Yesterday, Jack Welch, an acclaimed business executive and a person whom I once sat in the same room during a big corporate dog & and pony show was being played out literally where I recall respective C-level professionals standing up and respectively making all sorts of assertions about the various components of the marketplace without any form of substantiation as their various conjectures apparently were based on imaginative experiences. The back bencher's, us, the junior executives and managers who were going to be commissioned to carryout many of these assertive projections in the cause of greater revenues and profits privately would try to round off the bullshit to protect our jobs as often promises were impossible or based on unrealistic ideas.
Yesterday when I saw the reports of Welch, openly accuse the Presidential Administration of cooking the books, from this tweet:
Jack Welch @jack_welch
Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers.
...much like he and his companions in the corporate executive class did when they are massaging their company's stock values each quarter. But then he got cornered by his own ego and
"tweety-bird" on Hardball with Chris Matthews , (
watch it here link),that he was simply not calling in question this month's labor statistics---because it didn't fit into his own political narrative or belief. So now he has created another mythical, conspiratorial BLS'ism on the heals of a parade of conspiracy myths in that proliferate through our political spectrum.
Matthews: "...here you put out the word, unbelievable job numbers, fair enough, these Chicago guys will do anything so they changed the numbers, what evidence do you have they got to the BLS?"
Welch: "I have no---"
Matthews: "that they got to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and jimmied these numbers by 0.3%."
Welch: "I have no evidence to prove that, I just want to raise the question."
Matthews: "You didn't raise the question. You said that these Chicago guys will do anything so they changed the number. You are asserting here in your tweet that you put out at 8:35 in the morning just five minutes after the report came out. Did you talk to any economists or the accounting world to understand how the numbers were put together before you accused the Chicago guys of changing the numbers?"
Welch: "Chris, I know these numbers gathered by a series of wild assumptions, maybe they weren't right at 8.5%, maybe they weren't right at 8.4%, but it seems coincidental that one month before the election they would end up at 7.8%. the president today is on the stump. the president always talked about his 7.8%. he didn't mention 600,000 jobs added in the government."
Matthews: "Let's -- see, it's not your attitude about Obama people care about. it's your analysis and you came out this morning and asserted not a question mark or a question or concern about a coincidence, you say these Chicago guys will do anything so they change the numbers. do you want to take that back?"
Welch: "No i don't think so to take anything back."
Matthews: "This is serious, there was jimmying with the numbers, corruption, infiltration or getting to -- it's not funny, jack. you're talking about the president of the united states playing with the Bureau of Labor Statistics number. this is nixon stuff. this is what Nixon did back in the old days."
[...]
Matthews: "Jack, all I want to know is when we write this down three weeks from now or four weeks from now when the election is over, I want to know what you meant. do you mean it's a coincidence or do you mean you have evidence that there was corruption."
Welch: "I have no evidence of corruption, none whatsoever."
Matthews: "So these chicago guys had nothing to do with the number coming out today."
Welch : "I don't know that."
Matthews: "Why did you say it? these Chicago guys will do anything, change the numbers. You just said it in your tweet. I'm careful when I tweet. I usually have somebody like my producer say read my tweet. Did you really want to stand behind this tweet?
Welch: "I want to raise the question of these."
Matthews: "You did raise the question."
Welch: "Chris, these numbers defy logic. they defy logic. We do not have a 4% to 5% booming economy with 873,000 people added. I mean, stop it, Chris. on the face of it we don't have this GDP. I love you, but you can't get there."
Matthews: I think you're a great, brilliant businessman. I wish you were in charge of my stock options these days because you made a lot of money for us here, but let me ask you this one more time. So that all the people out there of lesser intellect will stop marching in your band, Jack Welch thinks this is a coincidence. Jack Welch does not believe the boys in Chicago changed the numbers?
Welch: "No, Jack Welch is raising the question for some good analyst to go look at."
Matthews: "Okay. good. you're raising the question. you certainly did that. jack welch, thank you for joining us at the very top of "Hardball" tonight."
In context what is being played out here---politics and partisan politics. Jack Welch, a leader of the corporate class who whose well earned nickname when during the '80s Jack Welch was bestowed the nickname
"Neutron Jack" for eliminating wide swath of employees and whole departments while then leaving the GE office's intact. Ironically the meeting that I was in was the final sales pitch by one of the world's largest staffing companies providing temporary staffing services for more "soon to be former GE employees" who were going to have their jobs eliminated but then rehired by the staffing firm to do the same thing. Ultimately the attitude of the GE executive staff was that the former loyal employees would be left with little choice. They believed that they could retain the expertise while lowering the cost and liabilities. Of course in the '90's the job market was flush and the best always left leaving the marginal talent behind.
