The manipulation capitalism uses to keep us all in line

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The manipulation capitalism uses to keep us all in line - 8/29/2012 11:33:14 PM

stellauk

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THE PEOPLE AS PAVLOV'S DOGS

quote:

Propaganda is not always obvious. No longer does it take the form of full-on jingoistic portrayals of the enemy, whoever it might be at any given time.

The term is certain to bring up images of those hostile xenophobic posters from the first world war urging working people to sacrifice their bodies and lives for their respective ruling classes. Images, too, of dictators adorned with bouquets of flowers from adoring children will spring to mind.

Modern propaganda is a much more sophisticated beast than that of the early 20th century, but its results are no less effective. Its destructive reach extends way beyond the theatre of war and conquest, influencing heavily the decisions we all make every day as consumers.

Not only are we indoctrinated into supporting rapacious wars around the globe, we are programmed on a mass scale to devote our lives to consumption, no matter what effect it has on our collective well-being.

Propaganda today is presented to us along with the faces of well-known celebrities, displaying the latest crap we ought to buy. In television and the print media, propaganda is pretentiously cloaked in airs of "objectivity" and "impartiality."

The first BBC report on the unprovoked invasion of Iraq in 2003 reveals a lot. Plush words such as "precision-guided bombing," "missile attacks" and "raids" were used to describe the actions of the US/British invaders.

Compare this with the tiresome language used to describe anyone other than Western governments who use violence.

The resistance movements in Iraq, Palestine, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Guatemala and all the other countries whose populations are considered by us in the west as non-people are always "terrorists," "bombers," "gunmen" and "murderers." The invaders, of course, are "our boys." Indeed, "imperialism" is a word rarely heard on the airwaves.

Reporting of the long-running occupation of Palestine is consistently ridded with propaganda, half-truths and lies. Mainstream outlets aim for "balanced" and "unbiased" reporting on this issue, as though there were a moral equivalence between occupier and occupied.

Mainstream media is also intensely selective of what atrocities and injustices go reported or unreported. The suppression of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s was news. The genocide of more than a million people carried out by General Suharto, capitalism's dictator, was not news. His crimes remain largely unknown in the west. He was "our" dictator. He provided "stability" to a volatile region, as did Gadaffi, Mubarak, Batista, Pinochet and the endless list of other dictators propped up by the West's "democratic" governments.

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Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, is often described as having been the "father of public relations." In his book, Propaganda - Bernays was quite explicit in his admission that he was a propagandist - he wrote: "If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it." This was called "engineering consent," the aim of public relations.

Bernays was the darling of the advertising industry, which, of course, is propaganda by another name. His insights were sought by a range of corporations seeking to boost sales and profits. Among his most famous feats was the encouragement of large numbers of women to take up smoking, which had previously been seen as a masculine pursuit.

Cigarettes were referred to as "torches of freedom" and smoking was said to be a blow against gender inequality. Sales of cigarettes skyrocketed. Bernays's legacy of manipulation and dishonesty continues today in the modern advertising and public relations industries.

Barack Obama's election victory in 2008 was one of the greatest accomplishments of propaganda since the second world war. The world was greeted with "hope" and "change," with many hoping the closing of the Bush era would represent the end of the imperialist US. It was, of course, all image and no content. It succeeded in raising the hopes of millions. This was the power of "Brand Obama," which earned him the accolade of Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008.

Since taking office, Obama has continued George Bush's wars and presided over the imprisonment of truth teller Bradley Manning. He has enthusiastically embraced the use of unmanned drones, which have slaughtered more than 2,000 people.

According the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, at least 392 of the victims were civilians - 175 of whom were children. The people who were sold "hope" and "change" by Obama's vast propaganda network have been sorely let down.

Following the crash of 2008, public and political anger across the globe was geared towards those who caused the crisis, namely, bankers and the rich.

The crisis took the mainstream media by surprise, whose "impartial" economic commentators, having been thoroughly schooled in neoliberalism, saw the boom of the 2000s as proof that capitalism had triumphed over all other systems.

The agenda of the same "experts" who failed to foresee the crisis now dictates political discourse. The blame has been shifted onto low-paid public sector workers and those in receipt of welfare.

"The deficit," a term most people would not have heard discussed before the Great Recession, is now the big political issue of the day. Yet, for most of the population, it is a non-issue. Noam Chomsky correctly pointed out in his recent book, Occupy: "The issue is joblessness, not the deficit. There's a deficit commission but there's no joblessness commission."

