Wanna Know Why We the People Really Don't Know Squat?

[Octafish]

Corporate McPravda owns the airwaves.



And Corporate Tee Vee is still where most Americans get most of their information, including their ideas about these two statues. Wonder what people would think were they to learn from the tee vee what pater and fils have really done with their power?

The Propaganda System That Has Helped Create a Permanent Overclass Is Over a Century in the Making

Pulling back the curtain on how intent the wealthiest Americans have been on establishing a propaganda tool to subvert democracy.

Wednesday, 17 April 2013 00:00
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, AlterNet | News Analysis

Where there is the possibility of democracy, there is the inevitability of elite insecurity. All through its history, democracy has been under a sustained attack by elite interests, political, economic, and cultural. There is a simple reason for this: democracy – as in true democracy – places power with people. In such circumstances, the few who hold power become threatened. With technological changes in modern history, with literacy and education, mass communication, organization and activism, elites have had to react to the changing nature of society – locally and globally.

From the late 19th century on, the “threats” to elite interests from the possibility of true democracy mobilized institutions, ideologies, and individuals in support of power. What began was a massive social engineering project with one objective: control. Through educational institutions, the social sciences, philanthropic foundations, public relations and advertising agencies, corporations, banks, and states, powerful interests sought to reform and protect their power from the potential of popular democracy.

SNIP...

The development of psychology, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines increasingly portrayed the “public” and the population as irrational beings incapable of making their own decisions. The premise was simple: if the population was driven by dangerous, irrational emotions, they needed to be kept out of power and ruled over by those who were driven by reason and rationality, naturally, those who were already in power.

The Princeton Radio Project, which began in the 1930s with Rockefeller Foundation funding, brought together many psychologists, social scientists, and “experts” armed with an interest in social control, mass communication, and propaganda. The Princeton Radio Project had a profound influence upon the development of a modern "democratic propaganda" in the United States and elsewhere in the industrialized world. It helped in establishing and nurturing the ideas, institutions, and individuals who would come to shape America’s “democratic propaganda” throughout the Cold War, a program fostered between the private corporations which own the media, advertising, marketing, and public relations industries, and the state itself.

CONTINUED...

http://truth-out.org/news/item/15784-the-propaganda-system-that-has-helped-create-a-permanent-overclass-is-over-a-century-in-the-making

Thankfully, to help spread light when the protectors of the First Amendment won't, Maria Galardin's TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) Radio. The podcast helps explain how we got here and what we need to do to move forward, starting with putting the "Public" into Airwaves again:

Alex Carey: Corporations and Propaganda
The Attack on Democracy

The 20th century, said Carey, is marked by three historic developments: the growth of democracy via the expansion of the franchise, the growth of corporations, and the growth of propaganda to protect corporations from democracy. Carey wrote that the people of the US have been subjected to an unparalleled, expensive, 3/4 century long propaganda effort designed to expand corporate rights by undermining democracy and destroying the unions. And, in his manuscript, unpublished during his life time, he described that history, going back to World War I and ending with the Reagan era. Carey covers the little known role of the US Chamber of Commerce in the McCarthy witch hunts of post WWII and shows how the continued campaign against "Big Government" plays an important role in bringing Reagan to power.

John Pilger called Carey "a second Orwell", Noam Chomsky dedicated his book, Manufacturing Consent, to him. And even though TUC Radio runs our documentary based on Carey's manuscript at least every two years and draws a huge response each time, Alex Carey is still unknown.

Given today's spotlight on corporations that may change. It is not only the Occupy movement that inspired me to present this program again at this time. By an amazing historic coincidence Bill Moyers and Charlie Cray of Greenpeace have just added the missing chapter to Carey's analysis. Carey's manuscript ends in 1988 when he committed suicide. Moyers and Cray begin with 1971 and bring the corporate propaganda project up to date.

This is a fairly complex production with many voices, historic sound clips, and source material. The program has been used by writers and students of history and propaganda. Alex Carey: Taking the Risk out of Democracy, Corporate Propaganda VS Freedom and Liberty with a foreword by Noam Chomsky was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1995.

