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CHAPTER FOUR MY COLD DEAD HANDS

“If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.”

—The Crown of a Life, Isa Blagden (1869)

In his book Political Parties (1911), Robert Michels, a German sociologist, wrote that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they start out, eventually develop into oligarchies (where a small group of people has control). It’s known as the “Iron Law of Oligarchy.”132

If an individual has risen to the top of their particular field, whether it’s in the business world, politics, or religion, we should naturally expect them to do everything in their power to stay on top, as they will have little motivation to change the system that got them there in the first place, unless, of course, those changes are designed to increase their power. As we saw in the last chapter, this desire to maintain the status quo inside their organizations can lead to a lack of reform and brutal attacks on criticism.

But what if the attacks come from outside the organization?

In this chapter, I want to explore the different kinds of tools the elite, some of whom are psychopaths, use to maintain their power and stage their war on the minds of the masses. The tools include religion, lobby groups, front groups, the corporate media, the education system, and the broader use of outright lies and propaganda.

It seems reasonable to assume that the elite will want to protect their organizations, and therefore themselves, from external criticism and reform, as much as they do from internal changes. This explains why such people are usually politically conservative—they want to conserve the status quo. Even if they vote for the less conservative of the major political parties in their country (for example, the Democratic Party in the USA, the Labor Party in the UK or the Australian Labor Party in Australia, etc.), you can bet they will still be relatively conservative on most issues that affect their wealth and power. They might be pro-gay marriage or support doing something about climate change or gun control—but what is their position on increasing taxes on the top 1 percent of income earners or increasing corporate tax rates? What is their view on increasing government regulations and oversight in their particular industry? What is their position on capping executive pay and bonuses or jail time for white-collar crime?

Take, for example, Qantas’ openly gay CEO Alan Joyce (Qantas is Australia’s largest airline). While very outspoken on issues like same-sex marriage, calling it “the morally right thing to do,” he also defends his $24 million salary,133 something others find morally unjustifiable.

You would expect them to be against policies that might have an impact on the continued success of their organization, which, in turn, would also affect their power. Things have been working out pretty well for them the way they are, so, naturally, they don’t want to shake the apple cart. I get it; I really do. But what’s best for their power isn’t necessarily what’s best for the rest of society. And you would expect them to use their control to fight for keeping the system stacked in their favor.

Let’s say that there is a political party that wants to pass legislation that might weaken an organization’s financial success—maybe deregulation of their industry, perhaps the introduction of new carbon emission regulations, possibly increasing the power of labor unions, and so on. What would you expect the CEO of an organization in that industry to do? I would expect her to try to use whatever power she has to prevent the political party from passing that legislation. And what tools does she potentially have at her disposal, as the CEO of a significant and financially successful corporation?

For a start, she probably has access to:

And if her organization’s financial success is being threatened, would you expect her to use each of these tools to her advantage? I would. It just stands to reason. It doesn’t make her a terrible person—it just makes her human. She doesn’t have to be a psychopath to want to protect her lifestyle. The lengths that she is willing to go to protect it will determine whether or not she is a psychopath, but not the initial desire to preserve her lifestyle.

The desire of the people in the top ranks of our organizations to protect their power, and the loads of cash and influence they have at their disposal to do so, is the flaw that lies deep in the heart of capitalism.

As Einstein pointed out, large organizations usually control immense power and the means to influence democracy well beyond the reach of any individual or even most groups of concerned citizens—and even more power than most political parties. The only thing that can get in their way is usually another equally influential organization with interests that are not precisely aligned. In these situations, we see a struggle for domination between organizational interests. The people sit on the sidelines and watch—or don’t watch. How often is the general public aware of the backroom meetings between lobbyists and politicians where they discuss the text of upcoming legislation? Rarely. These meetings are rarely made public and seldom covered by the media. Sometimes, like the negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, they are kept secret by corporations and politicians.134

Businesses, in particular, have a lot of influence on which stories are given coverage in the corporate media. This influence takes many forms. In some cases, it may be a direct influence. For example, the business or its principal shareholders or executives may also be significant shareholders in the media company (especially when a small number of companies control most of the media)135 and can exercise their seat on the board or their friendship with members of the board or a threat to dump stock (i.e., sell it cheaply) and drive down the share price (which can cause a range of problems for management and shareholders) to influence the stories that get covered and to what extent.

Alternately, a business may use an indirect form of influence via their advertising budget. As the primary source of revenue for most media corporations comes from advertising—selling access to customer attention—a business that threatens to withhold its advertising spend from a media organization can often get them to pay attention to whatever agenda they have. The CEO calls the publisher and threatens, “If you run that story, then we’ll pull all of our advertising and give it to your competitor paper/TV station/website.”

A DIFFERENT KIND OF TRUTH

Some people think propaganda only happens in third-world dictatorships, with a cult of personality built up around the “glorious leader” and dramatic posters depicting how the population is genetically or morally superior to others. But that’s only one kind of propaganda. In the West, we have just as much, if not more, propaganda in our daily lives, but because we’ve grown up knowing nothing different, we don’t even notice it.

According to French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul, most people are easy prey for propaganda,

“because of their firm but entirely erroneous conviction that it is composed only of lies and ‘tall stories’ and that, conversely, what is true cannot be propaganda. But modern propaganda has long disdained the ridiculous lies of past and outmoded forms of propaganda. It operates instead with many different kinds of truth—half truth, limited truth, truth out of context.”136

We need to understand that modern propaganda is far more sophisticated and insidious than the kind Big Brother uses in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

We get the word propaganda from the Vatican. The Congregatio de Propaganda Fide or “congregation for propagating the faith” is a committee of cardinals established 1622 by Gregory XV to supervise foreign missions. Propaganda means “to propagate.”

Propaganda is defined today as any form of indoctrination in which one group systematically uses manipulative methods to persuade others to conform to a particular way of thinking, any movement to propagate some practice or ideology. Another word for it is simply brainwashing. And we are all brainwashed from the day we are born, by our governments, media, and corporate and religious leaders—the very people we are told we should trust, the very people we are told are looking out for us, the very people who have control of our money, our politics, our education, our information, our spiritual path, and our military.

And they have to do it. The elite, the psychopaths, know that if we wanted to, the public could start a revolution and cripple the economic system that keeps them on top at any time. To prevent that, we need to be kept ignorant of the relevant facts, overworked, poor, heavily in debt, and distracted. And all of that takes systematic brainwashing. To keep the public from organizing and revolting, it’s imperative to brainwash them into believing what the elite are doing is right, ethical, and just and that we are poor because we just didn’t work hard enough—but we might get there one day if we just keep on believing.

It reminds me of Joe Bageant’s description of his “dittohead friend Buck” in his book Deer Hunting with Jesus:

He believes in the American Dream as he perceives it, which is entirely in terms of money. He wants that Jaguar, the big house, and the blonde bimbo with basketball-size tits. At age thirty-nine and divorced, he still believes that’s what life is about and is convinced he can nail it if he works hard enough. The sports car, the Rolex, McMansion, the works.137

It’s like some form of Stockholm Syndrome, where hostages develop sympathetic sentiments toward their captors and end up sharing their opinions and acquiring romantic feelings for them as a survival strategy during captivity.

David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, was fascinated with “the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, the implicit submission with which men resign.” In his book Of the Original Contract, he said that in all societies throughout the world, the real power is in the hands of the governed. So why don’t they overthrow their governments and take control of the power? He concluded that the people are governed by either force or by control of opinion. Control their attitudes, their beliefs, and you can control the power. According to Hume, this “extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the freest and most popular.”

Those of us fortunate to live in a democracy are taught that our governments are “for the people, by the people,” and we naturally assume this means we aren’t being lied to or manipulated. Whether you live in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, France, Germany, or any other developed, democratic, capitalist country, there is a reasonable chance that you are being lied to, day in and day out. Of course, not everything you hear is a lie. And perhaps “lie” is too strong a word. Let’s call it being “finessed”—after all, Orwellian newspeak is part and parcel of how the system works!

The idea that we all live in a free democracy, where everyone has equal rights, and an equal say in how society works, is an illusion that has been engineered and perpetuated by the largest of our organizations for as long as our countries have existed. Understanding why these illusions have been created and why they will remain until we re-engineer society is part of the journey to understanding the modern world.

If you asked most astronomers in the early sixteenth century what astronomy was all about, they probably would have told you that it was the study of how the stars and planets revolved around the Earth. The very definition of what they did prevented them from realizing the truth—that the Earth revolved around the Sun with the rest of the planets in our solar system. Sometimes our illusions about how things work can be so influential that they prevent us from seeing the truth—even when it is right there in front of our eyes.

Noam Chomsky, institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author, political activist, and considered the world’s leading intellectual,138 stated in a 2013 interview that the United States is “no longer a functioning democracy, we’re really a plutocracy.”139 And that was several years before Trump won the White House!

Plutocracy is government by the wealthy. Of course, this has been the most common form of government throughout history. Whether we call them kings, emperors, or presidents, the people with political power are usually either wealthy themselves or are financially supported by the wealthy. Recognizing that this is how our so-called democratic governments work today helps us to develop a model that explains a lot of how our propaganda system works.

Unfortunately, the models most of us have been given for understanding how our societies work are broken.

Those of us fortunate enough to have been born in the developed world after World War II have been indoctrinated relentlessly by our governments, by the corporate media, and by corporate advertising. We have been sold a story about how wonderful our societies are and how we fit into that picture. It’s not that much different from the kinds of propaganda we would expect in the Soviet Union or under Kim Jong-il.

We have been sold that story for so long and so persuasively that we believe it to be true. Billions of dollars are spent every year reinforcing these ideas in our brains. The indoctrination is so pervasive that it is tough for people to pull themselves out of it.

One of the most prominent ways that we are brainwashed is through corporate media. It’s essential to remember that they are for-profit corporations and that they exist for the same reason all for-profit corporations do—to make money for their stakeholders.

Like drug dealers in a depressed urban environment, corporations, especially if they are run by psychopathic cultures, don’t care about the health of their customers. They probably don’t want their customers to die as that will interfere with the source of the money. However, if a few die here and there—or if the people dying weren’t going to contribute to profits in the first place—then that’s okay. That’s collateral damage. There are always going to be more customers out there to replace them.

PROPAGENDA

The propaganda in Western countries has become so ubiquitous, sophisticated, and disciplined during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that someone coined a new term for it—propagenda. Propagenda is the act of creating an environment in which only a specific range of topics are allowed for discussion. Discussions about issues that don’t fit the decreed agenda are prevented from getting coverage by the media, the politicians, or the organizations that enable them. They are ignored, obfuscated, shut down, or covered up. You have been conditioned, not just to believe the lies, but not even to notice them.

In their book, Manufacturing Consent (1988), Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky proposed a theory called “The Propaganda Model” for explaining how the populations of Western democratic countries are kept calm and obedient by the “power elite.” Herman and Chomsky demonstrate that there are systemic biases, supported by a series of “filters,” in the mass media that have fundamental economic causes. These filters ensure that only the people who have the right biases, which essentially agree with the worldviews of the elite, can get employed and to build a career in the media and academia. Everyone else is either filtered out—fired or prevented from rising through the ranks—or filter themselves out by resigning.

The Australian social psychologist Alex Carey, the first person to provide a dedicated analysis of modern propaganda in democracies, wrote that

The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.140

According to Carey, the extension of the right to vote and the rise of the union movement in the first half of the twentieth century were perceived as threats to corporate power. This threat was met by learning to use propaganda “as an effective weapon for managing governments and public opinion.”

Corporate propaganda has two main objectives: to identify the free-enterprise system in popular consciousness with every cherished value, and to identify interventionist governments and strong unions (the only agencies capable of checking the complete domination of society by the corporations) with tyranny, oppression and even subversion.

One thing that many people don’t realize is that, in the first half of the twentieth century, there were robust newspapers that not only took a strong stance against capitalism and imperialism but also had a very significant readership.

For example, in 1933, the Daily Herald, a British newspaper that had opposed British involvement in World War I, supported British industrial strikes, supported the Russian Revolution but later condemned the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland, became the world’s best-selling daily newspaper and even into the 1960s had almost double the readership of The Times, the Financial Times and the Guardian combined.

According to James Curran, professor of communications at Goldsmiths University of London and author of Media and Power, the Herald was a “freewheeling vehicle of the left, an important channel for the dissemination of syndicalist and socialist ideas.” Even though it achieved 8.1 percent of national daily circulation, the paper only received 3.5 percent of net advertising revenue, significantly impacting its ability to survive.

Corporate advertisers aren’t likely to support a newspaper that actively speaks out against capitalism. As British journalist Andrew Marr wrote in his memoir, My Trade: “It’s hard to make the sums add up when you are kicking the people who write the checks.”

The paper staggered on until 1969 when it was bought by a then little-known Australian newspaper owner called Rupert Murdoch who turned it into the sexist, celebrity-obsessed, news-lite The Sun. The first headline under Murdoch was “HORSE DOPE SENSATION.”

It still has one of the highest circulations of all British newspapers, but of course, it has dispensed with supporting the political issues for which it was initially known.

As U.S. media analyst Robert McChesney succinctly put it, “So long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible.”141

“Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.”

—Noam Chomsky

Every news editor or radio or television news producer knows that they have a limited number of inches or minutes to fill with content every day. And there are countless stories to fill them with. How do they decide which stories they are going to cover?

They take into consideration a combination of factors.

Here’s an example of the last scenario.

In 2010, it was widely covered in the global news that President Obama had agreed to sell a record $60 billion of arms to Saudi Arabia. A quick Google search for “$60bn Saudi arms sale” returns nearly 10,000 entries. It was reported by The Guardian, Al Jazeera, BBC, Financial Times, The Independent, Wall Street Journal, and so forth.

But when I tried the same search on NBC’s website, I couldn’t find a single story covering the sale.

Another example: in 2010, it was widely reported that the United States also reached a separate $25.6 billion deal to sell the Saudis military helicopters, some manufactured by General Electric.

Again, that news was covered by many major news agencies—but not NBC.

THE FOURTH ESTATE

The media used to be called the “Fourth Estate,” which comes from the days in England when there were three primary centers of power—the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners. The press was called the fourth estate, the fourth center of power.

Oscar Wilde once wrote:

In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody—was it Burke?—called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism.142

The original role of the Fourth Estate was to keep the others honest.

When for-profit corporations run the news media, it makes sense that the news they choose to cover will mostly, if not always, fit neatly within the model of society that the corporations wish to promote. It would not serve for a corporation to run many news stories that might have the long-term effect of reducing their profits. Remember—corporations are, above all else, survival machines. They exist to maintain power. And if psychopaths rise to the top of the media organizations, how do you think they will use them?

Stories that question the values of our society will struggle to see the light of day. For example, how many stories have you seen in the mainstream media that argue against capitalism or the corporatocracy? It’s certainly not the case that those arguments can’t be made. They do get made, in alternative media and in books. But you won’t often see them in the mainstream media because they run counter to the values of the corporation.

In the same way, you wouldn’t expect a media organization to give fair coverage to scandals involving their own company.

During the 2012 Levenson inquiry into the culture, practices, and ethics of the British press following the News International phone-hacking scandal, evidence emerged that Rupert Murdoch and his papers wield enormous influence over both the Labour and Conservative parties in the UK. The conclusion reached by a committee of UK ministers was that “Rupert Murdoch is ‘not a fit person’ to exercise stewardship of a major international company.”143

The committee concluded that the culture of the company’s newspapers “permeated from the top” and “speaks volumes about the lack of effective corporate governance at News Corporation and News International.”

And they didn’t just point the finger at Rupert. They pointed it at the entire leadership of News Corp.:

The committee concluded that Les Hinton, the former executive chairman of News International, was “complicit” in a cover-up at the newspaper group, and that Colin Myler, former editor of the News of the World, and the paper’s ex-head of legal, Tom Crone, deliberately withheld crucial information and answered questions falsely. All three were accused of misleading parliament by the culture select committee.”144

A very telling example of how media companies manipulate the news they choose to cover is too look at News Corporation’s coverage of the phone-hacking scandal.

The Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at the University of Technology Sydney (which, unfortunately, closed down in 2017) once analyzed News Corp’s handling of its own terrible press.145 They looked at one week of coverage of the inquiry in a range of Australian papers, including those owned by News Corp (which make up 70 percent of Australian print media). They found that while News Corp’s newspapers did mention the inquiry, they ran far fewer stories than non-newspapers, and what they did run was buried deep in the paper, and relied mostly on commentary and editorial, much of which was critical of the inquiry.

Not one editorial supported the idea that there should be a similar inquiry into Australia’s media.

In the week under review, no News Ltd paper acknowledged any problems for News Corporation’s power or practices other than phone hacking. And phone hacking was only denounced in editorials once a statement was issued by News CEO John Hartigan describing phone hacking as “a terrible slur on our craft.”

We can see from this small example that corporate media will usually strive to protect its interests and the interests of its industry—logical behavior, to be sure, but it helps us understand the inherent bias that exists at the heart of our news media.

And what do we know about the quality of the news media? A separate study run by the ACIJ found that across ten hard-copy Australia newspapers, “nearly 55 percent of stories analyzed were driven by some form of public relations—a sad indictment on the state of Australian reporting.”146

People working in the news media, for example, journalists, editors, and so forth, will often argue that there is no bias and that they are faithfully reporting the news as best they can. However, as Chomsky and Herman pointed out in Manufacturing Consent, this is what you would expect. Organizations, being survival machines, tend to hire and promote people who “buy into” the mission and purpose of the survival of the institution.

And yet sometimes the curtain is briefly drawn aside, and we get a short glimpse of the wizard revealed in his true colors.

According to an interview on ABC Radio on June 2012, one of Australia’s most prominent businesspeople argued that the board of a newspaper should have the right to influence the editorial direction of the company’s media outlets, especially if the actions were designed to increase the company’s profits. Channel Ten (a leading Australian TV network) board member and Hungry Jacks (Australia’s version of Burger King) founder, Jack Cowin, told ABC Radio that newspapers are a business, not a public service and that the board has the right to decide what kinds of stories that business should cover.147

Cowin also happens to be one of the closest advisers to Gina Rinehart, the mining magnate who tried to buy control of one of Australia’s leading newspapers. When Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison had a state dinner with Donald Trump in September 2019, guess who he took as his honored guest? Gina.

As we can see, “editorial independence” isn’t a clear-cut issue.

Any student of the history of newspapers already understands that papers have always been used for political and commercial influence.

