Friday, January 9, 2009

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.

9 comments:

  1. I noticed that he was sentenced "to 292 months imprisonment, three years supervised release, and $45 million in restitution" but the appeals court remanded for a lesser sentence because Enron was not a "financial institution" under the criminal statutes.

    That may take 10 or 12 months off the 20 year sentence. Still he got hammered.

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  2. I guess Madoff can be added to the mix.

    Talk about deceit!

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  3. "That conspiracy allegedly included overstating the company’s financial situation"

    ...

    Something like "The fundamentals of the economy are strong"???

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  4. The Madoff busines model is used by our government when they use our tax dollars sometimes:

    The source for this news was a near-final draft of an as-yet-unpublished 513-page federal history of this nation-building fiasco. The document was assembled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction — led by a Bush appointee, no less. It pinpoints, among other transgressions, a governmental Ponzi scheme concocted to bamboozle Americans into believing they were accruing steady dividends on their investment in a “new” Iraq.

    Eight Years of Madoffs

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  5. Wiki has a good article on business and governmental propaganda:

    Propaganda

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  6. What? There are more Madoff type scandals out there?

    Brace for more Madoff scandals

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  7. The administrative department tries to deceive the congress and the news. Ho hum ... that isn't news ...

    Internal Report

    White House tapped interns to fill seats after few reporters show up for Bush's Last News Conference

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  8. "Chomsky is an intellectual and he is very,very real." Definitely,despite the low bar being set for one to arrive at that comparison when set next to the Liars Club.
    http://www.chomsky.info/articles.htm
    http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/Noam_Chomsky.html
    http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufacturing_Consent.html

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