Media and Ruling Class Undermine Social Values by Labelling Valid Demands as Extreme

Ever wonder why the media will report a few protesters breaking windows or fighting police when a hundred times as many register their protest peacefully? Naturally, like much media focus, it distracts from the purpose of the protest, but new research shows how support for a popular cause can be cut by labeling it as “radical” or “extreme”. Thomas Nelson, co-author of the study and associate professor of political science at Ohio State University, said that is why calling political opponents extremists is so effective, and popular as a political tactic. he added:

The beauty of using this “extremism” tactic is that you don’t have to attack a popular value that you know most people support. You just have to say that its supporters are going too far or are too extreme.

And people fall for it because we mostly consider ourselves civilized, and not at all extreme, and so tend to divorce ourselves from the extreme cause or group, even though we might actually prefer it given a fair chance. Thus people supported a gender equality policy when other supporters were not mentioned, but when the proposers of the same policy were described as “radical feminists”, participants in the study supported the policy much less.

Experiments in Evidence

1. 233 undergraduate students were asked to read and comment on an essay that they were told appeared on a blog. The blog entry discussed the controversy concerning the Augusta National Golf Club’s “men only” membership policy. This policy caused a controversy in 2003 before the club hosted the Masters Tournament. Participants read one of three versions of an essay which argued that the PGA Tour should move the Masters Tournament if the club refused to change this policy:

1. One group read that the proposal to move the tournament was led by “people” or “citizens”.
2. Another group read that the proposal was led by “feminists”.
3. The third group read that the proposal was led by “radical feminists”, “militant feminists”, and “extremists”.

Additional language reinforced the extremist portrayals by describing extreme positions that the groups allegedly held on other issues, such as getting rid of separate locker room and restroom facilities for men and women.

Participants were then asked to rate how much they supported Augusta changing its membership rules to allow women members, whether they supported the Masters tournament changing its location, and whether, if they were a member, they would vote to support female membership at the club.

The findings showed that participants were more supportive of the golf club and its rules banning women, less likely to support moving the tournament, and less likely to support female membership, when the proposal to move the tournament was described in language redolent of extremism and radical feminism. Nelson explained:

All three groups in the study read the exact same policy proposals. But those who read that the policy was supported by “radical feminists” were significantly less likely to support it than those who read it was supported by “feminists” or just “citizens”.

By associating a policy with unpopular groups, opponents are able to get people to lose some respect for the value it represents, like feminism or environmentalism.

2. In another experiment, 116 participants read the same blog entry used in the previous experiment. Again, the blog entry supported proposals to allow women to join the golf club. One version simply attributed the proposal to citizens, while the other two attributed them to feminists or radical feminists.

Next, the subjects ranked four values in order of their importance as they thought about the issue of allowing women to join the club:

1. upholding the honor and prestige of the Masters golf tournament
2. freedom of private groups to set up their own rules
3. equal opportunities for both men and women
4. maintaining high standards of service for members of private clubs.

How people felt about the relative importance of these values depended on what version of the essay they read:

1. Of those participants who read the proposal attributed simply to citizens, 42 percent rated equality above the other three values. But only 32 percent who read the same proposal attributed to extremists thought equality was the top value.
2. On the other hand, 41 percent rated group freedom as the top value when they read the proposal attributed to citizens. But 52 percent gave freedom the top ranking when they read the proposal attributed to extremists.

Observations and Conclusions

Nelson commented:

Tying the proposal to feminist extremists directly affected the relative priority people put on gender equality v group freedom, which in turn affected how they felt about this specific policy. Perhaps thinking about some of the radical groups that support gender equality made some people lose respect for that value in this case.

This tactic of attacking a policy by tying it to supposedly extremist supporters goes on all the time in politics. Opponents of President Obama’s health care reform initiative attacked the policy by calling Obama a “socialist” and comparing the president to Adolf Hitler. Nelson explained:

These tactics can work when people are faced with competing values and are unsure what their priorities should be.

Environmental values, for example, may sometimes conflict with economic values if clean air or clean water laws make it more difficult for companies to earn a profit.

