Americans are suckers! Anyone with even the least credibility can say almost anything they like and a certain percentage of American readers or viewers will take it as gospel.
It’s a disease, and more than anything else, it is ruining our political system. It’s the concept on which advertising is based. Say it often enough and they will buy anything. How many times have you heard the line, “I don’t care what you say about me, just spell my name right” That’s because no one will remember what was said only the name that is repeated over and over.
Why am I bitching about this; because it allows the American public to be lied to and to believe those lies. Look, no group of around 330 million people is going to be too bright as a whole. That’s true about the USA as much as it is about anywhere else in the world. Advertising is dangerous. This is true because it allows bad men to implant false ideas in the minds of susceptible people, which in turrn, leads them to make bad judgments that affect their lives and the lives of others.
The advertising for cigarettes was, over many years, the perfect example. When I was a kid in the fifties cigarette ads were done by doctors, telling us about the health benefits of smoking. Of course they failed to mention that death was one of those benefits. It kept you from ever getting sick again. The tobacco companies knew that they were selling death. They didn’t care, so they just lied.
Every Sunday morning on the three major networks we have, what I like to think of as politics light. Panel shows where polite discussions are conducted about what is happening in the world today. The producers of those shows know that their viewers want to have a working knowledge of what is going on in the world but don’t want to have to sit through too much bad news or dangerous controversy.
The sponsors who advertise on these limited controversy shows know that too; that’s why we find all the bad guys lumped together, producing one humongous continuation of lies and half truths, aimed at making those folks believe what are basically a tsunami of lies.
We see BP tell us about all the money they are spending in the Gulf of Mexico, rebuilding and creating really beautiful places for people to live and play, telling us what great people they are and how much they love the USA. Of course they love the USA, they are squeezing billions of dollars in profits out of the USA, despite the fact that they destroyed the complete ecology of the Gulf of Mexico. These commercials showing laughing water skiers don’t mention that you can’t water ski in about 95% of the Gulf because the oil that was supposed to have been taken away was just sunk and now it is rising back to the surface renewing its slaughter of waterfowl and sea life. It’s killing plant life and turning the entire Gulf into a dead zone, with shrimp that look like gargoyles and fish that will poison you on contact. They also don’t mention that BP is suing the US government to get back the insufficient fine they paid. These despicable, foreign swine think they paid too much for destroying thousands of square miles of America. We shouldn’t fine them, we should tear down every one of their rigs, tar them and feather them and send them back where they came from in chains. We should put every executive that had anything to do with that rig in jail and throw away the key.
Then we get GE, telling us how they create jobs and generate power all across the country; telling us how good for America they are, forgetting to tell us they don’t pay any taxes despite making more billions than even BP. The loss of those tax dollars means closed schools, underfunded hospitals, crumbling infrastructure and a lack of low income housing because they didn’t pay their fair share. They brag about generating power but forget to mention that most of that power comes from coal and the rest from oil and gas, all of which are poisoning our atmosphere, killing our children and making large areas of the planet uninhabitable, bringing us closer and closer to extinction.
BP and GE are followed by the Koch Brothers with Koch industries, showing us the diversity of its huge operation, saying they started small in the Midwest and are now reaching across the country. They sure are, just like a giant octopus, sucking up everything in sight and squeezing the life out of whatever they can, to make more money.
Starting small is a relative term when you speak of the Koch’s. The Koch’s inherited millions from their father, so they never really started small but truth be known they did go big, expanding their father’s interests into the largest privately held corporation in the country. To do that they have ignored the dangers of the materials that have made them billions, expanding their fossil fuel holdings to a point where they are absolutely endangering the future of the planet and doing everything they can to crush any environmentally friendly legislation or campaign that threatens their immense profits. To watch the Koch Industries ads, one would think the Koch’s replaced the Pope, as God’s gift to the moral universe.
In fact they are the unquestioned leaders of an empire of greed, made up of purchased police forces, corrupt local governments, bullies and thugs, all bought and paid for to protect their cancerous business dealings.
None of the above accusations would be believable if our only source of information was the drivel that is spewed out by the agencies bought and paid for with dollars from the likes of BP, GE and the Koch’s in an attempt to make the American public think that the bad guys are really the good guys. Of course the places where those things should be said, the programming that these bums sponsor, will never tell the truth because this is America where no one wants to spit in the hand that feeds them.
But the big horror of this situation is that the big three, mentioned above and a few hundred companies like them, are using a big chunk of those billions in profit to buy and sell the members of our congress, influencing them to support pro-pollution legislation or to oppose anti-pollution legislation, all with no thought to what this is doing to those who live in affected areas.
Money is indeed the root of all evil, especially when it intrudes on the health of a community. The above mentioned industries and many others have practiced and are pursuing policies that hurt the citizens of this country, but no one in government cares because they are all on the take. They almost have to be. The average congressman spends 40% of his time raising money for his next campaign.
Obama spoke about this in 2008 when he was running for office. It was one of his biggest themes but in the ensuing seven years he has done nothing about it. He has one year left and Bill Moyers, writing in Reader Supported News, has suggested that he now step back into the fray by signing a Presidential order requiring any company with a federal contract to disclose how much they spend on politicians and lobbyists and to name those getting the money.
In 2013 the US government shelled out about $460 billion on contractors with $177 billion going to just 25 companies. Since 2000 the top ten contractors have gotten $1.5 trillion of taxpayers money in federal contracts. These companies with federal contracts have long been banned from contributing to federal candidates, parties or political committees, but that ban doesn’t extend to their executives, shareholders and political action committees. This is as a result of the Citizen’s United decision of 2010, which freed contractors to contribute unlimited amounts of undisclosed money to super PACs and their like. The result is that companies with government contracts can now, in direct conflicts of interest, secretly contribute untold amounts of money to politicians who automatically become beholden to the whims of their contributors.
This is so blatant that the likes of Donald Trump brag about it, openly stating that he gives money to everybody so that they all owe him. This is something that absolutely has to be stopped. It is the single greatest impediment to the continuation of true democracy in this country. If we don’t find a way to stop it we will become Russia, an oligarchy ruled by a sham elections for the benefit of a few billionaires, while the rest of the population lives as serfs to the 1%. Of course there is an upside. If that happens, the robber barons will no longer need to run these phony commercials and we can watch our favorite programs without interruption.