At first I was inclined to dismiss this TruthOut post Friday that claimed Madison Avenue geniuses through using the latest brain research could get to my reptilian brain core so that corporations and politicians could use these modern sales techniques to influence my buying and voting patterns. Not my independent brain I told myself. I long ago gave up adoring stuff and with all the political insights I have gained through the Internet, there was no way that “using MRIs, EEGs, and other brain-scan technology to craft irresistible media messages designed to shift buying habits, political beliefs, and voting patterns” would work with me.

After checking out a petition effort by TruthOut and World Business Academy to build popular opposition to the unethical practice of neuromarketing manipulation, I decided they may be right even with someone as well informed as me. They are calling upon Congress to hold hearings to investigate the commercial and political uses of neuromarketing so the public can learn which companies and political candidates are using neuromarketing research to manipulate consumers’ and voters’ choices. “We call upon all companies to take the Ethical Marketing Pledge not to use neuromarketing or other unethical marketing practices, knowing that the World Business Academy will maintain a public list of those companies who volunteer to sign the pledge.”

I remembered some of the kitchen gadgets I bought through late night ads stuffed in a box somewhere in the basement along with two hard plastic arches (ouch!). Or how helpless I feel when dealing with car salesmen who I know never lose any money in their deals even in the worst economic times. Then it struck me. Almost all the politicians are car salesmen just like Alec Baldwin in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. Their antics and pitches are reptilian. Yet it works on a lot of people and probably me. See, I still won’t admit it works on me.

Director, producer and screenwriter William Friedkin then gave me the image of our elected officials that fits the pimp-whore status they now own. He proposed in a HuffPo post Saturday, “that every elected politician, state and federal, instead of going on hunting trips in Wyoming, appearing on So You Think You Can Dance or hiking in the Adirondacks, be required to spend a given amount of time before an election sitting in a window, perhaps in Georgetown with its little one and two story shops, with a sign around their necks proclaiming how much it will cost for their vote, be it on health care, corporate bailouts, cap-and-trade, whatever…”

The word legislator or representative does not do justice to the congress critters we have now. They are salesmen, sorry salesperson just doesn’t work for me. I’ll use seller for a gender neutral word. “My seller just asked me for more money and promised that he would keep those damn terrorists off all planes because he has a bill of goods that he just put together to persuade his fellow sellers to back.”

Politics today is selling stuff because our economy is now based on selling stuff rather than making stuff and then the Wall Streeters and bankers take the stuff they make or steal from Middle Streeters so they can gamble and make more stuff to buy stuff they really don’t need. George Carlin is either laughing or crying (or both) if his spirit still exists somewhere. It’s really not a laughing matter on what our reptilian desire for stuff has done to our nation and the world.

I learned in raising three sons and now assisting with the education of three grandsons and 14 years teaching children and youth in the inner-city that they can be among the best teachers. Look at what the NYT’s Nicholas Kristof in his column Sunday wants us to learn from a 14-year-old teen.

Kevin Salwen, a writer and entrepreneur in Atlanta, was driving his 14-year-old daughter, Hannah, back from a sleepover in 2006. While waiting at a traffic light, they saw a black Mercedes coupe on one side and a homeless man begging for food on the other.

“Dad, if that man had a less nice car, that man there could have a meal,” Hannah protested. The light changed and they drove on, but Hannah was too young to be reasonable. She pestered her parents about inequity, insisting that she wanted to do something.

“What do you want to do?” her mom responded. “Sell our house?”

Warning! Never suggest a grand gesture to an idealistic teenager. Hannah seized upon the idea of selling the luxurious family home and donating half the proceeds to charity, while using the other half to buy a more modest replacement home.

Eventually, that’s what the family did. The project — crazy, impetuous and utterly inspiring — is chronicled in a book by father and daughter scheduled to be published next month: “The Power of Half.” It’s a book that, frankly, I’d be nervous about leaving around where my own teenage kids might find it. An impressionable child reads this, and the next thing you know your whole family is out on the street.

If we want to stop the sellers from ruining everything, we need to convince those who vote that they are being sold a bill of goods by the sellers that is hurting them and the future of all children and grandchildren. All of us need to rethink what is and what isn’t important in life and base our political decisions on community and love, not sales pitches and dramatic scenarios written by sellers in Congress or ad brainstormers who are trapped in a broken system that compels them to act our these pimp-whore dramas while striving and failing to maintain their integrity.

I watched this video William Timberman posted here Saturday and see the essence of life: food, music, friends, family, community and love. I commented then, “Granted the Italians love opera, but what human, except those scarred by war, power and violence, wouldn’t want the former and dump the latter. The essence of our current political challenge, is finding ways to help selfish, guarded, cold hearts turn into compassionate warm ones. Easy to write, still not impossible to do. We have to change enough minds to gain majority vote power in elections which could greatly reduce the power of the Corporate Communists. Or as DCLaw1 put it, stop the “engineering of our society by business and industry into a state of passive consumption and political near-powerlessness.”

So using the advanced sections of our brains, let’s take advantage of our people power by stuffing stuff and the sellers who don’t represent us before we are nothing but gadgets stuffed in some forgotten box somewhere.