But this is about using conspiracy theories for political purposes which involves prejudice, bias, mythology and the reflex to jump to conclusions without a shed of physical evidence. It uses a weakness in human nature to first try to confirm a closely held belief. Our beliefs often play a determinate role in how we view the world and our own life. Beliefs provide a structured process through which humans evaluate everything---especially politics. Beliefs about reality are based on how people interpret the world according to their observations and personal experiences. There are two primary aspects which contribute to beliefs, the first is the emotional component, followed by a logical component.
Often beliefs begin similarly to how theories start out---with an hypothesis. Assumptions are made often based on some seemingly logical observation and deductive reasoning. In other cases a new belief comes from an emotional viewpoint that appears to be supported by some subjective form of logic---call it an echo chamber.
Then comes the blending of these two components which forms the structure of beliefs. Through a persons personal perspective of their beliefs, people try to make some sort of sense out of the things going on around us where presumptions about how the future will take place.
Now comes the mass mythology component. Once established, beliefs become accepted as fact, above the review of scrutiny, especially from those who deeply want to believe. Beliefs then become a person's or group's “personal operating system.”, akin to an operating system on a computer, where beliefs control how people sort and place data.
Therefore everything a person see's, experience's, think's, even feel's is then adjusted to fit with their beliefs. Translated, each person's version of reality is then a creation of their beliefs where an individual's personal operating system deconstructs and then reconstructs everything to conform to what they previously believed.
Below the squiggles...
So let us deconstruct BLS'ism as Welch proposed. He inferred that the President and this Administration would use the neutral reporting mechanism of the Bureau of Labor Statistics as a political advantage. In doing so he characterized them as the "guys from Chicago" insinuating that they were inherently corrupt as in the "Daley/Chicago Democrats" or even worse the "Chicago Outfit" of being able to gain such an advantage. Welch went on to say that historically and mathematically this was economically impossible, at least from his own belief or experiences. He offered his own anecdotal experience as evidence---something I have seen him do some sixteen years ago where his anecdotal experience and analysis was inherently flawed and self-serving but because he was Jack Welch and the CEO everyone shook their head in agreement (or at least not in dissent).
Hearing this from what could be an authoritative source of course the opponents of President Obama pounced on the opportunity to promote Welch as having a legitimate claim. It didn't matter that Welch provided zero evidence simply him stating the belief is enough for those already believing that Obama and his Administration is bad, corrupt, evil, the enemy or whatever.
Now I can counter Welch's anecdotal claim with my own where in the last couple months I have personally experienced signs that the labor market is incrementally getting just a bit better above survival levels as staffing and recruiting companies are beginning to look at adding recruiters. Talking with with two both express the fact that they are beginning to not being able to respond to demand outside of very high demand micro labor markets. In the educational micro market districts are having trouble filling some teacher positions, educational assistant positions and having enough substitutes. The market is a far place from 2006 but there is a measurable change from 2009 or 2010. Is my anecdotal analysis any more valid than Welch's, especially in a market where unemployment is well above the national average at 9.2%
But on deeper levels all these conspiracy theories the seek to despise or undermine the President are all met to feed into the mythical minds of Americans who are mythical believers. Let me push the hot button, the Republicans overwhelmingly have developed support, as in their base, from white, evangelical believers and white rural Catholics, as well, from high school educated population groups. All groups where belief in various forms of mythology contradict basic realities like science or medicine in the rest of the world. So it is no wonder why all these conspiracy ideas form a belief model as in birth'ism. If the belief that is only expressed privately that whites are superior than how can a Black-American President actually be elected by the majority of the country? Then the idea that he was an off spring of a foreign national here on a education visa compounded the belief system regardless of the physical evidence.
People have said in all honestly that if this was so untrue why would Donald Trump hold such a strident belief. My reply is that Donald is just rich, by knowing how to manipulate financial systems and commercial real estate. But he gets his own belief wrong as he gets things right as in trying to develop a casino-resort in Gary, Indiana.
The same for the poll'ism conspiracy where scientific polls are subject to a grand scheme to keep Obama as president. Knowing the statistical world I can dig into the various sampling data and determine whether survey protocols are manipulated like CNN's focus group for the first debate that was so weighted that it was hilarious, as on page 21`on their demographic report states that everyone was 50 yrs old or older and white from the Old South.
My favorite is the continuing myth that there is a left-leaning media bias, this might have been the case back in the '60's and '70's but the media is merely a reflection of the national culture---otherwise they would not be popular enough to sell one ad spot. Science based reviews show that the media is actually center-right but it is easy for believers to accuse the media reporting against them as having a bias.