If you want to fight against a proposed environmental law, you can’t publicly say you’re against protecting the environment, because that puts you in the position of fighting a popular value. So instead, you say that proponents of the proposed law are going to extremes, and are taking the value too far.

The problem with this tactic for society is that it damages support of the underlying values, as well as the specific policy. Nelson:

If you use this extremism language, it can make people place less of a priority on the underlying value. People may become less likely to think environmentalism or gender equality are important values.

Maybe that is why supporters of the Republican Party in the USA seem to be utterly immoral and obnoxious in general, although large numbers of them profess Christianity. As their bibles say, if they ever got round to reading them, you cannot serve God and Mammon. They serve Mammon, and so their Christian values, if they had them in the first place, evaporate.

When the media run down anyone whose policies seem fair and right, remember these studies. Even civilized people might have to protest violently to stop the propagation of obnoxious and selfish ones by the 1% and their media and academic lackeys. So look carefully at what extremists are extreme about. You might agree with them.

The Banker by C-J Moncur

The Banker

Hello, my name is Montague William 3rd
And what I will tell you may well sound absurd
But the less who believe it the better for me
For you see I'm in Banking and big industry

For many a year we have controlled your lives
While you all just struggle and suffer in strife
We created the things that you don't really need
Your sports cars and Fashions and Plasma TV's

I remember it clearly how all this begun
Family secrets from Father to Son
Inherited knowledge that gives me the edge
While you peasants, people lie sleeping at night in your beds

We control the money that controls your lives
Whilst you worship false idols and wouldn't think twice
Of selling your souls for a place in the sun
These things that won't matter when your time is done

But as long as they're there to control the masses
I just sit back and consider my assets
Safe in the knowledge that I have it all
While you common people are losing your jobs

You see I just hold you in utter contempt
But the smile on my face well it makes me exempt
For I have the weapon of global TV
Which gives us connection and invites empathy

You would really believe that we look out for you
While we Bankers and Brokers are only a few
But if you saw that then you'd take back the power
Hence daily terrors to make you all cower

The Panics the crashes the wars and the illness
That keep you from finding your Spiritual Wholeness
We rig the game and we buy out both sides
To keep you enslaved in your pitiful lives

So go out and work as your body clock fades
And when it's all over a few years from the grave
You'll look back on all this and just then you'll see
That your life was nothing, a mere fantasy

There are very few things that we don't now control
To have Lawyers and Police Force was always a goal
Doing our bidding as you march on the street
But they never realise they're only just sheep

For real power resides in the hands of a few
You voted for parties what more could you do
But what you don't know is they're one and the same
Old Gordon has passed good old David the reigns

And you'll follow the leader who was put there by you
But your blood it runs red while our blood runs blue
But you simply don't see its all part of the game
Another distraction like money and fame

Get ready for wars in the name of the free
Vaccinations for illness that will never be
The assault on your children's impressionable minds
And a micro chipped world, you'll put up no fight

Information suppression will keep you in toe
Depopulation of peasants was always our goal
But eugenics was not what we hoped it would be
Oh yes it was us that funded Nazis!

But as long as we own all the media too
What's really happening does not concern you
So just go on watching your plasma TV
And the world will be run by the ones you can't see

Written By Craig-James Moncur
16/10/2009

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The 30 Year War Against The American Dream: Henry Schoenberger

Henry Schoenberger, the author of How We Got Swindled By Wall Street Godfathers, Greed and Financial Darwinism, subtitled The 30 Year War Against The American Dream, points out that the OWS protests simply display the plethora of anger around in the USA. The level of poverty is now at its highest level ever—the poor are angry. The successful elderly planning on retirement after a lifetime of hard work are being hit—elderly retirers are angry. Young entrepreneurs, the foundation of our future economy, and those in their prime, whose enterprise should be creating new jobs to give a living to ordinary folk and a first step to the young—even many of those are angry.

Capitalism, as an economic philosophy, is only 200 years old, based as it is on the book by Adam Smith (1723-1790), the title of which is always given now as The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. The United States declared its independence that same year.

Since then, the abuse and misuse of Capitalism has paralleled the use and abuse of Democracy.

