In the introductory chapter of
Hostile Takeover, David Sirota refers to pivotal moment at the beginning of
The Matrix.
Casting himself as Morpheus to his reader's Neo, he offers the red pill of information. It's theoretically possible to close the book, swallow the blue pill, and go back to blissful ignorance.
Theoretically.
But chances are, just like Neo, by the time you've gotten to that point, you're ready to grab the damn pill out of his hand and swallow it down dry.
Having seen Sirota on TV,(a particular favorite is when he calls slithering
John Stossel a "smarmy looking liar" without even breaking stride in the point he's making)makes the book read as a call to verbal arms. Sirota challenges the reader in every sentence just like the red pill challenges every conception Neo had about what his real life was.
The challenge starts with the full title of the book, Hostile Takeover: How Big Money & Corruption Conquered Our Government--and How We Take It Back and follow all the way through as emphasized in that borrowed metaphor of the red pill.
The intricate system of lies "is everywhere," Morpheus says. "It's all around us, here even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes."
The same can be said for the hostile takeover. You can see it everywhere--in the media, at your job, when you fill out your IRS forms. As Morpheus says, "It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth"--the world where citizens' ignorance is corporate bliss. The more we are distracted from the painful realities foisted on us by corporations and their agents who have infiltrated our government, the more we can be bled for all we're worth.
Therefore you have a decision to make: close this book now and go back to believing your corporate-owned government works for you, or believing there's nothing you can do to fight back. You take the blue pill and live in the fantasy world so carefully prepared for you by the establishment.
Or as they say in The Matrix, "You take the red pill ... and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
That rabbit hole is both deep and wide. From taxes:
During the 2000 election campaign, George W. Bush knew that in order to sell his tax cuts, he would have to convince working-class Americans they would be getting most of the benefits. "By far the vast majority of [my tax cut] goes to people at the bottom end of the economic ladder," he said during the second presidential debate.
This turned out to be a straight-up lie. According to the nonpartisan Citizens for Tax Justice, when Bush's tax cuts are fully implemented in 2010, the top 15 percent of income earners will have received roughly two-thirds of the tax cuts, with the top 1 percent of americans recieving almost $600 billion in tax cuts. The bottom 60 percent of Americans will receive less than 18 percent of the total benefits.
President Bush, we later found out, knew all his talk of tax cuts helping the Average Joe was malarkey. According to journalist Ron Suskind, White House aides started purshing a new round of tax cuts for the wealthy in 2002. "Haven't we already given money to rich people?" Bush asked, acknowledging that he knew exactly whom his policies were benefitting.
To pensions:
The Galveston story is much the same. In 1981, the city and two other Texas counties opted out of the rock-solid, guaranteed benefits of Social Security and put their public employees into a system of private retirement accounts. In subsequent years, the Galveston system has been meticulously sugarcoated in an intense propaganda campaign to convince people it has been a screaming success. Texas congressman Kevin Brady (R), a recipient of almost a half million dollars of campaign cash from the financial sector, claimed Galveston retirees get "about twice [the] retirement paycheck as Social security would have provided." Similarly, the private investment manager who designed the system claimed, "In every case we ever looked at, people end up better off in our plan."
Apparently, they didn't talk to people who actually lived under the plan. Because if they did, they would have found the exact opposite in many cases. "I didn't come out ahead," one longtime Galveston court clerk told reporters in 2005. "My chief deputy did not come out ahead. My bookkeeper did not come ahead. I personally don't know anyone who has retired who came out ahead."
Similarly, a twenty-three-year Galveston county worker said, "I get around $460 per month now, but under Social Security, I would have gotten $1,000. They are putting this up to be a model for the rest of the country. some model.
To unions:
Yes, unions spend millions of dollars on all sorts of campaign activities: registering voters, getting people to the polls, advertisements--you name it, unions do it, and they would happily plead guilty to charges of political activism on behalf of workers.
But all those efforts are positively dwarfed by the amount corporate America spends influencing elections. According to a 2001 report by the nonpartisan watchdog group Public Campaign, "for every one dollar contributed by labor unions business interests gave $15." When looking at just individual contributions to lawmakers, the gap is even more pronounced: "Business executives out-contributed labor leaders and staff by a factor of 1,000 to 1."
Sirota names names and offers a common sense accessible solution for each of the problems he describes. This isn't just a book long rant.
It's also a reference book to go back and use time and time again when you're trying to get a fantasy based friend to come back to the reality based world.
Hostile Takeover did make it to the NYT expanded Best Seller list, which is great news for progressive publishing. However, don't let that stop you from landing a copy of your own.
The red pill is bitter to swallow, but the payoff is seeing the world as it really is, and an infusion of energy to change it to how it should be.
Sadly, I predict we'll all have plenty of use for it between now and 2008.
Crossposted from The Media Room at Texas Kaos