SOURCE: http://tucradio.org/new.html

If you find a moment, here's the first part (scroll down at the link for the second part) on Carey.

http://tucradio.org/AlexCarey_ONE.mp3

It's important for there to be more than a handful of companies providing "news." Democracy depends on it.

[The Magistrate]

1. Unfortunately True, Sir

[Octafish]

11. Politics is Democracy, Sir.

Only Truth makes the latter possible.

[byeya]

2. I would say your post accounts for maybe 90% of the problem. Another, minor one, is Hollywood

with its John Wayne/Rambo/John Ford BS about the ability of a lone individual, unstopable in his moral determination, to bring justice and light to the town, state or country. Kids are brought up on this neon meate lie when history shows even the "old west" was made possible by the US Army and its genocidal war against the original inhabitants and the trail of broken treaties these American Indians had to endure and are being subjected to even today.
Lying starts at the youngest possible age and continues unabated, imo.

[dogknob]

5. BillboReilly slipped up yesterday re: Hollywood...

He made a point about how "it's important to remember why all action-heroes and superheroes are conservatives," which contradicts the typical Fox line about "liberal Hollywood" and "liberal media."

[byeya]

6. That's really funny - thanks. Usually the Wingsters are better at following the script.

[Scootaloo]

16. Let me guess his reasoning...

Because action heroes and superheroes all live in a made-up fantasy world written by overpaid manchildren who insist that gun = manly and that Rob Liefeld is an artist?



WELL HE'S NOT!

[byeya]

33. I think Karl Rove has that poster in his bedroom

[watoos]

41. I think Karl Rove has a picture of Hitler in his bedroom

after all his grandpa helped build a concentration camp for the Nazis

[lindysalsagal]

38. No, sorry. He wasn't saying that he likes hollywood: He thinks superheroes are real: Not film fictio

fiction.

It's not that he thinks hollywood is helping conservatives: He missed the point that these superheroes are just hollywood projections: He thinks there really is a superman, and a spiderman, and batman, and the Green Lantern. These people are real to him, and he believes they're politics are conservative, for some unsubstantiated reason.

The fact that they help rescue regular people simply out of pure altruism is also something he can't label: Conservatives don't give a crap about needy people.

[rhett o rick]

47. Didnt Nietzsche also think there were super hero's? Those that were superior to the norm? nm

[patrice]

9. That programming right there is an essential factor across the whole political spectrum. People

aren't examining any assumptions about HOW things happen.

[MrScorpio]

3. Thanks for bringing up Alex Carey. nt

[Octafish]

32. You are welcome. I first learned about his important work on DU...

...no one in Corporate McPravda ever brought him to my attention.

Review of Alex Carey, Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Propaganda in the US and Australia

(University of NSW Press, 1995. 214 pp., $19.95)

Reviewed by Alex McCutcheon in Green Left Weekly

As Alex Carey sees it, "The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy''.

Throughout this book of collected essays with its unified theme, Carey succeeds in showing the reader that far from being a natural outcome of "market forces'' or some natural "law of nature'', the present hegemony that corporations enjoy has been the result of a consciously pursued goal whose origins lie within corporate America.

Carey makes the crucial (and often forgotten) point that in a technologically advanced democracy, "the maintenance of the existing power and privileges are vulnerable to popular opinion'' in a way that is not true in authoritarian societies. Therefore elite propaganda must assume a "more covert and sophisticated role''.

In the US, corporate propaganda has played upon the high level of religious beliefs in the community, beliefs which leave its citizens predisposed to see the world in "Manichean terms''. This outlook leads towards a preference for action over reflection, a "pragmatic orientation'' that is perfectly suited to the corporate aim of identifying positive symbols with business, while assigning negative values to those that oppose them, such as labour unions and welfare provisions.

CONTINUED...

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/25/006.html

Wish they had.

[chervilant]

43. Freud's nephew,

Bernays, was a significant force in the development of the propaganda model used by the corporate megalomaniacs who've usurped our media, our politics AND our global economy.

[Egalitarian Thug]

4. Sad to say, but those that have known this have known it for a long time,

and those of us that still don't are just not interested.
& R

[Octafish]

34. Message Machine PENTAGON and what Dorothy Parker said.

When challenged to use the word "horticulture" while enjoying drinks at the Algonquin, Ms. Parker replied: "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think.