Henry Schoenberger

Smith is often presented by right wing libertarians, Republicans, neoliberals, and assorted conservatives as the model entrepreneurial hero. Yet, he first held the chair of logic at Glasgow University, and then in 1752 became its chair of moral philosophy. So he was really one of those timeserving wasters lolling around a university with students and living off someone else's hard earned income! That, at least is how the right wing regard university teachers and research workers.

In 1759, he wrote the Theory of Moral Sentiments about the standards of conduct that hold society together, explaining how benevolent human motives and activities lead to a society beneficial for all, and thereafter a virtuous circle. Adam Smith had a lifelong interest in the value of morality for the public good. In his book, The Wealth of Nations, he expressed a belief that allowing the entrepreneur to pursue his own interest essentially unfettered would lead to the betterment of all because it would lead to the better use of resources, including time. He never imagined that his theories could be so distorted by the ultra rich cornering one particular resource to the detriment of most of the rest of us—money!

Darwin published his book on the Origin of Species 85 years after The Wealth of Nations, and, although most Protestant pastors in the USA and their theologians who run the Republican Party cannot now abide the thought of evolution, for the first century of so they loved it. The survival of the fittest was a perfect expression of capitalism. So Darwin's theory applied even within human society. It was not restricted only to the wild.

This extension of Darwinism into society was dubbed “Social Darwinism”. It even made it respectable for the protestant churches to abandon Christianity—Christ blessed the poor and damned the rich—but now Social Darwinism made it clear, they thought, that God meant the rich were blessed and the poor were damned! It was a creed that was soon attacked by social scientists, and began to fall into disrepute. Reaganomics and deregulation revived it.

We all need to know a little about economic theories to understand the fallacious arguments advanced today for unfettered greed. For thirty years after WWII, the rate of growth of the incomes of rich and poor were broadly the same. John Maynard Keynes, before the War had shown how economies can be controlled by regulation, such as using taxation to slow down growth when the economy was overheating, and feeding back into feeble economies some of the tax take to boost spending during recessions. It worked wonderfully well.

Controlling self interest worked for decades in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The top tax bracket went up to 90% and still the ultra rich survived, but so did our middle class and our society was not demoralized. There was enough concern on both sides of the aisle to pass Civil Rights legislation and CEOs did not earn more than 40 times the average wage in their industry.

Henry Schoenberger

Interestingly, it was a closer match to Adam Smith's teaching than libertarian capitalists like to admit. Smith knew that regulation was sometimes necessary, and did not pretend otherwise. He believed that once the boundaries were suitably set, and the operators accepted them, then they would work to better themselves and society as a whole through the so called “invisible hand”. The trouble is, when things work well, smug, greedy people always want to try their luck at extending the conditions to their advantage.

That is what Reagan in the USA and Thatcher in the UK tried in the 1980s. In what was imagined as an economic “Big Bang”, a bonfire of the regulations was arranged on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberalism became the watchword, and Social Darwinism was born again. Survival of the fittest became survival of the richest. In the last thirty years, the workers and even some middle class have lost income, the better off middle classes have maintained theirs, and the rich have multiplied their riches several fold!

In 1776, Adam Smith could not have seen that unregulated Wall Street financiers enjoying tariff free transfer of money anywhere in the world could manipulate markets and the rewards they had from them to the advantage of themselves as a new Brahman class in the supposedly classless western societies. Greed became endemic. Like the living dead they sucked the economic life blood—money—from the middle and working classes. The insatiable greed and selfishness of the rich has killed millions and millions of jobs, people's savings, their livelihoods and increasingly their lives, quite contrary to the ideas of the capitalists' holy book, The Wealth of Nations, by their innocent prophet, Adam Smith. Henry Schoenberger sums up:

Wall Street is a problem because for 30 years it has practiced innovative financial investment at the expense of our economy. Wall Street has turned away from real investment based on innovation for capital formation to create jobs to benefit our economy. Wall Street Trojan megabanks are a major part of the problem.

Government ought not to be the problem because it is the role of government to regulate, to ensure that the balance of society and its economy are right. Our governments neither guard the public good nor the public. The politicians lack all morality themselves, themselves infected with the zombie infection endemic among the rich and aspirants to riches, with the taste for more and more blood, salivating at the thought of more victims, us, and more dollars, ours.

