Information in the Age of Noise

(10AM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)

Almost three years ago Obama announced his support for FTA-Peru, after 4,000,000 Peruvian workers and farmers had gone out on general strike against it, and my previous indifference to that amiable wind-bag turned into hostility.

FTA-Peru was already a smoking-gun about the “real” Obama, but it wasn’t obvious enough for most of the so-called “progressive blogosphere,” as beautifully represented by DailyKos, MyDD, and many other high-traffic sites which quickly turned into cheerleaders for their inane and unprincipled TV Messiah.

Of course Obama could have turned himself around at any time between then and now, before he ran all the way off the far-right edge of the world with his repulsive Catfood Commission to cut Social Security  benefits, and cuts in the food stamps program at a time when 41,000,000 Americans depend on it, and all his broken promises about FISA and $300 billion in new tax-cuts for corporations and all the rest of it.

So why didn’t the progressive blogosphere unmask that repulsive con-man before he walked into the Oval Office?

All of us had access to a thousand times as much information as ever before. How many people in Peoria could read the New York Times and the Guardian and news reports from Peru and government reports on all conceivable subjects in 1952?

But in 1952 our two major parties nominated Eisenhower and Stevenson, both of them candidates whose experience and character make Obama look like less than zero.

Who was Obama in 2002?

Not much more than an undistinguished state senator from Illinois who won a student election at the Harvard Law Review once upon a time.

He had been crushed in a Democratic Congressional primary by Bobby Rush in 2000, when nobody noticed anything like charisma anywhere near him, but that was before Penny Pritzker hired Axelrod and Plouffe and their extremely expensive talents turned nothing into the illusion of…

Barack Obama!

That TV caricature was created by the unlimited wealth of Penny Pritzker, financial chairwoman of Obama’s campaign and former chairwoman of Superior Bank, who had to pay a $460 million fine to keep herself out of jail, but still couldn’t find another $10 million to reimburse the investors that she and her partners had diddled out of their life savings!

“They still owe me $113,000,” said Fran Sweet, 63, of Downers Grove, who deposited her $480,000 retirement account at Superior a month before it collapsed. “To the Pritzkers, this is nothing. They probably think, ‘Why pay her back?’ That’s nothing. But we’re all upset that someone who made these decisions could be in that position.”

Judging from the record-breaking job Pritzker has done raising money for Obama’s campaign, her fund-raising skills do not appear to be in question, but Sweet said it sends the wrong message.

“It sends the wrong message!”

But that message was lost in the noise of Obama’s $750 million campaign.

Now here we are in 2010, with both major parties intent on ripping the last shreds of our social safety net out from under us, on the verge of yet another multi-billion dollar campaign season when the Democratic and Republican noise-machines will roar like a hundred Niagras non-stop until the polls close again, and even the possiblity of anything other than the narrow “choices” offered by both major parties will be lost in the noise.

And then all of us will look around on the morning after the next election, and the next, and the next…

…and realize that everything about us, our jobs and houses, our own future and the future of our children…

Everything about us was lost in the noise.