According to Michael Wolff’s 2008 book, The Man Who Owns The News, Rupert Murdoch entirely altered the political landscape in New York within his first year of owning the New York Post in the mid-1970s:

He decides to use the Post as an instrument to elect somebody—he understands that it doesn’t really matter whom, just that the Post be responsible. After interviewing each of the prospective candidates for New York City mayor, he settles on the perhaps least likely guy—that is, the one who needs him the most. It’s Ed Koch, a congressman from Greenwich Village… The entire paper is put in service to the Koch election. The Post is transformed into an ebullient narrative of Koch’s presence, charm, and inevitability. The least charismatic man in the city becomes the most charismatic.148

When Koch was elected mayor of New York in 1977, Murdoch became one of the most influential people in the city. And this is only a few years after he arrived in New York and had been seen by the “old money” as easy picking. Koch was Murdoch’s first American political coup. Of course, nearly forty years later, another Murdoch media entity, Fox News, would play an enormous role in getting Donald Trump elected president of the United States.

Going back to the late nineteenth century, the term yellow journalism was coined by Erwin Wardman, the editor of the New York Press, to reflect the first “media war”—Pulitzer versus Hearst. Circulation battles between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal culminated in both of the papers using scandal-mongering, outlandish headlines, and rampant sensationalism to try to outsell each other.

One of the turning points in the history of propaganda was the Spanish-American War (April–August 1898). Hearst and Pulitzer both fabricated stories and embellished others to increase circulation and justify American intervention, which led to a war and even greater circulation. This strategy was immortalized in fiction in Orson Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane. Kane, the young, ambitious newspaper proprietor, receives a telegram from his reporter in Cuba, who says there isn’t any war to report on, so he’s spending his time writing poems. Kane issues the smug reply:

“You provide the prose poems—I’ll provide the war.”149

In Britain during the early twentieth century, Murdoch’s predecessors, press barons like Max Aitken (aka Lord Beaverbrook) owner of the Daily Express, and Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe), owner of the Daily Mail and The Times, were both heavily involved in anti-German propaganda that promoted Britain’s involvement in World War I. One of their competitors claimed that “next to the Kaiser, Lord Northcliffe has done more than any living man to bring about the war.”150

Northcliffe, who controlled 40 percent of the morning newspaper circulation in Britain, 45 percent of the evening, and 15 percent of the Sunday circulation, actually played a huge role in getting Lloyd George elected prime minister in 1916. For his efforts, he was offered a position in the cabinet. He turned that down—and was officially made “director of propaganda” instead. Imagine Rupert Murdoch being given the same title and you get how ludicrous this was. A media baron, who thought of himself as Napoleon reborn, being given a role in the government.

In return for supporting Lloyd George’s coalition government in the 1918 general election, Northcliffe demanded the government accept a list of the names of people who should be given roles in his government. To his credit, Lloyd George refused. That’s just one example of how the “free press” works in the West.

In more recent times, we have seen the role of Judith Miller at the New York Times in publishing propaganda that helped lead the U.S. into its invasion of Iraq in 2003.

As Salon.com noted:151

Since her early days at the Times, when she inserted CIA misinformation into a piece on Libya, she’s always been a tool of power. She was the voice of the Defense Department, embedded at the Times. She was hyping bullshit stories about Iraq’s WMD capabilities as far back as 1998, and in the run-up to the war, her front-page scoops were cited by the Bush administration as evidence that Saddam needed to be taken out, right away… Lying exile grifter Ahmed Chalabi fed her the worst of the nonsense designed to push America into toppling Saddam Hussein (and giving Iraq to him), and she pushed that nonsense into the newspaper of record. She got everything wrong.

Miller used Chalabi as an anonymous source for her reporting about Saddam’s efforts to build a nuclear weapon. Chalabi was born into one of Iraq’s wealthiest and most influential families. He left the country after the military coup in 1958 and lived most of his life in the United States. In the intervening years, Chalabi became a banker (the family business) and, after a bank he founded in Jordan collapsed, was convicted and sentenced in absentia to twenty-two years in prison for bank fraud. In 1992, he created an Iraqi opposition group, the INC, that was mainly funded by the United States. Chalabi used some of the funding to hire U.S. lobbying group BKSH & Associates to help him sell the idea of overthrowing Saddam to the American public. Two of the founders of BKSH were Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, who is currently serving time for five counts of tax fraud and two counts of bank fraud—and Roger Stone, who served as an advisor to the Trump campaign.

Miller didn’t mention anything about Chalabi’s background of fraud and corruption, his role with the INC, his funding by the U.S. government, or the lobbying firm he hired, when she published her stories in the New York Times. And the U.S. government, led by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, used her stories to back up their argument that Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq needed to be invaded.

So, to put it another way—the U.S. government gave Chalabi tax dollars, which he used to hire a lobbying firm. This firm helped him get anonymous, positive, and unquestioning coverage in the New York Times, which the U.S. government then used to justify a considerable military build-up and the invasion of Iraq—also paid for by tax dollars, much of which ended up in the hands of American businesspeople.

Is it any wonder, then, that, according to at least one study,152 the media is now the least trusted institution in the world? According to Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, “featuring lobbyists and corporate consultants to analyze the news without disclosing their glaring conflicts of interest” is “a scandalous media-wide practice.”153

In late 2018, he revealed that the Daily Beast, MSNBC, PBS, and CNN all used tainted sources to comment on Saudi Arabia and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He had previously disclosed that The Washington Post, Khashoggi’s employer at the time of his death, simultaneously hired journalists “who maintain among the closest links to the Saudi regime and have the longest and most shameful history of propagandizing on their behalf.” If this practice is as widespread as Greenwald suggests, where do we turn for a trusted analysis of events?

THE INTELLIGENT FEW

While propaganda has been around in some form since the dawn of humanity, the origin of modern public relations stems from World War I and perhaps the supreme PR story of all time.

As hard as it may be to believe, in the early twentieth century, the United States’ military was outnumbered by Germany’s by a factor of twenty. For the first couple of years of WWI, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson had advocated neutrality “in thought and deed” for the United States, and most of the country agreed with him. The war happening in Europe—a ridiculous war that should never have happened—had nothing to do with America.

Then, as now, there were fortunes to be made during a major war. America’s neutrality enabled their bankers and manufacturers to finance and supply all sides of the conflict. And they did.

The British, however, with their superior navy, were able to blockade Germany and prevent America from trading with them. In response, the Germans announced that they would use submarines to attack any ships trading with England. This led to some bright spark in the USA deciding to try to ship ammunition to England undetected in the holds of unarmed passenger ships.

Of course, the Germans found out about this cunning and dangerous strategy, and on May 7, 1915, they torpedoed the RMS Lusitania, a passenger ship that was secretly carrying four million rounds of .303 bullets from the USA to England. Both the UK and the USA long denied that the Lusitania was carrying ammunition, but evidence of the cargo was discovered in the wreckage ninety years later. The sinking of the Lusitania, which happened to be carrying 128 Americans among its passengers, began the process of changing American attitudes about entry into the war. (Of course, there was no punishment for the individuals or corporations who were responsible for putting the ammunition in the hold of the ship and endangering the lives of the civilians.) Wilson, though, ran for election again in 1916 (and won) on a neutrality ticket. The sinking of the Lusitania, although long held as the reason America entered the war, really had little to do with it. It wasn’t even an American ship. The Germans agreed to halt using torpedoes to sink ships, and Wilson was happy.

Unfortunately, the Germans flip-flopped on the torpedo issue, which upset the Americans. The Germans also tried, unsuccessfully, to get Mexico to attack the U.S., which they found out about and weren’t very happy about that either.

Neither of these things, however, were the primary cause of America’s entry into the war. As usual, the real reasons were economic. When we want to understand the causes of many political events, we should follow the advice of the Watergate informant Deep Throat and “follow the money.” Or, as the ancient Roman statesman Cicero put it “cui bono” (who benefits?).

The U.S. had huge economic investments with the British and French in the lead up to WWI. The Allies (mainly Britain and France), together with their colonies, had purchased 77 percent of American exports in 1913—which was all the more significant because the American economy had been struggling at the time. According to banker J. P. Morgan:

The war opened during a period of hard time that had continued in America for over a year. Business throughout the country was depressed, farm prices were deflated, unemployment was serious, the heavy industries were working far below capacity, [and] bank clearings were off.154

In the first couple of years after the start of the conflict (before the Americans got directly involved), the Allies purchased a lot of American steel, bolstering the American economy. But the Allies were cash poor, so they had to buy the steel, and other American products, on credit. The Allies took out the biggest loan in financial history from private American banks—brokered of course by Morgan. He also negotiated a deal that positioned his company as the sole munitions and supplies purchaser during World War I for the British and French governments. His cut was a 1 percent commission on $3 billion—about $30 million in 1914 or $753 million in today’s dollars.

By the way, Morgan’s father, J. P. Morgan Sr., actually created the corporation called U.S. Steel, which, at one point, made 67 percent of all the steel produced in the United States and was known on Wall Street as just “The Corporation” due to its overwhelming size and importance. You have to admire his son’s chutzpah—as a banker, he profited by organizing the loans to Britain and France; as the owner of U.S. Steel, he benefited again from the spending of those loans on steel, as well as earning a one percent commission on purchases of cotton, chemicals, and food.

If the Allies were to lose, then they would not be able to pay the banks back (amounting to about $2 billion 1917 dollars), which could cause the U.S. economy to collapse (or so the thinking went at the time). Wilson needed to reverse his position and find a way to convince the American people to get involved in a war he had been saying for two years had nothing to do with them.

To finance the war effort, the government tried to sell “Liberty Bonds.” A bond is, simply put, when the government says, “Loan me your money, and we’ll pay you back later with interest.” But the U.S. public was unenthusiastic, and the government struggled to get the people to hand over their cash.

And that’s where the Committee on Public Information came into effect. CPI was charged by President Wilson to “engineer the consent” of the American people for their involvement in World War I. CPI was an independent agency of the government, but it was composed by the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of the Navy, so it actually wasn’t all that independent. The fourth member of the committee was the civilian Chairman George Creel, an “investigative journalist.”

Creel gathered the nation’s artists to create thousands of paintings, posters, cartoons, and sculptures promoting the War. He also gathered support from choirs, social clubs, and religious organizations to join “The World’s Greatest Adventure in Advertising.” He recruited about 75,000 “Four-Minute Men,” who spoke about the war at social events for an ideal length of four minutes, considered at that time to be the average human attention span. They covered the draft, rationing, bond drives, victory gardens, and why America was fighting. It was estimated that by the end of the war, they had made more than 7.5 million speeches to 314 million people.

This was, of course, in the years before radio, film, television, and Netflix had any significant penetration. Imagine the same kind of thing happening today—the government organizing tens of thousands of people to travel around the country giving propaganda speeches to convince the people to go to war.

To help sell the Liberty Bonds, Morgan also bought a controlling interest in twenty-five of the top American newspapers. He wanted to make sure he got paid back a $400 million loan to Britain from the first Liberty Bond drive. The “isolationists continued to accuse the House of Morgan of whipping up pro-war sentiment.”155

After this massive propaganda campaign, the number of Americans ready to go to war rose from roughly 380,000 in 1915 to 4.8 million in all the military branches by the end of World War I.

Of course, none of the reasons why the U.S. had initially stayed out of the war had changed. It still had little chance of spreading to North America. The Mexicans had no intention (or capability) of launching an attack on the U.S. It was justified to the American people using the usual hyperbole, used by autocrats and imperialists since the dawn of time—by resorting to Pavlovian triggers such as “peace,” “justice,” and “freedom.” However, it is quite clear that the U.S. entered WWI largely because of economic reasons.

In the end, World War I cost the American public about $33 billion ($828 trillion when adjusted for inflation), a sum sufficient to have carried on the Revolutionary War continuously for more than 1,000 years at the rate of expenditure that war involved. About two-thirds were for direct costs; the remainder (over $10 billion) was loaned to America’s allies—who never paid it back.

The U.S. was debt-free before the war. After the war, it had a public debt of $25 billion.156

Why would the U.S. spend $33 billion to recover $2 billion in loans? That doesn’t seem to make much sense. But when you realize that it was the banks who loaned most of the money and the people who funded the war (via their taxes and “Liberty Bonds”), then it starts to become quite clear. It’s the same model for Western countries getting involved in foreign wars today. Use public funds to fight the war, while private corporations benefit from the result, through reconstruction contracts and trade agreements with the government of the post-war country. It’s another form of the socialization of costs and the privatization of benefits. It’s like getting your friends to invest in your business and then keeping all of the profits for yourself and justifying it by saying they are all better off because there is one more successful business in town. I’ll go into it in more detail later on in the book.

The Committee on Public Information was the engine behind the reprogramming of the American people. Their success in motivating the U.S. to support a war has been studied, repeated, and refined by successive administrations over the last century. And it expanded to become a global propaganda campaign.

The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, worked for the CPI. Just after WWI, he issued a press release that stated CPI’s role after the war was to keep up “a worldwide propaganda to disseminate American accomplishments and ideals.”

In the opening of his classic 1928 book Propaganda, Bernays explained his view of its role in modern Western societies:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Clearly it is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically. In the active proselytizing minorities in whom selfish interests and public interests coincide lie the progress and development of America. Only through the active energy of the intelligent few can the public at large become aware of and act upon new ideas.157

Another of my favorite examples of the power of brainwashing by the military-industrial complex is that of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in 1945. Within the first two to four months of the attacks, the acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki, with roughly half of the deaths in each city occurring on the first day. The vast majority of the casualties were civilians.

In the seventy-three years that have passed since Hiroshima, poll after poll has shown that most Americans think that the bombings were wholly justified. According to a survey in 2015, fifty-six percent of Americans agreed that the attacks were justified, significantly less than the 85 percent who agreed in 1945 but still high considering the facts don’t support the conclusion.

The reasons most Americans cite for the justification of the bombings is that they stopped the war with Japan; that Japan started the war with the attack on Pearl Harbor and deserved punishment; and that the attacks prevented the Americans from having to invade Japan causing more deaths on both sides. These “facts” are so deeply ingrained in most American minds that they believe them to be fundamental truths. Unfortunately, they don’t stand up to history.

The truth is that the United States started the war with Japan when it froze Japanese assets in the United States and embargoed the sale of oil the country needed. Economic sanctions then, as now, are considered acts of war.158

As for using the bombings to end the war, the U.S. was well aware in the middle of 1945 that the Japanese were prepared to surrender and expected it would happen when the USSR entered the war against them in August 1945, as pre-arranged between Truman and Stalin. The primary sticking point for the Japanese was the status of Emperor Hirohito. He was considered a god by his people, and it was impossible for them to hand him over for execution by their enemies. It would be like American Christians handing over Jesus, or Italian Catholics handing over the pope. The Allies refused to clarify what Hirohito’s status would be post-surrender. In the end, they left him in place as emperor anyway.

One American who didn’t think using the atom bomb was necessary was Dwight Eisenhower, future president and, at the time, the supreme allied commander in Europe. He believed:

Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and… the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of “face.”…159

Admiral William Leahy, chief of staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, agreed.

It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.160

Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins wrote that

MacArthur… saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.161

If General Dwight Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, and Admiral William Leahy all believed dropping atom bombs on Japan was unnecessary, why do so many American civilians still today think it was?

Probably because they have been told to think that, repeatedly, in a carefully orchestrated propaganda campaign, enforced by the military-industrial complex (that Eisenhower tried to warn us about), that has run continuously since 1945.

As recently as 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Smithsonian Institute was forced to censor its retrospective on the attacks under fierce pressure from Congress and the media because it contained “text that would have raised questions about the morality of the decision to drop the bomb.”162

On August 15, 1945, about a week after the bombing of Nagasaki, Truman tasked the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey to conduct a study on the effectiveness of the aerial attacks on Japan, both conventional and atomic. Did they affect the Japanese surrender?

The survey team included hundreds of American officers, civilians, and enlisted men, based in Japan. They interviewed 700 Japanese military, government, and industry officials and had access to hundreds of Japanese wartime documents.

Less than a year later, they published their conclusion—that Japan would likely have surrendered in 1945 without the Soviet declaration of war and without an American invasion: “It cannot be said that the atomic bomb convinced the leaders who effected the peace of the necessity of surrender. The decision to surrender, influenced in part by knowledge of the low state of popular morale, had been taken at least as early as 26 June at a meeting of the Supreme War Guidance Council in the presence of the Emperor.”

June 26 was six weeks before the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The emperor wanted to surrender and had been trying to open up discussions with the Soviets, the only country with whom they still had diplomatic relations.

According to many scholars, the final straw would have come on August 15 when the Soviet Union, as agreed months previously with the Truman administration, were planning to declare they were entering the war with Japan.

But instead of waiting, Truman dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan on August 6.

The proposed American invasion of the home islands wasn’t scheduled until November.

ONE NATION UNDER GOD

If you’re in charge of a significant church, you’ll also want to keep your power, which means keeping your church powerful and keeping people religious. You’ll use your influence with your congregation, especially those who are business and political leaders, to make sure you do whatever you can to prevent societal changes that could affect your strength.

What kinds of societal changes would make a religion panic?

In his book One Nation Under God,163 Kevin Kruse explains how the idea of America as a Christian nation was promoted in the middle of the twentieth century when the business elite was worried about the direction the U.S. was heading, with the Roosevelt government’s New Deal, the rise of union power, and the popularization of the tenets of socialism. So they recruited a vast number of conservative clergymen to preach the connection between faith, freedom, and free enterprise—and paid them handsomely to do it.

Business leaders in the U.S. engineered and funded a long-term campaign to recruit religious leaders to associate any attempt to curb the excesses of big business with the evils of Soviet-style communism. As the Soviet form of communism contained state-mandated atheism, this message also worked in favor of the American religious leaders—the rise of socialist thinking wasn’t in their best interests either—and helped brainwash Americans into thinking that any attempt to regulate the free market was anti-Christian and anti-American.

Some preachers thought this connection with capitalism was disgusting and refused to participate. Those that did jump on board, however, were financially rewarded. They got personally wealthy, had large churches funded by grateful business leaders and were given lots of free media coverage.

One preacher who was very happy to lead the clarion call of capitalism was James W. Fifield Jr., the head of the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles. The members of his 100-room cathedral were mostly very wealthy, and Fifield ended up being called “The Apostle to Millionaires.” He bought a million-dollar mansion on Wilshire Boulevard and hired a butler, a chauffeur, and a cook. First Congregational paid him $16,000 a year. Adjusted for inflation, that would be roughly a quarter-million dollars today. And this was in the middle of the Great Depression. Praise Jesus! Fifield was a trendsetter for today’s obscenely wealthy preachers.

The irony, of course, is that, according to the New Testament, the earliest Christian communities practiced an early form of proto-communism!

Acts 4:32–35 tells us: “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had… from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.”

Fortunately, not many Americans actually read the Bible, so the contradiction wasn’t evident.

It was as a result of these efforts that the phrase “In God we trust” became the official motto of the United States. Originally appearing as a verse in “The Star-Spangled Banner,” it had appeared on coins intermittently since the Civil War, although Theodore Roosevelt tried to have it removed, believing it was sacrilege. It wasn’t until 1955 that Congress decided to put it on paper money, and in 1956, it became the country’s first official motto.

