WAR ON TRUTH The Secret Battle for the American Mind

Ronnie

Jedi
This would be nothing new to SOTT readers, However the break down is interesting. Many Diagrams at the link below.

Give me control over a nation's currency, and I care not who makes its laws.
-- Mayer Amschel Rothschild, 1743 - 1812)

Today's silent weapons technology is an outgrowth of a simple idea discovered, succinctly expressed, and effectively applied by the quoted Mr. Mayer Amschel Rothschild. Mr. Rothschild discovered the missing passive component of economic theory known as economic inductance. He, of course, did not think of his discovery in these 20th-century terms, and, to be sure, mathematical analysis had to wait for the Second Industrial Revolution, the rise of the theory of mechanics and electronics, and finally, the invention of the electronic computer before it could be effectively applied in the control of the world economy.

SNIP

Economic Shock Testing

In recent times, the application of Operations Research to the study of the public economy has been obvious for anyone who understands the principles of shock testing.
In the shock testing of an aircraft airframe, the recoil impulse of firing a gun mounted on that airframe causes shock waves in that structure which tell aviation engineers the conditions under which some parts of the airplane or the whole airplane or its wings will start to vibrate or flutter like a guitar string, a flute reed, or a tuning fork, and disintegrate or fall apart in flight.

Economic engineers achieve the same result in studying the behavior of the economy and the consumer public by carefully selecting a staple commodity such as beef, coffee, gasoline, or sugar, and then causing a sudden change or shock in its price or availability, thus kicking every body's budget and buying habits out of shape.

They then observe the shock waves which result by monitoring the changes in advertising, prices, and sales of that and other commodities.

The objective of such studies is to acquire the know-how to set the public economy into a predictable state of motion or change, even a controlled self-destructive state of motion which will convince the public that certain "expert" people should take control of the money system and reestablish security (rather than liberty and justice) for all. When the subject citizens are rendered unable to control their financial affairs, they, of course, become totally enslaved, a source of cheap labor.

Not only the prices of commodities, but also the availability of labor can be used as the means of shock testing. Labor strikes deliver excellent tests shocks to an economy, especially in the critical service areas of trucking (transportation), communication, public utilities (energy, water, garbage collection), etc.

By shock testing, it is found that there is a direct relationship between the availability of money flowing in an economy and the real psychological outlook and response of masses of people dependent upon that availability.

For example, there is a measurable quantitative relationship between the price of gasoline and the probability that a person would experience a headache, feel a need to watch a violent movie, smoke a cigarette, or go to a tavern for a mug of beer.

It is most interesting that, by observing and measuring the economic models by which the public tries to run from their problems and escape from reality, and by applying the mathematical theory of Operations Research, it is possible to program computers to predict the most probable combination of created events (shocks) which will bring about a complete control and subjugation of the public through a subversion of the public economy (by shaking the plum tree).

SNIP

Diversion, the Primary Strategy

Experience has prevent that the simplest method of securing a silent weapon and gaining control of the public is to keep the public undisciplined and ignorant of the basic system principles on the one hand, while keeping them confused, disorganized, and distracted with matters of no real importance on the other hand.
This is achieved by:


disengaging their minds; sabotaging their mental activities; providing a low-quality program of public education in mathematics, logic, systems design and economics; and discouraging technical creativity.

engaging their emotions, increasing their self-indulgence and their indulgence in emotional and physical activities, by:
unrelenting emotional affrontations and attacks (mental and emotional rape) by way of constant barrage of sex, violence, and wars in the media - especially the T.V. and the newspapers.
giving them what they desire - in excess - "junk food for thought" - and depriving them of what they really need.


rewriting history and law and subjecting the public to the deviant creation, thus being able to shift their thinking from personal needs to highly fabricated outside priorities.
These preclude their interest in and discovery of the silent weapons of social automation technology.
The general rule is that there is a profit in confusion; the more confusion, the more profit. Therefore, the best approach is to create problems and then offer solutions.

Diversion Summary

Media: Keep the adult public attention diverted away from the real social issues, and captivated by matters of no real importance.
Schools: Keep the young public ignorant of real mathematics, real economics, real law, and real history.

Entertainment: Keep the public entertainment below a sixth-grade level.

Work: Keep the public busy, busy, busy, with no time to think; back on the farm with the other animals.

Consent, the Primary Victory
A silent weapon system operates upon data obtained from a docile public by legal (but not always lawful) force. Much information is made available to silent weapon systems programmers through the Internal Revenue Service. (See Studies in the Structure of the American Economy for an I.R.S. source list.)
This information consists of the enforced delivery of well-organized data contained in federal and state tax forms, collected, assembled, and submitted by slave labor provided by taxpayers and employers.

Furthermore, the number of such forms submitted to the I.R.S. is a useful indicator of public consent, an important factor in strategic decision making. Other data sources are given in the Short List of Inputs.

Consent Coefficients - numerical feedback indicating victory status. Psychological basis: When the government is able to collect tax and seize private property without just compensation, it is an indication that the public is ripe for surrender and is consenting to enslavement and legal encroachment. A good and easily quantified indicator of harvest time is the number of public citizens who pay income tax despite an obvious lack of reciprocal or honest service from the government.

Amplification Energy Sources
The next step in the process of designing an economic amplifier is discovering the energy sources. The energy sources which support any primitive economic system are, of course, a supply of raw materials, and the consent of the people to labor and consequently assume a certain rank, position, level, or class in the social structure, i.e., to provide labor at various levels in the pecking order.
Each class, in guaranteeing its own level of income, controls the class immediately below it, hence preserves the class structure. This provides stability and security, but also government from the top.

As time goes on and communication and education improve, the lower-class elements of the social labor structure become knowledgeable and envious of the good things that the upper-class members have. They also begin to attain a knowledge of energy systems and the ability to enforce their rise through the class structure.

This threatens the sovereignty of the elite.

If this rise of the lower classes can be postponed long enough, the elite can achieve energy dominance, and labor by consent no longer will hold a position of an essential energy source.

Until such energy dominance is absolutely established, the consent of people to labor and let others handle their affairs must be taken into consideration, since failure to do so could cause the people to interfere in the final transfer of energy sources to the control of the elite.

It is essential to recognize that at this time, public consent is still an essential key to the release of energy in the process of economic amplification.

Therefore, consent as an energy release mechanism will now be considered.

Logistics
The successful application of a strategy requires a careful study of inputs, outputs, the strategy connecting the inputs and the outputs, and the available energy sources to fuel the strategy. This study is called logistics.
A logistical problem is studied at the elementary level first, and then levels of greater complexity are studied as a synthesis of elementary factors.

This means that a given system is analyzed, i.e., broken down into its subsystems, and these in turn are analyzed, until by this process, one arrives at the logistical "atom," the individual.

This is where the process of synthesis propery begins, at the time of birth of the individual.

The Artificial Womb
From the time a person leaves its mother's womb, its every effort is directed towards building, maintaining, and withdrawing into artificial wombs, various sorts of substitute protective devices or shells.
The objective of these artificial wombs is to provide a stable environment for both stable and unstable activity; to provide a shelter for the evolutionary processes of growth and maturity - i.e., survival; to provide security for freedom and to provide defensive protection for offensive activity.

This is equally true of both the general public and the elite. However, there is a definite difference in the way each of these classes go about the solution of problems.