As a reminder for those who might've missed the boat while watching next installment of Desperate Housewares:

MESSAGE MACHINE

Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

By DAVID BARSTOW
The New York Times, April 20, 2008

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

SNIP...

Pentagon Keeps Tabs

As it happened, the analysts’ news media appearances were being closely monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.

Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.

CONTINUED...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html?_r=0

Glad you're a thinker, Egalitarian Thug. Seeing how many thousands of Americans -- and millions of innocents around the world -- have died needlessly for a lie in recent years, it's good to remind the more apolitical now and then about who is calling the shots in their lives.

[Doctor_J]

46. Quite true

If you keep up with the writings of Chomsky or Parenti or Media Matters or FAIR, this is really not news at all. The thing that all of us on our side need to remember is that everything that comes out of TV, Radio, or the so-called Newspapers is censored by the Cock Brothers or some other right-wing entity.

I do see a small silver ling to this darkest of clouds. When we decide it's time to take the country back, the starting point for the revolution is very easy to find.

[patrice]

7. I have been wondering how hate for Unions motivates what Bush's people do, so they grab all

subsidies they can in order to get an unfair advantage over unions and they would even police their own ranks, through means such as the IRS, and Breitbart & Rove -ian smear campaigns and such, in order to enforce neo-con compliance.

[Octafish]

35. And a lot of Democrats who were in the know just opened their gobs and said, 'Ah hah' and got along.

Union jobs are what created the great American middle class. People were paid a fair wage in exchange for work of quality. As a result, people could buy the things they made and the things they made helped create a better world for all.

Labor balancing the Ownership class was mediated by government. It was a fair system from the time of Roosevelt to the time of Johnson. Carter tried to keep it, but by then a new non-New Deal tradition was being established. Reagan and the neocons have held sway for the 32 years since.

Propaganda and Class Structure

Michael Parenti, 1988
excerpted from the book

Stenographers to Power
media and propaganda

David Barsamian interviews
Common Courage Press, 1992, paper

p43
MP: I would define propaganda as the mobilization of information and arguments with the intent to bring people to a particular viewpoint. In that sense there could be false and deceptive propaganda, and there could be propaganda that has a real educational value. You can after all inform people and mobilize them toward truth. In the United States the word "propaganda" is unrelievedly negative. In certain other countries, propaganda has a more neutral implication.

p44
MP: The first premise of propaganda in the United States today is at doesn't exist, that there is no propaganda from the established media and from the government and that we have only "information." Propaganda is something that other people do. That's reflected in that definition of a doctrine. And nobody in the United States says they're selling or pushing a doctrine; they all say they're just reporting it like it is. That's the first premise: the denial that there is propaganda. The second quality of propaganda in the United States is that it operates all the time and its major dedication is to avoid any kind of confrontation regarding class struggle in the United States. It denies any recognition that there is exploitation of labor, that the rich exploit the poor, that we exploit the third world, etc. We've now reached the point where you can talk about racism and sexism, but you cannot really talk about class power in America, and if you do, you are said to be engaging in propaganda.

p46
It's no secret. The Council on Foreign Relations was formed in 1922 by John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Nelson Aldridge and by J.P. Morgan. It's a council whose personnel are drawn from the corporate elite, with some college presidents, academics, news media people, and political leaders thrown in. The Council on Foreign Relations, the Committee on Economic Development, the Trilateral Commission are all organizations that have been formed, financed and staffed by these corporate elites. They provide the personnel who then serve in various administrations. The Council on Foreign Relations has placed its members as Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense in every administration, whether its Republican or Democratic.

