The Deceit Business

It is a "bird seal" comrades

Two scientists who are well respected by their peers were being interviewed about the subject matter of "deceit".

The word "deceit" is defined as concealment or distortion of the truth for the purpose of misleading; duplicity; fraud; cheating.

One of the two scientists who participated in that interesting interview is a world renowned professor of linguistics at MIT.

He astutely pointed out the work of another truth seeker, while integrating some of his own competent views:

"Noam Chomsky: One of the most important comments on deceit, I think, was made by Adam Smith. He pointed out that a major goal of business is to deceive and oppress the public.

And one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that process, so that we now have huge industries deceiving the public — and they're very conscious about it, the public relations industry. Interestingly, this developed in the freest countries—in Britain and the US — roughly around time of WWI, when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won that people could no longer be controlled by force. So modes of deception and manipulation had to be developed in order to keep them under control"

(Origin of Deceit, emphasis added). But if you have read most anything, you will know that Chomsky is a persona non grata in establishment propaganda circles.

He is dismissed as an intellectual. In other words he is "not real".

After the people had looked at the matter, first in the form of a grand jury, then later in the form of a criminal petite jury, they convicted a well known business person in a very large US company of deceit and conspiracy to deceive the public.

This week a Federal Appeals Court affirmed the conviction:

"Enron crashed into sudden bankruptcy. An initial investigation uncovered an elaborate conspiracy to deceive investors about the state of Enron’s fiscal health. That conspiracy allegedly included overstating the company’s financial situation for more than two years in an attempt to ensure that Enron’s short-run stock price remained artificially high."

(U.S. v Jeffrey K. Skilling, U.S. Court of Appeals, 5th Circuit, Case #06-20885, Jan. 6, 2009, emphasis added).

Hey, it is official. Noam Chomsky is an intellectual and he is very, very real.

The next post in this series is here.