Tea Party – Engaging Peace

Bait and Switch: Psychology and Trump’s Voter Fraud Tantrums

Posted on February 2, 2017February 1, 2017 by kathiemm

by Roy J. Eidelson, PhD

In recent days President Trump has, yet again, ludicrously asserted that millions of people illegally voted against him last November. Lies of such magnitude and consequence from the White House certainly deserve the attention and scorn they’ve received. After all, once we move beyond the realm of “alternative facts,” the real evidence shows that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than to impersonate someone else at the polls.

But to fully understand Trump’s complaints about “illegal voters,” we need to recognize that voter fraud and voter suppression are opposite sides of the same coin. By promoting beliefs about the former, the groundwork is laid for pursuing the latter. In this way, tales of unlawful voting have long been a pretext for obstructing the voting rights of U.S. citizens.

The mass manipulation at the heart of this strategy relies on what I call the “combating-injustice mind game.” With two steps, this psychological ploy preys upon the public’s acute and compassionate sensitivity to issues of right and wrong. First we’re bombarded with dire warnings that something terribly unjust is happening. These overwrought claims aim to spur broad outrage and demands for reform.

Then the propagandists step forward with carefully crafted proposals for how to address the purported injustice. But there’s a catch. Their recommended changes are designed with a very different goal in mind: to advance a narrow self-aggrandizing agenda, one that leaves those who were already disadvantaged even worse off than before. So, behind the seductive façade of combating injustice, wealth is extracted, power is entrenched, and the common good is trampled.

In short, complaints of rampant voter fraud are really just an elaborate cover story, constructed to hide repugnant attempts to gain electoral advantage by disenfranchising Americans. Paul Weyrich, for decades a leading voice of the conservative movement, indirectly acknowledged as much almost fifty years ago. In a speech in Texas back in 1980, he explained, “I don’t want everybody to vote. …Our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.” That master plan hasn’t changed in the intervening years.

That’s why the Republican Party’s 2012 platform emphasized, “Every time that a fraudulent vote is cast, it effectively cancels out a vote of a legitimate voter”; why Reince Priebus, now Trump’s chief of staff, has argued that requiring a photo ID at the voting booth is “fair, reasonable, and just”; why other right-wing mouthpieces insist we must “keep fraudsters away from polling places” and “vote fraud pervades our election process”; why True the Vote, the Koch-funded Tea Party outfit, cunningly describes itself as “regular citizens standing up for fair elections”; and why the GOP’s 2016 platform endorsed legislation calling for both “proof of citizenship when registering to vote and secure photo ID when voting.”

It’s no surprise that the favorite targets of voter suppression efforts include African Americans, Hispanic Americans, students, and low-income workers. That’s because most members of these groups are traditionally unlikely to vote Republican. They’re also less likely than most Americans to have a driver’s license or other valid photo ID.

But ID laws aren’t the only suppression tactics employed. For example, requiring physical proof of citizenship when registering to vote undercuts the effectiveness of low-income voter registration drives. Closing polling places on or near college campuses makes it tougher for students to vote. And eliminating early voting periods and same-day registration options particularly disadvantage voters of lesser means. These assaults are likely to shift into even higher gear if Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions is confirmed as the country’s next Attorney General. Sessions has described the Voting Rights Act as a “piece of intrusive legislation” and the NAACP and ACLU as “un-American.”

So the President and his allies are actually right when they warn of a dangerous plot to cripple and corrupt our democratic institutions. But the mischief doesn’t take the form of impersonators at the voting booth. Rather, electoral justice and the integrity of the ballot box are endangered by well-organized conservative efforts aimed at preventing some Americans from voting at all. Indeed, it’s the unjustly disenfranchised in the United States who truly number in the millions today.

Roy J. Eidelson, Ph.D. President, Eidelson Consulting,Past President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility www.eidelsonconsulting.com

This post was originally published by Psychology Today at https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dangerous-ideas/201701/bait-and-switch-psychology-and-trump-s-voter-fraud-tantrums

The “Just Enough” Policy: Behavioral Control of Collective Protest through Minimum Reward, Part 1 of a 3-part series

Posted on April 4, 2016April 5, 2016 by kathiemm

Author: James Montgomery Flagg. 1917. In the public domain.

By Anthony Marsella, Ph.D.

What does it take?

What does it take to awaken the American (USA) people to the egregious political, economic, and moral abuses and violations of their Constitutional rights and privileges? What does it take for the American people to demand changes in existing government and corporate political, economic, and social policies and actions limiting accountability, transparency, and participation?

What does it take for the American people to successfully reduce the concentration of power, wealth, and position favoring a few and denying equality and opportunity for the masses? Why are American people failing to respond to the numerous crises in American society that reveal widespread corruption, cronyism, and incompetence in public and private institutions and organizations?

Why are Americans savoring the fruits of consumerism, materialism, commodification, competition when the consequences of these institutionalized values are destructive for individuals and the social fabric? These questions are but a few of the many questions being asked daily across America and the world. At issue is the disproportionate presence of silence and passivity, and the absence of activism.