Jimmy Carter had 12 members of the Trilateral Commission in his cabinet, including himself and Walter Mondale. The Trilateral Commission was started by David Rockefeller. These elites have a capacity to place their members in the top decision-making positions unequalled by any other interest group in America. There's no labor union, no farmers' group, no teachers' group, there's no pro-abortion or anti-abortion group that could hope to place their leaders the way these people do. Their role is not to pursue the interests of any one particular corporation. Their role in these councils is to look at what are the common interests of all the various multinational corporations, what is the common interest, what is the common interest of the financial class.

p47
MP: You can't talk about these kinds of things in the mainstream media because the media are owned by the very same people who staff these councils and staff our top decision-making positions. Capitalism is not only an economic system, it's an entire social order. Its function is not just to produce cars and refrigerators and make a profit for its owners. It also produces a whole communication universe, a symbolic field, a culture, a control over various social institutions like universities, museums and churches. Those of us who have a view which is anti-capitalist are frozen out, or we are consigned to small publications. You can say, well, you're consigned to small publications because you don't have that much to say or people don't care about what you're saying. It's not true. People would be interested in our message if they'd get a chance to hear it. And in any case, why not give them a chance to reject it? Why don't we get a chance to get on networks? Why don't we get the syndicated columns that appear in 300 newspapers? Why don't we get space in the mass-circulation magazines, in Time and Newsweek? Why don't we get commentaries on ABC, NBC, CBS? Why don't we get on Nightline?

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporate_Media/Propaganda_Parenti_STP.html

Nowadays, the financial sector attracts all that capital where it receives a higher rate of return. We all know how that goes and goes and goes until there are no more union jobs, middle class, and better world.

While I haven't seen any numbers, I'd bet a fistful of donuts that War Inc. and Wall Street outspent the unions in the last election cycle by about 100 to 1.

Something for a man on the street interview program...:

Ask any tea bagger you happen to see: Who has the most secret Swiss bank accounts - the guys at the local AFL-CIO or the players in and out of Washington touched by Goldman Sachs?

[Mnemosyne]

8. K&R for later... nt

[Octafish]

36. Money.

Michael Parenti: I think alternative media is our only hope, media like community radio stations like KGNU, and the Guardian and Monthly Review, People's Daily World, In These Times, The Nation, The Progressive, Z and other alternative publications. The trouble is that those with class power, those with lots of wealth, can reach tens of millions of people. Those of us with very little wealth can reach only a small audience market. Because of our viewpoint we can't attract much advertising. The advertisers are all part of the business class. So we have little publications with limited circulation teetering on the edge of insolvency. Most Americans have never heard of The Nation, which is by the way only a liberal magazine. That magazine has been publishing for 120 years, yet they haven't heard of it. There are more people in America today who have heard of and read USA Today than have read The Nation, and USA Today has been around for about seven or eight years. That's because Gannett can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to put their rag up on satellite and get instant distribution. Within a couple of years USA Today becomes the third-largest selling newspaper in the country. It's a bubble-gum newspaper, a newspaper of the television age with seven different colors, with stories rarely longer than 500 words. So it's not that demand creates supply, it's that supply creates demand. People could say, "Well, you on the left don't sell much because nobody's interested in your message." It's not true. The public doesn't even know we exist and they've never heard our message.

[JEB]

10. The wool has been pulled over our eyes.

And it won't come off without a huge fight with the odds stacked against the citizens (serfs).

[Octafish]

49. Serfs got ears, eyes, driver's licences...

...but the wool won't come off without the proper message. Not a magic bullet, per se, but something that cuts through a lifetime of disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, outright lies as well as the unlimited cluttering psyops clouding perception, rewiring critical faculties and shaping beliefs. Might not be possible for the adult males, but who knows? Something worked in 1776...

[JEB]

50. Armed resistance

worked in 1776, probably not a realistic option nowadays....I was hoping for some sort of intellectual enlightenment of the people for most of my adult male years (age 61).

[G_j]

12. yep, there is no denying

that's it in a nutshell.. excellent post

[Overseas]

13. K&R. So true.

[hunter]

14. I think television is the worst. I don't watch it all.

It's like a direct propaganda pipeline into people's heads. News and talk radio have similar flaws.

While reading I can quickly skip over the propaganda, advertising, bullshit, and noise, even here on DU. Better, just like in face-to-face discussions, I can choose to directly confront the bullshit whenever I please.

[siligut]

15. I knew it was Reagan

The Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987 by the FCC. Reagan had staffed the FCC with prominent media businessmen who were intent on slashing government regulations… the equivalent of letting the fox guard the chicken coop. Among the many other regulations slashed during the Reagan years were anti-trust laws that prevented the media from becoming a monopoly. Much of this was done under heavy pressure by corporate lobbyists.

