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Why corporate media propagandizes and won't expose the "emperor has no clothes" obvious: They're in collusion with government "leadership" is the prima facie explanation. Let's examine this important question more closely.

A lot of heavyweight thinkers have offered explanations of the irrationality of modern political behavior--you know, behavior like Medicare recipients at town halls screaming about the evils of government-run health care or otherwise reasonable people likening Obama's plan to Nazi eugenics. George Lakoff theorizes that conservatives interpret reality through metaphors and meta-narratives modeled after authoritarian family structures. Drew Westen argues that they interpret facts according to emotionally based investments in conclusions they already hold, bypassing cortical centers of reason altogether. These and other analyses are powerful and helpful. But they aren't satisfying to me because they aren't specific enough to account for the passionate urgency and self-destructiveness of the right-wing rejection of a program that will obviously benefit them.

President Barack Obama Monday revealed his new U.S. healthcare reform proposal -- a blend of House and Senate plans along with his own recommendations.

Well, 2011, it's been nice. But I think we've worked enough already. In any case, we've already made enough money. Time to call it a year. This is a ridiculous idea, right? Yet, as the Canadian Financial Post reported at the beginning of the week, "Top CEOs will have earned average workers' full annual pay by 2:30 p.m. today." The "today" in question was Monday, January 3, the first business day of the year. Here's their explanation:

The clearest explanation yet of the forces that converged over the past three decades or so to undermine the economic well-being of ordinary Americans is contained in the new book, "Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class." The authors, political scientists Jacob Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of the University of California, Berkeley, argue persuasively that the economic struggles of the middle and working classes in the U.S. since the late-1970s were not primarily the result of globalization and technological changes but rather a long series of policy changes in government that overwhelmingly favored the very rich. Those changes were the result of increasingly sophisticated, well-financed and well-organized efforts by the corporate and financial sectors to tilt government policies in their favor, and thus in favor of the very wealthy. From tax laws to deregulation to corporate governance to safety net issues, government action was deliberately shaped to allow those who were already very wealthy to amass an ever increasing share of the nation's economic benefits. "Over the last generation," the authors write, "more and more of the rewards of growth have gone to the rich and superrich. The rest of America, from the poor through the upper middle class, has fallen further and further behind."

THIS DEMOCRAT RECESSION