance industry.

What the Obama Administration doesn’t seem to understand is that the institutions they are attempting to prop up are the very ones whose solvency depends on the continuing extraction of wealth and value from the real people and places making up America.

more…

CrowdSourcing the Bank Recovery

I don’t believe Tim Geitner’s toxic asset auction plan will work to change the basic problem of bank insolvency, but that doesn’t stop me from appreciating the sheer brilliance and post-partisan nature of the approach.

Most commentators and economists are focusing on the way the plan distributes risk, perhaps unfairly – with the government guaranteeing most losses while giving hedge funds and investors half of the gains. But that misses the point of the whole thing.

The underlying problem with the toxic assets currently on the books of most banks is that no one knows quite how to value them. (Their market value is very low right now – lower than most believe it should be. This is what is meant by “mark to market.” In time, when things are better and the world is generally less risk-averse, they should be worth more. Most banks need their balance sheets to look better now, and they can’t while they have these – perhaps artificially – deflated securities on their books).

Were the government to simply go in and buy them all, the Treasury Department would have to hire a huge staff of accountants to look at each and every toxic asset – every single loan package and bond and bond fund, and come up with what it is worth. If that were even possible.

While this would give government all the winnings if and when the securities become worth what they are really worth, they would be saddled with a huge actuarial task, and would surely arrive at numbers that banks feel are unfairly underestimating the securities’ true worth.

Geitner’s plan is less about spreading risk than it is about finding a more efficient way to evaluate all those issues. So why not crowd source?

The government assumes a hunk of the risk – the hunk that no one else wants to assume – while letting a huge army of investors bid and fight over the profit potential. His hope is that those people will do the necessary homework on all this stuff, since it is some real money they are staking.

Thus, Obama’s team comes up with entrepreneurial socialism, or market-based welfare. The scores of investors bidding on all these securities become a giant unpaid (but insured) bunch of bidders.

That’s the brilliant part.

The stupid part is that it’s not a real marketplace, so the invisible hand of collective market genius just won’t take effect. While the market may, in the best of circumstances, have some of the self-regulatory features of nature, we can’t expect it to act like nature when so many of the underlying rules have been rigged. Auction-determined prices will not reflect underlying value when some large percent of risk has been removed. And the percentage of risk assumed by government remains the same, regardless of the riskiness of the toxic asset. So, playing the game properly, investors should go for the highest odds instead of the lowest. Unless they don’t.

In the end, if these folks really and truly believed in the wisdom of the crowd, they would accept the fact that the market no longer values this stuff in the present.

Banks made a bad bet. Over time, it seems, banks came to believe that the terrible assets they were pawning on the rest of us actually had some value. They broke the cardinal rule of pyramid scheming and decided to maintain an account in the pyramid. They believed their own hype, or the guys who made up the hype died, leaving a generation of bankers who forgot how the scam of hand-me-down interest was supposed to work. It was actually a game hot potato: you’re supposed to get rid of it as fast as possible, and make your money on the commissions.

The fact that they were left holding stuff as crappy as the rest of us is the price of doing business.

The real market has crowd-sourced this fact already.

President Obama

Though I share in the jubilation at Obama’s election, I find I’m also a bit guarded. Holding back, as if afraid to get “fooled again” by the promise of new leadership.

To be sure, it’s going to feel good and be good for America to have a potential world leader as our president – someone who, instead of bringing himself down to the level of the least common denominator, actually demands that we raise ourselves to his level of discourse and sophistication. Friends are asking me what words like “bipartisanship” mean – a sure sign that they are actually, finally interested in how government functions and what it is Obama might do to change it.

But I’ve also got the nagging sense that too many of us are still hoping and waiting for what Obama’s going to do. As if the president somehow enacts policies or spends money in a way that makes everything better. This is not what a president does. Yes, there are certainly public works programs Obama can promote, to rebuild highways or develop alternative energy technologies while giving jobs to more Americans. These are potentially great top-down stimuli for a failed economy and neglected infrastructure – but they do not rebuild a society ravaged by runaway deregulated capitalism and military misadventure.