The Political Structure of a Nation - Dependency
The primary reason why the individual citizens of a country create a political structure is a subconscious wish or desire to perpetuate their own dependency relationship of childhood. Simply put, they want a human god to eliminate all risk from their life, pat them on the head, kiss their bruises, put a chicken on every dinner table, clothe their bodies, tuck them into bed at night, and tell them that everything will be alright when they wake up in the morning.
This public demand is incredible, so the human god, the politician, meets incredibility with incredibility by promising the world and delivering nothing. So who is the bigger liar? the public? or the "godfather"?

This public behavior is surrender born of fear, laziness, and expediency. It is the basis of the welfare state as a strategic weapon, useful against a disgusting public.

Action/Offense
Most people want to be able to subdue and/or kill other human beings which disturb their daily lives, but they do not want to have to cope with the moral and religious issues which such an overt act on their part might raise. Therefore, they assign the dirty work to others (including their own children) so as to keep the blood off their hands. They rave about the humane treatment of animals and then sit down to a delicious hamburger from a whitewashed slaughterhouse down the street and out of sight. But even more hypocritical, they pay taxes to finance a professional association of hit men collectively called politicians, and then complain about corruption in government.
Responsibility
Again, most people want to be free to do the things (to explore, etc.) but they are afraid to fail.
The fear of failure is manifested in irresponsibility, and especially in delegating those personal responsibilities to others where success is uncertain or carries possible or created liabilities (law) which the person is not prepared to accept. They want authority (root word - "author"), but they will not accept responsibility or liability. So they hire politicians to face reality for them.

Summary
The people hire the politicians so that the people can:

obtain security without managing it.
obtain action without thinking about it.
inflict theft, injury, and death upon others without having to contemplate either life or death.
avoid responsibility for their own intentions.
obtain the benefits of reality and science without exerting themselves in the discipline of facing or learning either of these things.
They give the politicians the power to create and manage a war machine to:

provide for the survival of the nation/womb.
prevent encroachment of anything upon the nation/womb.
destroy the enemy who threatens the nation/womb.
destroy those citizens of their own country who do not conform for the sake of stability of the nation/womb.
Politicians hold many quasi-military jobs, the lowest being the police which are soldiers, the attorneys and C.P.A.s next who are spies and saboteurs (licensed), and the judges who shout orders and run the closed union military shop for whatever the market will bear. The generals are industrialists. The "presidential" level of commander-in-chief is shared by the international bankers. The people know that they have created this farce and financed it with their own taxes (consent), but they would rather knuckle under than be the hypocrite.
Thus, a nation becomes divided into two very distinct parts, a docile sub-nation [great silent majority] and a political sub-nation. The political sub-nation remains attached to the docile sub-nation, tolerates it, and leaches its substance until it grows strong enough to detach itself and then devour its parent.

System Analysis
In order to make meaningful computerized economic decisions about war, the primary economic flywheel, it is necessary to assign concrete logistical values to each element of the war structure - personnel and material alike.
This process begins with a clear and candid description of the subsystems of such a structure.

The Draft (As military service)
Few efforts of human behavior modification are more remarkable or more effective than that of the socio-military institution known as the draft. A primary purpose of a draft or other such institution is to instill, by intimidation, in the young males of a society the uncritical conviction that the government is omnipotent. He is soon taught that a prayer is slow to reverse what a bullet can do in an instant. Thus, a man trained in a religious environment for eighteen years of his life can, by this instrument of the government, be broken down, be purged of his fantasies and delusions in a matter of mere months. Once that conviction is instilled, all else becomes easy to instill.
Even more interesting is the process by which a young man's parents, who purportedly love him, can be induced to send him off to war to his death. Although the scope of this work will not allow this matter to be expanded in full detail, nevertheless, a coarse overview will be possible and can serve to reveal those factors which must be included in some numerical form in a computer analysis of social and war systems.

We begin with a tentative definition of the draft.


The draft (selective service, etc.) is an institution of compulsory collective sacrifice and slavery, devised by the middle-aged and elderly for the purpose of pressing the young into doing the public dirty work. It further serves to make the youth as guilty as the elders, thus making criticism of the elders by the youth less likely (Generational Stabilizer). It is marketed and and sold to the public under the label of "patriotic = national" service.
Once a candid economic definition of the draft is achieved, that definition is used to outline the boundaries of a structure called a Human Value System, which in turn is translated into the terms of game theory. The value of such a slave laborer is given in a Table of Human Values, a table broken down into categories by intellect, experience, post-service job demand, etc.

Some of these categories are ordinary and can be tentatively evaluated in terms of the value of certain jobs for which a known fee exists. Some jobs are harder to value because they are unique to the demands of social subversion, for an extreme example: the value of a mother's instruction to her daughter, causing that daughter to put certain behavioral demands upon a future husband ten or fifteen years hence; thus, by suppressing his resistance to a perversion of a government, making it easier for a banking cartel to buy the State of New York in, say, twenty years.

Such a problem leans heavily upon the observations and data of wartime espionage and many types of psychological testing. But crude mathematical models (algorithms, etc.) can be devised, if not to predict, at least to predeterminate these events with maximum certainty. What does not exist by natural cooperation is thus enhanced by calculated compulsion. Human beings are machines, levers which may be grasped and turned, and there is little real difference between automating a society and automating a shoe factory.

These derived values are variable. (It is necessary to use a current Table of Human Values for computer analysis.) These values are given in true measure rather than U.S. dollars, since the latter is unstable, being presently inflated beyond the production of national goods and services so as to give the economy a false kinetic energy ("paper" inductance).

The silver value is stable, it being possible to buy the same amount with a gram of silver today as it could be bought in 1920. Human value measured in silver units changes slightly due to changes in production technology.

Enforcement

Factor I
As in every social system approach, stability is achieved only by understanding and accounting for human nature (action/reaction patterns). A failure to do so can be, and usually is, disastrous.
As in other human social schemes, one form or another of intimidation (or incentive) is essential to the success of the draft. Physical principles of action and reaction must be applied to both internal and external subsystems.

To secure the draft, individual brainwashing/programming and both the family unit and the peer group must be engaged and brought under control.

Factor II - Father
The man of the household must be housebroken to ensure that junior will grow up with the right social training and attitudes. The advertising media, etc., are engaged to see to it that father-to-be is pussy-whipped before or by the time he is married. He is taught that he either conforms to the social notch cut out for him or his sex life will be hobbled and his tender companionship will be zero. He is made to see that women demand security more than logical, principled, or honorable behavior.
By the time his son must go to war, father (with jelly for a backbone) will slam a gun into junior's hand before father will risk the censure of his peers, or make a hypocrite of himself by crossing the investment he has in his own personal opinion or self-esteem. Junior will go to war or father will be embarrassed. So junior will go to war, the true purpose not withstanding.

Factor III - Mother
The female element of human society is ruled by emotion first and logic second. In the battle between logic and imagination, imagination always wins, fantasy prevails, maternal instinct dominates so that the child comes first and the future comes second. A woman with a newborn baby is too starry-eyed to see a wealthy man's cannon fodder or a cheap source of slave labor. A woman must, however, be conditioned to accept the transition to "reality" when it comes, or sooner.
As the transition becomes more difficult to manage, the family unit must be carefully disintegrated, and state-controlled public education and state-operated child-care centers must be become more common and legally enforced so as to begin the detachment of the child from the mother and father at an earlier age. Inoculation of behavioral drugs [Ritalin] can speed the transition for the child (mandatory). Caution: A woman's impulsive anger can override her fear. An irate woman's power must never be underestimated, and her power over a pussy-whipped husband must likewise never be underestimated. It got women the vote in 1920.

