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| The "Prospering Prisons" Business Model |
In the first post Dredd Blog covered Jared Lee Lochner, in the second post Dredd Blog covered the cowardly Norwegian child killer.
In the third post we focused on more recent mass murder events, so today, I begin to expand this concept so as to take a look into the evolution from left to right within "institutions of governing", whether those institutions are made up of people on the federal payroll directly (see Homeland Security Happy Daze - 2), or whether instead they actively control government from the sidelines in the privacy of corporate structures (see MOMCOM: The Private Parts - 2).
That those "private structures" are fused with right-wing military adventurism is clear if we take a look at arms sales.
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| Top Arms Peddlers |
The graph to the right, from the New York Times, shows that arms sales are at a high, and that we make up over 3/4ths of worldwide weapon sales (U.S. Arms Sales Make Up Most of Global Market) while we talk about a lot of "peace".
The main institutions of governing to be focused on, in terms of the foundational structure of American life, are the military, the oil industry, and the media (see MOMCOM: Mean Welfare Queen), but when that structure is activated into "imperial activity", another term is used to describe that scenario (see The Virgin MOMCOM).
At various points during these posts it can help to link to posts from other series that have some relevance, so that readers can get more deeply into the subject matter by looking at other source materials.
Of course the originating factor responsible for the evolution from left to right is right-wing propaganda designed to destroy left-wing ideas and replace them with right-wing ideas.
The critical machinery for the success of promulgating that right-wing dogma is the vast main stream media, the celebrity portion of MOMCOM (see Blind Willie McTell News), aptly described by Adam Smith:
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.(The Deceit Business, quoting Noam Chomsky). At times that vast private industry, the main stream media, is not quite enough to "keep them under control", so other means and methods are resorted to:
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"...
Hoover supervised dozens of FBI agents who broke into the homes of Berkeley protest leaders and tapped their phones. The FBI compiled dossiers with intimate details of the lives of hundreds of students, planted informers and provocateurs within the ranks of campus antiwar groups, and tried to disrupt constitutionally protected political activities.(Wall Street Journal, book review: Subversives, by Seth Rosenfeld). Even Ronald Reagan (once a liberal democrat) evolved rightward to become a McCarthyite snitch or spy against his fellow actors.
Not content with spying on the students, Hoover authorized illegal surveillance of professors and college administrators who were deemed too sympathetic to the campus radicals. The FBI's intelligence-gathering operation even extended into the heart of California's political and business establishment: the members of the university's Board of Regents. And Hoover secretly worked to get the regents to fire the university's president, Clark Kerr, for failing to crack down on the student protesters.
Reagan did this while he was head of the Screen Writers Guild when he had access to all the guild's records on actors, as well as their trust.
He even had the FBI spy on his daughter Maureen, free speech activists, and had professors of universities fired for their political views.
About 10,000 FBI records about Reagan, released in a FOIA lawsuit, prove this (See video below, beginning at 56:47 for that specific Reagan data).
But what does that have to do with evolution from left to right?
Well, as that evolution proceeds the methods used have grown from operating on the private side of life into operating from the government side.
One important meaning of this is the fact that we now pay the government to spy on ourselves.
Whereas, before that right-wing public spy system evolved, when the nation was more to the left, and before this government spy monster had raised its head from the depths of cultural depravity, corporations paid for their own spying.
Now the corporations still run a vast public relations business, however, it is the government that "has your back" (wink, wink):
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.(The Keystone Complex To The Rescue - 3, emphasis added). Yes, as evolution from left to right took place, what Adam Smith and Noam Chomsky called the "huge industries deceiving the public", paid for by corporate money, became huge government spy agencies paid for by the public treasury.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.
* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
One of their functions is to dispense information in order to fashion and form what people think is happening (see Warriors Press For Propaganda).
How natural is that selection, how fit is it to survive, and how far to the right will it evolve?
When your president is a McCarthyite informant against his fellow celebrities:
The next post in this series is here, the previous post is here.
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