That part is up to us. And in this sense, we must take Obama at his word: the moment is now, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. The election of Obama is itself a cue. It’s a cue that America can elect a smart, capable, and caring person as its leader. That we are capable of transcending the logic of short-term self-interest, fear, and even racism. And if we are capable of doing this, it means we are better than we act most of the time. This moment is the bang of the starter’s pistol – an awakening, an opportunity.

When there’s a big blackout in New York, especially during the summer, some people take it as a “cue” to start looting. It’s not that the blackout itself makes it significantly to break down store fronts; it’s not that the police are so very busy with the blackout. The lights going out is a cue to behave differently – to release the hidden potential for vandalism and long-repressed rage.

Likewise, the election of a black man to the presidency is a cue that something has changed. As my friend, Ari Wallach explained to me on my new radio show last night, it’s a kind of “shock and awe.” There’s a thoughtful, progressive and black president-elect on the cover of the New York Post. The cognitive dissonance this generates is an opportunity to reprogram. It’s what advertisers and social programmers try to do in pretty much every communication they make. It’s as big a disconnect and reconnect as 9-11 was, only constructive instead of destructive. A narrative is broken; another is born.

But this new narrative is not the story of how we are led by some new person. It’s the story of how we lead ourselves. It’s about how we accept the cue to act.

Everyone I know in my own circles is obsessed with creating the next big Internet phenomenon or organization to marshall all this energy and help people do their own bottom-up activities. I’ve been invited to a few dozen meetings already for such projects, and I’m happy to see everyone so enthused. But if everyone wants to do the “meta” job of creating a brand or utility through which activism happens, then there will be no one left to do the actual organizing.

No, the opportunity is not to create the next great website for modeling bottom-up community activity, but to go and actually do the stuff. It is to participate the public school, work towards alternative energy possibilities, design and install bicycle lanes, argue at work for equal pay for women, assist local agriculture projects, develop complementary currencies and non-profit credit unions.

My faith in the change we need will be strengthened by my own and others initiative. Obama can inspire us, and even remove some of the obsolete regulations preventing progressive activities from taking hold. His ability to lead us out of this mire into a brighter future will be limited, however, by our own capacity to engage.

Obama’s going to be busy for while, anyway. Two wars, a dozen failed federal agencies, and a banking industry that needs to be dismantled are going to take up a lot of his time and energy. While he attends to mitigating the damage of past failures, it is we who need to build a new society based on the values we share but have closeted during these decades of institutionalized self interest.

How? Where? Just go out the door and look around. There’s opportunities literally everywhere. If we do get fooled again, it will only be because we have fooled ourselves.

Bottom?

This week we witnessed the collapse of all the bubbles. This is really just the echo of the dot.com crash, and happens after the birth of any new technology. There’s a great book on this – I have to find it so I can tell you who wrote it.

In any case, if there’s a new bubble we have to think of it as the bubble of government itself.

Not that I’ve got money to back it up, but my prediction is that this is a medium-term bottom and that people who buy stocks of good depressed companies at the current levels will be very happy in a couple of years.

Fannie and Freddie

All sorts of people have been calling my cellphone this weekend, asking for an explanation of what’s “really happening” with the Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae bailout.

Really briefly, here’s what’s going on and what I think it means.

Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac are essentially mortgage financers. Banks sell mortgages, package them all together, and then sell them as debt to other investors – usually other banks, investment firms, mutual funds or pension funds. These are the famous “mortgage backed securities” everyone is talking about.

Freddie and Fannie buy lots of these mortgages and then resell them at a profit. The rate they receive from the debtors (the mortgage money they collect) is at a better rate of interest than what they pay out to the institutions buying their packages of mortgages. The weird part is that Freddie and Fannie aren’t just regular companies. The mortgages they resell are ultimately backed by government guarantee. That’s right: they are private companies, owned by shareholders, but the mortgage securities they sell are backed by the US Treasury.

This means that the value Freddie and Fannie really provide is to guarantee loans. Because of their government backing, they have the ability to clean up or add cred to everything they touch. Think of it like money laundering: all you have to do is pass some low quality mortgages through one of these companies – even for just a couple of hours – and they’re as good as new. It’s like touching the recharger in a video game – you get all your strength back.