Factor IV - Junior
The emotional pressure for self-preservation during the time of war and the self-serving attitude of the common herd that have an option to avoid the battlefield - if junior can be persuaded to go - is all of the pressure finally necessary to propel Johnny off to war. Their quiet blackmailings of him are the threats: "No sacrifice, no friends; no glory, no girlfriends."

Factor V - Sister
And what about junior's sister? She is given all the good things of life by her father, and taught to expect the same from her future husband regardless of the price.

Factor VI - Cattle
Those who will not use their brains are no better off than those who have no brains, and so this mindless school of jelly-fish, father, mother, son, and daughter, become useful beasts of burden or trainers of the same.

http://www.lawfulpath.com/ref/sw4qw/index.shtml#five
 
SILENT WEAPONS FOR QUIET WARS: AN INTRODUCTION PROGRAMMING MANUAL

Diversion, the Primary Strategy

Experience has prevent that the simplest method of securing a silent weapon and gaining control of the public is to keep the public undisciplined and ignorant of the basic system principles on the one hand, while keeping them confused, disorganized, and distracted with matters of no real importance on the other hand.

We have a saying in Turkish : The wolf loves foggy weather.
 
SILENT WEAPONS FOR QUIET WARS: AN INTRODUCTION PROGRAMMING MANUAL

This is very interesting stuff. This material seems like an updated version of the "Protocols of the Elders," modernized based on current scientific knowledge and technology. It reminds me of some information I read by Dr. Norman Livergood, somewhere on his web site he stated that at one time he was involved in work on programming computer models that could VERY EXTREMELY ACCURATELY PREDICT human behavior individually and on a mass scale in ANY given situation--he did this work for DOD, of course. (Decide on the desired outcome, and then plug in the stimulus needed to get the desired output, until you find just the right one--you know, like 9-11, i.e., Mass Trauma Based Mind Control)

I am convinced that the "deep sleep" of Amerika is a very highly organized, scientifically designed phenomenon that has been finely honed and well tuned to get us to this point in time.

Now Dr. Livergood is trying to help folks wake up. He has an excellent web site (as an aside) that I highly reccomend that is based in part upon the: "Perennial Tradition, the secret legacy, the single stream of initiatory teaching to run through all the great schools of mysticism." : http://www.hermes-press.com/ and more advanced for those with a philosophical bent: http://www.hermes-press.com/Perennial_Tradition/academy_index.htm The essays are fantastic IMO, and this one is at least representative: http://www.hermes-press.com/life_awakening.htm (One could say that he is in basic agreement with QFS, however, he does not recognize hyperdimensional realities--at least overtly-- so could be missing part of the equation, IMHO)
 
SILENT WEAPONS FOR QUIET WARS: AN INTRODUCTION PROGRAMMING MANUAL

Yossarian said:
I am convinced that the "deep sleep" of Amerika is a very highly organized, scientifically designed phenomenon that has been finely honed and well tuned to get us to this point in time.
Indeed. Sadly the plan appears to have worked.

The information in opening post is quite interesting. Although I knew this sort of manipulation existed and is ongoing, it's interesting to see the potential methods and tactics explained in further detail.
 
SILENT WEAPONS FOR QUIET WARS: AN INTRODUCTION PROGRAMMING MANUAL

Yossarian ~ What a great link! Reading is how I rest my mind ~I think. I know this has been posted else where but, I'd like to share it again. http://www.taroscopes.com/webstream/webstream_startpage.html I was knocked out by how "IN YOUR FACE" this is and how numb we've been to it. Justin~ Yeah, you and me both.... It seems that the more I read It just reinforces how right Laura and the C's are about everything, It's ALL connected and It's ALL about the Money! .......... Sigh
 
SILENT WEAPONS FOR QUIET WARS: AN INTRODUCTION PROGRAMMING MANUAL

Hi Ronnie, Thanks for the links. I did find the movies you linked very interesting and helpful.
I went back and re-visited those videos again and I think that Michael Tsarion is very helpful! I'll be spending much time on his site as I think there's very useful information there. Thanks again.
I checked out his links and he links Cassiopaea.org and that's a very good sign of legitimacy.
 
SILENT WEAPONS FOR QUIET WARS: AN INTRODUCTION PROGRAMMING MANUAL

ugh my brain hurts.

Edit: Posted a link to the article on myspace and my friend replied with some rather interesting commentary, reproduced below.

Don't forget about using prison labor to compete with manufacturing demands overseas in China and to the south in Mexico. When Bush said that he would bring jobs back to the United States, he wasn't joking. He just meant that those jobs would pay incredibly meager increments, and only for those incarcerated. The average prisoner gets paid far less than even THOSE workers (and it's questionable that they even get any of it post-prison.) This information is as hard to swallow as it is to read about, especially since I have to write a long-ass paper on it.

This is also particularly disturbing when you consider the introduction of more laws, such as the "three strikes rule", and the attempt most recently by this administration to profit off an illegal substance (that Tenn. State Law link I showed you before.) This just adds more people (primarily poor, minorities, or drug addicts) into the illicit workforce in "blue collar" prisons. Since most of these prisons (even federal ones) are built and primarily governed by corporations such as Wackenhut, because it's cheaper to sub. it out to a company (not for the taxpayer mind you, for the government itself.)

It also gives the government an opportunity to blame "corporate negligence" for poor living conditions, disparaging nutrition for non-violent prisoners, and backward-ass medical conditions that make third world countries look tame (there's a variance of skin disease that has made an appearance outside of the prison where it's thought to have begun, and is similar to a flesh-eating virus.)

On top of this, guess who actually makes ammo clips, bullet-proof vests, canteens, helmets, and other "disposable" military items? Those prisoners.

Coincidence?
 
I came across this recently on Dr. Joseph Mercola’s website (mercola.com), which I find very informative regarding health and nutrition issues. (I kind of think of him as the "Laura Knight-Jadczyk" assigned to expose the psychopathic machinations of the FDA. ;) ):

Fox News Has a Long History of Reporting Bias

If you enjoyed watching Robert Greenwald's blistering documentary, “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices," you'll probably also want to set aside some time to review this earlier film, “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdock's War on Journalism" ( http://video(dot)google(dot)com/videoplay?docid=6737097743434902428&q=outfoxed )

This 78-minute documentary takes on Rupert Murdock, most widely known as the owner of the controversial Fox News Channel, a cable outlet that, more often than not, promotes a right-wing political bias. It focuses on how the opinions of one Australian man influence the day-to-day operations of some 100 cable networks besides Fox News, 40 TV stations and book imprints, nine satellite TV networks and 175 newspapers, skewing public discourse all over the world, and especially in America.

Dr. Mercola comments:

Some might think that I am a left-wing liberal for posting this article because Fox is the only "balance" to the traditional left-wing media. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. I recognize that nearly all media has bias and is not fair at times. However, after personally experiencing how they distorted the truth when they interviewed me a few weeks ago, I am convinced that they need to replace their slogan "fair and balanced" with "deception and distortion."

I am not a Democrat and I am not a Republican, but I am an advocate of the truth. If you take the time to actually view this video and NOT comment on the headline, then you will likely reach the conclusion that Fox has really stepped over the line in their behavior, so much so that some people actually call them "Fix" of "Faux" News.

