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.

A good case can be made that U.S. legislators no longer represent their voters and that our two-party system is only one-party because not only do banks own Congress as my senator Dick Durbin so honestly said, but pay to play politics owns Congress on all legislative matters. Voters like me, learned in the 2008 election that a change-President can’t make a dent on the corrupt power that owns Washington. So even when the citizens demand change to greatly reduce the corruption, they have little power to make it happen compared to the vast corrupters’ power.

Districts have been gerrymandered so 85 percent of incumbents feel safe from any real challenge. Even when citizens want to remove money as the primary means of getting elected, incumbents control any real chance for a constitutional convention because of free speech requirements. We have allowed our representatives to disenfranchise us from ourselves. The people, whom our constitution says hold the real power, have given it away. Even though there are a handful of congress critters who have not been corrupted, because the disease is so wide spread, all current ones need to be fired so we can start over.

Hey that is not such a bad idea. We could fire all of them- permanently! Before you dismiss me as a complete impractical crackpot, stay with me as we explore the idea a little further.

What I’m going to lay out in brief, crude and elementary form may seem far out and impossible to accomplish. I don’t think it has to be if we envision the capabilities we have before us. Technically it is feasible. Politically it presents a monumental challenge. If the proposal has enough credibility and creates enough excitement, it could be doable.

I’ve toyed with the idea briefly in my mind from time to time. A Seminal post by ekunin on FDL Representative Democracy Doesn’t Work Anymore, made me give more serious thought to my concept.

Put simply, we don’t need politically elected representatives to vote for us if we all could vote for ourselves. A reversion to town hall government updated through technology. Our representatives would all be fired. We would select from every state Bill-Developer Assistants (BDAs) who would craft and write legislation we request. We could select them in the same way we would vote on legislation- Internet voting. More on their role later.

Now if you already don’t think I’m crazy, you do now because of electronic election fraud that has already happened in Ohio and other states. If a fraud-proof, electronic system can’t be devised, I am crazy. I believe that we have the technology or can develop it, to build one that is fraud-proof. For example, every voter would provide a thumb print or eyeball to prove who they are and that they are a qualified voter. That can be done at home or in public locations. All votes could be videotaped for followup if any fraud is suspected. Or some technology geek can come up with something even more fraud-proof than I can conceive.

Just as we would use the same fraud-proof system to vote on the final bills, we can use it to tell our BDAs how we feel as the proposed bills wend their way into a final product. Lobbyists will have to tell us, not pay us or wine and dine us, their positions through the same websites we use. Any broadcast or print ads or attempts to influence voters on any specific bill would be prohibited. I’m not a legal expert, but if they have the same access to make their opinions known as any citizen, how can they claim we are violating free speech. We couldn’t prevent corporations, labor unions and other groups to use their own sites to make their case. Voters would have the choice of using those sites or not.

Internet ads could be allowed if the user has the choice to watch or ignore. If we legally can’t ban the ads, then we can encourage citizens to ignore them because straight, honest information is available online. Corporations don’t have enough money to buy all of us which they can do so easily and cheaply with our current congress critters and our money election system. Think of how cheap it is for them to craft and own legislation now in comparison to the trillions they make.

Websites for each bill would provide ample information for voters in words devoid of propaganda and emotional appeals. BDAs won’t represent parties or ideologies because they are assistants elected to represent all and all BDAs would receive the same salary except for bill leaders who will receive bonuses when work is complete. Voters would decide the bonus amounts based on the importance and excellence of the bill. The BDAs would have subordinates to help them with their work. We would have BDAs assigned to watch for the devil in the details to prevent surprises.

We would have to develop a way to keep the BDAs from being corrupted so that the lobbyists will have to use facts and logic to convince them of how their proposals will be best for Americans as a country, not just a state or region. We could develop college certification or specialty colleges to train the BDAs. We could give the BDAs similar status of our appeals court and justices of the supreme court in their goal of being free of prejudice and deciding on facts and logic to the greatest extent possible. Laws would have to be enacted to provide penalties for illegal access or attempts to influence as now exists for judges.

If the BDAs are selected by state in proportion to population, the argument will be made that urban will dominate rural which our present House-Senate system is supposed to equalize.

With modern communication, the significant differences are disappearing. Today, crazies can be found in both the country and city in fairly equal numbers. True, there is a greater concentration of crazies in six southern states, but if they can’t own BDAs like they own the congress critters, they will just have to learn to be responsible for educating themselves and not blindly rely on their critters.

There are two areas, and I am sure others I have missed, which I don’t have a good answer for yet. The first is classified information and operations. Even though my proposed new system is based on full transparency, there would be military and intelligence operations that require secrecy to be successfully carried out. My proposal would have to insist on a drastic reduction in using classification and it would have to be used when only absolutely essential and could not be used for political purposes. That’s the way it is supposed to be now and we all know how that is working out. The BDAs would have to be relied on as the critters are now to determine need for funds and secrecy or a citizens panel could be designated for just that purpose. Since the BDAs are not beholden to the states once elected, decisions should be better than our present system. While some aspects of new weapon systems would need to be classified, developing a totally secret system would just not be feasible.

The second is distributing federal money to states through a prioritized system. If the federal government has too much power deciding distribution, the states will be too powerless and would have to resort to even heavier taxation of their residents. Maybe there has to be a percentage distribution based on population and when situations occur where a need is greater in a small population state or even large one, the national voters would have to decide whether or not to assist them.

I realize this is a new paradigm in how our nation would function. It no doubt has many flaws. It should be better than how we operate now. Would appreciate your criticism and ideas if you think it has any merit.