[Octafish]

18. FOX is Right.

Last edited Sat May 18, 2013, 03:33 PM - Edit history (1)

Along with Rev. Freeping Sun Myung Moon, FCC let Freeping Rupert the Alien Murdoch in to rule the roost.

Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush led the deregulation efforts, from the FCC to INS to Wall Street to West.

The War against the Regulatory Cops on the Bank Beat

Monday, 30 July 2012 07:26
By William K. Black

EXCERPT...

The LIBOR and HSBC scandals simply confirm that the largest banks in the world will repeatedly violate the law and lie if they believe they can get away with it. The only entity that should consistently have the incentive to tell senior regulators the truth about problem and fraudulent banks are the examiners. Similarly, banks with honest senior leaders should love the independence of examines. Blankfein is right about examiners – they “don’t work for us.” That is why they are uniquely valuable. Examiners routinely speak truth to power. The author has no clue how rare and how valuable that is to an honest bank’s senior managers, to senior regulators, and the nation. The author also has idea how threatening a trait it is to the CEO running a control fraud.

SNIP...

The anti-regulators won prior wars on examiners – and produced recurrent disasters

Neither the WSJ author, Tarullo, nor whatever failed economist is telling Tarullo that information provided by the industry constitutes “hard data” is aware that we have heard this refrain before. [font color="red"]President Reagan’s task force on financial deregulation, chaired by Vice President Bush, recommended cutting the number of examiners and relying primarily on data provided by the banks and S&Ls. The Reagan administration immediately cut the number of S&L regulators. The results were disastrous.[/font color] California and Texas cut dramatically the number of their S&L examiners and supervisors. The results were disastrous.

The nonprime industry did something analogous. They reduced their reliance on loan underwriters and substitute reliance on automatic underwriting systems. These were grotesquely unsophisticated systems that typically ignored and facilitated fraud by the lenders and their agents. They were invariably called “sophisticated” systems. Their testing was farcical. To ensure the worst of both worlds, the fraudulent lenders’ managers could always override the automatic underwriting system and use “exception” authority to approve the worst loans. Countrywide was a classic example of a faux automatic underwriting system surrounded by tens of thousands of flaky exceptions. The results were disastrous. Experienced human underwriters invariably found copious bad nonprime mortgage loans. The fraudulent lenders (and purchasers) treated underwriters who displayed competence and integrity as the enemy. The results were disastrous.

The FDIC and the OTS cut the number of their examiners and sought to rely far more on the data provided by the industry. The results were disastrous. The Basel II economists who encouraged the SDIs and their regulators to rely on the SDIs’ proprietary models believed that doing so would allow “sophisticated” banking and regulatory decisions to be made on the basis of “hard data” that were far more reliable than examiners. The results were disastrous.

I doubt that there are five economists in the world who know this consistent history of disastrous failure. The chance that the pseudo-supervisors advising Tarullo knows of the failed history of efforts to substitute reliance on industry-supplied information as “hard data” for the judgment and expertise of examiners is nil.

CONTINUED...

http://therealnews.com/t2/component/content/article/75-more-blog-posts-from-william-black/1130-the-war-against-the-regulatory-cops-on-the-bank-beat

Of course, Poppy's Dim Son was there for Deregulation II in 2008 when all those trillions vanished into thin air. A coincidence, no doubt, missed by the Vanguards of the National Press Corpse.

You got a great memory, siligut. If more people knew what you knew, the greedheads and warmongers would be on the run rather than affording to lawyer up. Thank you!

[chervilant]

45. The results were disastrous

almost exclusively for those of us who footed the bills, eg: us lowly taxpayers.

Mozilla, as one prime example, made hundreds of millions by selling his stock before Countrywide went belly up -- RIGHT before.

I have to go finish planting my garden. I hope to see quite a large response to this essential OP when I return.