Schoenberger points out that Goldman has inveigled the government at the highest level for three decades. The OWS movement should demand the removal of any Wall Street executive from any important government post, and equally that government servants should be banned from transferring their allegiance to Wall Street until 10 years after leaving government. Consulting and “Atlantic Bridge” style “charities” and think tanks should be illegal as soon as they get near to government in any direct way, or even indirectly, if the influence can amount to bribery, or any similar illegal approach. That applies too to lobbying, nothing more than approved bribery.

High Street deposit banks must be severed from the high risk investment banks. Bonuses should be illegal. As compensation they must be treated as pay and seriously taxed. Taxes must reflect the reality that 1 percent has 40 percent, so that taxation is at least fair by percentage, and preferably progressive, so that richer people should pay a higher percentage. If a rich man faced with a 60% tax rate gets a rise of $1 million, are we seriously to believe he would refuse to work rather than receive $400,000 after tax.

Schoenberger concludes it “is the time for a movement to kick out all members of congress who vote against jobs! And stop wall street godfathers from taking advantage of the 99% who do not practice unbridled greed!”

Advertising Can Warp Your Memory

Some people were asked to read a descriptive printed advertisement describing the taste of popcorn with a fictional name but made by a familiar food brand. Others were asked to taste popcorn labeled with the fictional name. A week later, asked what the fictional popcorn tasted like, those who merely read the advertisement were just as likely to report eating the popcorn as people who actually ate it. N V Montgomery, with Priyali Rajagopal, an author of the study, said:

What we found is that if consumers falsely believe they have experienced this advertised brand, their evaluations of that product are similar to evaluations of products that they actually experienced. That is a fairly unique finding.

The phenomenon of false memories is well known in psychology, and this research extends it to marketing. But when the researchers replaced the well known brand name behind the popcorn with an unknown brand name but kept the same product name and vivid advertisement the effect was less pronounced, so the impression made by the brand name was crucial to the false memory. Michael Nash, a professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville said:

Humans are a lot more inaccurate than we think we are.

Montgomery said:

Advertisers have known that there are benefits to using vivid ads. I don’t know to what extent they are aware that these ads can impact memory.

He concluded:

Our intent was really just to educate consumers that they need to be vigilant when they’re processing high imagery ads, because these vivid ads can create these false memories of product experience.

Our Heroic Leaders Lead us into a Fruitless War Again! Why?

Well, here we go again. We are three days into another crusade against the Moslems. Western leaders inevitably deny it, but it has become essential for us to effect regime change over certain Moslem leaders, some of whom, like Gaddafi and the late Saddam Hussein, who used to be so much in favour that western arms dealers sold them billions worth of modern weapons. Only a few weeks ago, the latest grubby British leader to emulate the avaricious and unprincipled T Blair, “Dave” Cameron, was selling arms personally to Arab sheiks and kings. Now he is sending “our boys” to risk death flying over Libya to bomb the poor souls beneath, to save them from being bombed by Gaddafi! Could anything be more hypocritical?

The spokesman for the Arab League did not think so. He complained that the Arabs understood a “no fly zone” was to stop Gaddafi’s aeroplanes from flying, not to stop Libyans from living, whether supporters of Gaddafi or rebels. Plainly Cameron and his vile coalition, including Obama, intend to weight the civil war, which until last week looked favorable to Gaddafi, heavily towards the rebels. No one seems to know what proportion of the Libyans oppose Gaddafi. They quickly seemed to capture the north eastern corner of the country around Benghazi, then could make no more progress. The bulk of Libya seems to prefer their present leader to some western puppet.

“Dave” admits he wants to see regime change, admitting that his objectives are the same as Blair’s and Bush’s in Iraq, but pretends the terms of the UN resolution 1973 forbid it. Even so, almost the first blow struck was a cruise missile strike against an important administrative building in Tripoli where there was a chance that Gaddafi might be himself killed. While the direct objective cannot be Gaddafi, “Dave” explains, he can be legitimately targeted because the UN resolution said all means can be used to stop Libyan civilians from being killed, so killing one Libyan civilian can be legitimate on those grounds, and, naturally, many others might be killed colaterally—sad that!