The mainstream narrative, pushed by the same gang of neoliberal economists who failed to foresee the crisis, is tiring.

The welfare state must be dismantled. Health care must be privatised. The public sector has to shrink. "There is no alternative," we are told. Yet, if there are no alternatives, why do we bother having elections, parliaments and other supposedly democratic institutions? What's the point of democracy if nothing can be changed, if we have to persistently bend to the will of "the markets"?

Aside from the broader political scene, our everyday behaviour, too, is heavily influenced by propaganda. We are now exposed to thousands of advertisements every hour of our lives.

The aim of this wasteful industry, true to the legacy of Bernays, is to influence human behaviour on a mass scale. It plays on our most primeval desires and, among many people, seeds a constant feeling of deep dissatisfaction. It entices us to continue destroying the planet we rely on for survival for the sake of a short-term thrill, while at the same time driving us further into personal debt and diminishing our savings.

THE LOGIC BEHIND TAXING THE 1 PER CENT

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No-one has generated better historical data on the incomes of the super-rich than Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, who have emerged over recent years as the world's most respected authorities on income concentration.

But Piketty and Saez haven't done much work for the general public on the impact of top-heavy income distribution on our daily economic lives.

That just changed.

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Conservatives have an explanation for these numbers.

High tax rates on high incomes, they claim, discourage entrepreneurs.

Lowering high rates, the claim adds, encourages them. Entrepreneurs who can keep more of their income go on to invest in their economy, create jobs and make everybody happier.

In the bigger economy lightly taxed entrepreneurs build for us, conservatives freely admit, the rich will make plenty of money and even increase their income share. But the rest of us shouldn't mind any of this at all.

Thanks to the rich, they argue, we get to live in larger, more buoyant economies.

In their new Tax Justice Focus paper, Piketty, Saez, and Stantcheva put these claims to the test. If the conservative argument reflected reality, they note, nations that cut tax rates on the rich substantially should show much higher economic growth rates than nations that still levy stiff taxes on their richest.

In fact, the three economists point out, reality tells no such story.

Nations that have "made large cuts in top tax rates such as the United Kingdom or the US have not grown significantly faster than countries that did not, such as Germany or Denmark," their research shows.

So what's going on in countries where the rich all of a sudden face substantially smaller tax bills?

In these countries, Piketty and his colleagues say, top executives don't suddenly - and magically - become more "productive."

They instead find themselves with a huge incentive to play the system, to squeeze all the personal profit their power enables them to squeeze out of the companies they run.

In countries that have sheared tax rates on the rich, the more these executives can squeeze the more they can keep.

The result? The top 1 per cent in nations that go easy on the wealthy at tax time proceed, as the authors put it, to "grab at the expense of the remaining 99 per cent."

The three authors don't go into chapter and verse on this money-grabbing in their new paper. They don't need to.

Millions of US citizens already know this grabbing behaviour first-hand. They've seen corporate execs routinely outsource and downsize, slash wages and attack pensions, cheat consumers and fix prices.

There you have it.. Tax cuts for the rich don't help the economy and don't create jobs, no matter what you have been told in the media.

But isn't this the basis of Republican thinking and the Mitt Romney campaign?

President Bush and his supporters argued that high income tax cuts would benefit everybody because they would unleash investment that would spark widespread economic prosperity.

The US national debt has just hit a record breaking $16 trillion, more than any other country anytime in history.

It should be glaringly obvious by now to anyone that cutting taxes for the rich did not create jobs. Furthermore the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan created a major unnecessary burden for the US taxpayer. You have a huge chunk of the national debt right there.

From 2000 to 2007 the US lost one in five (3.5 million) middle-class jobs. The vast majority of the jobs created under Bush pay low wages under $18,000 a year without benefits. Meanwhile corporate profits are at their highest ever since 1960. The 2005 CBO data show that changes in law enacted since January 2001 increased the deficit by $539 billion in 2005. In 2010 when all the Bush tax cuts were finally phased in some 52.5% of benefits went to the richest 5% of taxpayers.

Yet the Romney campaign and Republican strategy is still based on the same unworkable ideology and the same tired rhetoric that 'tax cuts and deregulation' are the answer to American economic problems.

It hasn't happened, it isn't happening now, and it is unlikely ever to happen.

The neoliberal policies of Obama haven't done enough. But this doesn't change the fact that the Republicans don't really stand for anything and nobody is asking them to.

And this is what needs to change preferably before anyone gets elected.

_____________________________

Usually when you have all the answers for something nobody is interested in listening.