[Wounded Bear]

17. I'd say that our media situation is starting to closely resemble...

"The Golden Age" back in the late 1800's, when media conglomerates basically swept the US into the Spanish-American War in 1998. They called it "yellow journalism," perhaps because it rained down like horse piss on the unsuspecting populace, who, in their patriotic fervor, supported a war of aggression against a faltering Spain. The trigger? "Remember the Maine!" It was probably an accidental boiler explosion, but it was popularized into a bomb plot by the Spanish in Cuba and never really investigated, just used for the purpose of getting war fever up.

The similarities between that and Iraq are quite striking. They had to work a little harder to make the Iraqi-9-11 connection, but it worked.

Same problem. Large corporate ownership of multiple media outlets shoveling propaganda to a populace distracted by making a basic living.

War is enormously profitable to those who don't really have a dog in the fight. The 1% won't put their kids on the firing line. Vietnam only ended when the draft was extended to ALL kids, not just the poor and disadvantaged. Soon after we had the "all volunteer" service. Mostly that was to make sure that only the lower classes were put in actual combat.

Yeah, I'm a little cynical.

[nadinbrzezinski]

21. Starting? That is my only quibble with your post

[bhikkhu]

19. Because "we" don't want to?

...thinking about the premise, if people actually wanted to know what was really going on (as opposed to being spoon-fed whatever was the tripe-of-the-moment) then a real news program could be started on any scale, and it would succeed and out-compete the others. The market is open, essentially, and if people want the news, then a source providing actual news will out-perform the spoon-feeders.

What we find, unfortunately, is the opposite. Fox news is still the most popular TV news program, in spite of constantly serving up little but lies and misinformation. Obvious lies and misinformation, if one has the capacity for critical thinking.

On the radio, Limbaugh still tops the list as the "most listened to".

So I am prone to look at the evidence and think that people don't really know much because they don't really care much, or that they don't watch the news for the sake of information, but for other reasons.

The one thing that I see "corporate media" doing to perpetuate this is riffing on the persistent fatalistic message that government is inept, that people in general are stupid and corrupt, and that there is little point in doing anything more strenuous than mental masturbation.

But we get that here too, often enough.

[cprise]

27. I don't quite agree

It has a lot to do with the nature of commercial/consumerism, too. If you pay attention to sites like DU, you notice over the years that a number of well-informed and disciplined efforts at truth-telling don't get off the ground because they lack the kind of revenue that only mainstream advertisers can provide.

But the market is not "open"--it has an ideology called consumerism which was designed to both pacify the masses and solve the problem of capitalist overproduction. I recommend viewing this four part BBC series that outlines how it came about:

Notice how consumerism was only directly challenged once, at the end of the 1960s. Industry was sh!tting bricks that young adults weren't becoming consumers like their parents, so they re-invented marketing and ended up creating super-consumers.

[LuckyLib]

20. Because the popular media is a wasteland -- national and local.

Our metro area local affiliates now show photos of "celebrations" as they transition to weather -- recognizing a 2 year old's birthday, someone's wedding. WTF?

[OnyxCollie]

22. Bill Clinton put the final nail in the coffin with the Telecommunication Deregulation Act.

K&R.

[Egalitarian Thug]

37. Yes he did. I supported that SOB in 1992 with much more than I care to think about.

I risked, and damaged, my reputation bringing important people over to this funny sounding no-name Governor of a state nobody lives in, as well as many thousands of dollars and he fucked us, sans kiss.

Barring a clone of Bernie Sanders or the second coming, he was the very last POS politician I will ever give anything but my vote to.

[bvar22]

23. Don't forget to thank Bill Clinton....

...and the "Centrist", Free Trading, Deregulating Democrats!

Telecommunications Act of 1996

The Telecommunications Act of 1996[1] was the first significant overhaul of United States telecommunications law in more than sixty years, amending the Communications Act of 1934.

The Act, signed by President Bill Clinton, represented a major change in American telecommunication law, since it was the first time that the Internet was included in broadcasting and spectrum allotment.

One of the most controversial titles was Title 3 ("Cable Services&quot , which allowed for media cross-ownership. According to the FCC, the goal of the law was to "let anyone enter any communications business – to let any communications business compete in any market against any other." The legislation's primary goal was deregulation of the converging broadcasting and telecommunications markets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

This is one of the times I'm GLAD I'm OLD,
and can remember a better time.