Again, avoid focusing on the partisan politics but view it to see how they clearly manipulate and distort the facts…

Interestingly, a recent survey
(http://thinkprogress(dot)org/2007/04/16/daily-show-fox-knowledge/?s=colbert) showed that, of those who watch TV (I don't), viewers of the Daily Show and Colbert on Comedy Central were the smartest and those who watched Fox were the least knowledgeable.
 
Check out this recent survey about knowledge of national and international news. It found that, of those who watch TV,

* Viewers of the "Daily Show" and "Colbert on Comedy Central" were the most knowledgeable

* Viewers of "Fox TV" were the least knowledgeable

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/16/daily-show-fox-knowledge/?s=colbert
 
SURVEY: Viewers of FOX News are the least knowledgeable

Hmmm, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, and NPR patrons all about the same.
 
An Interview with John Stauber Published in "The Sun" March 1999
_http://home.earthlink.net/~dbjensen1/stauber.html

Australian academic Alex Carey once 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."

In societies like ours, corporate propaganda is delivered through advertising and public relations. Most people recognize that advertising is propaganda. We understand that whoever paid for and designed an ad wants us to think or feel a certain way, vote for a certain candidate, or purchase a certain product. Public relations, on the other hand, is much more insidious. Because it's disguised as information, we often don't realize we are being influenced by public relations. But this multi-billion-dollar transnational industry's propaganda campaigns affect our private and public lives every day. PR firms that most people have never heard of - such as Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton, and Ketchum - are working on behalf of myriad powerful interests, from dictatorships to the cosmetic industry, manipulating public opinion, policy making, and the flow of information.

As editor of the quarterly investigative journal PR Watch, John Stauber exposes how public relations works and helps people to understand it. He hasn't always been a watchdog journalist, though. He worked for more than twenty years as an activist and organizer for various causes: the environment, peace, social justice, neighborhood concerns. Eventually, it dawned on him that public opinion on every issue he cared about was being managed by influential, politically connected PR operatives with nearly limitless budgets. "Public relations is a perversion of the democratic process," he says. "I knew I had to fight it."

In addition to starting PR Watch, Stauber founded the Center for Media and Democracy, the first and only organization dedicated to monitoring and exposing PR propaganda. In 1995, Common Courage Press published a book by Stauber and his colleague Sheldon Rampton titled Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies, and the Public Relations Industry. Their second book, Mad Cow U.S.A.: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?, came out in 1997 and examined the public-relations coverup of the risk of mad-cow disease in the U.S.

I interviewed Stauber over dinner at the home he shares with his wife, Laura, in Madison, Wisconsin. He can be reached at: PR Watch, 3318 Gregory St., Madison, WI 53711, (608) 233-3346, or at www.prwatch.org.

Jensen: How is a propaganda war waged?

Stauber: The key is invisibility. Once propaganda becomes visible, it's less effective. Public relations is effective in manipulating opinion - and thus public policy - only if people believe that the message covertly delivered by the PR campaign is not propaganda at all but simply common sense or accepted reality. For instance, there is a consensus within the scientific community that global warming is real and that the burning of fossil fuels is a major cause of the problem. But to the petroleum industry, the automobile industry, the coal industry, and other industries that profit from fossil-fuel consumption, this is merely an inconvenient message that needs to be "debunked" because it could lead to public policies that reduce their profits. So, with the help of PR firms, these vested interests create and fund industry front groups such as the Global Climate Coalition. The coalition then selects, promotes, and publicizes scientists who proclaim global warming a myth and characterize hard evidence of global climate change as "junk science" being pushed by self-serving environmental groups out to scare the public for fund-raising purposes.

Another industry front group is the Hudson Institute, a prominent far-right think tank espousing the view that global climate change will be beneficial! The Hudson Institute is funded by the American Trucking Association, the Ford Motor Company, Allison Engine Company, Bombardier, and McDonnell Douglas, among others. The Global Climate Coalition and the Hudson Institute are routinely quoted in the news media, where they promote their message of "Don't worry, burn lots of oil, gas, and coal." In order to confuse the public and manipulate opinion and policy to their advantage, corporations spend billions of dollars a year hiring PR firms to cultivate the press, discredit their critics, spy on and co-opt citizens' groups, and use polls to find out what images and messages will resonate with target audiences.

For obvious reasons, public relations is a secretive industry. PR firms don't like to reveal their clients. Some of them, though, can be identified. Here's a list of just a tiny fraction of the clients represented by Burson-Marsteller, the world's largest PR firm: NBC, Philip Morris, Trump Enterprises, Jonas Savimbi's UNITA rebels in Angola, Occidental Petroleum, American Airlines, the state of Alaska, Genentech, the Ford Motor Company, the Times Mirror Company, MCI, the National Restaurant Association, Coca-Cola, the British Columbia timber industry, Dow Corning, General Electric, Hydro-Qu‚bec, Monsanto, AT&T, British Telecom, Chevron, DuPont, IBM, Warner-Lambert, Visa, Seagram, SmithKline Beecham, Reebok, Proctor & Gamble, Glaxo, Campbell's Soup, the Olympics, Nestl‚, Motorola, Gerber, Eli Lilly, Caterpillar, Sears, Beretta, Pfizer, Metropolitan Life, McDonnell Doug-las, and the governments of Kenya, Indonesia, Argentina, El Salvador, the Bahamas, Italy, Mexico, Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria.

Jensen: That list encompasses everything from biotechnology to genocide to jet-skis.

Stauber: In its latest reporting year, Burson-Marsteller claimed more than a quarter of a billion dollars in net fees from its clients. And it's only one of a number of PR firms owned by the Young & Rubicam advertising agency. Other top-ten PR firms include Hill & Knowlton, Shandwick, Porter/Novelli, Fleishman-Hillard, Edelman, and Ketchum - companies that most of us have never heard of, but whose influence we've all felt.

Burson-Marsteller alone has twenty-two hundred PR flacks - that's slang for a public-relations practitioner - in more than thirty countries. In its promotional materials, the firm says its international operations are "linked together electronically and philosophically to deliver a single standard of excellence." It claims that "the role of communications is to manage perceptions which motivate behaviors that create business results," and that its mission is to help clients "manage issues by influencing - in the right combination - public attitude, public perceptions, public behavior, and public policy."

Jensen: Why don't we read more about these hidden manipulations in the news?

Stauber: Primarily because the mainstream, corporate news media are dependent on public relations. Half of everything in the news actually originates from a PR firm. If you're a lazy journalist, editor, or news director, it's easy to simply regurgitate the dozens of press releases and stories that come in every day for free from PR firms.

Remember, the media's primary source of income is the more than $100 billion a year corporations spend on advertising. The PR firms are owned by advertising agencies, so the same companies that are producing billions of dollars in advertising are the ones pitching stories to the news media, cultivating relationships with reporters, and controlling reporters' access to the executives and companies they represent. In fact, of the 160,000 or so PR flacks in the U.S., maybe a third began their careers as journalists. Who better to manipulate the media than former reporters and editors? Investigative journalist Mark Dowie estimates that professional PR flacks actually outnumber real working journalists in the U.S.

Jensen: How does politics figure into this equation?

Stauber: Public relations is now inseparable from the business of lobbying, creating public policy, and getting candidates elected to public office. The PR industry just might be the single most powerful political institution in the world. It expropriates and exploits the democratic rights of millions on behalf of big business by fooling the public about the issues.

