Prosthetic eyeballs go for anywhere from $2,000 to $9,000 at an ocularist. You'll be thanking me for this information, as the US election ramps into high gear and the deluge of political propaganda, I mean advertising, puts sane people everywhere at severe risk of stabbing their own eyes out with knitting needles.

Controlling the thoughts of over 300 million people takes some doing. For the last few decades the choice of medium has been the idiot box, specifically mass media.

But mass media costs mass money.

If you're wondering how much, recent estimates by Kantar Media, an ad tracking firm, suggest that the price tag for political TV ads will clock in at $4.4 billion for the 2016 circus. This is up from $3 billion in 2012. Hey, what's another 1.4 billion amongst friends?

When it comes to politics, controlling the media is all-important since the media is the all important leverage into the populace's minds. Amassing power and personal fortunes begins with grabbing attention.

Our bent here is not to follow the political campaign, or to bother trying to figure out which podium doughnut gets the clown crown at the end of the charade. As far as I can tell, leading political candidates are selected for having no manners, no humour, no humility, and the sort of IQ commonly found in farmyard animals.

Those are the good ones. The bad ones are pure psychopaths and if I had my way they'd be thrown into cells sans plumbing or heating and forced to eat only what they can cultivate in their body hair. Predicting the outcome of this circus impresses me as a waste of time. It's a good thing they're performing for a populace, the majority of which have no intellect at all. 

The political process formula, like most things that work well, is simple. Mass media distracts mass populace and mass populace in turn votes for all manner of absurdity.

The Controlling Elite

Contrary to popular belief, there's no conspiracy of a group of grumpy old men in smoky rooms, sipping Chivas, wearing stripy cardigans and pushing the buttons; but rather there's a distributed elite group of people who went to the right schools, joined the right organisations, who understand how things work and employ lobby groups to further their interests.

Nothing formal but rather the elite who've managed to figure out the system for their benefit and who use their influence to create ever more influence. Power clusters under the system and those who acquire power manipulate more of the system accruing ever more power in a continuous repetitive cycle.

The GFC provided some insights into how the system works.

Investment bankers managed to defraud first pension funds and institutions and, when caught out, managed to coerce the tax payer to pay them bonuses.

As I mentioned in last week's post when discussing the criminal activities by Wall Street in the GFC.