Finally this takes me to Affirmative Action'ism where it is all there for everyone to see how political prejudice and resentment is attempted by Scott Brown against Elizabeth Warren regarding her Native American heritage. From TIME Magazine's Toure; Elizabeth Warren, Scott Brown and the Myth of Race
“There are no genetic characteristics possessed by all blacks but not by non-blacks,” wrote University of California at Berkeley law professor Ian Haney Lopez in the landmark 1993 essay The Social Construction of Race. “Intragroup differences exceed intergroup differences … The rejection of race in science is now almost complete. In the end we should embrace historian Barbara Fields’s succinct conclusion with respect to the plausibility of biological races: ‘Anyone who continues to believe in race as a physical attribute of individuals despite the now commonplace disclaimers of biologists and geneticists might also believe that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy are real.’ … Social meanings connect our faces to our souls. Race is neither an essence nor an illusion, but rather an ongoing, contradictory, self-reinforcing process subject to the macro forces of social and political struggle and the micro effects of daily decisions.” Lopez concludes: “Race is a social construction.”
So when
George Will writes:
Obama’s administration is in shambles, yet he is prospering politically. This may not, however, entirely be evidence of the irrationality of the electorate. Something more benign may be at work.
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Perhaps a pleasant paradox defines this political season: That Obama is African American may be important, but in a way quite unlike that darkly suggested by, for example, MSNBC’s excitable boys and girls who, with their (at most) one-track minds and exquisitely sensitive olfactory receptors, sniff racism in any criticism of their pin-up. Instead, the nation, which is generally reluctant to declare a president a failure — thereby admitting that it made a mistake in choosing him — seems especially reluctant to give up on the first African American president. If so, the 2012 election speaks well of the nation’s heart, if not its head.
It is a social construction of race that George Will doesn't get it. As people learn and grow, many of a person's former beliefs no longer serve individuals---namely race. The reason is they have outlived their usefulness. America is not supporting Obama in the majority because of race, it didn't elect him because of race either, America elected Obama because of the political and social policies Obama stood for. How effective he is to get those policies instituted is a whole other matter, but on the whole he has been quite effective. This is why his opposition is so extreme.
Could it be that it is not so much that people are voting for Obama because of his race but more about why people are voting against him because of his race?
TIME's Toure offers an insightful piece on racial coding and the scientific obtained statistics titled: How To Read Political Racial Code
Using certain words to invoke racialized fear and scare white working class voters is a long-established part of the Republican playbook. The GOP is a 90% white party and has been for decades. According to Ron Brownstein of the National Journal, Mitt Romney will need over 60% of white people to vote for him or he will lose. “That,” Brownstein says, “would be the best performance ever for a Republican Presidential challenger with that group of voters.” Given that math, in a base turnout election where Romney has a big lead among white, non-college educated men, it’s understandable why he’d try to motivate those voters with code words that remind them of their racial difference with Obama and stigmatize that difference. In this effort a word like “welfare” is extremely valuable. Sure there are more white than black Americans on welfare, but when a candidate says ‘welfare’ many whites think of their tax dollars being given to blacks.
So when Romney began running ads about Obama “dropping the work requirement from welfare” — ads which are still running even though the claim has been thoroughly debunked — he was merely updating Ronald Reagan’s old “welfare queen” meme. Both are designed to create racial resentment around entitlements. This tactic is bolstered by the classic stereotype of blacks as lazy. A recent Pew Research Center poll, for example, found that 57% of Republicans believe people are poor because they don’t work hard. When a recent Washington Post poll asked “Why do most black voters so consistently support Democrats?” the second reason given by Republicans was “black voters are dependent on government or seeking a government handout” while for Democrats it was that “their party addresses issues of poverty.” (The top answer for members of both parties was “Don’t know”.)
[...]
Do Democrats use racial code? No. The Democratic party is a racially diverse coalition. There would be no value to playing this game. In fact, the party has risked alienating white working class voters by fighting for people of color, a tightrope perhaps best symbolized by President Johnson signing the 1964 Voting Rights Act and then famously, and presciently, saying to an aide, “We have lost the South for a generation.”
he Hispanic population in America is rising rapidly and as Brownstein points out, “Whites have declined as a portion of the electorate in every presidential election since 1992, according to exit polls.” Those are two frightening trends for the future of the GOP and even prominent Republicans are publicly admitting it. “The demographics race we’re losing badly,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina recently told the Washington Post. “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
But for now, as the GOP paddles furiously trying to stay viable as an all-white party, we must shine a harsh light on their attempts to use old racial stereotypes to win votes.
So back to all the " 'isms", they are all social constructs of myths tied to racism and the fact that we have one political party that is exceedingly white, male and uneducated---and the pawn of the corporatists that must continually feed the flame of anger and resentment.