Unfortunately, there's no easy remedy to the situation. When Sheldon Rampton and I wrote Toxic Sludge Is Good for You, our publisher said, "This book is going to depress readers. You need to offer a solution or they'll feel even more disempowered." But there is no simple solution. Propaganda will always be used by those who can afford it. That's how the powerful maintain control. In defense, the rest of us need to develop our critical-thinking capabilities and maintain a strong commitment to reinvigorating democracy.

Jensen: But if it's not illegal and everyone uses it, what's wrong with public relations?

Stauber: There's nothing wrong with much of what is done in public relations, like putting out press releases, calling members of the press, arguing a position, or communicating a message. Everyone, myself included, who's trying to get an idea across, market a product, or influence other citizens uses techniques that fit the definition of public relations. After all, the industry grew out of the democratic process of debate and decision making.

Today, however, public relations has become a huge, powerful, hidden medium available only to wealthy individuals, big corporations, governments, and government agencies because of its high cost. And the purpose of these campaigns is not to facilitate democracy or promote social good, but to increase power and profitability for the clients paying the bills. This overall management of public opinion and policy by the few is completely contrary to and destructive of democracy.

In Washington, D.C., issues are no longer simply lobbied. They are "managed" by a triad composed of (1) public-relations experts from firms like Burson-Marsteller; (2) business lobbyists, who bankroll politicians, write legislation, and are often former politicians themselves; and (3) phony grass-roots organizations - I call them "astroturf groups" - that the PR industry has created on behalf of its corporate clients to give the appearance of public support for their agendas.

Jensen: How do people in the PR industry respond to these charges?

Stauber: In private, their response to me is invariably "You're right, only it's even worse." In public, they say, "What are you, against freedom of speech? Corporations and the wealthy have a right to make their voices heard, and that's what we do. This is just democracy in action."

Jensen: But how do they defend promoting the interests of torturers and murderers?

Stauber: PR executives compare themselves to lawyers. They say, "People come to us with a need to be represented in the arena of public affairs, and we have an obligation to represent them."

Jensen: To lie for them.

Stauber: To "manage issues and public perception" is how they would put it.

Jensen: How did all this come about?

Stauber: The PR industry is a product of the early twentieth century. It grew out of what was then the world's largest propaganda campaign, waged by Woodrow Wilson's administration to get the American public to support U.S. entry into the First World War. At that time, the country was much more isolationist than today. A huge ocean separated us from Europe, and most Americans didn't want to get dragged into what was seen as Europe's war.

In fact, citizens are almost always reluctant to go to war. Take the Persian Gulf War of 1991. We now know that the royal family of Kuwait hired as many as twenty public-relations, law, and lobbying firms in Washington, D.C., to convince Americans to support that war. It paid one PR firm alone, Hill & Knowlton, $10.8 million. Hill & Knowlton set up an astroturf group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait to make it appear as if there were a large grass-roots constituency in support of the war. The firm also produced and distributed dozens of "video news releases" that were aired as news stories by TV stations and networks around the world. It was Hill & Knowlton that arranged the infamous phony Congressional hearing at which the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, appearing anonymously, falsely testified to having witnessed Iraqi soldiers pulling scores of babies from incubators in a hospital and leaving them to die. Her testimony was a complete fabrication, but everyone from Amnesty International to President George Bush repeated it over and over as proof of Saddam Hussein's evil. Sam Zakhem, a former U.S. ambassador to Bahrain, funneled another $7.7 million into the propaganda campaign through two front groups, the Freedom Task Force and the Coalition for Americans at Risk, to pay for TV and newspaper ads and to keep on payroll a stable of fifty speakers for pro-war rallies.

The Hill & Knowlton executives running the show were Craig Fuller, a close friend and advisor to President Bush, and Frank Mankiewicz - better known as a friend of the Kennedys and former president of National Public Radio - who managed the media masterfully, particularly television: a University of Massachusetts study later showed that the more TV people watched, the fewer facts they actually knew about the situation in the Persian Gulf, and the more they supported the war.

But back to the history of the industry. After the Wilson administration succeeded in getting the public behind World War I, public-relations practitioners who'd been involved in the campaign - like Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays - began looking for business clients. The tactics of invisible persuasion that they'd honed working for the War Department were put to use on behalf of the tobacco, oil, and other industries. And with each success, the public-relations industry grew. Tobacco propaganda has surely been the most successful, longest-running, and deadliest public-relations campaign in history.

Jensen: Wasn't Bernays central to that?

Stauber: He was, although, to his credit, he later recognized the deadly effects of tobacco and condemned colleagues who worked for tobacco companies.

Edward Bernays was surely one of the most amazing and influential characters of the twentieth century. He was a nephew of Sigmund Freud and helped to popularize Freudianism in the U.S. Later, he used his relation to Freud to promote himself. And from his uncle's psychoanalysis techniques, Bernays developed a scientific method of managing behavior, to which he gave the name "public relations."

Believing that democracy needed wise and hidden manipulators, Bernays was proud to be a propagandist and wrote in his book Propaganda: "If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it." He called this the "engineering of consent" and proposed that "those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. . . . In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons . . . who pull the wires which control the public mind."

It appears not to have dawned on Bernays until the 1930s that his science of propaganda could also be used to subvert democracy and promote fascism. That was when journalist Karl von Weigand told Bernays that Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels had read all of his books, and possessed an even better library on propaganda than Bernays did.

Jensen: Let's get back to tobacco. How did that industry use public relations to promote its products?

Stauber: Prior to the 1950s, the tobacco industry actually hired doctors to promote tobacco's "health benefits." It calms the nerves, soothes the throat, and keeps you thin, they said. We have Bernays, Ivy Lee, and other early PR experts to thank for that. Then, when major news outlets began reporting tobacco's links to cancer - some publications even curtailed tobacco advertising - the tobacco industry launched what's called a "crisis-management campaign," primarily under the leadership of John Hill of Hill & Knowlton. Hill's goal was to fool the public into believing that the tobacco industry could responsibly and scientifically investigate the issue itself and, if it found a problem, somehow correct it and make tobacco products safe. What really happened, we all know, is that tobacco companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding and publicizing "research" purporting to prove tobacco doesn't cause cancer, and at the same time created one of the most powerful political lobbies in history to prevent tobacco regulation.

Jensen: This strategy of funding biased or phony research to support corporate profitability seems ubiquitous: the timber industry funds forestry schools, for example, where they teach that logging is needed to "improve forest health."

Stauber: Another proven strategy is polling the public to find what messages will resonate with people's values and desires. If they find, for example, that women have a desire to be free from male domination, the strategy might be to market cigarettes as "torches of liberty," as Bernays did in the twenties, when he arranged for attractive New York City debutantes to walk in the Easter Fashion Parade waving lit cigarettes. That single publicity stunt broke the social taboo against women smoking and doubled the tobacco industry's market overnight.

It's even better if you can put your message in the mouth of someone the public trusts. This is called the "third-party technique" and was also pioneered by Bernays. Surveys show that scientists are widely trusted, so the public-relations industry hires "scientific experts" to say things beneficial to the industry's clients. PR firms also deliver messages through journalists, doctors, and others who appear to be independent, trustworthy sources of information. For example, the public is naturally suspicious when pesticide companies claim their poisonous products are safe. But if former surgeon general C. Everett Koop, one of the nation's most trusted public figures, says pesticides are safe, we're more likely to believe the message. After all, Koop warned us about AIDS and tobacco, so wouldn't he be up- front about pesticides, too? Sadly, no. PR strategists scored a major victory in 1990 when Koop spoke out against Big Green, a referendum that would have regulated or banned many pesticides. His opposition was considered an important factor in the referendum's defeat.