And it wasn’t until Ronald Reagan that the phrase “God bless America” started being used to close presidential speeches. According to authors David Domke and Kevin Coe, before Reagan, only one president had used that phrase to close out an address—Richard Nixon trying to talk his way out of the Watergate scandal in 1973.164

HAVE A LITTLE FAITH IN ME

Political and business leaders have other reasons for promoting religion other than tying it to the prevention of socialism. “Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet,” said Napoleon Bonaparte, and the above stories suggest that business and political leaders in the United States see religion as a useful tool for maintaining social order.

If you can convince the general public that faith is at least as meritorious as reason and evidence-based decision making, perhaps it is a lot easier to get them to support other nonreligious initiatives that cannot be bolstered by evidence—such as Ponzi schemes (named after Charles Ponzi, an Italian swindler and con artist in the U.S. and Canada in the first half of the twentieth century).

For example, the FBI’s Utah Securities Fraud Task Force investigated why Mormons often fall victim to typical fraud schemes. It appears that the Latter-Day Saints are highly susceptible to “affinity fraud”—where a con artist preys on a group of people who share a common bond. In 2010, the FBI said its office in Salt Lake City was one of the top five places for Ponzi schemes.165

Sixty percent of Utah’s population is Mormon, which has made the state a prime target for religious-based affinity fraud, according to Utah’s Attorney General Sean Reyes.

Is it possible that the same propensity to fall for affinity fraud makes “people of faith” easier to deceive in other areas as well? Or, conversely, are people who tend to be more skeptical harder to convince of political arguments?

For example, if you had a skeptical population that was used to demanding evidence before they believed anything and their government said, “we need to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction,” the population might reply “Well, show us some hard evidence, and we might believe you.”

However, if you have a population that has been trained to “just have faith,” then perhaps it is a lot easier to get their consent without having to worry about annoying little things like proof. It seems quite likely that one reason the Catholic Church was able to get away with hiding child rape for so many decades is that their congregations had too much faith in the clergy.

David Kuo, an evangelical Christian who served as special assistant to President George W. Bush and deputy director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, claimed that the White House used its faith-based initiatives program as a political tool to try to recruit “unconventional” Republican voters—including Christians among America’s poor minorities,166 while privately calling evangelical leaders “nuts,” “out of control,” and “goofy.”167

In the United States, polls have found that “78 percent of religious people display the flag on their clothing, in the office or at home, while only 58 percent of nonreligious do likewise. Evangelicals were the most likely to say they displayed the flag; those Americans unaffiliated with religion the least likely.”168 Side note: as an Australian, I find America’s obsession with its flag disturbing. That kind of thing doesn’t happen here. Or anywhere else I’ve traveled. It reminds me of the extreme nationalism of Nazi Germany.

Evangelicals also claimed America was the greatest country in the world at a far higher rate than Americans of other or no religious convictions. So at least in America, it seems there is a direct connection between being an evangelical Christian and being a patriotic nationalist.

Of course, having faith is not limited to religion. According to a 2005 Gallup poll, 22 percent of American adults believe in witches, and 36 percent believe in ghosts.169

Other Pew surveys have found that 26 percent of Americans believe in spiritual energy located in physical things such as mountains, trees, or crystals; and 25 percent profess belief in astrology (that the location of the stars and planets can affect people’s lives).170

Why do people still have faith in esoteric ideas in the twenty-first century? Possibly because it’s hardwired into us. This kind of thinking serves or used to serve, a fundamental purpose.

There are scientific theories that suggest that there are evolutionary biological reasons for humans, in days gone by, to accept on faith what their elders told them. For example, if a senior person in your tribe told you not to eat a certain kind of berry because it was poisonous, just accepting that theory on faith probably had survival advantages. If you were too skeptical about such pronouncements and ate the berry to see for yourself whether or not it was poisonous, you might not live long enough to pass on your skeptical genetics.

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, the Nobel Prize winner and the intellectual godfather of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman,171 explains the two different ways the brain forms thoughts. He refers to these ways as “System 1” and “System 2.”

System 1 thoughts are fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, and subconscious. These include the thoughts we have that confirm our existing models for how the world works. When we are presented with concepts that appeal to our cognitive biases, they allow us to think quickly and easily. Kahneman’s research shows that System 1 thinking makes us feel happy because it requires less effort and energy. However, it can also be easily fooled. Our “gut instinct” can often be wrong.

System 2 thoughts are slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, and conscious. They require more energy and effort, and, as a result, we tend to avoid them as much as possible.

An example of System 1 thinking is detecting that one object is more distant than another (easy, fast, requires no effort), while an example of System 2 thinking is parking in a narrow space (hard, takes initiative, and concentration).

If we can make decisions via System 1 quickly, easily, without having to engage our thinking muscle, the more mental energy we have to dedicate to other activities, like figuring out how to make more money or get laid (and I have a theory that the former is only useful because it helps the latter). If we have some kind of operating heuristic (rule of thumb) that allows us to make quick decisions about political, religious, and social issues, it saves us time and energy. If we merely accept that God exists, we don’t have to think too hard about alternative theories and their implications. This is all the more efficient if our parents and friends have the same heuristic. In days gone by, it meant our ancestors didn’t argue with tribal elders and risk being kicked out. When we assume our political party are the good guys and other parties are the bad guys, or when we assume that America always fights for freedom and the Russians are always evil, or that our prime minister is honorable, or that our CEO probably knows what she is doing, we are using System 1 thinking.

Unfortunately, System 1 plays right into the hands of the propagandists. If our brains have been saturated for decades with certain assumptions about how the world works, then it is easy for us to conform to those ideas. It requires much more effort to challenge those fundamental assumptions. It takes serious effort to train ourselves to ask hard, probing questions when watching the daily news. However, the more we force ourselves to think independently, the easier it becomes, especially as we build for ourselves new mental models for understanding how the world works.

Faith, in all its forms, makes life easier. You don’t have to think as hard. But does faith make life better?

Religious people might think that modern ills are directly related to a decline in faith, but the evidence suggests the opposite.

It might be a coincidence, but the countries on top of the OECD’s Better Life Index172 usually correspond closely to the world’s least religious countries—China and Japan being the major exceptions.173

Highly secularized countries also “tend to fare the best in terms of crime rates, prosperity, equality, freedom, democracy, women’s rights, human rights, educational attainment, and life expectancy,” according to the LA Times.174

Being skeptical apparently pays off.

WORKER BEES

One of the key pieces of propaganda we must fight against is the idea that a small number of people “deserve” immense wealth and power, because they work so hard, while the rest of society deserves to struggle for a lifetime because they are lazy bums. This concept is becoming pervasive in modern democracies, and its propagation is enormously destructive.

The Ayn Rand (author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) school of thought is that it is the ambitious visionaries who drive society forward and therefore should be allowed to keep the proceeds of their work; otherwise, they won’t invent things, and civilization will collapse. There is an element of truth in that. Where would we be without the innovations of Thomas Edison (well, Tesla) and Henry Ford? However, the theory falls apart if you think about it for a few minutes.

Wealth isn’t the only reason people accomplish significant innovations. Albert Einstein didn’t become particularly wealthy through his work and a great deal of the prosperity we enjoy in the twenty-first century is derived from his breakthroughs. Edison’s rival, Nikola Tesla, didn’t become wealthy either. His motivation was unraveling the mysteries of science (specifically electricity). The American inventor Buckminster Fuller spent his life designing innovative forms of housing, transport, and engineering without any thought of financial reward (according to his own testimony). So it isn’t true to say that all innovation is motivated by wealth. Many inventors simply want to make the world a better place.

The opposite school of thought to Ayn Rand was articulated very succinctly by Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law School professor, Democratic Senator for Massachusetts and 2019 presidential candidate:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea—God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.175

To extend her analogy—could this person have built their business if they had to hunt their own food? Build their own house? Make their own clothes? Teach their own children? I suggest they would have been way too busy trying to survive to pursue their business. On top of that, the customers of their business would also be too busy to be able to buy the business’s product or services, so the company would be a failure.

We live in a community, and every person in that community plays a vital role in keeping the community functioning. We might think of it as similar to a bee colony. Is the queen bee more critical than the worker bees? Without the worker bees bringing food into the hive, keeping the hive maintained, sealing honey, building honeycomb, carrying water, and keeping the hive cool, the queen bee would die. She needs the worker bees as much as the colony needs her to continue the species. It’s a relationship of mutual benefit, a symbiotic relationship.

The same could be said for human “worker bees” and the entrepreneurs or corporate executives, the “queen bees.” We need each other. One cannot survive without the others. Why, then, does one get paid 100 times or 300 times what the other gets paid? Do they work 100 times as hard or as long? Are their IQ scores 100 times higher (and, even if it was, can they take credit for having a high IQ or is it a gift of genetics)?

The queen bees in our society were educated in schools paid for by taxes, taught by teachers who, in turn, survived through being part of an integrated community. “No man is an island” as the English poet John Donne wrote.

Maybe we even need psychopaths? Perhaps many of the great inventors, the ones who didn’t care what people said about them, who ignored their families in pursuit of their vision, were psychopaths?176

OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE

Political parties, like every other organization, have one overpowering primary instinct—to survive by retaining their power at all costs. They all evolve and morph over time, abandoning, if necessary, their original policies and principles, to survive perceived changes in the realities of the political climate. Like corporations and religious organizations, they obey the laws of “organizational Darwinism.” Over time, their values, policies, and platforms evolve to reflect the changing times. In some cases, this has been a great thing—for example, up until the 1970s, both of the major political parties in Australia supported the White Australia Policy (where only white Europeans could lawfully immigrate to Australia), a fact I still find shocking.

There is no reason to think that political organizations would work any differently to the other kinds of organizations we have already explored—people who rise to the top of the party will have a natural incentive to try to preserve their power by maintaining the control that the party has.

In Western democracies, we’ve been led to believe that our governments are “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln put it. While this may be a beautiful sentiment and something we should aspire to, the frequency with which people seem to fall for lies told by our governments suggests that might be a naïve view.

Today most Western democracies are dominated by a handful of political parties (themselves controlled by a handful of corporate interests) that have become increasingly difficult to tell apart. The parties on the left have drifted, at least on many economic issues, to the right; in response, the parties on the right have had to move to the extreme right (especially in terms of their rhetoric) to keep a gap between them.177 The culmination of decades of the U.S. Republican Party’s drift to the right was the 2016 presidential win of authoritarian billionaire Donald Trump.

And it’s happening around the world. In Australia, according to one analysis:

The Australian Labor Party reflects this drift, now occupying a space to the right of the 1980s Liberals. The debate between the two primary parties, however heated, is within narrowing parameters. The two parties are now closer together than at any other time. The clash of economic vision of earlier campaigns is absent. It’s no longer about whether the prevailing neoliberal orthodoxy is actually desirable, but merely a question of which party can manage it best.178

Meanwhile, another form of political organization, the union movement, has been systematically weakened worldwide. In the U.S., union membership has fallen to 11.3 percent of all workers. In the private sector, unionization fell to 6.6 percent, down from a peak of 35 percent in the 1950s.179

In Australia, the decline is even more severe—from nearly 65 percent in 1948, to around 15 percent today.180

As a result of these and other factors, including off-shoring of jobs and automation, growth in real wages in most developed economies (Australia is an exception, thanks mainly to our mining boom) has mostly stagnated since the 1980s. This is seen most clearly in the United States—the world’s second-largest economy (after socialist China).181

What happened?

One factor was the aforementioned deliberate association of raw, unbridled capitalism with Christianity. There also seems to be a connection between the rise of corporate wealth and influence in the late twentieth century and the decline of progressive politics. According to Julian E. Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University:

The Democratic Party in the 1990s ran away from much of the robust economic vision that had defined the party since the progressive and New Deal eras. Many Democrats accepted some of the market-based premises of conservative politics, backing away from central parts of their core domestic agenda like progressive taxation and economic regulation. The growing power of corporate interest groups in Washington, which mobilized huge teams of lobbyists and threw around sizable campaign donations, made both parties less willing to hear demands for redistributive public policy.182

Regulatory mechanisms created after the Great Depression, designed to prevent its recurrence, were systematically dismantled and destroyed by successive governments of all stripes after 1980. Ronald Reagan‘s attack on America’s progressive tax system, which he claimed came “direct from Karl Marx,” culminated in his historic reduction in corporate and individual tax rates in 1981, which ultimately benefited wealthier Americans.

This led to today’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge, organized by Republican strategist Grover Norquist, “the high priest of Republican tax-cutting,” which asks all candidates for federal and state office (in the United States) to commit themselves in writing to the American people to oppose all net tax increases and punishes those who do not.183

Consolidation of corporate media ownership and the rise of television as the primary entertainment and news medium led to a population that could be manipulated more efficiently than ever before.

In the United States, the Republicans and the Democrats have swapped ideologies over the last 150 years,184 with the Republicans becoming more conservative while the Democrats have become more socially liberal than they once were (supporting gay marriage, abortion, etc.), but more economically conservative (the financial industry regulations put into place under FDR in the 1930s were dismantled under Clinton in the 1990s,185 support for free trade agreements, Obama’s continuation of Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, etc.). When it comes to foreign policy, it gets harder to tell them apart—both tend to support significant Pentagon budgets, financial and military support for apartheid Israel and Sunni fundamentalists, journalist-executing Saudi Arabia, and trying to clamp down on any nation that doesn’t fully accept American domination of global trade. And they both tend to fully support the surveillance state apparatus (the NSA, FBI, and other agencies) while taking a hard stance on government whistleblowers (e.g., Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Reality Winner).

The late American political theorist Sheldon Wolin, in his book Democracy Incorporated,186 coined the term “inverted total-itarianism” to describe America in the early twenty-first century. Journalist Chris Hedges defines inverted totalitarianism as a system where corporations have corrupted and subverted democracy and where economics trumps politics:

Inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state. Our inverted totalitarianism pays outward fealty to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, but it has effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent.187

As media ownership has been concentrated into the hands of the relative few (something all of the major parties in Western democracies have allowed to happen188), and countries have produced more and more billionaires and wealthy corporations with the ability to swing elections, the policies and practices of political parties have had to pander to the pressures placed upon them by the powerful.

This is a natural outcome of capitalism predicted by Karl Marx. He predicted that capital would be accumulated by a small number of people who would achieve economies of scale, which would, in turn, lead to further concentration and centralization of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, with competition leading to the big firms killing or eating the smaller firms, thereby destroying the competition.

Marx explains:

It is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals.… Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many.… The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities demands, ceteris paribus, on the productiveness of labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages.… It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish.189

And this is precisely what happened:

Today, mom-and-pop shops have been replaced by monolithic big-box stores like Walmart, small community banks have been replaced by global banks like J.P. Morgan Chase, and small farmers have been replaced by the likes of Archer Daniels Midland.190

And we should ultimately expect that when the wealth of a nation becomes increasingly concentrated into the hands of a small group of psychopaths, they will reshape the political landscape to protect their interests as the elite consolidate their control over the media, and their ability to determine the outcome of elections increases. Political parties, therefore, need to court the media owners and try to win their favor. Those who don’t will be relentlessly attacked in the media until their credibility is destroyed. In Australia, successive Labor Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard witnessed the ability of the Murdoch media to destabilize their governments with attacks after they announced their intention to impose a carbon tax in 2009.

The incestuous relationship between politicians in Britain and the Murdoch family, exposed during the 2012 Levenson inquiry into the voicemail hacking scandal,191 perfectly demonstrated how politicians would bend over backward to get on the good side of certain influential media owners. UK Prime Minister David Cameron hired a former News Corp executive, Andy Coulson, as his communications director. Coulson had previously been the editor of the News of the World (a Murdoch tabloid paper, which closed in July 2011 amid the phone-hacking scandals) from 2003 until his resignation in 2007, following the conviction of one of the newspaper’s reporters concerning the scandal. Coulson himself would later be charged with phone-hacking offenses in July 2012.192 He was found guilty and sentenced to eighteen months in prison (but served less than five—it’s nice to have influential friends).

Also charged in the hacking scandal was Rebekah Brooks, another former editor of News of the World and ex-News International chief executive. She was cleared of all charges by a jury, which accepted her defense that she had zero knowledge of the illegal acts carried out by the newspaper she was in charge of. In September 2015, Brooks was confirmed as the new CEO of News UK, the renamed News International.

Another trend in Western democracies is for the political candidates themselves to come from the ranks of the privileged. According to a 2011 report by The Center for Responsive Politics, nearly half of the members of the U.S. Congress are millionaires, a status shared by only 1 percent of Americans. These millionaires don’t come from just one side of politics either—140 of them were Republicans while the remaining 109 were Democrats.193

While millionaires and the rest of us share some interests, we will also naturally differ on many issues. Millionaires from both sides of politics are likely to hold significant financial investments in substantial organizations and businesses; therefore, it would be reasonable to expect them to support policies that protect the wealth and power of those organizations. It would also be wise to expect them to support policies that minimize the taxation of the wealthy. When you end up with a government with interests closely aligned to the elite, it is entirely reasonable to presume that the policies they implement will tend to favor those same interests—even if the policies are clearly based on nonsense.

Therefore when U.S. President George W. Bush (a millionaire) ushered in the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (aka “Bush’s tax cuts for the rich”), nobody should have been surprised.

Bush justified the tax cuts with a rehashed version of President Reagan’s favorite justification—supply-side economics—even though economists and scholars have consistently debunked this theory for decades. Developed by an economic adviser to Richard Nixon, supply-side economics claims that lowering marginal tax rates and reducing government regulation will lead to more successful companies, which will then create more jobs and the wealth will “trickle down.” It used to be called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

Bush’s own father, George H. W. Bush, derided Reagan‘s supply-side policies as “voodoo economics” during the 1980 election. Economist Paul Krugman wrote in 2007: “Supply-side doctrine, which claimed without evidence that tax cuts would pay for themselves, never got any traction in the world of professional economic research, even among conservatives.”194

Economist N. Gregory Mankiw, professor and chairman of the economics department at Harvard University, former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under Bush II’s presidency and a conservative economist, once referred to supply-side theories as “fad economics,” comparing it to fad diets:

People on fad diets put their health at risk but rarely achieve the permanent weight loss they desire. Similarly, when politicians rely on the advice of charlatans and cranks, they rarely get the desirable results they anticipate.195

When Bush’s successor Barack Obama (another Harvard-educated millionaire, whose net worth climbed 438 percent during his time in the White House)196 renewed the tax cuts in 2010,197 it was predictable. Despite members of his own party calling the bill “an expensive giveaway to the richest Americans at a time when America could not afford it” and his own rhetoric that there were “some elements of this legislation that I don’t like,” I have to wonder—could a millionaire, educated at an Ivy League university, who relied on millionaires to fund his own election campaigns, do anything different? Admittedly, he eventually did put up the taxes for the rich, but only marginally.