Problem is, too many of Freddie and Fannie’s loans were no good. And the cash cushion they told everyone they had turned out to be a lot smaller than they were leading the world to believe. (Whether they intentionally overstated their cash cushion or just added the columns wrong has left to be seen.) But the long and short of it is that the company is in such bad shape that the government is stepping in and taking over the whole company.

Why? A few reasons. First off, Freddie and Fannie had to get their money from somewhere, right? How else could they buy all those mortgages? Well, they got a lot of that money by selling bonds – a lot of them to foreign investors. Now, they don’t really have the money to pay those bonds back. And that means they have even less money to buy all those mortgages from banks. Without a place to sell their mortgages – and “clean” them – banks can’t lend money to prospective home buyers. And without a good supply of mortgages, the housing crisis gets even worse.

So the Feds are coming in and taking over the two companies, kicking out management, and buying the mortgages themselves. They’re also going to back all the mortgage-backed investments that Freddie and Fannie have been selling. They’re even going to pay back all those bondholders, foreign and otherwise, who put up the money for the mortgage purchasing.

The only ones they’re not going to pay back are the shareholders. All the people who own Freddie and Fannie stock, like people with these once-safe stocks in their 401k plans and mutual funds, will be left with investments worth nothing.

The other people left holding the bag, as usual, will be the taxpayers. The billions of dollars these companies were about to lose on their bad mortgages will now be paid with our tax money. While it might be a necessary bail out of the housing market, this doesn’t stop anyone from foreclosing on their homes. All it means is that when we do foreclose, the investment firm that bought our Freddie-cleansed loan will still get paid.

In the bigger picture, I have to wonder what this will do to the stock market. This bailout pays back bondholders and “preferred” shareholders, but leaves regular old “retail” public shareholders losing all their money. If people begin to put two and two together, they will come to realize that owning publicly sold shares puts them at the very bottom of the totem pole as far as getting anything out of a dying company. Being “bailed out” may save those who hold bonds, but does nothing for those holding shares, who will likely be left with little or nothing.

Given that many corporate bonds are now selling “below par,” or below their original price, this presents an interesting set of scenarios. Will people start dumping overpriced stocks in favor of now discounted bonds, especially since discounted bonds pay very high interest rates and – and least in this case – don’t present the same risks as stocks? Will this week see investors encouraged by a government bail out and rushing into stocks or will stock investors instead see it as a sign that they will be last in line when the going gets rough?

Hate Party

I felt a bit nauseous watching the Republican convention last night. I’m very much a give-the-benefit-of-the-doubt kind of guy, so I try to listen to the arguments people make even when they’re made in over-the-top or patronizing ways. Sometimes it’s good to distinguish between the rhetorical devices and the underlying substance. Even people who use manipulative language sometimes have an important point beneath their persuasion techniques (ads against smoking, for example).

I usually don’t feel uneasy when I put those filters on, but last night – during the Guiliani speech – I realized I was no longer filtering a speechwriter’s intentional manipulation; I was trying to look beyond real hate. These folks were gritting their teeth, shaking their fists, and smiling the way gladiators do when going into combat against barbarians. And this is the incumbent party. The ones currently in power.

What is it they hate? Guiliani and Palin both made it pretty clear: community organizing. Community organizing is energized from below. From the periphery. It is the direction and facilitation of mass energy towards productive and cooperative ends. It is about replacing conflict with collaboration. It is the opposite of war; it is peace.

Last night, the Republican Convention made it clear they prefer war. They see the world as a dangerous and terrible place. Like the fascist leaders satirized in Starship Troopers, they say they believe it is better to be on the offensive, taking the war to the people who might wish us harm than playing defense. It is better to be an international aggressor – a bulldog with lipstick – than led by the misguided notion that attacking people itself makes the world a more dangerous place.

In their attack on community organizing – a word combination they pretended they didn’t know what it meant – Giuliani and Palin revealed their refusal to acknowledge the kinds of bottom-up processes through which our society was built, and through which local communities can begin to assert some authority over their schools, environments, and economies. Without organized communities, you don’t get the reduction in centralized government the Republicans pretend to be arguing for. In their view, community organizing as, at best, equivalent to disruptive and unpredictable Al Qaeda activity.

