Reflections on the Wisconsin recall election -- Columbia County Talk

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Subject: Reflections on the Wisconsin recall election

Author:
Ned Depew

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Date Posted: 19:38:03 06/06/12 Wed

Lincoln is whirling in his grave.

He never anticipated the power of mass media and "depth psychology" advertising techniques developed over the past two decades. As Jackson Browne puts it:

They sell us the President the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us every thing from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars.

Outspent by a ratio of 7:1 by mostly out-of-state billionaire interests through "super-pacs," Walker and his elite supporters did manage to fool "enough of the people enough of the time."

If advertising can sell can maipulate people enough to sell low-mileage them pick-up trucks and "SUVs" that the vast majority of owners don't need and that cost them a huge premium by using psychological techniques to manipulate them into believing they have a "need" for those Detroit albatrosses, they can clearly - given enough money and enough control of the media - sell refrigerators to Eskimos - which is exactly what they did in Wisconsin.

It's not something of which to be proud. It's another nail in the coffin of democracy in America. de Tocqueville warned in 1815 that the Achille's heel of American democracy was the manipulation of a poorly informed-electorate by demagogues. The Koch brothers have proved his point.

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