Are Cain, Cantor and Romney campaigning for Obama?

As many of you must know by now many from the right wing are criticizing the Occupy Wall street movement and some of the most vocal ones are Mitt Romney, Eric Cantor and Herman Cain.

(This was originally posted on Open Salon October 12, 2011)

A Sample of the criticism is available in the following articles:


Mitt Romney: Occupy Wall Street Is ‘Dangerous…Class Warfare’
Mitt Romney zings "Occupy Wall Street" and praises Herman Cain in N.H.
Eric Cantor Condemns Occupy Wall Street 'Mobs': They're 'Pitting Americans Against Americans'
Herman Cain steps up attacks on Occupy Wall Street protests

I’m sure you’ve heard the arguments so I won’t go into too much detail; but the most dominant argument seems to be that the Occupy Wall Street Crowd is using class warfare and they trying to create divisions among American’s. If you don’t see how distorted that is I’m not going to go to much trouble to convince you; but it is clear that the ones fighting class warfare are the oligarchies that are rigging the system and they’re also the ones attempting to use divide and rule tactics. This claim that Occupy Wall Street is just a lame attempt to attribute the tactics being used by the oligarchies on their opponents; and I have no doubt that any rational person could see this. This means that it would essentially backfire for certain; and if you combine that with the fact that the Mass Media continues to try to present only two options to the public, generally speaking, the incredibly corrupt Democrats including Obama that have sold out to Wall street and the even more corrupt and fanatical Republicans. Any candidate that is sincere about representing the public and rational is boycotted by the Mass Media and since they can’t get any name recognition then the public is presented with the choice of choosing Wall Street candidate A or B.

By presenting such an absurd argument they are presenting the public with defenders of Wall Street even though any rational person can see that Wall Street is incredibly corrupt and then Barack Obama comes along and sympathizes with the protestors, or at least he pretends to. This could enable him to present himself as the defenders of the majority against these much more radical Republicans. Since both parties are receiving their campaign financing from Wall Street and they both spend much more time meeting with representatives of Wall Street and they both do more to pass legislation to benefit wall Street than the public then I don’t think it is unreasonable to consider the possibility that Wall Street has control over the government and they’re only giving the public lip service to keep them from revolting. The only difference between the parties is the type of lip service they give the public.

For the most part I see little or no reason for Wall Street to be concerned if representatives from one of these two parties gain power since they both work for Wall Street; however they have to do a good job presenting the appearance of democracy to the public. Or at least they used to. For one reason or another they seem to have gotten much greedier than they used to be and they no longer seem to feel the need to do much to pretend presumably because they think the public will continue to accept the false choice between corporate candidates A or B. the reason for this may be because it has worked for so long so they keep trying to get away with a little bit more until it gets to extreme levels which it has. Under these circumstances if they can arrange for one of the parties to become demons and rely on the support of their extreme right wing social conservatives that vote largely on one issue like guns or abortion and the other to do a little better job pretending to represent the people then they can elect Obama and they can continue corrupt business as usual.

I’m tempted to say that maybe Ann Coulter is also using reverse discrimination to help elect Obama except for one problem; she mentioned the fact that Obama is also representing Wall Street in a simple manner that seems accurate and to the point. In a recent interview on Fox News (see; “Coulter: Occupy Wall Street doesn’t reflect well on Obama, Pelosi” at daily caller.com) she made one of her usual statements about how the Occupy Wall Street protestors are demonic and they’re close to violence. This is the same Ann Coulter that said that “I thought Juan Williams should have punched Chris Wallace in the face for saying that when he came on in the same half of the program,” when talking about comparing gays to blacks (see: “Ann Coulter On Fox News: Chris Wallace Deserved To Be ‘Punched’ For Rick Santorum DADT Debate Question” on mediate.com). I guess she thinks it’s OK when she incites violence but not when the opposition protest peacefully, although she would prefer to present them as violent. The problem is that she also correctly to a point, as far as I know says, “I mean, on one hand to the extent they say they stand for anything at all, they’re against Wall Street, well Wall Street — but they support Obama. Well, Wall Street gave its biggest campaign donations in world history to Obama. It was Obama who bailed out the banks, you know, for Pete’s sake.” As far as I know Obama did collect more money from Wall Street than any candidate in history. This is part of a trend that has been going on for decades; the sitting president always breaks previous records when it comes to collecting bribes, thinly disguised as campaign contributions, mostly from Wall Street. He definitely collected more money but I’m not sure exactly where he got it though.

