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Friday, January 15, 2010

The Chamber of Corruption

The spirit of deceit that has governed corporations in the U.S. for so many years is no secret to some academics:
"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"
(The Deceit Business). By now being deceived by government and corporations through the mainstream media and the publishing world is solidly ingrained in U.S. culture.

Everyone knows what "spin" is, not enough know what reality is.

This has been emphasized and made visible to anyone who wants to see.

As an example consider The United States Chamber of Commerce:
This week, National Journal reported that the health insurance lobby funneled tens of millions of dollars to the Chamber of Commerce to fund an ad campaign attacking heath-care reform. The Chamber essentially acted as a pass-through, allowing the health insurers to avoid having their names tied to the campaign.

The story understandably generated outrage -- with health-care reform advocates now demanding hearings. But it looks like the pass-through tactic is nothing new. In fact, it's a technique the Chamber has been pioneering for almost a decade.
(TPM). A $10,000,000.00 campaign to stop health care for Americans who need it, conducted by a propagandized "United States" entity that is supposed to help commerce.

But is now bent on stealth and deceit instead?

The origin of the propaganda content of media is the military media oil complex controlled through massive corporate empires like General Electric, who make vast stores of weapons and who own large media empires:
The Bush administration turned the U.S. military into a global propaganda machine while imposing tough restrictions on journalists seeking to give the public truthful reports about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Associated Press chief executive Tom Curley said Friday.

Curley, speaking to journalists at the University of Kansas, said the news industry must immediately negotiate a new set of rules for covering war because "we are the only force out there to keep the government in check and to hold it accountable."
(Warriors Press For Propaganda, emphasis added). The news beat goes on with its duty to beat down the people until wee are the people.

The next post in this series is here.

2 comments:

  1. Well, you've gotta hand it to them, they've certainly done their job extremely well. It hardly even feels like propoganda anymore. Americans hardly even need to be persuaded anymore to give up their contitutional rights (the Patriot Act), their present and future wealth (tax cuts and giveaways to the wealthy who need it least, multiple endless foreign wars), and indeed, the future environmental habitability of the planet in favor of current business interests.

    Will we turn any of this around in time to save the nation as a "going concern?" From as objective of a viewpoint as I can muster, I must conclude NO, as there's simply no sign of progress on any of these fronts. Obama was seemingly our last great chance to turn things around before inertia took over and became irresistable, but he's since been revealed as just a kinder/gentler, more articulate form of the same virulent cancer that already afflicts us.

    Oh well, we had a good run while it lasted. We can at least party like there's no tomorrow on the way down!

    ReplyDelete
  2. disaffected,

    "Will we turn any of this around in time to save the nation as a "going concern?" From as objective of a viewpoint as I can muster, I must conclude NO, as there's simply no sign of progress on any of these fronts."

    One of the effects of propaganda / deceit is that the sense of reality is lost.

    Everyone acts like these things are only on TV and we can just turn it off and all will be ok.

    The government strategy is triage combined with ark building like in the movie 2012 where governments just let their people go but build arks for themselves so they could survive.

    ReplyDelete