Hypocrisy

Meanwhile the hypocrisy of taking precipitate action against some oil rich dictators while favoring other equally unpleasant or worse oil rich dictators passes by the half of our knowing electorate that happily soak up every lie the BBC, Murdoch and company sling at them. Simultaneously with the rebellion against Gaddafi the people of Bahrein rebelled against their king, who after being forced to say he was willing to concede some reforms, was obliged by an unyielding public, to bring in the Saudi Arabian army, an army that is the personal arm-twister of the Saud family who rule Arabia.

Arabia is the best friend of all opportunistic western leaders because of their oil, and their oil wealth, which again makes them prime customers for arms dealers. The arms they sold were used against a tiny island, just a causeway off Saudi Arabia, but where is the call for the king of Bahrein and the wicked Saud family to yield to the legitimate rebels? Why is there a no fly Zone over Arabia? For the same reason that Bush chose to bomb Iraq as punishment of the Moslems for the 9/11 attacks, even though the 9/11 bombers were almost entirely Saudi terrorists, not Iraqi terrorists—Osama bin Laden is a Saudi. But the Saudi’s are chums of the west, specifically of the Bush family, it was said at the time. There can be no one with a brain cell today who does not know this, but sadly our cynical rulers know full well that there is nothing easier than for the minority to rule the majority. Just use media manipulation.

In the UK, before the war in Iraq, a million people turned out against the war. It woke up the British ruling class and their media pals to the need for continuous propaganda, so a campaign began that is continuing still. Almost the only history taught in British schools these days is Hitler and WWII, the way our “brave boys” beat the Nazis. They were indeed brave boys… then… fighting against a right wing racist dictatorship that wanted to control the world from Europe to India, and most of them conscripted, not professional soldiers, but it gets our youth admiring warfare, and imagining that we only fight just wars—now a big lie.

Our “brave boys” today are more like the Nazis, fighting against poor foreigners thousands of miles away who just want to live their own lives. But the propaganda in the last decade has worked, and these—our own soldiers—though they are killing farmers and their families trying to wrest back the control of their own land from foreigners, are hailed as heroes! Well, they are called that when they return in a box, or with bits of themselves missing. In the UK a charity was set up for these heroes called, would you believe, “Help the Heroes”, when the people helping could have been more help marching in an angry mass to stop these boys, and girls, from wasting their lives for no good reason. Helping rich men grab someone else’s resources, mainly oil not carrots, is not heroic. They do not differ from heavies working for gangsters, except that the heavies know what they are doing, and do it for profit, while our soldiers are paid little more than KPs.

We can always afford a good war!

Now the Queen has given the little Wiltshire town of Wootton Basset the accolade of “Royal” because it hosted a regular mass line up of people grieving for the victims as each one, returned to Lineham air base, proceeded in a funeral procession through the town. Some will have grieved genuinely. But how much more valuable it would have been if they had instead been protesting against the war. Instead it became a neo Nazi showcase of tattooed bikers, war veterans who ought to have known better, various other rentacrowd types, and, of course, BBC and Murdoch’s TV camera men duly filming it several times a week, for its propaganda value. The town naturally loved it—business had never been better.

Now we learn that with the launch of the war against Libya, another propaganda charity has started, “Horses for Heroes”, in which disabled soldiers are riding from John o’Groats at the tip of Scotland to Land’s End at the tip of Cornwall, around 1000 miles, nominally to raise money, but, in fact, like “Help the Heroes”, to continue the war sympathy campaign on the British people. The UK is now like the US. It is on a permanent war economy, and even the media have to show some people, even veterans, saying so, and criticizing the hysteria for war sentiment. These wise people ask:

How can we afford these wars when we are bankrupt, and ordinary people are feeling the weight of government cuts through pay freezes and tax hikes. How can money be found, in these allegedly dire circumstances, for stupid overseas adventures which are of no concern for us.

