The reality of politics

[unusualmusic_lj_archive]

From Daily Kos No one is going to save you fools

The first thing you need to understand about healthcare reform is what Jane Hamsher identified long ago: nothing--absolutely nothing--is going to trump the White House's deal with PhRMA and the insurance industry.  The question you need to ask yourselves is: why?  If you're intellectually mature enough to get past "personal betrayal" as your best answer, you'll be on the right track.


While you ponder that one, you might want to also consider why nothing has been done--nor will anything serious actually be done--about financial industry reform.  Standing up to the financial industry in the current political environment should be a no-brainer.  So what in the heck is going on here?  If you can think past shadowy conspiracy theories and possible personal enrichment for the Obama family, you'll be doing the kind of thinking that will help actually solve the problem.


The problem is people like me, and the people I work for.  I'm what they call a Qualitative Research Consultant, or QRC for short.  Here's my website.  There's even a whole association of us who meet regularly to discuss ideas and tactics.  Together with the AAPC, the MRA, the AMA, ESOMAR, and a whole host of other organizations you've never heard of, we have more power and control than you know.  We're extremely good at what we do, and we do it all behind the scenes, appealing to and manipulating your subconscious brain in ways that your conscious brain has little to no control over.



Give us a little money to test some things out, and we can work magic.  Our business is persuasion, and we're very good at it.  Just watch PBS Frontline's series, The Persuaders to get just a small inkling of what you're up against.  We can make a company that earns a 38% gross profit margin manufacturing purely propriety products seem hip, cool and progressive.  We can take sugar water and sell it back to you as a health drink, and even Whole Foods shoppers will believe it.  We can take 30 different brands of vodka with almost exactly the same ingredients, and make you understand instantly just what kind of person drinks which brand, and how much you should expect to pay for each, without a moment's thought.  


For any given category of products, I can show you a bunch of different brands, and you'll be able to tell me a wealth of information about each one, despite the near absolute similarity of their actual products to one another.  One exercise we QRC's like to conduct involves actually turning a brand into a person in a group discussion; it's called personification.  And you wouldn't believe how effectively and universally we can tailor a brand's image, right down to what kind of car that "person" would drive, and what music he/she would listen to.  


So much attention has been paid to Naomi Klein's outstanding Shock Doctrine, that few pay much attention anymore to her far more provocative and important work No Logo.  If all Americans truly internalized the message of No Logo, people like me would be out of work, and we could really reform this country. ...


If you want to win, you will ORGANIZE. You will organize in the same way the Right has done for the last 40 years, and you will spend money on persuasion, where it really matters.  You will, in short, make the politicians as afraid of you as they are of them.  The Right has built vast networks of think tanks, newspapers, periodicals, cable news channels, and political advocacy organizations to spread their finely tuned, well-honed messages.  Their politicians may fail them, and their actual policies may be deeply unpopular, but their message machine nearly always works its magic to get them what they want, even when Democrats are in power.


That's partly because the American political Right never quits and never gives up.  They know that organization is the key to their success, and they don't trust politicians to do their work for them.  Democrats, on the other hand, get disappointed and quit when our politicians don't pan out the way we wanted.  That's why we lose.MORE

Comments

[parlance.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this, the writer confirmed many things I've suspected with regards to how badly the fight for single-payer health care has been bungled. I'm going to start following him on Twitter.

[the-willow.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

I've been hanging out at the MEF. I've seen No Logo and spent this past half year reading contemporaries and having my eyes opened to things I'd noticed but hadn't been able to draw connecting lines to for a while and BOOM. Whoa.

[paradox-dragon.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this link. That was one of the most thought-provoking things I've read in a long time.