In March 2008, eight months before that year’s U.S. election, I wrote a blog post about my skepticism regarding the hope and change hype surrounding Obama. Like a lot of people, I wished that he was the real deal, someone who was really going to clean up Washington. However, I suspected the Harvard-educated poster boy for liberal America might be another puppet of the elite, designed to charm the pants off the Americans disaffected with George W. Bush, but would just be more of the same.198

I had a look at who the top contributors to his campaign were in early 2008. The top ten names included Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase & Co., UBS AG, Kirkland & Ellis (the largest law firm in the United States), Exelon Corp., Lehman Brothers, Skadden, Arps (the fourth largest law firm), Sidley Austin (the sixth-largest law firm), and Citigroup Inc.199

When Goldman Sachs is at the top of a candidate’s list of contributors, it’s a decent indication that the candidate isn’t perceived as a threat to the interests of the elite.

And these were the days before the Citizens United case removed all obstacles from corporations to donate unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns, so these were donations from political action committees (PACs)—individual contributions from employees or owners but raised through the company. It isn’t the company itself writing a giant check—but that’s beside the point. People who work at Goldman Sachs, for example, a bunch of investment bankers making million-dollar bonuses, know what they are doing when they invest in a candidate. These people don’t donate money to a campaign. They invest in it. They expect to get something in return for their contribution.

“As a businessman and a very substantial donor to very important people, when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal in July 2015. “As a businessman, I need that.”200

Billionaire President Donald Trump continues the trend, despite his promises to “empty the swamp.” His appointment of self-described “Reagan supply-sider” Lawrence Kudlow to head up the White House Council of Economic Advisers was an early signal that Trump was planning on making the rich richer.201

In the United States, it has become nearly impossible for someone to run for president unless you are either a millionaire or have the backing of many millionaires (or billionaires). As it turns out, there have been very few presidents who were not millionaires.202

Has the U.S. political system always has been engineered to prevent nonmillionaires running for office?

According to Open Secrets, the cost of the 2016 U.S. elections, including all money spent by presidential candidates, Senate and House candidates, political parties, and independent interest groups trying to influence federal elections, ran to nearly $7 billion.203 The presidential election itself cost roughly $3 billion.

If billionaires are funding political campaigns for millionaires and billionaires, whose interests do we expect will be given top priority by the incoming government once elected? If elected politicians don’t deliver on the interests of their financial supporters, they can be sure that future financial support will be harder to raise. That is to be entirely expected. Where does this leave the rest of the population?

While in Australia the situation may not be as dire, the majority of political donations still come in the form of financial gifts from corporations.204

Former Qantas CEO John Menadue warned Australians that “Corporate donations are a major threat to our political and democratic system, whether it be state governments fawning before property developers, the prime minister providing ethanol subsidies to a party donor, or the immigration minister using his visa clientele to tap into ethnic money.”205

Front organizations in Australia, such as the Cormack Foundation (the largest single donor to the Liberal Party) and John Curtin House (the ALP’s single largest donor), provide the major political parties with an anonymous cash flow, as under the Australian Electoral Commission guidelines, they are not bound to disclose how they raised their money.206

Sometimes wealthy individuals will buy a significant stake in a media company to have even greater influence over its reporting. In 2012, Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart, the wealthiest person in Australia and one of the most affluent women in the world, tried to buy Australia’s oldest newspaper business, Fairfax.207 She was denied a seat on the board when she refused to sign Fairfax’s charter of editorial independence and ended up selling her stake. Her reticence about allowing independence hints at her intentions.

Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, actually did buy The Washington Post. What his purpose is, we can’t say. According to Politico’s Jack Shafer: “I assess Washington Post coverage of Amazon as pretty even-handed. So does Fortune.”208

But during the 2016 election campaign, The Washington Post ran 16 negative stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 hours.209

Political candidates who refuse to kiss the ring often find themselves on the outside looking in. U.S. Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich has struggled to get media coverage during campaigns, possibly because of his liberal point of view on issues such as American military invasions. During the 2004 presidential campaign, the American ABC network decided not to cover his campaign at all. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Kucinich was “disinvited” from a Democratic presidential debate on MSNBC which was owned by General Electric, one of the largest corporations in the U.S. (GE has since sold NBC to Comcast).

In an interview with Democracy Now!, Kucinich expressed his concerns over the role of the media in political campaigns:

You know, I think that the attempt by the media to determine who people should vote for and who they shouldn’t vote for to determine who the candidates are, and who are not acceptable as candidates is something that raises real questions about the nature of the media’s role in our society, and about what right they have to be able to engage in a process of pre-selection. When you understand the corporate nature of the media, it further troubles one who is concerned about the nature of democracy itself.210

Kucinich explained his concerns about significant corporations being able to determine which political candidates the public get to listen to:

We’re in a conundrum here about what the public’s rights are, because this goes far beyond my humble candidacy. It goes right to the question of democratic governance, whether a broadcast network can choose who the candidates will be based on their narrow concerns, because they’ve contributed—GE, NBC and Raytheon, another one of GE’s property, have all contributed substantially to Democratic candidates who were in the debate. And the fact of the matter is, with GE building nuclear power plants, they have a vested interest in Yucca Mountain in Nevada being kept open; with GE being involved with Raytheon, another defense contractor, they have an interest in war continuing. So, NBC ends up being their propaganda arm to be able to advance their economic interests. I think we need to have an understanding here, that the larger issue is public financing. All these people who are running for president are good people, but we have a system that—it’s a terrible system. It requires people to do the kinds of pirouettes and gymnastics to make it appear that they’re pure and chaste while their opponents are not. The truth is that the whole system is rotten… we’re going to continue to see our politics in America be as an auction, where policy is sold to the highest bidder.211

Awareness of who is funding a candidate’s campaign can often give us strong indications about how corporations view that candidate. Would you expect a corporation to support the campaign of a candidate they believed would hurt their interests once elected? Would you expect a media company to cover the campaign of a candidate if they thought her success would damage their business? Of course, there are times when both of those things might happen, for example, if the candidate seems highly likely to win anyway, and the corporation feels like they have a better chance of having at least some influence if they show their support. But all else being equal, you would expect them to do everything in their power to try to prevent a candidate’s campaign from having any success if they suspect she is a threat to their interests.

Cui bono? Or, as Detective Lester Freamon put it in one of my favorite TV shows, The Wire: “You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don’t know where the fuck it’s gonna take you.”

During the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, 90 percent of the top twenty contributors to Hillary Clinton were corporations or providers of services to corporations. However, 95 percent of the top twenty contributors to Bernie Sanders were unions.212

Another sign that made me think Obama was “on board” with the military-industrial complex’s agenda back in 2008 was the level of positive press attention he got. If a candidate is terrible news for the military-industrial complex, they don’t get media coverage. Conversely, any candidate—including the ones you might think are on the left—that get enough media coverage to make them a viable candidate, have already been vetted and approved by the powers that be in the corporate media. Why would you expect anything different?

The 2016 U.S. presidential election provided further examples of the power of media coverage. According to a Harvard Kennedy School study:

During the year 2015, major news outlets covered Donald Trump in a way that was unusual given his low initial polling numbers—a high volume of media coverage preceded Trump‘s rise in the polls. Trump’s coverage was positive in tone—he received far more “good press” than “bad press.” The volume and tone of the coverage helped propel Trump to the top of Republican polls. Trump’s coverage in the eight news outlets in our study was worth roughly $55 million.213

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Figure 1: Harvard Kennedy School

Note that Trump received this positive free press despite his low polling numbers.

By comparison:

Over the course of 2015, the Democratic race got less than half as much news exposure as the Republican race. Less coverage of the Democratic side worked against Bernie Sanders’ efforts to make inroads on Clinton’s support. Sanders struggled to get badly needed press attention in the early going. With almost no money or national name recognition, he needed news coverage if he was to gain traction. Sanders’s initial low poll numbers marked him as less newsworthy than Clinton but, as he gained strength, the news tilted in his favor.

Sanders’s low polling numbers were a hindrance to getting press coverage, but Trump’s small numbers didn’t hinder him at all, probably because of his celebrity and how he built his campaign by saying outrageous things. Trump knew how to play the media better than anyone—possibly better than any candidate in history.

In the UK, a total of £31m (U.S.$49m) was spent by all parties in the 2010 general election, making the 2016 U.S. election spending 120 times greater or 23 times as much per capita, something worth considering. We have to wonder why the U.S. spends so much per capita on elections compared to the rest of the world.

The UK isn’t immune to the corrosive influence of political cash. Access to politicians in the UK also comes at a price. Peter Cruddas is an English banker and businessman who has a £10m apartment in Monaco, a £5m house in Hertfordshire, a home in Antibes, a yacht, and a private jet. According to the 2007 Sunday Times Rich List, he was named the richest man in the City of London, with an estimated fortune of £860 million. While he was co-treasurer of the ruling Conservative Party, he allegedly told reporters posing as foreign business investors that donors giving £250,000 a year could lobby the prime minister directly and have their views “fed in” to the government. When the story came out, Cruddas resigned his position.214

If you have enough wealth, you can buy political influence, effectively buying politicians. Yet most of the people still believe, most of the time, that democracy represents them. They think this for two reasons—it is convenient, as it doesn’t require them to try to change anything (System 1); and because they are told to believe it, repeatedly, by the political parties and the corporate media.

If the people are going to take control of the democratic process, it needs significant reform. Voting for the “lesser of two evils,” as many people justify their vote for one of the major parties, is never going to result in genuine reform.

My friend Tony Kynaston suggests we should start a new global political party—the “Don’t Vote for Me” party. It would purely exist to provide an alternative to the mainstream parties and to send a message. Candidates who get elected would do the bare minimum possible to retain their seat—they wouldn’t vote on bills, wouldn’t accept bribes or donations, would sit for a volunteer lie-detector test every six months, and would act as the eyes and ears of the population, agreeing to provide regular and honest feedback about what’s happening in the halls of power.

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Wall Street—Which way shall we throw the 1912 election, old pal?

Big Banker—As we are “non-partisan reformers” we must elect the candidates of either party who secretly bind themselves to support the private central bank bill, oppose government money and favor corporation currency.

Uncle Sam (to himself)—Why don’t them goldarn fool progressives all get hold of the same end of that rope, or flock by themselves and form the National Progressive Party?

Currently, the only other solution I can see to break the back of the system is to vote against the major parties, sending a broad message that we aren’t going to take it anymore. I tend to vote for independents or minor parties, even though I know they don’t stand a chance in hell of getting into power. If enough of us vote against the major parties, eventually we will send a message—it’s time for a change.

In political systems as we have in Australia, this tactic has merit. In the 2010 federal elections, neither of the major parties garnered enough votes to form a government. They were forced to form alliances with minor parties and independents who, in turn, were able to negotiate changes to their policies. Unfortunately, this didn’t end well—the party that ended up winning government, the Australian Labor Party, lead at the time by Julia Gillard, was mercilessly attacked by the Murdoch press for trying to introduce a carbon tax—one of the policies they were forced to adopt by the alliance they formed to win government.

In the United States, some people worry that voting for minor parties plays into the hands of the majors. Some claim that Trump was elected, at least in part, because too many people didn’t vote for Clinton. But of course, that’s precisely what the major parties want you to feel—that you have to vote for one or the other major party.

However, what would happen if enough people continually voted away from the major parties at each election? Would this eventually engineer a change to the political landscape?

Another thing we need for genuine political reform is a new media, free of corporate influence. When people are told how to think and how to vote by a handful of corporate-owned media entities, it is nearly impossible for them to think outside the box. When the media belongs to a cozy coalition with corporations and governments, they will continue to fill the minds of the public with propaganda designed to endorse the status quo. And as it’s highly unlikely that the corporate media is going to change their tune suddenly, we desperately need a new media, by the people and for the people, to help people to think about the issues in a new light.

Fortunately, in the twenty-first century, we have the tools to make the new media a reality. There was a time in the early 2000s when it seemed like that new media might have a chance. People were blogging, podcasting, tweeting, and crafting a new dialogue as a result. Unfortunately, the corporate dollars soon started flowing in, and these new forms of media were consumed and co-opted to fit the objectives of the wealthy elite.

Here’s how it usually works:

As soon as an independent blog or podcast gets enough of an audience to become influential, they are acquired by a big corporation. The Huffington Post is an excellent example. It started as an alternative media source, inviting writers from across the spectrum to provide thoughtful analysis about current issues. However, when it was acquired by AOL (who also purchased Weblogs, Inc. from Jason Calacanis) in 2011 for U.S.$315 million, its content started to change. Today its front page is as likely to have stories about celebrity gossip and breast implants as it is genuine political coverage. In other words, it has become another mainstream corporate media entity. AOL, like any major corporation, was owned by a significant group of wealthy and influential organizations whose officers sat on the board and governed how it was run. Board members of AOL included Fredric Reynolds, formerly of CBS, Hugh Johnston formerly of PepsiCo, and Eve Burton, previously of The Hearst Corporation. You know where their bread is buttered. Today AOL is part of Verizon.

Unfortunately, this kind of tale is all too common.

When my media company, The Podcast Network215, was still in its infancy, I briefly entertained offers from MSN and News Corporation, who both offered to take a majority stake in the business. I feared that if I accepted the offers, I would end up being gradually forced out of the company, and it would become another mainstream content company—or shut down. Of course, I would have profited from it, and therein lies the rub: if you don’t dance with the devil, you can’t afford the running costs of a significant media business. And where else will this money come from, if not from the wealthy elite? It’s a conundrum that any media entrepreneur has to face. You either sell out or float your business on the stock exchange—where it will also become the plaything of investors whose agenda is likely not to be friendly to anyone trying to change the system.

We desperately need a new funding model for media companies, one that breaks the control of the wealthy elite. Is crowdfunding (e.g., Kickstarter) the way to go? Does this model provide an alternative to building the media companies of the twenty-first century? There are some early signs that this may be the case—at least on a small scale.

These days on The Podcast Network, most of our shows are paid for by listener subscriptions. While that was a risky proposition when I started testing it in 2014, by 2019 it has become more common to find podcasters asking their listeners for a paid subscription, often using services like Patreon to manage the funds.

And in 2017–18, I was able to raise enough funds from my podcast audience (and Tony Kynaston, who I first met after he became a listener) on Kickstarter to help finance my first history documentary, Marketing the Messiah.216

A group of very lovely people supported this book itself in a crowdfunding campaign on publishizer.com.

THE BEWILDERED HERD

One of the main ways the elite fight the war on our minds is by owning or influencing the corporate media. They battle it out, with slightly different agendas, to get the public to do and think how they want them to.

In his 1922 book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann, the American journalist who popularized the terms “Cold War” and “stereotype,” referred to the public as “the bewildered herd.”

He went on to say:

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough.

And so the elite, the psychopaths, invest enormous time, funds, and energy to “manufacture the consent” of the public.

Colossal advertising budgets also give organizations the ability to determine, to a large extent, which media companies survive and which do not. When publishers, television and radio stations, blogs and podcasts rely on advertising to pay the bills, they become very amenable to the demands of the advertisers. As they say, the golden rule is that he who has the gold makes the rules.

When Mother Jones magazine launched in 1976, they were approached by cigarette companies offering them a steady stream of advertising revenue. Despite ethical concerns, the Mother Jones board decided to accept the advertising, believing they could successfully uphold their editorial integrity.

Their resolve was put to the test a few years later when, in 1979, the magazine published an article called “Why Dick Can’t Stop Smoking,” which described nicotine as addictive and asserted the tobacco industry used political donations to influence Congress. As punishment for daring to run a story that ran counter the interests of their advertisers, Philip Morris, Brown & Williamson, and other cigarette companies not only pulled their advertising from that particular issue of the magazine, they pulled their entire multi-year advertising commitment to the publication.217

Now, you might think, “Well, fair enough, why would Philip Morris pay money to support a publisher that is damaging their business?” And, of course, you’re right. They wouldn’t. But that’s the heart of the issue.

The general public relies on the media to tell us what’s going on in society. Publishers rely on advertising, and advertisers don’t want them publishing information that, although it might be in the interests of their readers, runs counter to the interests of the advertiser. In this way, the advertisers try to influence public discourse—which is fine. Advertisers have a right to do that. The thing we need to watch out for is that corporations don’t use their power to influence the direction of so much of our media that we can no longer find an unbiased or even just both sides of a story.

Publishers, on the other hand, love to run controversial stories, because they boost audience numbers, which drives up revenue.

As the saying goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

When I’m researching an issue for one of my podcasts, I find it often takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to find an alternative version of events than the one that is being pushed by the mainstream media. Take the Trump–Russia collusion story that dominated so much of American media after the 2016 election. It was nearly impossible to find a balanced version of that story in the press. Many articles (and therefore many Americans) assumed that hard evidence of collusion would appear in the Mueller Report. When Mueller declared he didn’t find enough evidence of a conspiracy for an indictment, people were shocked and stunned. Had they been led astray for two years by the media? If so, who was responsible?

Was it the Democrats trying to deflect attention from their failure to stop the Russians from interfering in the 2016 election? Was it the DNC trying to divert attention from how they screwed over Bernie Sanders during the primaries and then lost the election? Was it the media just profiting from the chaos? Was it Wall Street who continued to bleed America dry and run their foreign wars while everyone was distracted by a big, sweaty nothingburger? Was it a little of all of those things? I don’t know the answer—but I think those are the right questions to be asking about now because that is what is destroying America’s democracy. Not the Russians. Not Trump. It’s the forces that allowed Trump to get elected in the first place. Trump is just a symptom of the underlying problems.

I’LL SEE YOU IN COURT

Using expensive lawsuits is another classic tactic organizations use to influence the media. While there is nothing wrong with trying to use the legal system to protect your organization from libel and slander, that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about using the cost of defending against litigation to try to dissuade the media from publishing reasonable stories about an organization’s activities.

The Church of Scientology, for example, which makes millions of dollars from its tax-exempt status, has a long track record of using its considerable wealth to bury the media under thousands of lawsuits if they try to print stories that criticize the church, its current leader, David Miscavige, or its celebrity golden boy, Tom Cruise. Way back in 1991, Time Magazine estimated that the church was spending an average of $20 million a year on legal actions.218 That figure is probably much higher today.

If you’re a publisher and you don’t want to spend years and millions defending yourself against Scientology lawsuits, you might decide not to write negative stories about them—which, of course, is just what they want.

Perhaps the Scientologists learned how to do it from observing the tobacco industry.

Back in 1976, British filmmaker Martin Smith produced a documentary, Death in the West,219 about six American cowboys who were dying of lung cancer. The film also featured old Marlboro commercials, interviews with Philip Morris executives, and physicians who provided testimony that cigarettes caused the cowboys’ cancer.

