Powter surge

Susan Powter recognizes the irony: She’s in the midst of a nationwide tour that blasts corporate America for controlling the minds and buying habits of women, and she’s speaking mostly at chain book stores in malls.

“It’s the Japanese art of war. There are no independents left,” she says in a cell phone interview en route from one mall to another. “It’s very deliberate.”

She’ll sign her latest book, the self-published and self-marketed The Politics of Stupid, at a “wellness seminar” Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. at Waldenbooks in the Chico Mall. Her video, Trailer Park Yoga, was also recently released.

Powter is the bleached-blond, formerly fat fitness infomercial queen of the 1990s and author of The New York Times Best Seller, Stop the Insanity.

Powter, 46 and hot, has emerged edgier, smarter—and with a lot fewer men handling her money. “I walked away from everybody,” she says. “I had to buy my own name back.”

Along with the “Christian, white men” who run the country, Powter is sick of the corporate message and how women are falling for it instead of using their consumer power to reject unhealthful food from “poison palaces.” She has two adult boys and one who’s 5, who will never see a McDonald’s drive-through.

“There is no other mother talking to other mothers about what is going on,” she says, with the hyper insistence of a preacher—or should it be high priestess? “Mothers are realizing that what corporate America wants more than anything is the next generation of non-thinking consumers, and it’s pissing them off. There’s a revolution going on.”

Powter carries special loathing for the mainstream print media and says, “I don’t suck up to the press. I don’t care if you write total shit about me.”

It’s a refreshing take, and the event promises to be comedic and inspiring. At the end, she says, mothers and teen daughters alike “have their fists in the air.”

“It’s like a one-woman show with a life-changing message," Powter says. She’s authentic, and it makes her a happy person. "I have never in my whole life felt better or been more free."