You are the 98%

The enclosed piece You are the 98% posted on The Last Psychiatrist website is another viewpoint of the continued struggle between the have's and the have's not.  Expect the whole debate between all sides involved in this great discussion to really come to the forefront this coming year as it reaches it climax with the presidential election in November 2012.  You're already getting a sneak peak of this action now as the Republican party goes through the process of selecting its candidate.


Here are a few points that I found interesting

• "We are the 99%." Rarely does a slogan perfectly capture the zeitgeist, the ethos and the pathos, each word a passionate announcement of a popular uprising.  And neither does this one. It is, however, an important piece of propaganda.  It sounds like the enemy is Wall Street, but observe that the slogan doesn't point to an enemy, it defines the group.  The slogan is a twist on an old fascist standby:  select a minority enemy, and create an impression of opposing unanimity.  Once done, the leaders of the group have the powerbase to do what they want, making it impossible for anyone in the rest of the 98% to disavow this madness.  When it all goes down you will be too terrified, or too busy, to dissent.  
• What you don't realize about those pictured as "the 99%"--what they have in common is not that they are young or college educated or indebted or white females, but that they were willing to put a picture of themselves on the internet, fully of the belief that they stand for something worth being pictured for.  Bad move.  You think marching on Wall Street gives you power, a voice; but it is a wholesale surrender to the media, you have signed a waiver allowing them to use your image any way they want, and they will tell the rest of us what to think of you and titrate our exposure and emotional responses, all while feeding us with marketing for the very things that got us into our predicament.  The income disparities, the education pyramid scheme, the personal and public debt, the anxiety, brought to you by Revlon and the makers of CNN.
• "Marching gets our message out."  No it doesn't, it gets CNN's message out.  "We don't watch CNN, we use the internet."   Yet given the infinity of the internet you still surf the same 5 websites, looking for and finding exactly what you want, like a baby playing peekaboo in a mirror over and over and over and over and over and over and...  
• Take a look on how the media portrayed the latest Washington snafu of the payroll tax issue.  The media played it up as a tax cut when indeed it was a tax holiday.  The payroll tax wasn't cut it was merely postponed.  It is all about framing the message the way you want it in order to get the reaction you are looking for.