You will know them by their WORKS,
not by their promises or excuses.
[font size=5 color=green]Solidarity99![/font][font size=2 color=green]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[/center]

[byeya]

30. I think even Bob Dole said this was an unwarranted giveaway of public airspace. He probably ended

up voting for it though.
Bill Clinton sure sucked a lot of the time.

[Corruption Inc]

24. Many people don't want to learn anything, they prefer corporate propaganda

When real news is presented to them they ignore it. There are a lot of real news sources available today, largely ignored.

The "brainwashing" of the public is done mostly by the public themselves, they willingly allow themselves to believe almost anything.

[nadinbrzezinski]

26. Welcome to DU

And that is very correct.

[cprise]

28. But these people also usually need something strong to wash it down

Like antipsychotic meds or manic religion (like fundamentalist Christianity) or extreme material gratification.

[treestar]

57. Agreed

It does not take much effort now to get news from all over the world. In earlier eras, perhaps. But now, just get on the internet.

[Initech]

25. And now they own the prisons, and they're coming for our education.

[cprise]

29. Watch the docu I posted here

The Century of the Self...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022862898#post27

It explains a lot. For further viewing, I recommend another Adam Curtis docu called The Mayfair Set. It describes how/why the West was de-industrialized, with the exception of arms manufacture.

[Rex]

31. The GEM$MNBCDEFG is the tool of the 1%.

Their social engineering experiment exceeded far beyond their expectations.

[Zorra]

39. Awesome post. Propaganda for the “manufacture of consent” ~ that's it. nt

[GeorgeGist]

40. Narrowcasting ...

has replaced Broadcasting.

[CanSocDem]

42. Another great thread, Octafish.

Thanks for all you do.

.

[snot]

44. K&R'd & Bookmarked--very helpful!

[hfojvt]

48. isn't that one of the corporate talking points?

That "we the people don't know squat"?

Or maybe it is part of the "alternative" conventional wisdom.

Some of this article is very interesting. Some of it reads like a silly conspiracy theory “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

A phrase like "the true ruling power of our country" seems quite silly and conspiratorial to me. Like their is a cabal of twenty or something, sitting in a board room and somehow "running" things. Like millions of us are not going through our daily lives making millions of choices, but are instead being brainwashed and guided (somehow).

[ucrdem]

51. Things may not be as Orwellian as all that

but on the other hand, Orwell modeled the Ministry of Truth in 1984 after the BBC's Ministry of Information, so it's worth considering:

During the Second World War, George Orwell wrote a weekly radio political commentary, designed to counter German and Japanese propaganda in India, that was broadcast over the BBC overseas service.

His wartime work for the BBC was a major inspiration for his monumental novel, 1984. Very few readers of 1984 know, for example, that Orwell's attack against the perverse double-talk language called Newspeak was based on the author's revulsion against Basic English, an artificial language that Churchill's wartime cabinet wanted the BBC to use in its overseas propaganda.

Similarly, Orwell's model for the lying Ministry of Truth was the British wartime Ministry of Information, which censored BBC broadcasts. The shorthand form, Minitrue, was taken directly from the Ministry of Information telegraphic address, Miniform.

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v06/v06p--4_Weber.html

[Octafish]

53. Hadn't heard that. Do know that it's no conspiracy theory. It's a war.

One can call it a class war or a war for minds, I don't give a damn. The information environment in which we live is most polluted by those who can most afford to make noise.

METHODS OF MEDIA MANIPULATION

by Michael Parenti
Media Alliance

We are told by media people that some news bias is unavoidable. Distortions are caused by deadline pressures, human misjudgment, budgetary restraints, and the difficulty of reducing a complex story into a concise report. Furthermore, the argument goes, no communication system can hope to report everything. Selectivity is needed.

I would argue that the media's misrepresentations are not all the result of innocent error and everyday production problems, though such problems certainly exist. True, the press has to be selective--but what principle of selectivity is involved? Media bias does not occur in a random fashion; rather it moves in the same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor, corporations over corporate critics, affluent Whites over low-income minorities, officialdom over protesters, the two-party monopoly over leftist third parties, privatization and free market "reforms" over public-sector development, U.S. corporate dominance of the Third World over revolutionary social change, and conservative commentators and columnists like Rush Limbaugh and George Will over progressive or populist ones like Jim Hightower and Ralph Nader (not to mention more radical ones).