Jensen: We ought to remember what's at stake here. What we're really talking about is corporations promoting death for profit.

Stauber: The most powerful PR firms, such as Hill & Knowlton and Burson-Marsteller, often work for brutal dictatorships. Most Washington lobbying firms are willing to represent dictatorships.

Jensen: How do these people live with themselves?

Stauber: Apparently, very well. They have prestigious positions, nice wardrobes, six-figure salaries, and expensive homes. They hobnob with celebrities and politicians and corporate executives. They tell themselves that what they do is beneficial to society, or that if they didn't do it, someone else would. Some PR flacks invoke the Nuremberg defense: "I was just following orders."

I have a friend who was recruited right out of college by a major PR firm. They liked what she'd written about environmental issues, and they said to her, "All you have to do is write, and we'll pay you a nice salary." It was just what she wanted to do, and she was paid much more than most writers. She rose to be a vice-president. Then one day, she woke up in a cold sweat and couldn't go on. She quit and went to work in journalism. But few people opt out the way she did.

Jensen: How did you get started doing this sort of work?

Stauber: Ironically, I owe my inspiration to Burson- Marsteller, because it was after I caught them infiltrating and spying on a meeting of public-interest activists that I decided to start PR Watch and shine a light on this sordid industry.

In 1990, I organized a meeting of citizen groups opposed to the Monsanto company's genetically engineered bovine growth hormone, called rBGH. Surveys of consumers and farmers showed overwhelming opposition to injecting a hormonal drug into cows to force more milk out of them. Unfortunately, thanks to the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by Monsanto on public relations and on influencing the Clinton administration, rBGH was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1993 and is now in wide use. What's worse, milk and dairy products produced with the use of the drug are not labeled, which means consumers have almost no way of avoiding it. Some companies, like Ben & Jerry's and Stonyfield Farm, that have refused to accept milk from cows injected with rBGH have been threatened with legal action by Monsanto. Back in 1990, when rBGH was still just a billion-dollar gleam in Monsanto's corporate eye, I organized a meeting in Washington, D.C., of the Consumers Union, the National Family Farm Coalition, the Humane Farming Association, and other groups. Shortly before the meeting, I received a call from a woman who identified herself as "Lisa Ellis, a member of the Maryland Citizens Consumer Council." She said she'd heard of the meeting and asked if her organization could send a representative; it wanted to make sure schoolchildren could avoid rBGH-produced milk. I said they were certainly welcome, and a woman named Diane Moser attended our meeting.

A few months later, a reporter told me that Monsanto was bragging about having placed a spy in our meeting. A little sleuthing revealed that the Maryland Citizens Consumer Council was a ruse, and that both Diane Moser and Lisa Ellis were working for Burson-Marsteller on the Monsanto account. A former employee of that firm later told me that it routinely sends new employees into deceptive and unethical situations to see if they're willing to be dishonest on behalf of its clients. At the time, though, I'd never heard of such a thing. I felt invaded and swore I would find out what kind of scum went around spying this way. Who was Burson-Marsteller?

Through the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to obtain thousands of pages of internal documents from their PR campaign. I found I was up against one of the largest, most effective, best-funded, best-connected public-relations campaigns in history. Few people even knew the battle was going on, however, because most Americans had never heard of genetically engineered bovine growth hormone. Many of those who did hear about the drug heard about it under a different name. A 1986 survey done for the dairy industry - which has worked hand in hand with Monsanto to promote rBGH - showed that the term "bovine growth hormone" caused consumers to worry, so the industry began calling the drug bovine somatotropin, which is Latin for "growth hormone." Then a PR firm that monitors reporters began giving positive marks to those who called it bovine somatotropin, and negative marks to those who referred to it by its proper name, bovine growth hormone.

Jensen: I've seen the same thing happen in logging. Timber-industry and Forest Service representatives try not to use the term "old growth," preferring instead to call ancient trees "overmature" or "decadent." There are also a number of euphemisms for clear-cuts; my favorite is "temporary meadows."

Stauber: If you can control the terms of the debate, you'll win every time. If you read something about bovine somatotropin, a "natural protein" used to enhance yields in dairy farming, your response will likely be more positive than if you read about injecting dairy cows with a genetically engineered growth hormone.

Jensen: How do PR firms get away with planting these terms in news stories?

Stauber: Journalism is in drastic decline. It's become a lousy profession. The commercial media are greed-driven enterprises dominated by a dozen transnational companies. Newsroom staffs have been downsized. Much of what you see on national and local TV news is actually video news releases prepared by public-relations firms and given free to TV stations and networks. News directors air these PR puff pieces disguised as news stories because it's a free way to fill air time and allows them to lay off reporters. Of course, it's not just television that's the problem. Academics who study public relations report that half or more of what appears in newspapers and magazines is lifted verbatim from press releases generated by public-relations firms.

Jensen: That doesn't surprise me. But maybe I'm just cynical.

Stauber: Frankly, if you're not cynical, you're not understanding what's happening. The reality is that the wheels of media are greased with more than $100 billion a year in corporate advertising. The advertisers' power to dictate the content of what we see as news and entertainment grows every year. After all, the real purpose of the media as a business is to deliver an audience to advertisers. Journalists find themselves squeezed between advertising money coming in the back door and press releases coming in the front.

Not only this, they've become dependent on PR firms for the stories they do write. All journalists know, if you want to investigate a corporation, you eventually have to talk with someone there. Unless you belong to the same country club as the top executives, you're going to pick up the phone and get the "vice-president of communications" - i.e., a public-relations flack. You need this person's help. This probably isn't the last story you'll do on this corporation. If you write a hard-hitting piece, no one at that corporation will ever speak to you again. What's that going to do to your ability to write about that industry? What's it going to do to your career?

Some PR companies - such as Carma International and Video Monitoring Service - specialize in monitoring news stories and journalists. They can immediately evaluate all print, radio, and television coverage of a subject to determine which stories were favorable to corporate interests, who the reporters were, who their bosses are, and so on. The PR firms then rank reporters as favorable or unfavorable to their clients' interests, and cultivate relationships with cooperative reporters while punishing those whose reporting is critical. Certain PR firms will provide dossiers on reporters so that, between the time a reporter makes an initial phone call and the time a company's vice-president of communications calls back, the company will have found out the name of the reporter's supervisor, all about the reporter's family and background, and other pertinent information.

Jensen: We often hear charitable giving referred to as "good public relations." How does this work?

Stauber: Corporations want us to believe that they are concerned, moral "corporate citizens" - whatever that means. So businesses pump millions of dollars into charities and nonprofit organizations to deceive us into thinking that they care and are making things better. On top of that, corporate charity can buy the tacit cooperation of organizations that might otherwise be expected to criticize corporate policies. Some PR firms specialize in helping corporations to defeat activists, and co-optation is one of their tools.

Some years ago, in a speech to clients in the cattle industry, Ron Duchin, senior vice-president of the PR firm Mongoven, Biscoe, and Duchin (which represents probably a quarter of the largest corporations in the world), outlined his firm's basic divide-and-conquer strategy for defeating any social-change movement. Activists, he explained, fall into three basic categories: radicals, idealists, and realists. The first step in his strategy is to isolate and marginalize the radicals. They're the ones who see the inherent structural problems that need remedying if indeed a particular change is to occur. To isolate them, PR firms will try to create a perception in the public mind that people advocating fundamental solutions are terrorists, extremists, fearmongers, outsiders, communists, or whatever. After marginalizing the radicals, the PR firm then identifies and "educates" the idealists - concerned and sympathetic members of the public - by convincing them that the changes advocated by the radicals would hurt people. The goal is to sour the idealists on the idea of working with the radicals, and instead get them working with the realists.