The megarich financier class gets richer while ordinary people get poorer. The megarich, investment capitalists and bankers, get bailed out by poor people’s sacrifices, and arms dealers get rich by killing the poor, here allegedly being heroes, and abroad by being evil cowards blowing up our heroes to defend their land and homes. All is fair in war, as far as the rich are concerned, providing that the profits roll in. I wonder what they would do if we rebelled. Would they shoot rebels? It is what they have usually done. Does anyone seriously think they are different now?

Powers of Persuasion—Marketing by Metaphor

Lera Boroditsky, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford, says:

We can’t talk about any complex situation—like crime—without using metaphors. Metaphors aren’t just used for flowery speech. They shape the conversation for things we’re trying to explain and figure out. And they have consequences for determining what we decide is the right approach to solving problems.

Test subjects were asked to read short paragraphs about crime rates in the fictional city of Addison, including some startling figures about how much crime had risen, and then were asked to answer questions about the city. The researchers wanted to know how people answered when crime was described as a beast compared with when it was described as a virus. The subjects’ response depended on the metaphor used. 71 percent of participants called for more enforcement when they read:

Crime is a beast ravaging the city of Addison.

But only 54 percent wanted more enforcement when they read:

Crime is a virus ravaging the city of Addison.

Asked to say what part of the report had influenced them most in their decision, only 15 of 485 participants said the metaphor. Most of the rest else said it was the figures. Boroditsky said:

People want to believe they’re logical. They like to think they’re objective and making decisions based on numbers, but really they’re being swayed by metaphors.

As expected Republican participants were 10 percent more likely to suggest enforcement, but reading that crime was a beast swayed 20 percent more to suggest enforcement than reading that crime was a virus, whatever their political persuasion.

It explains why right wing politicians and their supporters like to be so doom laden and aggressive. When we are faced with Godless commies who eat babies, the poor dupes called the public are more ready to send their sons to fight foreign wars, and cut the unemployment roll. When we are faced with evil Moslem terrorists who want to destroy our civilization, we are again ready to send half educated country boys and black urban youths in uniform to fight for western freedom and Christianity.

These powers of persuasion are very well known in our capitalist society which uses them daily to mould our tastes, and influence the brands we prefer, and the places we go. It’s called marketing. Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders warning us against it half a century ago. By now, Joe and Jane Public ought to know all about it so that they are not so easily duped, but that is not what our leaders want. We are meant to be easily duped. The ruling caste would rather dupe us into fighting each other than fighting them, the real enemy!

Media Manipulation of the Poor Prevents Wealth Redistribution

Nate Kelly, a professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Peter Enns of Cornell University studied of economic inequality and public views of government redistribution programs by analyzing hundreds of thousands of responses to survey questions from 1952 to 2006.

The results are very revealing about the mentality and conditioning of poor Americans, and poor Americans certainly now includes a large chunk of people who like to consider themselves as middle class! One would imaging that people struggling in hard economic circumstances would appreciate government assistance, but they do not in the US. Kelly found:

When inequality in America rises, both the rich and the poor become more conservative in their ideologies. It is counterintuitive, but rather than generating opinion shifts that would make redistributive policies more likely, increased economic inequality produces a conservative response in public sentiment.

As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, both oppose government welfare programs. At present, in the US, governments cannot act to change inequality. As Obama is finding out, the poor even oppose measures that help them! Poorly off subjects, asked if they thought the government spent too much money on welfare, inevitably replied “yes”, and still do even though inequality over the last few decades has zoomed in the US.

This isn't because are unaware. They know about the huge wealth differences in the US. The reason is, the authors conclude, because the elites, political leaders and media moguls, distract and shape public opinion. In good economic times the media focus on individual achievement, and so the poor resist government programs. But in bad economic times, the media emphasize government welfare programs as handouts, and no one likes a self image of being a beggar or a hobo down on their luck. Kelly observes that:

What is clear from our work is that the self reinforcing nature of economic inequality is real, and that we must look beyond simple defects in the policy responsiveness of American democracy to understand why this is the case.