But it actually goes deeper than this. Consider how Republicans have so far justified their choice of candidate: he is a “great man.” That America needs a “hero” in the White House to lead us in continued preemptive strikes against Bin Laden in Iraq (I know Bin Laden is not in Iraq, but Giuliani clearly implied he was). Only a leader with McCain’s war record and paternal qualifications can help Americans muster and maintain the tenacity necessary to “drill baby drill,” (even though this will have no influence on oil price or supply) and generate the requisite hate to “kill baby, kill.” As I explained in Coercion, having a parent figure on whom to transfer authority allows people to regress to a more childlike state. This not only allows them to feel safe; if gives them the freedom to express their rage. Make no mistake – that’s what we’re witnessing. And this rage – not America – is the greatest threat to humanity’s long-term chances for survival.

Republican party representatives are proud today that their convention has finally produced the “same level of energy and enthusiasm” as the DNC’s last week. And while it may have produced the same level of excitement, the excitement was of a very different character. It’s much easier to get people riled up but inviting them to hate a man – particularly one who they haven’t been allowed to hate for traditional reasons. Giuliani’s job – much like his job as mayor of NYC – was to give the Republicans in attendance permission to hate Obama and the potentially intelligent society he represents. It’s not about city vs. country or educated vs. military. It’s about thought vs. violence.

In the black and white world of those committed to war as an international relations strategy, voting “present” makes no sense – especially when the Illinois legislative process is willfully misrepresented. (Voting present is a way to preserve the bill without passing it in its current state. Far from an easy out, it is the hard path – requiring further negotiation to remove earmarks and other problems.) They would prefer the simple relief of a “yes or no” world, where the evil are punished and the good rewarded. For in such a world, we get to know who the enemy is and just hate them.

I don’t believe hate is the best way to motivate people to develop long-term solutions to problems. It is a tried and tested way to motivate them to short-term support of dangerous leaders. That much is certain. But if McCain and Palin are able to rouse the national hatred they will need to actually win this election, I fear they will have unleashed a force that they will be unable to control.

Beyond Brand Obama

Nothing against Barack Obama, but we’d be mistaken to consider his politics a complete break from the past, a renaissance in participatory government, or the realization of an Internet-enabled “open source” democracy. He’s pretty damn good, don’t get me wrong, and he may just represent the closest thing yet to a GenX, post-boomer, anti-sentimental and a-mythic candidate for president. But there are a few ways in which his candidacy also reinforces some of the branded, celebrity-based, and charismatic techniques of traditional politics. To make the most of his candidacy and, hopefully, his presidency, we’ll have to distinguish one from the other.

When Obama was first emerging into national awareness, he showed both promise and predictability. I watched his speech to the Democratic Convention in 2004, and saw pretty much what the Democratic party wanted me to see: a hopeful young politician who appealed to people beyond their classic demographic divisions. He spoke of a “one America” beyond blue-state/red-state classifications. Like Mario Cuomo’s convention keynote speech of a decade earlier, he cast the Democratic Party as the party of higher ideals, greater compassion, and a more united people.

Obama’s speech was also calculated, however, to neutralize the “hot-button” politics of the right. Karl Rove and other right-wing strategists had by then almost perfected the technique of micro-casting specific, emotionally charged messages to the people whom they wanted to hear them. Their direct mail experts sent letters to fundamentalists explaining that John Kerry wanted to make the Bible illegal. They sent others to southerners who owned pickups threatening the banning of the Confederate flag. This inspired many of them to hold protests side-by-side with white supremacists and Nazis.

If the Republican party would be the part of divisions, the Democrats would – at least officially – be the party of unification. The less factions saw themselves as special interests in competition with one another, the less those emotionally charged, hot-button issues could be made to work. The Democratic party would be about transcending division, while the Republicans could keep fighting in the gutter. Problem was, at least in ’04, most of America was still angry and desperate enough to choose division and self-interest over any other possibility.