After the film aired on British TV, Philip Morris sued Thames Television and obtained a court order preventing the movie from being shown again until their case had been resolved. Their primary objective seems to have been to prevent the film from being shown in the U.S., at the time their leading market, and they knew that 60 Minutes was negotiating with Thames Television to buy it. Philip Morris agreed to settle the case out of court if Thames agreed to destroy all copies of the film. Although Thames believed they had a reasonable chance of winning the suit, they didn’t think they could recoup the cost of the legal defense with future sales of the film, so they agreed to the terms.220

Anyone who tries to fight the power of a corporation will find that they have nearly unlimited budgets for spending on lawyers and law firms to threaten and harass smaller companies, not-for-profit organizations, and individuals with legal action. They can tie up these more modest, less-funded groups in court for years, eroding their ability to promote their agendas. They can also finance private detectives to dig up dirt on people and politicians they want to threaten with blackmail, like disgraced Hollywood film mogul Harvey Weinstein who hired Israeli firm Black Cube to run an “army of spies” to subvert and intimidate his accusers.221

Donald Trump is another infamous user of litigation to silence his critics and crush his enemies, a tactic he learned from Roy Cohn, the notorious lawyer who made his name chasing alleged communists during the McCarthy hearings. Before becoming president, Trump had been a plaintiff in over 1900 lawsuits. Some of those he used “to distance himself from failures and to place responsibility on others.”222 And he has continued to sue people since becoming president, including porn stars, even after his “long-time personal attorney and ‘fixer,’ the real-estate and taxi-medallion entrepreneur Michael Cohen, received a three-year sentence for his guilty pleas related to tax evasion, bank fraud, lying to Congress, and campaign-finance violations.”223

In 1990, McDonald’s Corporation brought a libel case against environmental activists associated with London Greenpeace who had been distributing fact sheets that were critical of the fast-food company. Two of the activists, Helen Steel and David Morris, decided to fight the case. It’s known as the McLibel case (technically called McDonald’s Corporation v. Steel & Morris).224 The trial lasted nearly ten years, which made it the longest-running case in English history. McDonald’s spent several million pounds on the matter—Steel & Morris spent £30,000. The case was so embarrassing to McDonald’s that in 1995, they offered, during a private meeting with the defendants, to drop the case if Steel & Morris agreed to stop criticizing McDonald’s in public and kept their criticisms to private conversations with friends. Steel & Morris countered that they would agree to the terms if McDonald’s ceased advertising its products and instead only recommended the restaurant privately to friends.

Although a British judge found in favor of McDonald’s, he also ruled that many of the outrageous allegations in the pamphlet were mainly true. Steel & Morris took their case to the European Court of Human Rights that found the original case had breached Article 6 (right to a fair trial) and Article 10 (right to freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights and ordered that the UK government pay Steel and Morris £57,000 in compensation.

Using litigation to block libel and slander is fine. But when organizations or individuals use it to crush any criticism, it’s evidence of a psychopath or psychopathic culture.

MEET ME IN THE LOBBY

Another standard tactic organizations use is the “third-party technique.” This is where they use seemingly independent third parties to influence the media, the public, and politicians. Ready-made “experts” on contentious issues, secretly funded and unleashed by industry front organizations and lobby groups, appear in the media and meetings with politicians, well-armed with biased narratives. These experts are useful in influencing the way stories get covered in the media, and therefore the public perception of the issues, as well as how legislation is voted on by politicians.

A front group, according to SourceWatch.org, is “an organization that purports to represent one agenda while in reality it serves some other interest whose sponsorship is hidden or rarely mentioned—typically, a corporate or government sponsor.”

Front groups work to saturate the media with the views of their clients, intending to influence the public and how they vote—pushing them toward the politicians that the lobbyists have also engaged in writing the legislation favorable to the client. Sometimes front groups take the form of think tanks, which operate to engage with national media to develop stories that influence public opinion and political decisions.

For example, it’s understood that in the last decade, Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE have spent vast sums of money influencing American think tanks in Washington—especially those that provide opinions regarding American’s foreign policy in the Middle East.225 The way this kind of influence works is subtle. The country offers to donate funds to support a think tank—nothing wrong with that on the surface. Middle Eastern countries want American politicians and business leaders to have a better understanding of their culture and history, so they provide funds to enable that kind of research and analysis. However, the hidden, often unspoken, contract is that the think tank receiving the funding will avoid criticizing the provider of the funds. So if, for example, a think tank is getting funds from the Saudis, they might avoid talking about the Saudi history of human rights abuses.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2013 more than 12,000 registered lobbyists spent over three billion dollars attempting to influence the policies of the U.S. federal government, and similar efforts have been documented in the states, where both the amount and importance of lobbying has increased sharply since the late 1980s.226

How many of those conversations make it into public awareness? A tiny percentage. Why don’t they get more media coverage? We might assume because (a) people don’t care enough and it doesn’t sell papers (or online clicks), and (b) it’s not in the interests of the media elite to bring greater awareness to the lobbying process, as they actively engage their own lobbyists.

If the public hears anything at all about the lobbying process, we are usually given a heavily edited and sanitized version of events, massaged into shape by public relations professionals for general consumption and propagated by the corporate-owned media who are part of the game.

“This is about giant corporations who figured out that by spending, hey, a few tens of millions of dollars, if they can influence outcomes here in Washington, they can make billions of dollars,” according to Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat, of Massachusetts.227

In 2018, total lobbying spending in the United States rose to $3.46 billion—an increase of one hundred percent over twenty years.228

Depending on which source you believe, somewhere between 12,000 and 100,000 lobbyists are working in Washington, DC.229 The primary objective of these lobbyists? “To protect the company against changes in government policy.”230

A study found that between 2007 and 2012, 200 of America’s most politically active corporations spent a combined $5.8 billion on federal lobbying and campaign contributions. Those years were examined because they fell three years before and three years after the infamous “Citizens United” decision in the U.S. Supreme Court (which removed restrictions on “independent” political spending by corporations and unions).231

But the $5.8 billion these 200 corporations spent on lobbying and campaign donations is insignificant compared to what they got back in return: $4.4 trillion (yes, that’s trillion with a T) in federal business and support.232 That’s a 760:1 return on investment. According to the report, “the $4.4 trillion total represents two-thirds of the $6.5 trillion that individual taxpayers paid into the federal treasury” over that time. That’s a pretty sweet business model.

In their book about front groups, Merchants of Doubt, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway explained how a small group of scientists took money from various organizations for over forty years to write articles that mislead the public about the scientific data on subjects including the ozone hole, climate change, and cigarettes:

In case after case, Fred Singer, Fred Seitz, and a handful of other scientists joined forces with think tanks and private corporations to challenge scientific evidence on a host of contemporary issues. In the early years, much of the money for this effort came from the tobacco industry; in later years, it came from foundations, think tanks, and the fossil fuel industry.233

One of the documents Oreskes & Conway uncovered was Bad Science: A Resource Book. They describe it as “a how-to handbook for fact fighters, providing example after example of successful strategies for undermining science, and a list of experts with scientific credentials available to comment on any issue about which a think tank or corporation needed a negative sound bite.”234

That’s what front groups do best. They sufficiently sow the seeds of doubt about a particular issue, so the corporations can avoid being forced to change their behavior as long as possible.

According to SourceWatch.org:

[The tobacco industry is] notorious for using front groups to create confusion about the health risks associated with smoking, but other industries use similar tactics as well. The pharmaceutical and healthcare industries use front groups disguised as “patient’s rights” advocates to market their products and to lobby against government policies that might affect their profits. Food companies, corporate polluters, politicians—anyone who has a message that they are trying to sell to a skeptical audience is tempted to set up a front group to deliver messages that they know the public will reject if the identity of the sponsor is known.

In Britain, one of the most notorious tobacco front groups was ARISE (Associates for Research into the Science of Enjoyment). It claimed to be an “apolitical affiliation of independent scientists and academics” who researched how people enjoyed terrific things like chocolate, tea, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco—but was actually run by the PR agency Fishburn Hedges and funded mostly by tobacco companies. Between September 1993 and March 1994, the group generated 195 newspaper articles and radio and television interviews in places such as the Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune, the Independent, the Evening Standard, El País, La Repubblica, Rai, and the BBC. Professor David Warburton of the University of Reading, who claimed to run the group, was head of psychopharmacology at the University of Reading and wrote and published several articles, which questioned findings regarding the addictive qualities of nicotine. The University of Reading also received indirect funding, more than $500,000, from the tobacco companies via ARISE, which should give you an idea of how deep the rabbit hole goes. Front groups, run by PR firms, co-opting corruptible scientists and the universities they work for, to spread spin about products that are banned from advertising via cooperative media companies.235

So, whenever you read or see an opinion by an “expert,” it’s always worth suspending your belief in what they are saying until you know more about the interests that expert represents.

The use of front groups might have reached its apex in 2009 with the rise of the American “Tea Party” movement. The Tea Party first rose to prominence when its members started protesting at Congressional “town hall” meetings to discuss healthcare reform. Although the media portrayed the Tea Party as a grassroots movement, it appears to have actually been a front-group funded and coordinated by several wealthy individuals, in particular oil magnate brothers David and Charles Koch, via their other front groups Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, to fight against taxes on carbon use and the activation of a cap and trade program.236

David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, called the Tea Party “a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”

Is this really different from the established political parties? Don’t the Republicans and the Democrats also accept funds from corporate donors? Yes, of course, they do—and it’s a shame the media doesn’t pay more attention to those donations and what the quid pro quo is.

One difference is that the corporations involved in funding the mainstream parties don’t often feel the need to hide behind a front group.

Front groups are incredibly useful when it comes to helping media companies present a “false balance.” This is what it’s called when the media presents an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence actually supports. A classic example of false balance is the media’s reporting on science issues, including the topics of human-made versus natural climate change.

Although the vast majority of climate scientists attribute global warming to the effects of human industry, you can always find a tiny number of scientists who will take a contrary position. By giving equivalent television time and column inches to scientists on both sides, the media makes it seem like there is a substantial deviation within the scientific community, when in fact there is an overwhelming consensus amongst climate scientists that humans are causing global warming.

A false balance is also often evident in the way Western media covers international conflicts. For example, after the death of Fidel Castro in 2016, the New York Times published a long and extremely biased account of his life and the Cuban revolution,237 which I dissected at length on my Cold War podcast.238 As I pointed out in those episodes, one of the other ways the media provides a false balance is via the sin of omission—leaving out pertinent information, which is necessary when developing a balanced view of a subject. In the case of the Castro obituary, the NYT coverage omitted relevant facts regarding the U.S.’ financial and military support of Cuba’s pre-revolutionary dictatorship, the amount of Cuban industry that was controlled by U.S. corporate interests before the revolution, as well as the valid reasons for a lot of the revolutionary government’s actions in the subsequent decades.

As American Cold War journalist I.F. Stone wrote in 1952:

Emphasis, omission, and distortion rather than outright lying are the tools of the war propagandists…239

I’d argue that the use of front groups in American politics ramped up when Ronald Reagan was elected president. It’s hard to think of a better scenario for corporations than an aging, pliant, charismatic actor with a long history of being a corporate shill becoming a president who is willing to say whatever is written for him.240

In 1954, Reagan began hosting the General Electric Theater on television.241

GE’s public relations department developed the concept. Condensed versions of plays and books would be acted out by leading talent, with Ronnie talking about excellent GE products during commercial breaks. By the time GE eventually fired him in 1962 for complaining about one of their largest customers (Tennessee Valley Authority) as an example of the evils of “big government,” he had become both famous and wealthy, due to his part ownership of the series. He had also transitioned from being a Democrat and a self-described “New Dealer to the core” to a political conservative, calling his years with GE his “post-graduate education in political science.”242

Before his GE years, Reagan had another part-time career—snitching suspected communists inside Hollywood to the FBI as early as 1946, often with very little evidence. Reagan would give the FBI names of actors, directors, and writers that he thought might be a bit too red. During his tenure as president of the Screen Actors Guild in the ’40s and ’50s, he made personnel files on SAG members available to the FBI. In return, the FBI, with the approval of director J. Edgar Hoover, worked on his behalf, investigating his estranged daughter’s life and marriage, with agents secretly gathering information about her and passing it on to her father.

Just before Reagan’s campaign to become governor of California, Hoover again personally intervened to prevent his agents from interviewing Reagan about his adopted son’s involvement with the son of Mafia boss, Joseph Bonanno, aka Joey Bananas,243 to spare him embarrassment. It pays to have friends in high places, especially for someone with presidential ambitions.

Knowledge of Reagan’s involvement with the FBI was kept a secret from the public until finally revealed via a Freedom of Information request in 2012.

What better candidate for a puppet president than someone who became wealthy as the official spokesman for America’s largest corporation and worked part-time as an FBI snitch?

FUD (FEAR, UNCERTAINTY, DOUBT)

Front groups have played an enormous role in media coverage of climate change. For many years now, much of the media coverage has continued to suggest that there is still a high degree of doubt about the cause of climate change, even though the vast majority of climate scientists (over 97 percent) agree that humans cause it.

One 2004 media study, which examined 636 articles from four top U.S. newspapers between 1988 and 2002, found that most reports gave as much time to the small group of climate change doubters as they did to the scientific consensus.

A 2013 study of major Australian newspapers by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at the University of Technology in Sydney found that one-third of articles in 2011 and 2012 did not accept the consensus of climate scientists. The study found that Australia’s two most prominent newspapers by circulation, the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun (both, unsurprisingly, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation), published articles that were skeptical about anthropogenic climate change more than 60 percent of the time.

Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist, wrote a memo in 2003 that contained the following advice for Republicans when discussing global warming:

You need to be even more active in recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view, and much more active in making them part of your message. People are willing to trust scientists, engineers, and other leading research professionals, and less willing to trust politicians. If you wish to challenge the prevailing wisdom about global warming, it is more effective to have professionals making the case than politicians.244

The Luntz report also had some advice on terminology:

It’s time for us to start talking about “climate change” instead of global warming and “conservation” instead of preservation. “Climate change” is less frightening than “global warming.” As one focus group participant noted, climate change “sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.” While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.245

It’s getting increasingly difficult these days to read, watch, or listen to the news and know whether or not the “expert” you are listening to is a member of a front group. It’s a pretty safe bet that, more often than not, they are.

The Energy and Policy Institute (EPI) in the USA released a report that documents “how and where fossil fuel companies and front groups have attacked renewable energy standards and net metering policies throughout the country in 2013 and 2014.” According to the report:

Fossil fuel-funded front groups operate in multiple areas to influence the policy-making process in their attempts to eliminate clean energy policies. First, groups like the Beacon Hill Institute provide flawed reports or analysis claiming clean energy policies have negative impacts. Next, allied front groups or “think tanks” use the flawed data in testimony, opinion columns, and in the media. Then, front groups, like Americans for Prosperity, spread disinformation through their grassroots networks, in postcards mailed to the public, and in television ads attacking the clean energy policy. Finally, lobbyists from front groups, utilities, and other fossil fuel companies use their influence from campaign contributions and meetings with decision makers to push for anti-clean energy efforts.246

The general public usually won’t take the time or energy required to fact-check the statements they hear in the media. Neither do many of us have the skills to analyze for ourselves the accuracy of such reports. Most of us are busy working to keep the roof over our heads and food in our kids’ mouths. When you keep the population so busy they don’t have time to think, it’s so much easier to pull the wool over their eyes—especially if you have unlimited funds to saturate the media with your version of the truth.

According to The Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch, the Kochs and other corporations, such as corporate and trade group funders as ExxonMobil, Chevron, the American Petroleum Institute, Syngenta, Bayer CropScience, CropLife America, Procter & Gamble, the Personal Care Products Council, Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper/Snapple, and McDonald’s, have bankrolled the American Council on Science and Health that “poses as an independent science-based organization devoted to outing ‘junk science,’ but consumer advocates have called it ‘a consumer front organization for its business backers’ that ‘glove[s] the hand that feeds it.’247

As just one example of ACSH’s work, PR Watch claims they published reports calling fracking “a safe and efficient path to energy independence,” despite the hazardous chemical cocktail used in hydraulic fracturing, which spoils millions of gallons of fresh drinking water each year.

And front groups, of course, are a global tactic.

Australia’s right-wing front groups have also been busy in recent years creating a “disturbance in the Force” over subjects from climate change to the plain packaging of tobacco.

One of the most notorious front groups is the benign-sounding Institute of Public Affairs (IPA)—which is, in fact, a right-wing, corporate-funded think tank based in Melbourne. It was established in 1943 by G. J. Coles, founder of one of Australia’s largest retailing behemoths, during an era in Australia when the conservative movement was struggling. In 1944, the IPA participated in the formation of the Liberal Party (despite the progressive-sounding name, the Liberal Party is Australia’s conservative party, akin to the Republicans in the U.S. or the Tories in the UK). Today it is one of the two major political parties in Australia and the current government.

The IPA key policy positions include: advocacy for privatization and deregulation; attacks on the positions of unions and nongovernment organizations; support of assimilationist indigenous policy; and refutation of the science involved with environmental issues, such as climate change.248

According to John Roskam, executive director of IPA, “of all the serious (climate) skeptics in Australia, we have helped and supported just about all of them in their work one way or another.”249 One of Roskam’s previous jobs was—wait for it—manager of government and corporate affairs for mining giant Rio Tinto Group. Who would have thought that the leader of a significant climate change–denialist group used to hold an executive role at a mining company? I am shocked, I tell you, shocked!

The IPA made headlines in early 2012 for sending out hundreds of free copies of a new book on climate change by one of their pet denialists to targeted schools around the country. Roskam claimed that “school kids are being indoctrinated by teachers every day. There should be two sides to the story, and the science is far from settled.”250

If 97 percent of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming,251 I wonder what level of consensus he would need? 98 percent? 99 percent? Just give us a number, John.

Finding one or two fringe scientists willing to accept money to support ideas that deny the current state of scientific consensus, but which suit the destructive policies of a few significant corporations, is turning into a new corporate blood sport. Just like a mafia don trying to fix the next boxing fight, if your bribery fund is significant enough, and you look long enough, you’ll always be able to find a scientist who is in a tight spot, whose career isn’t going too well, and who is willing to take a fall in the third round if you make some of his problems go away in return for a one-way ticket to Palookaville. “I coulda been a contender!”

It’s like trying to find a general in a Latin American country who has been passed over for a promotion and wants a shot at being president. There’s always at least one.

We wonder if Roskam would also like schools to teach that the world rests on the back of a giant turtle and that it’s turtles all the way down? Surely, he can find someone out there to endorse that view if paid enough money.

As Carl Sagan once said:

They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.

One thing these front groups specialize in is the deterioration of the public understanding of science and the scientific process. They create FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt, a tactic I learned about in my Microsoft days) about science, which is then merrily distributed by the corporate media as if it is valid. The consequence is that we have a population of people who say inane things such as “science doesn’t know anything” or “science has made mistakes before,” instead of appreciating that the scientific process involves the finest minds in a field performing the best experiments possible with the most accurate instruments available and then debating the results until they come to a consensus on the best interpretation. Even when they come to this consensus, they leave the subject open to future improvements in experimental methodology and tools, which allows current scientific opinion on subjects to change over time.