Realists, according to Duchin, are people who want reform but don't really want to upset the status quo; big public-interest organizations that rely on foundation grants and corporate contributions are a prime example. With the correct handling, Duchin says, realists can be counted on to cut a deal with industry that can be touted as a "win-win" solution, but that is actually an industry victory.

Jensen: Why does this strategy keep working?

Stauber: In part, because we don't have a watchdog press that aggressively investigates and exposes PR lies and deceptions. Its success is also a reflection of the sorry state of democracy in our society. We really have a single corporate party with two wings, both funded by wealthy special interests. On the critical issues - taxation, health care, foreign policy - there's rarely much disagreement. If there is, more special-interest money floods in to make sure the corporate agenda wins out. On a deeper level, we all want to believe these lies. Wouldn't it be great to wake up and find ourselves living in a functioning democracy? To be truly represented by our so-called Representatives? Not to have to worry about the destruction of the biosphere or the safety of the water we drink and the food we eat? I think we all buy in because we want to believe things aren't as bad as they really are.

The reality is, though, that the U.S. political and social environment is corrupt and deeply dysfunctional. Structural reforms must be made in our political and economic system in order to assert the rights of citizens over corporations. But since big corporations dominate the media, we're not going to hear about this on network news or in the New York Times. We're not going to hear about it from politicians who are bought and paid for by wealthy interests. The beginning of the solution is for people to recognize that it's not enough to send checks in response to direct-mail solicitations from politicians and public-interest groups. We need to become real citizens and get personally involved in reclaiming our country.

Big environmental organizations, socially responsible investment funds, and other groups perpetuate the myth that if we just write checks to them, they'll heal the environment, reform the corrupt campaign-finance system, protect our freedom of speech, and reign in corporate power. This is a dangerous falsehood, because it implies that we don't have to sweat and struggle to make democracy work. It's so much easier to write a check for twenty-five or fifty dollars than it is to integrate our concerns about critical issues into our daily lives and organize with our neighbors for democracy.

Many so-called public-interest organizations have become big businesses, multinational nonprofit corporations. The PR industry knows this and exploits it well with the type of co-optation strategies that Duchin recommends.

Jensen: This seems especially true of big environmental groups.

Stauber: E. Bruce Harrison, one of the most effective public-relations practitioners in the business, knows that all too well. He's made a lucrative career out of helping polluting companies defeat environmental regulations while simultaneously giving the companies a "green" public image. In the industry, they call him the "Dean of Green." As a longtime opponent of the environmental movement, Harrison has developed some interesting insights into its failures. He says, "The environmental movement is dead. It really died in the last fifteen years, from success." I think he's correct. What he means is that, in the eighties and nineties, environmentalism became a big business, and organizations like the Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society, the National Wildlife Federation, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Natural Resources Defense Council became competing multi-million-dollar bureaucracies. These organizations, Harrison says, seem much more interested in "the business of greening" than in fighting for fundamental social change. He points out, for instance, that the Environmental Defense Fund (whose executive director makes a quarter of a million dollars a year) sat down and cut a deal with McDonald's that was probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars in publicity to the fast-food giant, because it helped to "greenwash" its public image.

Jensen: How so?

Stauber: After years of being hammered by grass-roots environmentalists for everything from deforestation to inhumane farming practices to contributing to a throwaway culture, McDonald's finally relented on something: it did away with its styrofoam clamshell hamburger containers. But before the company did this, it entered into a partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund and gave that group credit for the change. Both sides "won" in the ensuing PR lovefest. McDonald's took one little step in response to grass-roots activists, and the Environmental Defense Fund claimed a major victory.

Another problem is that big green groups have virtually no accountability to the many thousands of individuals who provide them with money. Meanwhile, the grass-roots environmental groups are starved of the hundreds of millions of dollars that are raised every year by these massive bureaucracies. Over the past two decades, they've turned the environmental movement's grass-roots base of support into little more than a list of donors they hustle for money via direct-mail appeals and telemarketing.

It's getting even worse, because now corporations are directly funding groups like the Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society, and the National Wildlife Federation. Corporate executives now sit on the boards of some of these groups. PR executive Leslie Dach, for instance, of the rabidly anti-environmental Edelman PR firm, is on the Audubon Society's board of directors. Meanwhile, his PR firm has helped lead the "wise use" assault on environmental regulation.

Corporations and public-relations firms hire so-called activists and pay them large fees to work against the public interest. For instance, Carol Tucker Foreman was once the executive director of the Consumer Federation of America, a group that itself takes corporate dollars. Now she has her own lucrative consulting firm and works for companies like Monsanto and Proctor & Gamble, pushing rBGH and promoting the fake fat Olestra, which has been linked to bowel problems. She also works with other public-interest pretenders like the Washington, D.C.-based organization Public Voice, which takes money from agribusiness and food interests and should truthfully be called Corporate Voice.

Jensen: It seems the main thrust of the PR business is to get the public to ignore atrocities.

Stauber: Tom Buckmaster, the chairman of Hill & Knowlton, once stated explicitly the single most important rule of public relations: "Managing the outrage is more important than managing the hazard." From a corporate perspective, that's absolutely right. A hazard isn't a problem if you're making money off it. It's only when the public becomes aware and active that you have a problem, or, rather, a PR crisis in need of management.

Jensen: How does your work at PR Watch help?

Stauber: The propaganda-for-hire industry perverts democracy. We try to help citizens and journalists learn about how they're being lied to, manipulated, and too often defeated by sophisticated PR campaigns. The public-relations industry is a little like the invisible man in that old Claude Rains movie: crimes are committed, but no one can see the perpetrator. At PR Watch, we try to paint the invisible manipulators with bright orange paint. Citizens in a democracy need to know who and what interests are manipulating public opinion and policy, and how. Democracies work best without invisible men.
 
Important article! I noticed Stauber mentioned Wilson a couple of times. According to a video I watched recently called “Monopoly Men, Federal Reserve Fraudᾠ narrated by Dean Stockwell - 47 minutes, Wilson was the one who let the Federal Reserve get their foot in the door.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7065177340464808778&hl=en

In the video they claim that Orson Well’s broadcast “War of the Worldsᾠ was a psychological warfare [pr move] event.

So JP Morgan owned Roosevelt according to the film that had George Perkins, his right hand man, living at the white house with the current president, Taft. So Roosevelt was dragged out of retirement for a tactic to get Wilson into office. Roosevelt bolted the party as a Progressive, and split the party, which the Federal Reserve boys were having trouble with initially with their Aldridge bill that had previously failed one party, then the other.

The first thing Wilson did once elected is to remove the protective tariff, which seemed important for the structure of what had been. The very next thing that came in was the IRS. And last, the Federal Reserve. It was done around Christmas while Congress was out of office.

Charles A. Lindbergh Sr., father of Lucky Lindbergh, fought them hard over it and lost. The Morgans and Rothchilds were supposedly pulling all the strings. Once the monopoly is in place, PR [and war] has a seemingly more important factor of involvement especially for puppet masters because now they have built their wealth into the manipulated system they created to gain profits from it.

Shortly after that, the Federal Reserve’s invisible men mount their first major attack against the people in the great depression, of not meeting the demand for money. What did they do?