The primary season pitted unifiers against factionalists again – so far, with different results. While Huckabee ran for the religious right and Romney ran for the wealthy conservatives, McCain ran as a guy with ideas he thinks are good for the country. Although not explicitly a unifier, he’s not particularly tied to any of the special interests that make for good hot-button politics. That’s why the conservatives hate him: he’s not strong enough on abortion or gun control or Jesus for them to make convincing and polarizing arguments over these issues. In if they’re not sufficiently activated, the crazies may just stay home.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, ran a similarly divisive campaign against Obama. It’s probably why the two of them ended up surviving the longest: she best represented the politics of splinter demographics, while he best represented the ethos of united-we-stand. While Clinton broke down the party into Hispanics, whites-who-really-work, and even caucus vs. primary states, Obama sought to address everyone at once. Clinton most effectively thwarted Obama by recasting the electorate as a set of separate tribes with mutually exclusive goals.

Her argument for maintaining this stance was that the real world is a combative and terrible place. In a dog-eat-dog world, only a mean dog can lead. This is why she ended up selling herself as a “fighter.” She would fight against Obama and the Republicans, and thus prove her ability to fight against the bad guys out there in the Arab countries or even Europe.

That Obama represents an alternative to this divisive, target-marketed pandering is certainly a step in a great direction. That the American electorate is capable of seriously considering him as a viable candidate and leader is a leap in the same one. Both McCain and Clinton pose “you’re either with us or against us” dualities. McCain does it because he’s promoting a neoconservative ideology dependent on simple black and white dichotomies. Clinton did it in a cynical effort to pander to the people she believes are stupid and angry enough to respond to divisive, faux-populist rhetoric.

Obama alone (well, actually he, Kucinich, and Biden) presents a more complex understanding of the challenges facing America. It’s a “GenX” sensibility, really, that depends less on emotionality and choosing sides than on a post-ideological clarity, and an ability to embrace seeming paradoxes. One can disagree with certain things Reverend Wright says while still embracing his message and influence. To the post-boomer audience, this is not weakness but strength. The alternative, as outlined by right-wing extremists such as Sean Hannity, is that candidate Obama Hussein secretly agrees with Wright, Farrakhan, and black militants which is why he cannot condemn the preacher. He hopes to turn over America to the Muslims. But if Obama were involved in such a secret agreement, then wouldn’t he have just condemned Reverend Wright from the beginning?

In all these respects, Obama does offer a non-polarizing and inclusive alternative to traditional political engineering, and we must embrace the possibility that America is ready to engage with itself and the rest of the world in this way. True, it would make it more difficult for us to drop bombs on other countries because we might see them as real people. But it might also make it less necessary to drop bombs on them, or even to kill or starve them in other ways. This is all good.

Where the Obama effort has always disturbed me, however, is in how branded it all feels. From the beginning of his candidacy, I felt as if the Obama name and image represented a new way of doing things more than it exemplified it. My own sense of cynicism reached a peak when Oprah Winfrey began campaigning for him. I’ve watched her similarly enthused by fakers from Tom Cruise to the founders of The Secret. Oprah’s “energy,” if you will, is that of national branding. Oprah + (insert your product here) = MegaBrand. Using Oprah to push Obama feels a bit like using rock to push religion. But it’s not fair to criticize Obama for letting a powerful media celebrity attempt to teach her followers why he’d be good for the country, is it? He needs to get elected, after all.

Then there’s Obama’s efforts to reach out to new audiences online. And for sure, Obama’s Facebook/YouTube/website representation is far beyond anything Howard Dean and his folks did last time out. Where Dean’s people inserted their stock candidate into an online fund-raising campaign, Obama’s message and media are more organically related to one another. His message is about invigorating bottom-up, grass-roots, community organizing – and the Internet is that, if anything.

Still, a closer look at Obama’s online effort reveals many opportunities for work, and few opportunities for what I consider to be intelligent participation. We can sign up to make phone calls, send emails, volunteer in the streets, or become precinct captains. But where’s the participatory democracy wiki? Where do we get involved in the conversations that help shape his policy positions? How is he incorporating the massive intelligence of his support network into his philosophy of governance? BarackObama.com is a great example of crowd-sourcing, but it’s a far cry from even a fledgling effort at open source democracy.

Then again, by the very design and scale of national politics, no presidential campaign could offer more than a wink and a nod to true participatory politics. Activism isn’t something that happens on TV for a general viewing audience, but at home with real people who aren’t watching the tube at all. While a president can provide some inspiration – Oprah-style, if need be – for a whole lot of people, the executive isn’t the locus from which real change occurs. As president, Obama could enact policies that make activism easier to accomplish, jobs easier to create, and corporations more easy to resist – but this activity itself would have to come from us.