The list of fringe science groups is growing. They typically have very sensible-sounding names, like the “Discovery Institute” (funded by evangelical Christian groups to promote the idea of intelligent design), the “Global Energy Balance Network” (funded by Coca-Cola to promote the notion that obesity is due to lifestyle alone and not excessive calorie consumption) and the “Association of American Physicians and Surgeons” (which promotes AIDS denialism and links between abortion and breast cancer).

Front groups work hard behind the scenes to use money from mining companies to individuals and organizations who are willing to challenge scientific consensus—for a buck. Just one such mining company, Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest private-sector publicly traded coal company, “has funded at least two dozen groups that cast doubt on manmade climate change and oppose environment regulations.”252

The U.S.-based Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI), where Lord Christopher Monckton, the infamous climate change denialist, is the chief policy advisor, emerged from another think tank, the Center for Science and Public Policy (CSPP), which was launched with a grant from oil giant Exxon.253

The corporate media happily plays their role by allowing the denialists equal or better airtime or column inches in the name of “media balance,” creating debate and confusion where none is deserved. This, of course, creates ferocious public debates that help drive the sale of papers or get people to watch television shows. Higher sales and ratings help sell more advertising. And so the world turns.

These are just a few examples to remind you that you absolutely cannot take for granted anything you read, watch, or listen to. They are just some of the ways that the elite use their money and influence to protect their future from progress—and keep themselves in power.

With psychopaths in control of front organizations and lobby groups, we can never be sure of what is real and what is not.

LAWS AND SAUSAGES

According to Eric Schmidt, the former executive chairman of Google, “The average American doesn’t realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists. It’s shocking how the system actually works.”254

While it’s reasonable that corporate lobbyists should have as much of a say about the shaping of new legislation as anyone else in a democracy, it appears that they often have significantly more influence than we might imagine. In some cases, the actual laws that are eventually passed end up with significant sections that are word-for-word written by lobbyists. A case in point is a 2013 amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act, designed originally to protect the U.S. from another Wall Street collapse like they had in 2008.

Out of a total of eighty-five lines in the amendment, seventy of them were written by lobbyists representing Citigroup.

The amendment, which of course reduced the level of protection the original Act provided, was passed in the House by a vast majority of both Republicans and Democrats—even though it was opposed by the Obama administration and was unlikely to pass the Senate (who, in fact, referred the bill to the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, where it died). When asked why the House Democrats would pass it under these circumstances, people close to the situation gave this answer: “Republicans have enough votes to pass it themselves, so vulnerable House Democrats might as well join them, and collect industry money for their campaigns.”255

Some people suggest that lobbyist input into legislation isn’t always a terrible thing. They help out, like harmless little Oompa Loompas, when the budgets of legislators have been cut because people make a big fuss out of “big government.”256

But I’d suggest that’s partly why you hear a lot of fuss about government budgets in the first place. The idea is to keep governments broke and underfunded. Why?

The smaller the budgets government departments have, the fewer the resources they can hire, the lower the salaries they can pay, which makes them less competitive with significant corporations in hiring smart young grads or experienced executives. The result is that government departments have less know-how or the resources to stop the corporate lobbyists from pushing through their preferred legislation.

It also means governments will have another excuse to privatize important public assets that provide essential services, creating profits dispersed as bonuses to business leaders and dividends to shareholders, instead of those profits being spent on additional public services.

WAR IS A RACKET

Lobbyists and front groups are also used to keep countries at war. War is not only big business; it’s also one of the easiest ways for a company to fill its coffers.

As Major General Smedley Butler, one of the most decorated U.S. Marines in history, wrote in his classic book, War Is a Racket:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

War is a sure-fire way to quickly siphon money out of the public treasury, as I’ve explained in detail on the economics episodes of the Cold War podcast.257 This is a lesson American business leaders learned during World War II when they discovered that war was an excellent way to pull the country out of continual economic depressions.

From the late decades of the nineteenth century, starting with the “Panic of 1873,” which was the original “Great Depression,” the U.S. economy suffered from severe and regular recessions, leading up to the more famous depression of the 1930s.258

While there were many factors involved, a consensus emerged among the American political and business elite that the solution was to expand the export of American manufactured products to foreign markets. The country’s manufacturers and farmers were getting too good at their jobs—they were overproducing for domestic consumption and needed to find new sources of revenue. In other words, they were making too much stuff, more than they could sell at home, so they needed to either make less, which means downsizing (not great for the economy) or find new markets—overseas markets. The problem with this solution was that the foreign markets in the early twentieth century were locked up by various colonial powers, trading blocs, groups of countries within a geographical region that protected themselves from imports from non-members. The British Empire’s trade bloc contained roughly 25 percent of the world’s population. The French had their own, while Germany and Japan sought to build their own, first through trade, then through conquest (as the British, French, and Americans had done before them). The desire of the UK and the U.S. to prevent Germany and Japan from building their economies through territorial acquisition lead to World War II.

Here’s a quote from Leslie M. Shaw, secretary of the United States Treasury under President Theodore Roosevelt, from his lecture to the students and faculty of Chicago University, March 1, 1907:

The time is coming when the manufactories will outgrow the country, and men by the hundreds of thousands will be turned out of the factory. The factories are multiplying faster than our trade, and we will shortly have a surplus, with no one abroad to buy and no one at home to absorb because the laborer has not been paid enough to buy back what he has created. The last century was the worst in the world’s history for wars. I look to see this century bring out the greatest conflict ever waged in the world. It will be a war for markets and all the nations of the world will be in the fight as they are all after the same markets to dispose of the surplus of their factories.259

A “war for markets” was one of the underlying causes of both World War I and II. This wasn’t Marx or Lenin speaking. It was the secretary of the United States Treasury.

Dean Acheson, secretary of state under Truman, and one of the architects of the Marshall Plan and the Cold War, expressed something similar in 1944:

It seems clear that we are in for a very bad time, so far as the economic and social position of the country is concerned. We cannot go through another ten years like the ten years at the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties, without having the most far-reaching consequences upon our economic and social system. When we look at that problem, we may say it is a problem of markets. You don’t have a problem of production. The United States has unlimited creative energy. The important thing is markets. We have got to see that what the country produces is used and is sold under financial arrangements which make its production possible. You must look to foreign markets.260

So, selling into international markets was seen as one solution to prevent future recessions. Another was to get the government to spend money from its treasury to revitalize the economy.

The famous British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote a letter to FDR in 1933, amid the Great Depression, suggesting that the answer to economic stagnation was through government spending. He recommended borrowing money to spend on infrastructure and a public works program and mentioned that spending money on war would lead to intense industrial activity. This was eight years before the U.S. would find a justification to join the most enormous war humanity has ever seen.

And it turned out that Keynes was right—during World War II, U.S. corporate profits rose from $6.4 billion in 1940 to $10.8 billion in 1944. That’s a 70 percent increase in profits in just four years! American men may have been dying on the Western front, but American businesspeople were prospering back home. After WWII, a lot of business and political leaders decided that Keynes was on to something with this war business—the business of war.

Charles E. Wilson, the president of General Motors and executive vice chairman of the War Production Board, delivered a speech to the Army Ordnance Association in January 1944, where he suggested a continuing alliance between business and the military for “a permanent war economy.”

This bastardized version of Keynesianism is known as “military Keynesianism.” Keynes, I should point out, hated this idea.

But here’s why businesses love military Keynesianism—if a government tries to spend money on domestic infrastructure, like schools, hospitals, parks, roads, and so forth, people will want to have a say in how it’s spent. They will want to get involved—and that slows down the transfer of funds into the hands of big business. However, when it comes to military spending, the people don’t get much of a say. The government merely says the magic incantation “Sim Sala Bim, Ala Peanut Butter Sandwiches, national security,” and that’s the end of it, especially if there’s a sense of urgency around the spending, which there always seems to be, whether it’s genuine or manufactured.

“Stalin/Mao/Castro/Khrushchev/Khomeini/Gaddafi/Saddam/bin Laden/ISIS/Kim is going to kill us all! We have to act now!” And so the businesses who win a war-related contract with the Pentagon can just collect their checks without much oversight by the general public or the media. It’s a much easier way to get paid than to have to bother with annoying, old-fashioned things like marketing and selling.

After WWII ended, Truman had cut the military budget to the bone and the easy cash for the military-industrial complex dried up.

Fortunately for them, in 1950, the Korean War conveniently provided the impetus for the U.S. to justify a massive U.S. military buildup. Even before the war broke out, individual members of the government were advocating for the U.S. to remain on a permanent war footing, in the top-secret policy paper by the United States National Security Council, known as NSC-68.

Think about how this war racket works for a second.

A country goes to war.

Who pays for that?

The government.

Where do they get the money?

From the federal treasury.

Where does that money come from?

From taxation and borrowing.

Who pays for that?

The people.

And if money is borrowed?

It also gets paid back from the treasury—which comes from taxation.

For example: total U.S. federal revenues in the fiscal year 2015 were about $3.18 trillion.

These revenues came from three primary sources:

So more than two-thirds of federal revenues come from taxes that individuals pay, directly or indirectly. Today the U.S. military spending is about $600 billion per annum. That’s about 20 percent of revenue. Since 2001, the U.S. has spent about $1.7 trillion on the military.

However—that’s just for direct military budgets. According to an analysis by Boston University, the real sum is a lot higher. If you also factor in things like additional war-related spending, including additions to the Pentagon base budget and Veterans health and medical disability expenses, they alone total just under $1 trillion. Then you have to factor in the cost of Homeland Security, which has been heightened because of the wars. Plus the interest the government takes on from the borrowing to pay for the wars. If you factor in the other indirect costs, the sum is closer to $4.4 trillion.

So where does the money go? One study in 2013 suggested that the Pentagon has dispersed around $385 billion to private companies for work done outside the U.S. since late 2001. By the second Gulf War, contractors represented roughly one half of deployed personnel in Iraq, with the company now known as KBR—we’ll talk more about them in a minute—employing more than 50,000 people.

But wait, there’s more. It’s not just manufacturers of the tools of war or the people who make guns and tanks and bullets or supply mercenaries that benefit from wartime spending. American businesses of all sizes, from Google261 down to removalists (the U.S. Defense Department spends roughly $8 billion annually moving some 500,000 people to new assignments; about $2 billion is spent transporting household goods, and $6 billion is spent on allowances and indirect costs), get a slice of the military pie.

Way back in the mid-1980s, the Pentagon was critiqued for wasteful spending when the news emerged that they paid $640 apiece for fifty-four toilet seats.262 That might sound like a lot of money for a toilet seat (especially in 1980 dollars, even allowing for the fact it was for a custom-built toilet enclosure for the P-3C Orion antisubmarine aircraft) but more recent studies have found the Pentagon’s wasteful spending of late makes the $640 toilet seat seem minuscule. One recent study found Pentagon wastage added up to over $33 billion—such as $150 million spent on private villas for a handful of Pentagon employees in Afghanistan and $2.7 billion spent on space blimps.263

All of those 800 massive U.S. bases in foreign countries have to supply their personnel with food and clothing and computers and cars and pens and Starbucks and Burger King. TomDispatch discovered 1.7 million individual contracts,264 many of those benefiting from what they refer to as “the growing use of uncompetitive contracts and contracts lacking incentives to control costs, outright fraud, and the repeated awarding of non-competitive sweetheart contracts to companies with histories of fraud and abuse,” for services outside the United States since the start of the Afghan war (the fiscal year 2002). Who pays for all of that?

The people. Individual taxpayers.

So war becomes a smooth transfer of wealth out of the public treasury into the hands of private contractors and corporations. If a corporation wants to make money under normal conditions, it needs to work hard to sell its product to a customer. You have to advertise, you have to fight to win contracts with businesses, and you have to deal with constant scrutiny—but if you get a war contract, you don’t have to work so hard. The Pentagon employees aren’t spending their own money, and if there’s the urgency of a war situation, the funds are made available and spent as quickly as possible.

And there is very little oversight on where the money goes.

It’s just a fire hose of easy money that flows out of the public treasury into the coffers of the corporation. And the most significant benefactor of U.S. military budgets in the last decade? KBR—Kellogg Brown & Root—who has received over $44 billion in military contracts.265 That’s a lot of cornflakes! No, wait, wrong Kellogg. They were originally called Brown & Root, better known to critics during the Vietnam War as “Burn & Loot,” and they made a lot of money in the 1930s from government contracts scored for them by their close friend, local Texan congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose political career they helped finance. As LBJ’s career advanced, he helped B&R win government contracts to build airports, pipelines, and military bases, while they, in turn, poured money into his campaign war chest. You might have heard of the company that acquired B&R in 1962—Halliburton. In 1995, Dick Cheney became Halliburton’s president and CEO after helping jumpstart the Pentagon’s ever-greater reliance on private contractors when he was President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of defense.

In 2009, the Pentagon’s top auditor testified that KBR accounted for “the vast majority” of wartime fraud. In 2007, after years of terrible publicity, Halliburton spun KBR off as an independent company and moved its headquarters from Houston to Dubai. The list of controversies surrounding KBR includes allegations of corruption, bribery, negligence, sexual assault, human trafficking, and knowingly exposing their employees to poisonous smoke from “burn pits.”266, 267

None of that has stopped KBR winning ongoing Pentagon contracts though, according to their investor presentations.268

But it’s not just the companies that are running the overseas operations and bases that are benefiting. It’s also, of course, the arms suppliers.

The world spent $1.69 trillion on the military in 2016.269

In 2011, the 100 largest U.S. contractors sold $410 billion in arms and military services to the U.S. military in one year alone. These are companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. They make missiles, artillery, aircraft, and so forth.

Again, it’s easy money that flows from the public treasury into private corporations. It is nothing new to argue that members of the corporate defense industry—famously labeled the military-industrial complex by President Eisenhower—are, in essence, merchants of war.

In his first speech as president in 1953, just after the death of Stalin, Eisenhower said:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

In his last speech as President in 1961, he warned:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Something you might not know—in the original draft of this speech, Eisenhower referred to it as the military-industrial-congressional complex. But the term congressional was dropped at the last minute to appease the then-currently elected officials. This is according to Eisenhower biographer Geoffrey Perret and supported by forty-two-year CIA veteran Melvin Goodman, later a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, who says he heard it from Eisenhower’s brother, Milton.

When Milton asked about the dropped reference to Congress, Eisenhower replied: “It was more than enough to take on the military and private industry. I couldn’t take on the Congress as well.”270

Of course, arms dealers don’t only profit from their own country’s spending. They also sell to other countries.

The U.S. is by far the most significant supplier of arms to the developing world. They sell about 30 percent of the world’s weapons. And the biggest buyers? The Middle East, especially the U.S.’s long-standing partner, Saudi Arabia. From 2010 to 2016, the Obama administration authorized a record $60 billion in U.S. military sales to Saudi Arabia—triple the transactions under the George W. Bush administration. Mind you, this is one of the most brutal and corrupt regimes on the planet. Saudi Arabia is consistently ranked among the “worst of the worst” in Freedom House’s annual survey of political and civil rights.271 And there is growing evidence that the Saudi government was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks.272

And of course, Trump is going to try to beat Obama’s record.273 This is despite the CIA concluding Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman ordered the hacksaw assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The arms trade is pretty brilliant. Here’s how it works. U.S. arms dealers sell to developing countries, particularly those controlled by military or religious dictators. But that means that the U.S.’s military superiority declines. So the U.S. needs to buy more arms for itself! And then, of course, one of these dictators inevitably does something to justify a war with the U.S.

OMG, he’s got a bomb!

How do you know?

We sold it to him!

And the U.S. then needs to supply the dictator’s internal opposition—generously referred to as “rebels” in the Western media, instead of “insurgents,” a term reserved for rebels fighting the dictators that we like or our own occupying armies—with more arms so they can resist him. Finally, if these rebels don’t succeed, the Pentagon sends in the U.S. military with even more weapons. If the U.S. military defeats the dictator’s forces, using the latest American-made weapons versus slightly out-of-date American-made weapons, they will install his opposition (the rebels) into government and make sure they have enough American-made weapons to threaten the people into obedience. And the cycle starts again.

Of course, it isn’t just American arms dealers involved here—Russia is the world’s second-largest arms supplier. But the U.S. is the most significant—by a long shot.274

This is precisely what happened with Iraq. During the Iraq–Iran war in the early ’80s, the Reagan administration supplied Saddam with billions of dollars of credits. Who did Ronnie send to do the deal? Donald Rumsfeld. What did Saddam do with the U.S. credits? He bought weapons from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt. Where did they get them from? The United States. The U.S. was also directly shipping military helicopters and “dual use” hardware to Iraq. That’s hardware that can be used for military and nonmilitary purposes. The U.S. also knew that Iraq was using mustard and sarin gas against the Iranians and the Kurds but turned a blind eye to it. How did they know? They sold it to Iraq.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. This is on the record. In May 1986, the U.S. Department of Commerce licensed seventy biological exports to Iraq, including at least twenty-one batches of lethal strains of anthrax, cyanide, and weapons-grade botulin poison.275

Richard Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State, said: “The U.S.-Iraqi relationship is… important to our long-term political and economic objectives.”276

These objectives, no doubt, include selling more weapons in the Middle East.

And ISIS—where do their weapons come from? While a lot of them are old Soviet weapons left over from the ’80s, they also have a lot of U.S. weapons. The U.S. sells arms to Iraq, Turkey, and Syria, which then end up in the hands of ISIS.277

So remember—war is big business. And it’s easy business. It’s the easiest and fastest way to transfer vast sums of wealth out of the public coffers and into the hands of corporations. And it doesn’t get talked about nearly enough when considering the factors that lead us into war.

Another important consideration: it’s well understood that the U.S. technology industry derives a ton of benefits from military spending.

Here’s how it works. The U.S. uses tax dollars to fund technology research and development (R&D) at places likes DARPA—Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency—which is where guys like Vint Cerf invented the internet.278 And places like MIT were nearly entirely funded by the Pentagon up until the ’70s. Transistors, the cornerstone of the computing industry, were developed at Bell Labs, part of AT&T. AT&T, at the time, had a government-mandated monopoly. So they could afford to create new technology. And of course, a lot of technology R&D done by private industry is funded by the Pentagon with an eye to developing new weapons. I’m sure everyone has seen the terrifying videos of the horse-like robots developed at Boston Dynamics (BD).

Who funded BD?

The Pentagon.

Who pays for that?

The taxpayers.

Anyway, that technological R&D then makes its way into the hands of private companies like IBM and Apple and Microsoft, and so on. And they adapt it and sell it back to the people—the people who funded it in the first place. And, of course, lots of corporations and their executives become very wealthy out of the process of publicly funded research. And you might think, “Well, those corporations pay it back in taxes on their profits”—but we know how that’s working out, don’t we? These companies today use very sophisticated loopholes to offshore their profits in countries like Ireland, where they pay minimal taxes. Not much of it makes its way back to the U.S. This we know, thanks to the Panama Papers.

