Element #1: Here’s the headline for an article by a young whippersnapper working for the venerable Forbes Magazine:

Pimco’s Bill Gross Says Stocks Were A Ponzi Scheme For The Last Hundred Years

Element #2: Last night’s episode of The Newsroom was all about dumbing down the news to attract viewers. They used the Casey Anthony trial and Nancy Grace as the example for trading intelligence for hysteria and exploitation.

Element #3: Current political ads – Obama is removing the “work” part of welfare and Romney killed that man’s wife.

What do these three elements have in common? All three are a reflection of the partisan polarization in the U.S., nurtured and manicured by popular media.

The real danger with it all is that we citizens have become sheep, led to the trough by our particular form of bias with varying levels of absorption. How completely have you swallowed the Kool-Aid for your team?

Let’s start with the first one – the young guy from Forbes writing about Bill Gross’s essay about equities. The headline implies that your 401-K or pension money is being invested in a fraud, and you will lose everything. Right? Isn’t that what happened to Bernie Madoff’s “investors”?

This feeds right into the continuing saga of missteps and outright theft perpetrated by Knight Capital, MF Global and Peregrine, to name three that have been in the headlines in the past six months or so. So, let’s sell everything and move to the hills of Montana! Nobody on Wall Street can be trusted, they are all thieves, cheats and liars, so let’s invest in … in what? Why, nothing of course! Put the cash in the mattress and let the parade go by.

Reality is very different. What Bill Gross suggested in his real contribution that you can access on your Ipad or Iphone through the Pimco App is that the return from equities over the past 100 years has effectively exceeded the world’s GDP by almost double. He explains that two factors created the path to that additional wealth creation:

1) reductions in cost for labor, both in the U.S. and world wide as a function of globalization; and
2) reductions in corporate tax rates

Bill then asks the question: are these returns (6.6%) sustainable for the next 100 years? He suggests the answer is a resounding “No”. He concludes that there are only two paths for the future: your investments will take a ‘haircut’ (i.e. they will be devalued) or inflation will let you feel like you’re making money, but you won’t be in real terms. Oh, by the way: the phrase “Ponzi Scheme” does not appear anywhere in his essay.

On to Element #2: Last night’s episode of The Newsroom. I must admit, in the beginning I too was fascinated by the Casey Anthony story – for about 10 minutes. It became clear after a few viewings of Nancy Grace that the manipulation was palpable, and time was better spent waxing the coffee table. The point of The Newsroom was that there were about 400,000 of their viewers that switched because they weren’t talking about the trial. Since they wanted to secure the rights to the Republican debates, they caved to the pressure and began covering the trial.

So how does this fit with my thesis? Well, part 2 of the saga airs next week, when we will find out if it was worth it. But one of the characters shares the thought that as soon as they caved in to the pressure, they sold their soul, never to retrieve it again. Isn’t that the state of popular media? Watched ABC News lately? Pictures of guys’ arms in alligators mouths on Sunday night. A story about a plane crash that blamed the pilot for being out of his seat for 1 minute, based on – what? ABC is owned by Disney! Walt would be horrified to see how his company’s money is being spent.

Finally, the newest political ads. You know the ones I’m talking about. Both are lies and everybody knows it. They know that YOU know they are lies, but so what? Obama’s team thinks it’s OK because it didn’t air on television, only on the internet. Romney’s team is lying because – well, that’s what they do because they have no confidence in their own electorate to tease out the truth.

Where does all this end? Think Howard Beale.