Burning Down the House: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 56-65

Every single one of these books begins the same way: they start off really strong and then slow down once they have to provide details. Robison did the same thing when he began writing about the specific people and their actions, as Allen did when he tried to trace the connections between wealthy people and their charities (which, again, Allen thinks charitable foundations are a bad thing). Cooper has the same problem here, but I have to give him credit for what his writing here.

So far, Cooper has been discussing some kind of silent weapon. Ok, his audience--the real Americans (both black and white)--are on board. The problem for Cooper, and one that he recognizes, is that these weapons aren't understandable. Cooper doesn't understand economics, we've established that, but even less so is his audience. It's not just that they don't understand it, it's too abstract for them to see his point. Rockefeller is a name to these people, he's not a person. International finance is just a phrase and somehow it's bad. For Cooper's argument to be compelling he's got to connect the international Harvard-run supercomputer to his reader's home. Most conspiracy theorists don't do this. They leave it abstract and then talk about freedoms. At least Cooper has some respect for his reader. 

The section titled "HOUSEHOLD MODELS" (his emphasis) is an attempt to tie the previous sections' economic claims with the average reader's daily life. The first thing that Cooper points to is the economic tracking of household purchases. This is a section that is interesting in how accurate a conspiracy theorist can be while also being so wrong. What Cooper describes is economic demographics, "Applied to economics, this means that all of the households in one region or in the whole nation are studied as a  group or class rather than individually, and the mass behavior rather than the individual behavior is used to discover useful estimates of the technical coefficients governing the economic structure of the hypothetical single-household industry..."

That's his ellipses, not mine. He ends the paragraph like that.

Marketing people pay for this kind of information. It's how Facebook and Twitter earn money. The CEO of American Express once bragged that his demographic and purchasing information could predict when a woman was pregnant before anyone else (this later became an urban legend concerning the CEO of Target, Walmart, or some other store). He's dressing it up on technobabble, but all he's saying is that "they" are tracking your purchases. Cooper is writing in 1991 so he'd be amazed at the tracking now. It's not even the things you buy, it's the things you look at to buy. I look at new laptops and I'm inundated with ads for them for at least a week. In order to make these data points Cooper blames the UPC code, which I love. I love how afraid these people were of UPC codes. 

The household application is not just tracking our purchases but in seeing our responses to economic shocks. Inflation, the great boogeyman of the right-wing conspiracy theorist; strikes, and shortages are artificially created so that "they" can see how we react. 

Cooper spends the next few pages describing how the data collection is processed and he even provides a questionnaire that will be the data input. It's a three-page list appearing on pages 58-61. The outputs for this data collection are mostly phrases like "(25) controls the storage of information (26) develops psychological analyses and profiles of individuals." 

None of the outputs make sense because Cooper hasn't described how the inputs are processed into outputs. It's just techno babble because Cooper has a familiarity with electronic and computer systems. He can call them anything he wants as long as he never has to explain how the actual processing works. 

What bothers me is that he still hasn't explained the silent weapons yet. Cooper has been discussing the war and its goals; but the economic shock isn't a weapon to further the goal, it's a test to see how people react. It's an effect, not a cause. How are "they" going to cause it? Inflation? No, because inflation is an effect the way that he's described it. He calls taxes and tax information a weapon, but that's just data. It could be a weapon but then Cooper has to describe how it is going to be used as a weapon. 

For someone that has inspired generations of sovereign citizens (or Freemen on the Land if you're in the UK), his hate for the IRS is rather tepid. Yes, yes; taxes are theft...blah blah blah. Cooper wasn't the first, but in the 90s he was the best known so I expect his IRS hatred to be visceral and not this, "the number of such forms submitted to the IRS is a useful indicator of public consent, an important factor in strategic decision making."

That's it? Just, "they want too much paperwork." So far the Cooper myth is vastly inflated. 

The section ends very oddly. Cooper begins a comparison between wages, the draft, and slavery. It's odd because he claims that labor by consent no longer becomes an energy source for the "them" in that they can't use it in their silent war. This doesn't make sense in his worldview because he just spends a significant amount of time talking about how the system fools us into consent through the economic factors that he was describing. I think that Cooper lost his own thread here. 

What's the strangest thing about this section is that it sounds so much like Socialism and not in the way that Cooper means. He laments that people want to be taken care of and not do any work themselves (damn millennials) which is standard "kids these days..." talk. Ok, I disagree, but this is nothing revolutionary or new. 

So no one wants to work, but according to Cooper, no one should. He's spent the last dozen pages talking about how labor is slavery even if we consent because we've been tricked into consent. There should be no corporations because those are artificial creations. So how do we work for? Everything is part of the system according to him, and this system is waging this quiet war against us. The only solution is to work together so that everyone benefits...which sounds a lot like Marx's utopia. Even worse is that Cooper recommends resisting calls to wars that only serve to make rich men richer. 

It's a strange argument for the anti-Communist militia block to be agreeing to. Then again, it's only strange because they do not understand either side of the argument. Cooper is right about education keeping us dumb, but he's pointing his ire in the wrong direction. Kids aren't taught history, they are taught an approved version of history that gives a glorified story while skipping over all of the terrible things that have happened. The people that agree with Cooper do not have the full picture other than to say "yeah they don't teach us history anymore" but they don't accurately know what is missing. For example, they are taught that communism = bad but not the why of it. If they understood well, why communism was bad, they may be seeing that the criticisms of that system could also apply to other economic systems. 

I don't know if Cooper is aware of this or if he's as genuinely ignorant of the problem too. I'm thinking it's the latter and he is looking at the sanitized education concerning his war and realizing that all of these young men were drafted into a war but the classes aren't explaining that it the entire affair never had a point. It's funny to see how close conspiracy theorists get to a legitimate point when their work gets "boring."