Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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What part of US media is propaganda? All of it. by Herb Ruhs, MD I was once challenged by a young man in a class, in response to my claim that scientifically designed propaganda was at the root of most of our problems in US society, to state what part of broadcast and print media were propaganda. My immediate and sincere response was "all of it." Without an adequate opportunity to explain my answer my credibility was immediately trashed by what was interpreted by the class, steeped in carefully designed propaganda as they were, as an
It was not an exaggeration. Nor was it the result in my belief in some grand conspiracy on the part of some evil cabal (though evil cabals do exist and do their part to contribute to the ignorance and confusion that serves them so well). What I meant was that the stories that appeal to folks, the slants and spins that become the fabric of belief, the substance of the "public mind" are those that tap into deeply held biases and prejudices that are consistently fanned and more often than not are totally manufactured by an "information industry" that constantly works to make the irrational and fake explanation of events the "respectable" one and does its best to take the reality out of stories by offering appealing oversimplifications that, at a distance, resemble childhood fairy tales and Disney cartoons. Take the explanations that people are buying about the current "financial crisis" (in quotes because it is a "crisis" only for those that are not profiting from it handsomely). Everyone, the left included, has come to see this debacle as the result of a lot of greedy people buying houses that they could not afford with the cooperation of sleazy mortgage brokers who hid the fine print. That did happen, but is it a sufficient explanation for the massive number of housing foreclosures that are happening? Not even close. First of all, this story ignores the massive expansion of the money supply and pernicious tax policies by the Clinton and more-so by the Bush administrations that induced a gargantuan housing price bubble. The government knew exactly what it was doing and why. The why was that it was presiding over a heinous wage squeeze and exportation of productive capacity that resulted in a real decrease in income for most citizens of the US and the government, responding to the interests of concentrated wealth, needed to soften the blow of these underlying economic realities by expanding credit insanely so that the population would not revolt as the result of being robbed blind. The underlying reality that is seldom referenced is that over the last thirty years we have had a tremendous transfer of wealth into the hands of a very, very narrow segment of our society. Everything else we are seeing are just the consequences of this transfer of wealth, this grand scale robbery. We live in an economically predatory society that is designed to select out the weak and destroy them for the benefit of the few. We tolerate this horrible situation because the propaganda mills keep enticing us to believe that we, as opposed to those "undeserving" others, will come out on top in a freely "competitive" society. The real story is a rich-get-richer one on steroids that exploits the naive belief of success through hard work and talent. As we march into economic chaos we need to remind ourselves that we have been here before. To some extent our recurrent economic disasters are built into our national psyche and can be seen as inevitable results of how we have been conditioned to think about wealth and money, rugged individualism and social justice. I always encourage people to not believe everything they think. For most folks that advice could extend to most of what they think. The reason being that virtually everything we think is something we picked up from somewhere in whole form, untested and unsourced from media or from trusted others who picked up these thoughts from media sources that have virtually no incentive to tell the plain truth. The first victim of the knowledge blender of mass media is complexity. People don't like complexity. We want our stories simple. We want the story lines that we have been imbibing since we were in the crib. We want concretely visualized villains with black hats and equally concrete heroes in white hats. We want simple logic in our explanations, A causes B, not A and sometimes Q, especially in the presence of Z, may cause B. This is our weakness of mind that those who would exploit us utilize to rob and enslave us. The current "financial crisis" is a great case study in the power of propaganda to distract the public while it is being robbed. We are told that non-performing home mortgages are at the root of the collapse of a dizzying variety of incomprehensible credit and securities schemes that has undermined the entire world's credit system. So far so good. The scamsters on Wall Street did sell a lot of fraudulent paper,
Simply put, the evolving economic system in the US is deliberately designed to make people fail, to cast ever greater numbers of folks into the ranks of the dispossessed and downtrodden. The economic system currently in power, which is more than just "capitalist" or "free market" based, is one that is exploitive to a degree that it consumes itself and guarantees collapse after collapse. Marx would have marveled at the mixed economies of Europe and much of the rest of the world. Capitalism with social safety nets, guaranteed educations and free comprehensive health care. When he talked about the crisis of capitalism, he was talking about the nineteenth century model of capitalism and the one virulently alive in the US today. Ours is a system of guaranteed self-destruction. I just came across an interesting study of the actual individual causes for home mortgage defaults. Turns out that half are due to inflated medical expenses. Consider the findings published in the study called "Get Sick, Get Out: The Medical Causes of Home Foreclosures [pdf]" by Christopher Tarver Robertson, Richard Egelhof, & Michael Hoke from Harvard University.
People from socially conscious societies with functioning democracies just don't understand how a rich country can hang so many of its citizens out to dry. With this kind of blindness mortgage-backed securities seemed like a safe bet. And remember, for every large group of people thrown out of their family homes, another multimillion dollar mansion is being built. It is not a simple story at its root, but it is a simple story to understand once we clear away some of the obscuring propaganda. Herb Ruhs, MD PERMANENT LINK
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