I am not discussing, nor am I advocating, widespread rebellion or revolt, even as some voices have called for these as solutions in the face of a creeping oppression. Rather, I am seeking an understanding of why so few protests have emerged and been sustained across time and place?

No one can deny the existence of protests from both “liberal/progressive” circles, (e.g., Occupy Wall Street, Wisconsin Teacher Unions, LBGT organizations) and conservative/tea party circles (e.g., regarding border immigration, abortion rights, gun ownership rights). Yet, in my opinion, these protests have been focused on specific causes, often informed by narrow ideological reasons. I am seeking an understanding of sources that could undertake a broader and unified protest, seeking to re-claim and to improve upon America’s inspired heritage of human rights — a protest to reclaim “moral authority,” “national identity,” and “social and civic responsibility,” not through guns, violence, and anger, but through virtue.

It must be asked whether current divisions across gender, racial, ethnicity, social class, political, wealth, regional, and religious boundaries have limited any collective citizen response challenging the concentration of power, wealth, and position that seeks national and global domination. In my opinion, the concentration denies citizen participation by controlling means, motives, and consequences of national activism, especially by creating divisions across diverse population sectors. Although developing diverse identities is to be encouraged because diversity is the essence of life itself, a sense of unity is lost as too many are denied equality.

And how does the fractioning of a society lend itself to external control and domination by those with wealth, power, and position? For me, the answer is simple: “A society can assume unlimited diversity, as long as it provides equal access to opportunity.”

It is the disproportion in opportunity, rights, and freedoms that lead to resentment, struggle, and violence. The USA needs a national vision identity that recognizes and accepts the conditions required for civility and citizen accommodation in our global era, including (1) an appreciation of the value of diversity, (2) a willingness to accept an interdependence ethic, (3) the commitment to nonviolence/nonkilling, and (4) a belief in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Unfortunately, what has emerged in the USA is a “limited good” mentality¹ in which gains by one group or sector are considered losses by another, because there is only so much “good” to go around. But while this may be, in part, an accurate appraisal of our global situation, there are forces at work that seek control stemming from the age-old divisions rooted in concentrations of power, wealth, and position. Choose your century, country, or cause, and “concentration” will always be the root of problems.

In today’s global era, filled with challenges that defy solution (e.g., population increases, poverty, violence, wars, environmental pollution, crime), “control” by a few (e.g., 1%, bankers, dictators, corporate royalty, Davos faction, monopolies) has become the means and the end. In the USA, which leads the world in military force, financial wealth, corporate cartels, and exportation of popular culture, “control” is essential to preserve an existing state of affairs that denies equality, and promotes homogeneity.

The USA has the world’s largest military budget, highest medical costs, greatest number of prisons and prison inmates, and greatest divisions of wealth (e.g., 1% versus 99%). What this enables — indeed ensures — is the opportunity to implement a “Just Enough” approach to keeping collective control.

NOTE:

George Foster (1965). Peasant society and the image of limited good. American Anthropologist. Limited good refers to the concept that in peasant societies the world is seen as a “competitive” place in which “goods” are limited, and so distrust, envy, jealousy, and resentment are fostered. Hmmm?

Anthony Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu. He is known nationally and internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 15 edited books, and more than 250 articles, chapters, book reviews, and popular pieces. He can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.

This is the first in a three-part series originally published on https://www.transcend.org/tms/2014/06/the-just-enough-policy-behavioral-control-of-collective-protest-through-minimum-reward/

“Disastrous rise of misplaced power”

Posted on April 14, 2011April 17, 2011 by kathiemm

[Note from Kathie Malley-Morrison: Today, just before Tax Day in the U.S., we again welcome guest contributor John Hess, who writes about the financial consequences of war.]

In the mid-1960s, I saw the initiation of social programs that promised to transform and improve America, making it truly the land of opportunity and giving it the rough equality that we like to think it should have.

Those social programs were far from perfect, but they were a promising start. Yet that promise was never achieved because of Vietnam, a war that sapped the country’s resources and took them away from social programs and into destruction.

The same is true today. The U.S. has already spent some 1.1 trillion dollars on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, with no end in sight. Indeed, we are spending roughly $8 billion a month in Afghanistan alone, and it is estimated that we will spend at minimum another $125 billion if we do not withdraw until 2014 (if then).

You all know what that money could do if even half of it was spent here: public higher and k-12 education, infrastructure, Medicare and Medicaid, and on and on.

I am no great fan of President Eisenhower, for I know of his reluctance to honestly deal with segregation and integrating schools. Nonetheless, Eisenhower was a warrior, one greatly sobered and humbled by the savagery and slaughter of WWII. Though he did little to nothing to stop its growth during his tenure in office, he gave us a famous warning in his “Farewell Address”:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

That military-industrial complex weighs so heavily upon us today. The Tea Party movement has shown how effective grass-roots efforts can be at cutting budgets, but has chosen to attack vitally important social programs, not the overbearing military-industrial complex.

What will it take to get tax-payers to preserve needed social programs while stopping the engines of destruction?

John Hess, Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Boston