He means, of course, that leaders like Obama who would like to redistribute the huge inequalities in US wealth have not been utterly lacking in the US, but the US propaganda machine is so successful that too many people just cannot bring themselves to admit they would welcome it. They are conscious enough about their own poor circumstances, but simply do not realize how the US media manipulate them. Obama and anyone equally public minded are bound to lose until poor Yankees realize the rich and their media are pissing on them from a great height!

The Hidden Persuaders

The mention of manipulating the people reminded me that Vance Packard wrote in 1957 (The Hidden Persuaders) that Americans had become the most manipulated people outside the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain was pulled open in 1990, so who absolutely are the most manipulated people in the world now? In fact, the people of the Soviet Zone were not so much manipulated as given no choice about what they could think. They were fed one viewpoint, the Marxist-Leninist one approved by the state, and that does not require much in the way of manipulation, or is the crudest form of it. Western manipulation was, and remains, more subtle.

Nominally, we in the west can do, say and read whatever we like, though, in practice we do not. The range of viewpoints offered to us as acceptable to reason—ie not extreme—is remarkably narrow and skewed frighteningly toward the right. It is, of course, the product of manipulation. The acceptable US conservatism of the Republican Party verges on fascism to Europeans. Indeed European fascists are encouraged by what they see in the US. Equally liberalism is dangerously socialist to the average American. Even many Democrats seem hardly democratic to Europeans used to a wider range of acceptable political options. For Americans, socialism, and—God Forbid!—communism are not acceptable at all. When the whole of the left wing of politics has been manipulated out of existence, what remains of democracy? Socialism and communism are forbidden and liberalism is considered a dangerous aberration from the American Dream that everyone can be a millionaire, leaving the choice between liberalish conservatism and fascistic conservativism.

Unfortunately, the American Dream can only ever remain a dream for most of the dreamers. The reason is the distribution curve of wealth. Unless some attempt is made to change this distribution curve to give the poorer people a greater share of the wealth than they have at present, few people have any chance of getting further towards the rich end of the scale, the nature of which is that only a small proportion of the population are rich while the large bulk of people are close to average or are below it. Redistribution of wealth to the poor means squashing the distribution to make it narrower. More people are average and fewer are rich or poor. For everyone to be rich, everyone would also be poor. There would be no difference between them and the American Dream will have been attained.

It would mean everyone had the same, and the distribution of wealth would have become ideally communistic. Thus the American Dream is attainable only when America becomes communist, and so it is in contradiction with the propaganda of the megarich classes and their publicity agents in the media and academia. The American Dream is a propaganda pipe dream. It suits the rich to spread the fantasy that every American can be rich. It keeps them onside as supporters of capitalism against socialism, but it is pure manipulation. No one will want to criticize a system which notionally allows them to join the megarich, so the alternatives are beamed out constantly as unacceptable and contrary to the American dream, and lotteries and celebrity reality shows let them think it is all just so easy!

And the class of the megarich is largely now a caste made up of the descendants, the kids and grandkids, of pioneers and entrepreneurs who once had a good idea to benefit themselves, and the community at the time. Now the kids own their grand pappy’s earned wealth and have done nothing to earn it themseves. They just pay a little of it to their publicity agents and politicians to protect the system that benefits them. This caste has one idea only, and that is to protect their inherited wealth and status.

Newspapers and advertisers use psychological methods to manipulate public opinion, and now the internet is providing new and comprehensive ways of obtaining information about people’s preferences to allow them to be manipulated more effectively. The American Dream is one such method, an old one but evidently still effective, not least because some people can occasionally find their way through the system into the top class. There they join the old school and begin to sponsor their publicity agencies.

Even with their huge propaganda armory, the leaders of the megarich political class, Leo Strauss’s “Gentlemen”, are not averse to straightforward lying. Strauss’s school of neoconservatives even boasted about the myths they created to keep the gormless masses onside. “Myths&rdquo = “Lies”. Few people in the USA seemed to notice, or create a fuss, and those who did got minimal publicity, so as not to rock the gravy boat. Saddam’s WMD was one such myth, and probably al-Qaida was another, but unfortunately one that dissident Islamists thought was quite a good myth—for them! They took to saying they were this or that branch of it.

The American public are now like Pavlov’s dogs. They are conditioned! And what the Americans do, we all do a little later!