Look broadly and look deeply—tunnel vision is not useful when changing society

The public’s short memory permits the corporate press and corporate government to lie about everything.

Our so-called "democracy" is a sham. That's not just folk wisdom -- Gilens and Page proved statistically that the rich get the public policies they want and the rest of us don't, regardless of elections. The rich limit who can vote, who can be candidates, and who can be mentioned respectfully in "mainstream" media. The truth is that the rich have always controlled everything. The USA has been a plutocracy thinly disguised as a democracy ever since its founding in land theft, genocide, and slavery.

All of the USA's wars are based on lies; the USA is NOT the "defender of the free world"; the US military is the greatest terrorist murder organization the world has ever known. Thank the veterans for bravely offering their lives in what they BELIEVED was the defense of our country; but do not honor them for believing lies so easily. Orwell published "1984" just 2½ months before the USSR exploded their first nuclear bomb; perhaps Orwell did not quite foresee how nuclear weapons would limit the major powers to cold wars and proxy wars -- but he got the lying part right.

Every American is free to sleep under the bridges.

And our economic system is a lie much older than the USA, much older than capitalism. We have been ruled by plutocracy for 10,000 years. The rule is perpetuated by lies: The rich tell lies to justify the order of things. Hundreds of years ago they claimed that they had been chosen by God. Today they claim that the rich got that way through being smarter or more hard-working -- lies, all of it. Modern-day "liberals" believe that it is possible for anyone to climb up the "ladder of success" through hard work -- more lies. "Progressives" believe the ladder needs some repairs, but they believe the basic principle (capitalism) is sound. We need to awaken them from that delusion.

It is interesting to watch the battles developing between the different factions of the plutocracy. The competition between Democrats and Republicans always was at least partly truthful: Both money parties serve the same corporate masters, but the winning party gets paid more by those masters. After decades of polite decorum, the competition became more fierce, perhaps around the time when Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House -- I think that is when the two parties started calling each other evil. Trump was the next logical development: If the other party is evil, then there is no reason to play by any rules, and no reason even to hide the fact that one is cheating. In fact, one can take pride in flouting the rules, and use that as a campaign asset, recruiting all the voters who also believe the other party is evil.

Russiagate is interesting. The Democrats cannot accuse Trump of any of his real crimes, though they are many, because the Democrats are guilty of all those same crimes. So instead the Democrats had to invent a crime, and make use of the fact that they currently have better control of the corporate news media. A lie repeated sufficiently many times begins to seem true. And why not simultaneously paint Russia or China as bad guys; this will enable the weapons companies to sell more weapons at higher profit.

Some of these ideas appear in abridged form in my new 5-minute video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsx381GB58w

Transcript: http://LeftyMathProf.org/primer/