A dinner conversation that's still bothering me.

[PatrickforO]

10. I will tell you how this happened. An entire generation of Americans

has been brainwashed with the very finest and most insidious techniques. How?

Begin with the memo future Supreme Court justice Powell wrote to the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971, which lays out a strategy for 'conservatives' to get the corporate message out through a broad array of coordinated efforts. This is when we began to see right-wing AM talk radio springing up.

Then, fast forward to 1981, when Ronald Reagan slithered into the White House and began busting unions. His systematic destruction of the Air Traffic Controller's union is considered one of the biggest blows to American labor in the twentieth century.

In 1987, the snake Reagan committed a further great crime against freedom; he vetoed the reauthorization of the Fairness Doctrine.

This had far reaching consequences in that it allowed big corporations and billionaires like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, the Mercers, and more, to put their Ayn Randian ideas into a systematic propaganda organ and have those ideas echoed through the cars and work trucks of millions of American middle class workers.

Instead of truth, these people now were subjected to a steady bombardment of corporate propaganda designed to make them good, docile consumers, haters of government, and 'rugged individualists' who are ever watchful, and ever fearful, that our government might 'give' away something to people who 'didn't earn it,' because, dang-nab-it, we pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps here in 'Murika, and we're ignorant and proud of it!

In the meantime, beginning in the early 1950s big tobacco hired a PR firm called Hill & Knowlton to cast doubt on scientific findings showing smoking to be a causal factor in lung cancer. These firms, now known as Merchants of Doubt, are hired by industrial clients such as Conoco and Monsanto to put out pseudo-scientific 'studies' that 'refute' the findings of the actual scientific community.

The result of all this: George Carlin can tell you better than I...

.

If you want to know more, here are some very good book titles:
Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States
Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky - Manufactured Consent
Naomi Klien - The Shock Doctrine AND This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate

Good luck to us all. It will take years of resistance to turn this around and dig ourselves out of the big capitalist shit-hole we've been buried in. Why do you think Trump won? BILLIONS of dollars were behind him along with decades of systematic and sophisticated corporate propaganda.

Believe these things, or you are NOT a good American:
Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!
Don't give anybody anything they didn't earn!
Helping the poor just promotes their dependency!
Climate change is a hoax!
The earth is 6,000 years old.
We need to teach creationism side by side with evolution.
Women should earn less and stay at home to bear and raise children...
Privatize! Deregulate! Gut social programs!
The private sector can ALWAYS do it better, faster and cheaper...

And many, many others. How many of these corporate memes have touched you? How many have tempted you to believe? How many trolls on this site have been successful in driving a wedge between those who supported Bernie and those who supported Hillary?