Government contracts, especially those coming out of the Pentagon, are notoriously poorly managed and easily gamed. There is little bottom-line accountability, and nobody is paying enough attention, especially during times where there is a sense of urgency (like during an invasion of a country in the Middle East). If there is an audit and profligate spending is discovered, there might be a few negative news cycles, maybe even a Senate hearing, but it will all disappear relatively quickly.

How many people remember that time in 2004 when the U.S. sent $12 billion in cash to Iraq, where it promptly disappeared, and there were no records kept of whom it was given to?279

About a year after the U.S. illegally280 invaded Iraq in 2003, some bright sparks in Washington decided it would be a solid idea to ship billions of dollars in cash to the war-torn country, in theory, to help with the reconstruction after the devastation caused by the invasion.

The money was shipped in secret as 281 million notes, weighing 363 tons, flown from the U.S. Federal Reserve in New York to Baghdad once or twice a month on military aircraft.

What happened to it when it arrived in Iraq? Well—that’s the $12 billion question.

The money was to be administered by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), a transitional government set up by the U.S., UK, Australia, and Poland.

The $12 billion came from Iraqi assets seized after the first Gulf War, from the sale of Iraqi oil, and surplus payments from the UN oil-for-food program. It belonged to the people of Iraq and should have been dispersed with some level of accountability. Instead, the CPA, under the leadership of American Paul Bremer, a former managing director at Kissinger and Associates, a worldwide consulting firm founded by Henry Kissinger, put no internal auditing into place, and, as a later report found, allowed nearly $9 billion to disappear, quite possibly as a result of fraud and corruption.281

According to investigations carried out by the U.S. government, it was literally handed out as cash to unknown people, with no invoices or receipts required.

One of the handy things about this money was that as it belonged to Iraq, few people in America cared what was done with it. And, of course, the Iraqis were in no state at the time to worry about it either. They might have been better equipped to play a role in the dispersal of the funds once the Iraqi provisional government took control in July 2004, but Bremer made sure the money had already been spent before that happened. And to make sure nobody on the American side of things could be held responsible for the disappearance of the funds, two days before he left Iraq, Bremer signed “Order 17,” which gave everyone associated with the CPA and the American government immunity. One of his former top aides is quoted as saying that Bremer “wanted to make sure our military, civilians, and contractors were protected from Iraqi law.”282

Invade a country, make $9 billion of their cash disappear, and make sure no one associated with it can be prosecuted later—all in a matter of months and in broad daylight. Forget about Ocean’s Eleven. Surely this is one of the greatest heists in history.

Now we can only imagine who ended up with these missing billions. If you knew a friend of yours had $12 billion in untraceable cash sitting in his office and was handing it out willy nilly, how quickly would you be there with your hand out? At least one of Bremer’s management team doesn’t think it’s a problem where the money went.

Rear Admiral David Oliver, who was the director of management and budget under the CPA, when asked by the BBC where the money went, replied:

“I have no idea—I can’t tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn’t—nor do I actually think it’s important.”

BBC: “Not important?”

Oliver: “No. The coalition—and I think it was between 300 and 600 people, civilians—and you want to bring in 3,000 auditors to make sure money’s being spent?”

BBC: “Yes, but the fact is that billions of dollars have disappeared without a trace.”

Oliver: “Of their money. Billions of dollars of their money, yeah, I understand. I’m saying what difference does it make?”283

Okay, so billions of dollars being squandered is okay when it’s not taxpayer’s money, according to David Oliver. What about when it is the taxpayer’s money?

Someone, somewhere, is benefiting from those government contracts. Cui bono? I’d start by looking at offshore tax havens.

So to summarize, here are some of the ways people profit from war.

  1. By selling weapons, both to their own country and other countries, funded by tax dollars.
  2. By selling other goods required during and after a war, including everything from food and clothing to reconstruction efforts—also funded by tax dollars.
  3. By gaining access to undeveloped markets with new sources of natural resources and cheap labor.
  4. By locking up control of export markets that they can sell their goods and services to.
  5. By using war to get technological research done that then makes its way into the hands of corporations.

I’m not arguing that economics is the only reason we go to war, but it’s a significant factor and one that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. And it’s another way the elite increase their wealth.

I could go on with examples of wasteful military spending, but I’m sure you get the idea. That’s not to say private and public companies don’t also waste money—they absolutely do—but it isn’t taxpayer money that could have been spent on improving healthcare, education, or infrastructure.

What does war have to do with psychopaths?

It’s a quick way to get rich. Who cares if people die as a result?

MONEY CAN’T BUY ME LOVE—BUT IT CAN BUY A GOVERNMENT

We’ve looked at indirect ways the elite manipulate democracy so they can remain in power.

What about direct ways? Can enough money really buy elections?

Though it isn’t always the case, a 2014 study that analyzed 467 congressional races held in the United States in 2012 found that candidates who out-fundraised their opponents were nine times more likely to win elections.284

And politicians obviously know this.

Candidates who upset the people with the money can quickly find themselves coming second-place in the campaign funding stake and consequently out of a job.

This is the basis of the NRA playbook.

The National Rifle Association was founded in 1871 as a recreational group designed to “promote and encourage rifle shooting on a scientific basis.”

Today we associate the NRA with promoting gun rights in the U.S., but that’s a relatively recent development.

After the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, with a rifle purchased by mail-order from an ad in the NRA magazine American Rifleman, NRA Executive Vice-President Franklin Orth supported a ban on mail-order sales, stating, “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”

The culture of the NRA moved to the hard right under new leadership in the early 1980s, in response to the Black Panthers using the Second Amendment to justify an individual’s right to carry a loaded weapon in the 1970s.

In 2016, the NRA reported $433.9 million for total revenue. It spends about $3m per year to influence gun policy. They also spend a good chunk getting politicians who support their position on the Second Amendment elected.

Leading up to the 2016 election, the NRA spent more than $30 million in support of Donald Trump.

Get on their wrong side, however, and they can cause trouble for your election campaign.

Take the story of Debra Maggart, an American politician who served in the Tennessee legislature from 2004 to 2012 with solid conservative credentials—she believes gay couples are unfit to parent and have “numerous emotional dysfunctions and psychological issues.” She also had an A+ rating with the NRA and supported allowing guns in bars. But when she decided not to support a bill that would have allowed guns in cars on properties where the owners did not want guns, the NRA turned against her. They dropped her rating from A+ to a D and aggressively funded her political opponent, a member of the Tea Party. They created a “Defeat Maggart” website and used billboards, robocalls, radio ads, YouTube videos, and twelve full-page newspaper ads to drive her from office.285

Of course, the NRA is just one of the thousands of lobby groups that fund election campaigns and whose backroom dealings with politicians are typically hidden from the public.

In 2007, Australia elected the Australian Labor Party to govern the country, sweeping their then wildly popular leader Kevin Rudd into power. Rudd and his treasurer, Wayne Swan, were determined to make the mining industry, a significant part of the Australian economy and 83 percent owned by foreign interests, pay higher taxes as a result of the “super profits” they were earning from a resources boom, fueled in significant part by exports to China.

The mining industry went on the offensive, spending nearly $22 million in just six weeks on TV ads attacking the new tax and Kevin Rudd.286

The Rudd government was also the victim of a constant stream of negative editorials by Rupert Murdoch‘s newspapers,287 possibly because the government had started providing financial assistance to the commercial free-to-air television networks which potentially harmed the market expansion of pay-TV provider Foxtel (50 percent owned by News Corporation).

Quite quickly, the ALP decided Rudd was a liability to the party’s chances in the upcoming election, and replaced him with a new leader, Julia Gillard, his former deputy, making her Australia’s first female prime minister.

That’s all it takes, then, to change the democratically elected leader of Australia—$22 million in television ads and Rupert Murdoch‘s support. Why bother going to the trouble of having elections in the first place?

Gillard quickly moved to make peace with the mining industry. At her first news conference as prime minister on June 24, 2010, she declared “I am throwing open the government’s door to the mining industry.”

The mining tax survived in a different form, with a different name, but with the guts ripped out of it, which is what happens when mining companies can make and break governments. When it was finally introduced in 2013, instead of delivering $12 billion in revenue in the first two years, it delivered only $126 million in the first six months after its introduction. Think about that for a second—instead of paying $12 billion in new taxes, the mining companies spent a mere $22 million on advertising. Not a terrible return on investment!

Also in mid-2013, due in part to renewed pressure by the Murdoch press, the ALP flip-flopped, replaced Gillard with Rudd, making him prime minister once again. But he quickly lost the 2013 federal election to the Coalition parties lead by Tony Abbott—who had the support of the Murdoch press and who threw the entire mining super profits tax out of the window as soon as he could.

And just in case you still think the news media doesn’t try to influence how people vote, you might be interested to know that according to Rudd’s chief political strategist during the 2013 election, Murdoch‘s senior newspaper editors were instructed that “with Rudd’s revival in the opinion polls, they were to go hard against him and the government.” He argues that the “storm of negative stories emanating from News Corp blew their campaign off course.”288

Furthermore, in 2018, after yet another Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, this time from the other side of the political divide, was also stabbed in the back by his party colleagues and forced to resign while holding office, Kevin Rudd wrote an article pointing the finger at—Rupert Murdoch.289

Speaking of Turnbull, it’s time to talk about his former employer again, Goldman Sachs, the world’s most influential investment bank.

It’s everywhere—including inside other governments besides Australia.

George W. Bush’s last Treasury secretary was the former Goldman CEO, Henry Paulson. In his earlier years, Paulson worked for the administration of Richard Nixon, serving as an assistant to John Ehrlichman, who was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury and served eighteen months in prison for his role in Watergate.

Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary, spent twenty-six years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup. As I’ve already mentioned earlier, Goldman employees were the most significant private group of donors to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. And his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, later the mayor of Chicago, was previously Bill Clinton’s 1992 finance director where “he ran the biggest fundraising machine the Democratic Party had ever seen. While doing that job he was also on the Goldman Sachs payroll.”290

Donald Trump, who continually drew attention to how much money Hillary Clinton had earned in speaking engagements for Goldman, named Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner and senior manager, as his Treasury Secretary. Trump named the president of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn, as his choice for director of the National Economic Council.

Goldman Sachs has been buying influence with the U.S. government since the Great Depression. Sidney Weinberg, who started with Goldman Sachs as a janitor’s assistant, where his responsibilities included brushing the firm’s partners’ hats and wiping the mud from their overshoes, worked his way up to the top job in 1930.

A couple of years later, he raised more money for Franklin Roosevelt’s first presidential campaign than any other individual.

FDR rewarded him by asking him to create the President’s Business Advisory and Planning Council. Even though he was a registered Democrat, Weinberg was happy to play both sides. He supported Eisenhower in his 1952 presidential bid and Johnson’s campaign in 1964. As you might imagine, his influence with these presidents was extraordinary.

Since then, Goldman Sachs employees have gone on to become the minister for finance of Sweden, World Bank president, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, prime minister of Italy, president of the European Commission, governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, governor of the Reserve Bank of South Africa, chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, governor of New Hampshire, chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, chairman of Japan Airlines, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, mayor of Chicago, president of the European Central Bank, secretary of State of Economy and Finance of Spain, governor of the Bank of Greece, governor of the Bank of England, governor of the Bank of Canada—and chief executive officer of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. As I said—they are everywhere.

Meanwhile, Goldman has also been involved in a list of controversies so long that one might suspect they reflect more than momentary lapses of judgment.291

For their key role in causing the 2008 global financial crisis, which played a significant role in the failure of many businesses and declines in consumer wealth estimated in trillions of U.S. dollars, the firm, who according to the SEC deliberately “misled investors,” agreed to pay a $550 million fine, “one of the largest penalties ever paid by a Wall Street firm, to settle charges of securities fraud linked to mortgage investments.”292

But, of course, no one went to jail. Instead, nearly 1000 Goldman bankers and traders were paid million-dollar bonuses,293 and Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, instead of going to jail, took home $42.9 million in salary and bonuses in 2008.294

Too big to fail, indeed.

While on the campaign trail in 2016, Trump said: “Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people.”

But according to USA Today, as of June 2017, six months later, “More than 100 former federal lobbyists have found jobs in the Trump administration” and “roughly two-thirds of them—sixty-nine—work in the agencies they have lobbied at some point in their careers,” according to research by American Bridge 21st Century. Fifteen of them work in the executive office of the president. Under Trump, the number of lobbyists in Washington is on the rise for the first time in a decade.

Of course, breaking a promise not to hire lobbyists isn’t unique to Donald Trump. His predecessor, Barack Obama, made the same promise during his 2008 campaign, pledging to close “the revolving door that lets lobbyists come into government freely and lets them use their time in public service as a way to promote their own interests… when they leave.” By 2013, there were sixty-five former lobbyists in his administration.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, didn’t even bother to make the same anti-lobbying pledge as Obama did when they were both running in 2008. And why would she? They were a huge financial support to her 2016 campaign.

THE POISONING OF MINDS

One of the most aggressive battlegrounds for the war on the minds of the masses over the last forty years has been inside the education system. If you can engineer the education system to churn out new generations of obedient capitalists, who have been taught from a young age to conform, and not to question the narrative, and to associate reform with the evils of autocratic regimes, then it’s much easier to maintain your power.

Aristotle supposedly said, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.” In other words, get ’em while they’re young. And he was the tutor of Alexander the Great, so he should know a thing or two about shaping young minds.

If you were a strategic planner for the corporate takeover of education, how would you do it? I’d have a simple four-step plan:

  1. Drive up the costs of education, forcing kids to go into deep debt, and therefore needing a high-paying corporate job once they graduate.
  2. Lobby the government to cut education funding.
  3. Swoop in with my corporate checkbook and offer to pick up the deficit—in return for influencing the subjects taught and the teachers doing the teaching.
  4. Push for fewer humanities courses—because they teach kids logic and philosophy—and push for more “practical” subjects, like engineering and economics.

Doesn’t that sound close to what’s been happening in capitalist countries since the 1980s?

In the early days of the Cold War, American conservatives were worried that the education system might be responsible for rising criticism of capitalism.

William F. Buckley, publisher, television host, CIA agent, and father of the modern conservative movement, complained in his 1951 book, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” that universities like his alma mater (where he was a member of the secret Skull and Bones society) “serve as indoctrination camps for liberalism.”295

This complaint was picked up two decades later by lawyer Lewis Powell. Powell worked for a significant law firm in Richmond, Virginia, focusing on corporate law and representing clients such as the Tobacco Institute. He was later appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States by Richard Nixon and is best known for writing his memorandum “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” aka the “Powell Memorandum.”296

His memo was motivated, in part, by Ralph Nader’s attempts in the 1960s to expose how General Motors was putting profit above safety. Powell had been a director of the board of tobacco giant Philip Morris and didn’t like it when people exposed corporate corruption. As his title suggests, he saw it as an attack on the American system by what he perceived to be an infiltration of communists into the education faculty who were guiding the young minds of America.

Composed in 1971 (long after we might have imagined the McCarthyistic fear of “Reds under the bed” had dissipated), Powell’s memo to Eugene Sydnor, the chairman of the Education Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, pointed out that these American schools and universities were funded and supported by businesses:

The campuses from which much of this criticism emanates are supported by tax funds generated mainly from American business, contributions from capital funds controlled or generated by American business. The boards of trustees at universities are overwhelmingly composed of men and women who are leaders in the business system and most of the media, including the national TV systems are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend on profits and the enterprise system on which they survive.

What should business leaders do about it? According to Powell, they needed to go on the front foot.

The day is long past when the chief executive officer of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits, with due regard to the corporation’s public and social responsibilities. If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself.

His solution involved corporate America and the chamber of commerce getting more directly involved in the education system, both at the secondary and campus level:

Should not the Chamber also request specific courses in such schools dealing with the entire scope of the problem addressed by this memorandum?

He also advised them to monitor textbooks and television programming for any “insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system” and to counter it by providing “staffs of eminent scholars, writers, and speakers who will do the thinking, the analysis, the writing, and the speaking.”

Does that sound familiar? It could be the blueprint for Fox News and a whole host of institutions of the modern right. He is talking about using corporate-funded propaganda to prevent criticism of capitalism.

And how has education in the U.S. changed since Powell’s memo? It’s definitely become more expensive.

According to The Economist, “The cost of university (in the U.S.) per student has risen by almost five times the rate of inflation since 1983.”

In Australia, a university education was completely free, paid for by the government, until 1983. Since then the fees have steadily climbed but have avoided several attempts by conservative governments to deregulate them totally.

Meanwhile, while fees have soared, the quality of a college education in the U.S. has declined: “A federal survey showed that the literacy of college-educated citizens declined between 1992 and 2003.”297

“You have to go into near-permanent debt to get a college degree,” according to one source,298 but then you graduate with unsure employment prospects—one report estimates that 45 percent of college grads worked in a “non-college job,” which is defined as a role in which fewer than 50 percent of the workers in that job need a bachelor’s degree.299

But one thing is for sure—it’s a hell of lot harder to be a political activist when you are up to your eyeballs in debt at the beginning of your working life. You’ll probably want to knuckle down, work hard, get that debt paid off as soon as possible—which of course makes you an obedient, compliant worker bee. Start your adult life buried in debt, with huge penalties for default, including destroying your credit rating before you even get started.300 Are you really going to go on strike for higher wages when you might lose your job as a result, which means you’ll default on your student debt, which means you’ll never be able to buy a car or a house? Probably not.

By increasing the cost of education, the elite can reduce the number of young people willing to protest unfair working conditions.

Decades later, Powell’s philosophy was taken on board by the Koch brothers.

In 2011, the details of a 2008 grant agreement between Florida State University and the Charles Koch Foundation were made public. It was revealed that the foundation had given $1.5 million to the university. Part of the deal was that the foundation had an influence on which individual professors would get the funds. During the first round of hiring after the “grant,” Koch rejected nearly 60 percent of the faculty’s hiring suggestions.301 And you end up with a conservative foundation determining who gets to teach students.

In his 2015 book, Schooling Corporate Citizens: How Accountability Reform Has Damaged Civic Education and Undermined Democracy,302 Ronald Evans argues that the “accountability movement” in education (i.e., making schools and teachers accountable for, and paid on, student results) is motivated by the desires of corporate interests and their lobbies to educate a compliant, efficient workforce. In describing the tension between corporate interests and educators, he refers to a “tone of confrontation.”

In 2007, American conservative writer David Horowitz penned The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,303 in which he railed against the “shocking and perverse culture of academics who are poisoning the minds of today’s college students.” This guy is also the author of books with such heart-warming titles as Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes.

Trump’s Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos—wife of billionaire Amway heir Richard DeVos, daughter of billionaire industrialist Edgar Prince and sister of Erik Prince, the founder of the notorious mercenary outfit Blackwater304—is a big fan of pushing American education in the direction of “charter schools”—schools that are privately run but publicly funded.305

As they are private, these schools can do a lot of things that public schools cannot—like make it harder for minorities to attend.306 And as they take “charitable donations” from the wealthy elite,307 you have to wonder how much influence these foundations demand over the direction of the education and the hiring of teachers, as required by Charles Koch.