Stauber said:
"Managing the outrage is more important than managing the hazard."
The public was managed while the hazard was hard felt.
 
OCKHAM said:
In the video they claim that Orson Well’s broadcast “War of the Worlds� was a psychological warfare [pr move] event.
Perhaps the event was PR, or at least a test. It certainly provided a good case study of mass hysteria, even if many accounts were exaggerated it seems certain that there was mass panic. The timing of War of the Worlds is also interesting because it occurred during the start up of WWII, and only a few years earlier than the psy-op Pearl Harbor.

This is also interesting in relation to an article Mark posted in the ID4 and 911 thread a couple of days ago:

http://memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=945
11/17/2005 Clip No. 945
Iranian Filmmaker and Commentator Nader Talebzadeh: 9/11 Footage Appeared in Movies from the 80's and 90's. The Aliens in "War of the Worlds" Are Muslims

Following are excerpts from an interview with Iranian filmmaker Nader Talebzadeh. The Iranian News Channel (IRINN) aired this interview on November 17, 2005

Talebzadeh: After Samuel Huntington's article was published... The American government wanted this article to shape a certain trend. In an interview, Fred Halliday said about Huntington: "I would give Samuel Huntington an F for his article." This article is that superficial. [...]

The most famous symbolic work in this field is Independence Day, which was made prior to the events of 9/11. Imagine: Hollywood makes a film that becomes a blockbuster and the box-office hit of that year. In this film there are aerial attacks on the skyscrapers of Manhattan – the same city where the events of 9/11 took place... The film's escape scene, which takes place in Wall Street, Manhattan, closely resembles the (9/11) footage shown on CNN. Just like... The footage... Even before the event, we were shown footage of it. The famous American director, Robert Altman, said in an interview: "I am sure this 9/11 film was made in advance, and that people saw it in movie theaters before it took place." He was referring to Independence Day.

Before this – 15 or 16 years ago – the film The Man who Saw Tomorrow was made. Orson Wells was the narrator. This film was aired millions of times on TV, and it is still broadcast in many languages. [...] This film is a documentary depicting the end of the world. In this film too, the Twin Towers and the Manhattan skyscrapers are attacked. So that makes twice. Once was 16 years ago... 18... or maybe not... If we say 1980, then it is twenty-something years ago. W were shown this film. Everyone saw the Manhattan skyscrapers being attacked by missiles or flying objects. In this film they had the audacity to say that the attack would be carried out by Muslims – that there would be an attack by apocalyptic Muslims, and that this would be the third anti-Christ. Today, they are afraid to talk this way. They talked like this back then, when many events had not yet occurred.

[...]

The War of the Worlds is Spielberg's most recent work. It is also a blockbuster... A box-office hit... This film is also a metaphor. It doesn't explicitly say Islam and Muslims, but the monsters that attack planet Earth are, in fact, Muslims. This is their ideology... They have come from another planet...They are alien... In Independence Day they came from the sky, while in The War of the Worlds they came from beneath the ground. They've always been here among us, but we never saw them. They were beneath the ground and suddenly emerged, and they have extraordinary strength.
I've been interested in Orson Welles as of late, finally watching the Third Man a couple of days ago. I'm not sure what to make of him, if he was a genuine 'third man' or if he lived to help put some of the pieces of the puzzle together. The book below on Orson Welles by Bart Whaley looks interesting. Whaley has an interesting background to be writing such a book too:

From Amazon:
Bart Whaley is a research professor in the Department of Defense Analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and is a consultant with and author for the National Intelligence Council's Foreign Denial & Deception Committee (FDDC). An internationally renowned scholar and authority on deception and counterdeception, Dr. Whaley has also been associated with M.I.T.'s Center for International Studies, The American University's Special Operations Research Office, the RAND Corporation, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He received his Ph.D. in political science from M.I.T.

Orson Welles: The Man Who Was Magic
by Bart Whaley
_http://www.lybrary.com/orson-welles-magic-p-400.html
This Orson Welles ebook is a case study of an individual that was able to think “out of the box� . Each small fact presented leads to the whole of a thinking process that will always provide an unexpected Third Option. The process that is presented here is the kernel of all deception theory. It's why Bart is called the “defining expert� of deception and counterdeception (the detection of deception) by the intelligence communities of many countries.

Not only does it personify the Whaley Deception Theory it presents the genius of Orson Welles through all his creative work, not just Citizen Kane. Orson Welles was not the pitiful individual that some biographers present. This unique presentation of Orson Welles not only buries many of the old myths but, for the first time, presents him not just as a stage and film celebrity but as the extraordinarily multi-talented and creative thinker that he was.
 
Orson Welles was definitely a very interesting character. He was immensely talented. He left his mark on radio, theater, and film as an actor, writer and director. After the "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast, he was offered a three film contract to write, produce, direct, and act with RKO Pictures. The contract was unprecedented because it guaranteed complete creative control to Welles as director. "Citizen Kane" was the first film he made, which received incredibly good critical reviews for the most part. The character of Charles Foster Kane was based on the powerful media magnate William Randolph Hearst. Hearst was very unhappy about the film to say the least, and all his publications "blacked out" Citizen Kane and all of Welles’ later films. Hearst also tried to buy the negatives from RKO and burn them before the film was released.

Welles had to deal with petty jealousies in Hollywood for his unprecedented film contract (at the age of 24 or 25) without having any film experience at all. There seemed to be many "conspiracies" against him and his career. Hollywood regretted giving him any creative control over his films, realizing that they can not control him like an expendable commodity as was usual in the film industry. Every film after Citizen Kane was taken out of Welles’ control and re-edited, new scenes shot, etc. even though, in the case of the RKO contract it was a breach of the agreement. He also had a very hard time getting financing for his films after he left RKO.

Many of his later films, Welles financed with his own money from acting in other directors’ films, and the projects usually took a very long time to complete as he came by funds little by little. He was smeared with a false reputation of being profligate, always going over budget and schedule, and thus impossible to work with, which there is much circumstantial and testimonial evidence from those who worked in his films that this was totally untrue. Whenever he did get funds from other sources for a film, it was usually quite modest, and he always stayed on budget and schedule, and created several masterpieces with very limited resources.

In a (British, I believe) documentary entitled "Orson Welles: A Life in Film" he was asked if he was bitter about his experiences with Hollywood, and he responded no, that there was no honest reason to be bitter because when he first arrived to work there he soon realized the whole game, atmosphere and framework; he said something like it was pretty obvious that it was their game and if you sat down to play you had to play by their rules. Welles’ did not want to play by their rules and tried to do his own thing and paid the price in a very hard and suppressed and stifled film career.

There are many biographies on Welles, with many conflicting claims and takes on his life and career, but I believe the only "authorized" one on which he cooperated and gave access to many documents and sources of information is by Barbara Leaming. Welles died shortly after this book was finished.
 
This is a bit (major) off topic but I ran into Stefan Molyneux's freedomain videos from a link on Ed Griffin's newsletter. I searched the forum for any info/comments but found none. His videos are quite good IMO. His videos carry the label True News and he appears to be doing battle for the American Mind on the side of truth. Here's a link to part three of one of his series.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P772Eb63qIY&feature=SeriesPlayList&p=0629B97DDFA9C7DB&index=12

I've listened to a number of his videos, and he is impressive. See what you think.


He appears to lack the psychopath's connection so some of his solutions miss the mark.

Update: Appears to be an agenda here regarding Al Queada and 9/11.
 
Back
Top Bottom