If he didn’t get it from Wall Street then where else could he have gotten it; the unions which are supposedly the biggest supporter to campaigns except for big business organization? After they saw how he kept his promise to “put on some comfortable shoes and walk the picket lines himself,” I doubt if they were too enthusiastic about raising too much money for Obama especially since he agreed to negotiate one item after another that would benefit wall Street in exchange for, well nothing, really, since the republicans kept saying they wouldn’t negotiate on anything they would just keep taking the concessions that Obama made. This was also made clear by some of the protestors including some that showed up on the Ed Show at one point. Ed tried to imply that Obama was in their corner and they made it clear, politely that they didn’t think so; I don’t remember the exact words on this but this was the basic idea that they presented and there have been other examples where some participants have clearly indicated that they’re not impressed by Obama or the Democratic party either. Unfortunately this isn’t the way the Mass Media is presenting it to the vast majority of the public.

This could be just idle speculation about them using reverse discrimination; and this hypothesis certainly has some problems; however, even if there is no intent behind it, and I suspect there probably isn’t for this purpose at least, the results are the same and the choice being presented to the public involves either the fanatical greedy Republicans or Obama who collects more money from Wall Street and does a slightly better job pretending to represent the public. While I was in the process of writing this blog post a new twist was added that could make this much worse; there was an alleged attempt to assassinate the Saudi ambassador. There are now calls to retaliate and these may escalate dramatically before the campaign ends although I hope not. The circumstances surrounding this are suspicious; and the US has a history of going to war based on false pretences so skepticism is warranted although believing the most bizarre conspiracy theory isn’t. I’m sure there will be conspiracy theories surrounding it; however even if the official version is true then there is still reason for skepticism of any attempts to initiate a get tough policy against Iran.

I have gone into this on other posts and so have many others so for now I will just say that any action on the part of the United States should keep in mind that they have been meddling in the affairs of many other countries including Iran when they supported the coup to restore the Shah and kept him in power for decades while he tortured his own people; then when he was finally out of power they provided finances and weapons to both sides of the Iran Iraq war among many other things. Any claim to the high ground by the US will be based on lies and propaganda; and except for those that accept the propaganda of the US Mass Media every well informed person knows it. We could potentially be presented with one side that represents the get tough on Iran position and defends Wall Street despite the enormous amount of corruption that is based in fact verses another side that does a better job pretending to stand up to Wall Street without actually doing it and joining in the demonization of Iran when necessary; and the public will be encouraged to base their votes on highly emotional grounds that don’t involve scrutinizing the facts. If this isn’t the exact scenario we are faced with it could be something way to damn close.

Fortunately the protest are growing and many of the people involved in it are presumably much better informed than the Tea Party or the complacent majority. This has even gone world wide, as indicated by several articles including “Occupy Wall Street Movement Sparks World Wide Protests” at wfxd.com; protests are now being held in the UK, Canada, Australia and many other countries. They’re almost certainly being supported in many other poorer countries including the ones that are forced to live under oppressive governments that are supported with money obtained with the help of US corporations that rely on sweat shop labor. Many of these countries also recognize that anyone of them could be invaded at some point based on false pretences. This may seem alarmist to some but it wasn’t too long ago that we went to war based on claims of WMDs that were disproved even before the invasion and many other past military activities including Vietnam were based on lies. Furthermore claims that people like Mitt Romney or even Barack Obama are “very moral men,” as one preacher put it in reference to Romney should be highly suspect when they support powerful institutions that use sophisticated tactics to obtain profits for a small percentage of the public by conducting activities that lead to great damage to the majority including torture, lack of health care, starvation and even mass murder.