The corporate mainstream media seldom stray into territory that might cause discomfort to those who hold political and economic power, including those who own the media or advertise in it.

SNIP...

Labeling. A label predefines a subject by simply giving it a positive or negative tag without the benefit of any explanatory details. Some positive labels are: "stability," "the president's firm leadership," and "a strong defense." Some negative ones are: "leftist guerrillas," "Islamic terrorists," and "conspiracy theorists." In the June 1998 California campaign for Proposition 226, a measure designed to cripple the political activities of organized labor, union leaders were repeatedly labeled "union bosses," while corporate leaders were never called "corporate bosses." The press itself is falsely labeled "the liberal media" by the hundreds of conservative columnists, commentators, and talk-show hosts who crowd the communications universe with complaints about being shut out of it.

A strikingly deceptive label is "reform," a word that is misapplied to the dismantling of social reforms. So the media talked of "welfare reform" when referring to the elimination of family assistance programs. Over the last 30 years, "tax reform" has served as a deceptive euphemism for laws that have repeatedly reduced upper-income taxes, shifting the payment burden still more regressively upon middle- and low-income strata.

CONTINUED...

http://mediaalliance2.live.radicaldesigns.org/article.php?id=510

Something else I know: For Democracy to function, let alone survive, it requires an informed electorate. Personally, I believe that should include the entire populace. But, hey, that's just me. I'm a Democrat of the Old School.

[hfojvt]

54. no argument about the pollution

I said something similar in my journal a while back

"One of the troubles with supposed trolls, is that we, as Americans are swimming in a sea of excrement, crap that fills the airwaves and newspapers and books and the internet. False ideas and lies and distortions and propaganda - excrement. Our public discourse is so full of excrement that everybody who swims in it is bound to get some in their mouth, or in their head, and then spew it out like its not some crap that was catapaulted into their mind.

Some people, true trolls, embrace the crap, believe enough of it that they have gone over to the dark side."

Which I cannot link to because it was posted in "meta".

But I am not sure I would go so far as to say that the "sea of excrement" or the "information pollution" is enough to make it true that a small group of people "run this country". Class warfare would make more sense, but in some sense many are not fighting that, but really just working to grab a piece of the pie. I don't think there is really any organization uniting the top 1% or top 0.1% or top 5% or top 20%. They just sorta all pull together by having common interests.

But there is a common theme that the corporate world uses to defeat the left, and the left, such as it is, uses to defeat itself. As Somerby put it, the rightwing tells the public "liberal elites think they are better than you". And liberals, for their part run around proving those rightwingers correct, as they/we constantly gripe about how stupid and uninformed "the masses" are.

Now you may say "but it is TRUE". The question is, how are you gonna frame it? If you lead with "the public does not know squat" it reads as a typical attack on the public by some liberal elite who thinks he knows more than anybody else. If, instead you lead with "the public is bombarded with lies" then your attack is on the lying liars and not on the public which swallows those lies.

[coldmountain]

52. George W Bush was 6 ft tall and George Herbert Bush was 6 ft 2 inchs tall

Team W lies about everything no matter how petty.

[Octafish]

58. Prescott S Bush was 6 ft 4 inches tall

He is underappreciated, in a way.



Know your BFEE: Spawn of Wall Street and the Third Reich

Then, again...

Know your BFEE: War and Oil are just two longtime Main Lines of Business

[H2O Man]

55. Recommend #100!

Very well done!

I will say that, while the OP is accurate, "we, the people" have a duty to be well-informed. And it requires some work, but is something we can certainly accomplish. The resources are definitely available to us all. It may be hard at times to learn the truth, but it is always much harder not to do so.

[treestar]

56. I was getting news from the BBC

both satellite radio and the internet. It was very interesting. Nothing about the "scandals" and a lot of things going on in the world which Americans never hear about. We don't have to limit ourselves to the junk media of the US.

All time listening to the pundits regurgitating the same talking points - we could give that up in favor of outside media.