Media misleading most Americans

When people get all their information from someone else, they unwittingly become a prisoner to that person's prejudices.

That may be the real tragedy of many of the teabaggers.

There really is little question that from a financial and a medical perspective, almost everyone below the median income in the United States would benefit from a government-run, single-payer health care system. It would cut their costs and reduce the insecurity of heaving their insurance tied to their job.

But people who have a strong vested interest in maintaining the present system have bombarded them with propaganda, lying to them that we have the best health care in the world and that single payer is somehow un-American.

Many of the teabaggers aren't bad people at all. They're good, hard-working folks who in the past might have been called the American yeomanry. They grew up in a world where if you worked hard, you got ahead. You could buy a house, send your kids to college and hope they would have a better life than you did.

But times changed. A lot of the jobs got sent overseas when companies started caring more about their stock price than about their employees. We were told that a corporation's first responsibility is to its shareholders, not to its customers or the people who serve those customers.

In many ways, America was a better place back when a small town might have one primary employer, a business owned by the "rich family." In some of those towns, it wasn't much better than serfdom, but in others, a sort of noblesse oblige prevailed and the company settled for smaller profits so that the employees could have good lives.

Globalization changed all that. When the mill in your town is owned by Deutsche Bank or some other massive company, no one ever sees the people who do the work. It's all about the balance sheet, and if moving that mill to Malaysia makes sense, so be it.

So life changed, people suffered and others took advantage of it. An entuire talk-radio industry grew up around assessing blame -- those damn liberals -- and protecting the money people.

The fact is, if most of the teabaggers had any idea how the truly wealthy live, they'd be breaking out the pitchforks. Purdue professor Charles Kelly had a terrific book in 1994, "The Great Limbaugh Con," in which he said the only purpose of Rush LimbaughRush Limbaugh's show on the radio was to protect the image of the rich and build support for lower taxes for the top brackets.

Most rich people have publicists they pay to keep their name out of the papers. In fact, of you ignore the publicity that comes with crimes, there are really only three billionaires you ever see in the media.

Bill GatesBill Gates spends billions on philanthropy.

Warren BuffettWarren Buffett lives very modestly.

Donald TrumpDonald Trump is the clown prince of the rich.

So average folks -- what H.L. MenckenH.L. Mencken called the "booboisie" -- never see the incredible difference between their lives and those of the wildly wealthy. Nope, no class envy here.

So with Limbaugh and Glenn BeckGlenn Beck and others earning good money to suppress the truth and keep the rubes stirred up, the rich pretty much have it their way.

That's not going to change anytime soon.