Brands were invented primarily to replace local commerce and social activity with mass produced goods and corporate-provided services. Brand mythologies alienate people from one another and insert themselves in the place of real relationships. Instead of buying meat, corn, drugs, or soap from local producers, we buy them from A&P, Green Giant, Wal-Mart or P&G. These national brands have great mythologies, but serve to disconnect us from one another, and distribute power to those with capital and away from people who actually do work.

The danger in Brand Obama is that our focus on a heroic or mythic presidency could easily distract us from the hard work and reality of creating change ourselves. “Hard working” democrats loved listening to Hilary Clinton talk about how hard she was going to work for them because it made it seem like the president is in position to stay up all night and, through the extra effort, get food on our tables or money in our bank accounts. It just doesn’t work that way, and Obama’s refusal to, say, cut gas taxes over the summer to cater to this mentality speaks volumes.

The best thing about Obama is what appears to so many people to be his hesitancy. For many, it tarnishes his brand. As I see it, this is not lack of resolve at all but his greatest strength. He stutters and stumbles – but usually because he’s trying to answer a question in a way that doesn’t make himself out to be the answer to an abstract and collective problem. He understands that the presidency is itself a social construction, and that agreeing to “play” president is a mutual agreement – not a genuine ascendance. TV’s West Wing may have done more damage to the Left than we know. It gave us undeserved solace during the darkest Right wing presidency in history, and created false hope of how much the White House could accomplish with the right leader in the Oval Office.

Those of us hoping to build communities, improve our schools, invigorate our local economies, restructure our land use, or reduce our energy dependence mustn’t equate a presidential campaign with substantive change. Obama may be a convenient conceptual placeholder for these concerns, as well as a person capable of dismantling a good amount of America’s more fascistic and militaristic infrastructure. But the only way he’ll even have the latitude to behave in a slightly more enlightened manner than his predecessors will be if we, the actual people on the ground, have chosen to live more consistently with those goals. If he’s president of a nation of fast-food-eating, bigoted, and selfish SUV drivers, he’ll prove as powerless as Cheney was malicious. And the results will be the same.

Obama can help legislate some of the structural changes that will make it easier for us to renegotiate our civic, social, and commercial relationships with one another. But the job of actually changing society and its priorities will happen from the bottom up. He can help write laws that make it easier for us to build transportation alternatives, but we have to actually go do it. That’s how representative democracy works; they represent our interests, but we do the actual stuff.

Yes, I’ll be voting for Obama and, assuming enough votes are counted, will be happy to see him as our next president. But I’ll also remember that this will only mark the beginning, not the conclusion, of my participation in the democratic process.

Obama is not condescending

The fact is, Americans are smarter than Clinton and McCain suggest. Americans are frustrated that their government supports corporations at the citizens’ expense. People are getting poorer and their educations are getting worse and more expensive. As people get poorer and angrier, they do more readily cling to symbols and superstitions. Under threat or antisemitism, Jews cling more steadfastly to Israel. Just as persecuted gun owners cling to their guns, and fundamentalists cling to their gods – especially when voting.

The more repressed and dejected a population, the more susceptible they are to the hot-button issues that pollsters rely on to keep the populace divided and self-interested.

By calling attention to the fact that politicians can rely on highly emotional hot-button issues during economically stressful times, Obama was actually suggesting that we can and should operate from a higher place when exercising our democratic rights. It’s hard – especially when ruthless, patronizing politicians are telling us that our guns or bibles will be taken away from us – but these are the sick, emotionally based appeals we have to reject if we are to resist the fascism at their heels.

By labeling Obama the elitist patronizer, Clinton and McCain are attempting to preserve the elitist, top-down, manipulative politics of the past (and present). They want to make sure they can continue to manipulate uneducated and poor people living in small and big towns alike. It is they who seek to maintain their cynical hold over poor people’s emotions.

It’s all so sick, and the mainstream media mostly plays along. I suspect Clinton will soon achieve her goal of preventing any Democrat from taking the White House until she can regroup for 2012. But by then, the rest of the world won’t believe that we don’t really support the neoCons we repeatedly elect.