DON’T ROCK THE BOAT

If someone has risen to the top of their company, party, church, or industry, it would be extremely unnatural to expect them to push through significant revolutionary changes. The system as it stands has worked for them, so why would they want to change it dramatically?

And yet, if you look throughout history, you can find examples of these revolutionary leaders—but unless they have come into power as the result of an actual revolution, for example, Fidel Castro or Joseph Stalin, you’ll often find they don’t last very long in their jobs. People who try to turn the system upside down usually get turfed out pretty quickly—often by the other members of the elite.

Here’s the story of a guy who tried to change too many things too quickly and was punished for it.

Australians remember the government of Gough Whitlam. Elected to government in December 1972, after his party had spent twenty years in the political wilderness, Whitlam, standing six-foot-four with silver hair combed back from his high forehead and bushy attack eyebrows that could take the tops off bottles, didn’t want to wait until his cabinet could meet two weeks later before he started implementing some of his campaign promises. So he and his deputy leader Lance Barnard formed a “duumvirate” (an alliance of two) whereby they split between them all of the ministerial and quasi-ministerial roles typically held by a full cabinet. Together they revolutionized Australian society—they moved to establish full relations with China (after the previous Australian government had refused to recognize the Chinese government for twenty-four years), exempted the entire population from conscription, freed those in jail for avoiding conscription, reopened a case pending before a government tribunal into equal pay for women (and appointed the first woman to the tribunal), eliminated sales tax on contraceptive pills, banned racially discriminatory sporting teams from visiting Australia, instructed the Australia delegation at the UN to vote in favor of sanctions against apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, and ordered home all Australian troops still in Vietnam.

Not a bad start!

And he didn’t stop there. Over the next three years, Whitlam’s government introduced free university education for all Australians, launched universal health insurance (yes, my American friends, Australia has had universal health since the early 1970s), introduced the Trade Practices Act, introduced land rights for indigenous Australians, passed Australia’s first environmental legislation, introduced social welfare reforms including welfare payments for homeless people and a single mother’s benefit, abolished the death penalty, introduced non-punitive divorce laws, reduced the voting age to eighteen, replaced “God Save the Queen” with “Advance Australia Fair” as the national anthem, introduced a Racial Discrimination Act, established the National Gallery of Australia, the Australia Council for the Arts, and the Australian Heritage Commission; and gave Papua New Guinea their independence. Whew. I’m exhausted just writing the list.

After he moved Australia toward joining the Non-Aligned Movement (a group of countries who do not want to be officially aligned with or against any major power bloc, created in 1961 by Yugoslavia’s president, Josip Broz Tito; India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru; Egypt’s second president, Gamal Abdel Nasser; Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah; and Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno), threatened to close the CIA’s top-secret Pine Gap spy base in central Australia (the existence of which was unknown to the general public at the time), and some of his ministers publicly condemned the U.S. bombing of Vietnam as “corrupt and barbaric,” a CIA station officer in Saigon said, “We were told the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators.”308

Victor Marchetti, a CIA officer who had helped set up Pine Gap, later told journalist John Pilger, “This threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House.”309 Little did Whitlam realize at the time that the CIA (with the assistance of Britain’s MI6) was bugging the communications of the Australian political and trade union elite.

Under Australia’s constitution, the governor-general, who represents the Queen, has the power to appoint and dismiss the prime minister of Australia under specific circumstances, for example, if he decides the PM has lost the confidence of the Parliament, which is precisely what the governor-general of Australia, Sir John Kerr, decided in 1975, when he dismissed Whitlam’s government and installed the opposition party into power. The government was, at the time, embroiled in several controversies, constantly criticized by the opposition and the media, with an economy that was stagnating (Whitlam came into power in the same year the OPEC crisis began, which crippled economies around the globe). Kerr’s decision to dismiss the government came after the federal opposition party decided to block a supply bill, effectively shutting down the government’s ability to fund itself, described as the greatest political and constitutional crisis in Australian history. Whitlam wanted to hold a snap election to break the deadlock, but Kerr decided to dismiss him instead.

According to one CIA contractor who worked at Pine Gap, the Americans referred to Kerr as “our man Kerr.”310 Kerr was also a member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, described by one source as “an elite, invitation-only group… exposed in Congress as being founded, funded, and generally run by the CIA.”

Conspiracy theories have run rampant ever since. Did the CIA conspire with Kerr to remove Whitlam? There’s no hard evidence to support that theory. Kerr, of course, always denied it. However, a deputy director of the CIA later told Pilger, “Kerr did what he was told to do.”311

Did the elite punish Whitlam for trying to do too much, too fast, too soon? Did his anti-American policies just piss off the wrong people? Or, did he just run an irresponsible government that just got itself into an economic crisis and paid the political price?

Plenty of politicians campaign on the promise that they are going to make dramatic changes once they are elected and yet very few live up to those promises like Whitlam.

Politicians like Whitlam are, unfortunately, rather rare. Most don’t want to rock the boat. And why would they?

Thomas Jefferson once wrote:

Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties:

  1. Those who fear and distrust the people and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.
  2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the wisest depositary of the public interests.312

Politicians seem to fall into these two camps as well. The first type distrusts the people outright, while the second thinks the people are too erratic to be responsible for affairs of state—they are, to use Lippmann’s phrase, “the bewildered herd,” and need to be led by the intelligentsia, Bernays’ “intelligent few,” or the “vanguard of the proletariat” as the Bolsheviks referred to themselves.

I prefer to break Western politicians down into two primary flavors—those who promise to return things to how they were in the good ol’ days (e.g., “Make America Great Again”) and those who campaign on the promise of progress (e.g., “Hope and Change”).

Both have no incentive to rock the boat.

The MAGAs typically have an agenda of trying to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of the elite. They usually want to sell off public infrastructure—assets governments have traditionally invested in, built, and maintained because they were for the public benefit, such as telecommunication providers, hospitals, power, water and gas companies, roads and highways, tunnels, and so on. Selling those assets allows the government to reap the short-term cash from the sale to offset budget deficits and get the future running costs off the government’s books (which usually means laying off thousands of government employees). It also allows private individuals and corporations to profit from the assets, which are generally providing things people can’t live without—like electricity and roads—in markets where there is limited competition and limited incentive for competition to enter because the start-up costs are phenomenal. The typical justification for selling off public assets (often referred to as “privatization,” which sounds less threatening than “selling off public assets” because everyone likes the sound of “private” things) is that it will be more efficient, that private industry can do a much better job of running the business than a government department. This is, of course, complete nonsense. The privatization of public assets has become a major fixation of governments around the world since the 1980s. Privatization belongs to the same bucket of voodoo as “trickle-down economics.” Both have failed over and over again, but governments continue to pretend they work.

The Danish institute AKF published a meta-study on the effects of privatization in 2011.313 They reviewed eighty studies since the year 2000 across sectors, including public transport, healthcare, prisons, employment, water, waste management, social care, and electricity. They concluded that “It is not possible to conclude unambiguously that there is any systematic difference in terms of the economic effects of contracting out technical areas and social services… there is no general evidence here to say that private actors deliver the services cheaper or with a higher quality than the public sector itself does.”

While they are busy selling off public assets (to their wealthy friends and campaign funders), the MAGAs will simultaneously be cutting taxes on corporations and the rich, reducing social services, and increasing budgets for the police, military, and prison systems (because you need them on your side if the people get uppity). They also tend to be hawkish, overtly religious—and statistically find themselves embroiled in more sex scandals, especially those associated with prostitutes and underage boys.314

The HACs (Hope And Change), if they get elected, will be prepared to spread the wealth around a little bit, by marginally increasing social services, slightly increasing taxation on the wealthy and corporations, while passing some incrementally progressive legislation. But they aren’t trying to push through massive changes.

Huey Long was another politician who rocked the boat. The 40th governor of Louisiana, and member of the Senate 1932–35, once argued for a maximum $100 million wealth limit.

This was in 1934. Under his plan, nobody could have more than $100 million, which, adjusted for inflation, would be about $2 billion today. Sounds like enough to me! This was part of his “Share Our Wealth” plan. Where is today’s Huey Long? Even Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez look mild compared to him.

They probably remember what happened to Huey. He was assassinated in 1935, shot on the steps of the State Capitol, by the son-in-law of his political opponent.

The HACs exist to give the voters the illusion of a choice. At the end of the day, their campaigns are funded by the rich and the corporations almost to the same tune as the MAGAs.

There’s no reason to think that the people who rise to the top of the HAC party in your country is any less a psychopath than the people at the top of the MAGA party.

And here’s good evidence to support that idea—both sides get themselves embroiled in corruption scandals at roughly equal rates.

If this list of American politicians convicted of crimes either committed or prosecuted while holding office in the federal government is any guide, then the Republicans and Democrats are about equal when it comes to political corruption (fifty-five Republicans versus forty-nine Democrats).315

Although they differ in some of their views and their rhetoric, both types of politicians will more or less want to keep things from changing too dramatically. Neither of them really trusts the public, and neither really wants to change things so much that it destabilizes their hold on power.

Whatever the lines of division might be, we can safely assume that politicians are human (despite David Icke’s assurance that they are lizard overlords from another planet) and are driven by Maslowian desires for security and safety. Even the ones that aren’t psychopaths want to protect their jobs, their incomes, their future opportunities, and their lifestyles.

Significant changes to the system aren’t in their best interests. More than the rest of us, they are familiar with stories of politicians like Whitlam who tried to do too much, too quickly, and burned up like Icarus.

It makes sense that they will want to either support the status quo or, if they can, tweak the system only so much that their party can hold on to power longer than usual. Change brings unknowns, and unknowns bring instability (try saying that in your best Yoda voice). Best to keep things the way they are.

But of course, they can’t just come out and say this in public. It’s not much of a campaign slogan to say, “If I win, I’m going to keep things just the way they are because I’ve made it to the top, baby!”

That isn’t going to fly with the electorate—except maybe for the elite, who wholeheartedly agree with keeping things the way they are. By the way, it’s predominantly the elite of the elite, “the 1 percent of the 1 percent” who are actually financing election campaigns—small donations from the average Joe are just gravy. And who are the elite of the elite? They are “mostly male, tend to be city-dwellers and often work in finance” according to one study.316 And we’ve already seen that the rates of psychopaths in the finance industry are extraordinarily high.

So, you’ve got the elite of the elite, many of whom are possibly psychopaths, who don’t want things to change, paying for politicians to run advertising campaigns talking about how much they are going to change things once they get elected. Why would they do that?

Because the elite understand the Three Steps of Democracy:

Though he by no means invented this model, we have to admit that Donald Trump is the master of it.

THE FIELD OF BROKEN PROMISES

How many election promises actually get broken? A 2009 survey across Europe and the United States found that political parties kept, on average, only 67 percent of their campaign commitments.317

This may sound surprisingly high, but we have to remember that not all campaign promises are the same. There are the little promises, which are easier to keep (we’re going to fix up a road), and there are the big promises (we’re going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it) that are harder to keep but make for excellent sound bites.

What’s more surprising is how cynical people are about political promises.

The authors of the 2009 survey found that if you “ask people around you if they think that political parties keep their electoral promises… you will probably obtain a high rate of negative answers.”

Political scholars seem to agree.

American political scientist E. E. Schattschneider long ago argued that “party platforms are fatuities. They persuade no one, deceive no one, and enlighten no one.”

British political scientist Anthony King asserted that party manifestos are “empty and meaningless” documents having a “virtually random relationship” with what the party will in fact do in office.

So why do we still pretend democracy works?

Because people have the memory of a goldfish.

And iPhones are just making that… oh look! An update!

… Sorry, where was I? Oh, right.

If people don’t truly believe the campaign promises politicians make, why do they vote for them in the first place? Does it have more to do with personality and a sense of tribal connection than we typically acknowledge?

For example, there is substantial evidence to suggest that we gravitate toward tall leaders. Male Fortune 500 chief executive officers tend to be taller than the average American male and the taller of the two presidential candidates wins 58 percent of the time.318 Donald Trump is, of course, much taller than Hillary Clinton, so maybe that was all that he needed to win? Perhaps height has more to do with how we vote and not what they say or do?

Back to breaking promises. “All politicians lie,” people often tell me. “Just accept it and move on.”

Of course, they usually only say things like that when defending a politician they support, but that argument goes out the window when they are attacking someone from the other team. But hypocrisy isn’t the issue here.

Psychologists tell us that it’s our responsibility to set guidelines for how people treat us in a relationship. If you catch your spouse, colleague, manager, or child lying to you multiple times and you do nothing about it, what do you think will happen? Chances are they will keep it up. If they see no disincentive for lying, why would they stop? By allowing them to continue to lie, a psychologist would tell us that we are enabling that person’s behavior, like the spouse of an alcoholic enables their continued drinking by not drawing a line in the metaphorical sand and saying, “Get help and quit or I’m leaving.”

If we just accept that we’re getting lied to by politicians, and don’t try to do anything about it, we are also enablers. By accepting their behavior, we’re giving them a blank check to continue to lie and break promises. Only by continually calling them on their bullshit and punishing them for it, can we hope to create a world where people in power are forced into being honest about their actions and motivations.

“We do punish them—by voting them out,” you might say. But is that really much of a punishment? What happens to politicians after they lose their seat? Most don’t end up on the street, living under a bridge. Many of them are very well looked after by the interests they represented while in office. They end up with highly paid executive roles, speaking engagements, consulting offers, and book deals. Of course, not all end up like that, but many do. People just tend not to notice, because once they are out of politics, politicians tend to keep a fairly low public profile.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, either.

“Politicians have no leisure because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself—power and glory, or happiness.”

—Aristotle

But while they are in power, to prevent us from paying much attention to their broken promises, the elite have perfected the art of distraction.

BRIGHT SHINY OBJECTS

Like every respectable magician in Las Vegas, the elite know how to use misdirection to distract us with one hand while doing something crafty with the other. Magicians understand that the average human mind has limits to how many things it can concentrate on at any one time. An accomplished magician will take advantage of these limits, manipulating the audience’s perceptions, drawing them to make false conclusions. They will often first grab their audience’s attention with a small shiny object then will use misdirection, through combinations of comedy, sleight of hand or by introducing additional-yet-unimportant objects, to distract the audience while they do the real trick with the original object behind their back.

Every day in the media you will see some new “bright, shiny object,” as former presidential candidate and HP CEO Carly Fiorina put it on Meet the Press.319 Fiorina, who probably knows a little bit about the subject, said that in “every election cycle, (politicians) hold up some bright, shiny object” to distract the public from the important issues.

For the record, during her short tenure at HP, Fiorina was paid $100 million, laid off 30,000 U.S. employees, fired three executives during a 5 AM telephone call, and says she later voted to ban same-sex marriage. Make of that what you will.

A BSO (bright, shiny object) is usually designed to titillate, outrage, or scare significant swathes of the public. It forces everyone from politicians, commentators, religious leaders, and the military to weigh in and consumes the media cycle for a day, a week, or longer, until it is replaced with the next BSO.

The list of BSOs include:

A lot of these BSOs fall under the category of “junk food news”—inconsequential trivia that is designed to titillate, isn’t very nourishing, and is cheap to churn out.

Let’s be clear—all of these BSOs operate for a number of different reasons—they involve careers for a huge range of people and profits for the businesses that run them. But they are also distractions that help the elite stay in power and are therefore encouraged by the elite in many ways. A population with fewer distractions, or who valued these distractions less, might become more interested, educated, and involved in politics—and this would not be in the interests of the elite.

The “brightest and shiniest of all the bright, shiny objects,” according to David Axelrod, a long-time Obama political adviser, is Donald Trump.322 During the 2016 election cycle, Trump perfected the art of creating a new BSO every day, sometimes several per day, forcing the media and the rest of the candidates to respond to him, focus on him, and pay attention to him. Despite the general consensus that the general public would soon tire of his BSO shenanigans, the tactic worked. His technique of making outrageous statements from the podium and on Twitter, TV, and radio kept the entire political circus on their toes, constantly predicting his imminent political demise, while devoting so much attention to him that it left hardly any room for anyone else. He devoured media minutes like Godzilla attacking Tokyo. He played on our BSO susceptibility.

Trump, of course, was using the BSO technique to get all of the attention while the elite usually use it to distract from things they don’t want to get much attention (although he also used them to distract from his previous day’s BSO). They know that newspapers only have so many inches to fill—television and radio only so many hours. People only have so much time to read, watch, and listen to the news. So, if you can manipulate the news into covering BSO issues—sex scandals, celebrity gossip, sporting results, fear that our society is being undermined by communists, fascists, Muslims, and “the gays”—they won’t be able to focus on the real issues.

And Trump didn’t stop with the BSO tactic once he made his home in the Oval Office. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! Since the beginning of his presidency, he has thrown out a new BSO or two on Twitter every single day. A ban on Muslims! We’re building a wall! Rolling back Obamacare! Transgenders in the military! Bomb Syria! Threaten the Little Rocket Man! Iran! Biden’s corrupt!

Many commentators think that Trump deliberately uses the BSO strategy to distract media and public attention from his real agenda—signing legislation that pushes the interests of the GOP base. And the media, and the people, continue to fall for the tactic. They are constantly chasing his BSOs around, like kittens chasing a laser light on the floor. Meanwhile, the really important issues, like the military budget, the U.S. support for Israel and Saudi Arabia, unlimited campaign funding, and psychopaths in the system, get mostly ignored.

As Noam Chomsky puts it:

“At one level, Trump’s antics ensure that attention is focused on him, and it makes little difference how. Who even remembers the charge that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Clinton, depriving the pathetic little man of his grand victory? Or the accusation that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower? The claims themselves don’t really matter. It’s enough that attention is diverted from what is happening in the background. There, out of the spotlight, the most savage fringe of the Republican Party is carefully advancing policies designed to enrich their true constituency: the constituency of private power and wealth, “the masters of mankind,” to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase.”323

It’s also critical to understand that the media loves a BSO as much as the politicians. CNN had its most profitable year ever in 2016—the U.S. presidential election helped the network generate over $1 billion in profit. Fox News had an even better election year, with their audience numbers up 11 percent on their previous best and a gross profit of over $1.67 billion.324

When you realize that election-based advertising would have been a huge chunk of those profits, it’s easy to see how the significant corporate media companies have as much invested in the election circus as the politicians. The crazier BSO things a candidate says, the higher the ratings are, and the more they can charge for advertising.

Using a BSO to distract the public is part of the art of political propaganda.

These are just some of the ways the elite have manipulated the minds of the general public so that we allow them to keep their power. If we are going to address the psychopath problem, we need to understand the conditioning and propaganda we have been subjected to over the course of our lives—and find a way to break free from it.