Since these things are done by complex institutions the people who run them maintain what they consider plausible deniability by controlling the propaganda machine; however these atrocities wouldn’t be happening without the support of these powerful people and the propaganda machine therefore it would be much more appropriate to think of these people as sociopaths. This may sound extreme to some but I have no doubt that if a close look at the details were allowed then it would hold up to scrutiny. One of the things that Stanley Milgram found while conducting his Obedience to Authority experiments is the fact that when people were farther from the actual damage (out of mind out of sight) they were much more likely to obey orders that cause the torture of the subject. Even though he wasn’t actually being electrocuted in this experiment they thought he was. These complex institutions enable many people to maintain plausible deniability, as long as they don’t look to close including those that run the institutions and many people with much less access to information that support them by simply being unwitting consumers or voters that make their choices based on lies.

This is all the more reason why we should have what I have described as an Educational Revolution or something similar to inform the public better about many activities so that thy will be beeter prepared to participate in democracy and implement Election reform which enables the public to control the election process, not the corporate media. This should involve requiring qualified candidates to answer questions similar to a job application that is established with the input of the public and attend interviews on various subject that are controlled by the public with the help of people educated on any given subject.

A follow up blog about the activities surrounding the response from Occupy Wall Street to Charlie Rangel and John Lewis which may involve either misinformation or potential mistakes of some sort will be coming soon. For additional information on Occupy Wall Street and other related organizations see the following:

https://occupywallst.org/
http://www.occupytogether.org/
http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/occupywallstreet
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/26/occupy_wall_street_protest_enters_second
http://www.thevoters.org/index.php
http://october2011.org/
http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

(For more information on Blog see Blog description and table of context for most older posts.)

The following are the original replies when this was first posted on Open Salon.

I thought Cain might have been equipped to at least run for the office but now I find out ‘he think they Jealous and wants to take his Cadillac’ I think I will pass on him to. The GOP is so out of line with its candidates that it could quite possibly be a Wall Street conspiracy to reelect the Golden Man, he sure has been golden to them. The current crop of GOP candidates fail in every known intellectual criteria. No one could round up a roster of imbeciles like this by accident.

Jack Heart October 12, 2011 05:01 PM

Jack, this certainly seems like a reasonable hypothesis; however few people will believe it and a close look will almost certainly bring some problems. That doesn’t mean the official explanation makes sense though; what they’re doing on a routine basis is downright insane and absurd. There is definitely an unexplained mystery surrounding the social behavior of the most powerful people in this country. Sometimes I get the impression that some of these fanatics might actually believe their own BS; perhaps because the only ones they listen to are those within their own circle of ideologues. One of these fanatics that might believe their own crap might be Charles Krauthammer who just wrote another article, Democrats settle on ‘eat the rich’ as key to campaign so one sided it is hard to believe he can’t see the problems with it if he allows himself to listen to different points of views. He made a variation of the usual class warfare argument then he wrote:

“Except that the real tea party actually had a program — less government, less regulation, less taxation, less debt. What’s the Occupy Wall Street program? Eat the rich.”

Naturally neither he nor Barack Obama mentioned the fact that the rich have gotten rich by skewering the system to enable them to gouge both the consumers and the workers through a variety of corrupt tactics; which means they never earned their money at all; they stole it!

zacherydtaylor October 14, 2011 10:12 AM

"we should have what I have described as an Educational Revolution or something similar to inform the public better about many activities so that thy will be beeter prepared to participate in democracy and implement Election reform "....Amen!

I take issue with the fact that there are far too many nuevo politicos who have no real understanding of the political landscape and there is far too much chatter.

Fay Paxton October 14, 2011 11:37 AM

Fay, the problem is also with the voters who are not as informed as they should be and the way they're fed a constant stream of propaganda that encourages them to stay that way. This is beginning at a very early age and it increased dramatically when they introduced Channel One into schools although many of us weren't paying attention. they're drilling ads into children younger and younger and it is interfering with their ability to think rationally and participate in the system. Fortunately there are people researching this but the results need to be relayed to the majority so that they can stand up to this propaganda.

zacherydtaylor October 14, 2011 12:02 PM