Dec 17 2009

The Hammer Comes Down: the Truth Attacks DKOS

This is a diary touting a diary on DKOS called No One is Going to Save You Fools”. A big thank-you to thereisnospoon.

Some exerpts.

I’m what they call a Qualitative Research Consultant, or QRC for short.  Here’s my website.  There’s even a whole association of us who meet regularly to discuss ideas and tactics.  Together with the AAPC, the MRA, the AMA, ESOMAR, and a whole host of other organizations you’ve never heard of, we have more power and control than you know.  We’re extremely good at what we do, and we do it all behind the scenes, appealing to and manipulating your subconscious brain in ways that your conscious brain has little to no control over.

The basic techniques for public mind-control met its modern master in Edward Bernays who everybody here should study. The last fifty years of social-science research both academic and secret (MK Ultra and other projects) have created an arsenal of mind-control weapons we must be aware of if we expect to make any difference in our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren. We must study them as well.

The fruits of these studies have been refined to meet almost any situation. Remember these are WEAPONS meant to destroy you and enslave you. There is no other reason for their existence.

Our business is persuasion, and we’re very good at it.  Just watch PBS Frontline’s series, The Persuaders to get just a small inkling of what you’re up against.  We can make a company that earns a 38% gross profit margin manufacturing purely propriety products seem hip, cool and progressive.  We can take sugar water and sell it back to you as a health drink, and even Whole Foods shoppers will believe it.  We can take 30 different brands of vodka with almost exactly the same ingredients, and make you understand instantly just what kind of person drinks which brand, and how much you should expect to pay for each, without a moment’s thought.

And he goes to the whole crux of the matter.

So here’s what you have to understand.  If the health insurance and financial industries really felt scared by any particular politician or political party, or their lobbying efforts were inadequate, they could throw them out of power in a heartbeat.  With a wave of their hand and a few billion dollars or so in our direction, the pharma companies and Goldman Sachs could absolutely destroy the Democratic Party in 2010 and beyond.  The only reason they don’t do so is that it’s cheaper and easier to buy a few key Democrats off instead, and intimidate the rest.  Plus, they don’t have to run the risk of a right-wing populist backlash, either.

and…

f you want to win, you will ORGANIZE. You will organize in the same way the Right has done for the last 40 years, and you will spend money on persuasion, where it really matters.  You will, in short, make the politicians as afraid of you as they are of them.  The Right has built vast networks of think tanks, newspapers, periodicals, cable news channels, and political advocacy organizations to spread their finely tuned, well-honed messages.  Their politicians may fail them, and their actual policies may be deeply unpopular, but their message machine nearly always works its magic to get them what they want, even when Democrats are in power.

That’s partly because the American political Right never quits and never gives up.  They know that organization is the key to their success, and they don’t trust politicians to do their work for them.  Democrats, on the other hand, get disappointed and quit when our politicians don’t pan out the way we wanted.  That’s why we lose.

Finally what I’ve been saying for quite some time and will keep repeating it.

If you want to win, ORGANIZE.  Develop parallel organizations willing to persuade with the power and intensity of a corporation.  As long as people like me are out there, and most of them are willing to work for the highest bidder, you’ll need to stop looking for saviors, and instead learn to fight fire with fir

Please, this is essential. We have collectively been coming to this point. There’s almost nothing more to be said except it is worse than thereisnospoon says. Far worse. He didn’t even get into the whole shady political world of massive criminal networks, black-operations and professional hit squads.

But we should take his advice and start talking about facing up to the real situation which is as he describes it — in fact, he is precisely right. Go over to KOS and recommend there are already over 1500 comments as of the time of this writing.  

51 comments

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    • banger on December 17, 2009 at 21:35
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  2. I am so fucking embarrassed.  

    • Edger on December 17, 2009 at 23:08
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    Thanks for linking to it, Banger. It’s probably the most important diary anyone there will ever read…

    I’d also strongly suggest that everyone read The Unseen Lies: Journalism As Propaganda, by John Pilger…

    The title of this talk is Freedom Next Time, which is the title of my book, and the book is meant as an antidote to the propaganda that is so often disguised as journalism. So I thought I would talk today about journalism, about war by journalism, propaganda, and silence, and how that silence might be broken. Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, wrote about an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. He was referring to journalism, the media.

    That was almost 80 years ago, not long after corporate journalism was invented. It is a history few journalists talk about or know about, and it began with the arrival of corporate advertising. As the new corporations began taking over the press, something called “professional journalism” was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the establishment-objective, impartial, balanced. The first schools of journalism were set up, and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around the professional journalist. The right to freedom of expression was associated with the new media and with the great corporations, and the whole thing was, as Robert McChesney put it so well, “entirely bogus”.

    For what the public did not know was that in order to be professional, journalists had to ensure that news and opinion were dominated by official sources, and that has not changed. Go through the New York Times on any day, and check the sources of the main political stories-domestic and foreign-you’ll find they’re dominated by government and other established interests. That is the essence of professional journalism.

    [SNIP]


    Read the WHOLE thing…

    • Inky99 on December 18, 2009 at 03:00
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    http://video.google.com/videop…

    The Century of the Self, Part 1.

    It’s a REAL eye-opener.

    Thanks to Tocque Deville for turning me onto it.

  5. Most of it has to happen off line, though, cause someone is always listening/reading on the toobz. Snailmail even, whatever it takes!

    Count me in!

  6. Because it’s Naranjastan.

    They already ARE an organization, but all they did was kick the cool kids out. ;-7

    The entities he’s talking about can be beaten – regularly.

    I’ve been looking at this, and doing it, for a very long time.

    Big hint: I don’t own a TV, and I don’t listen to regular radio often.

  7. It is essential that the progressive left will learn to package its message well.   Lakoff calls it framing, to frame our ideas in a way which really communicates.  I recced your comment and reference to both this and tins’s dkos diary yesterday in buhdy’s essaym “Firing Squad…”

    Thanks for highlighting this.

  8. … for years now and say it better?

    Oh, wait, he’s a pro, I’m just a social scientist. That’s why.

    We get lazy when we say, “the majority of people agree with X”. The reason the majority of the people are allowed to agree with X is because there are structural impediments to X that means a majority bigger than THAT is required to overturn it.

    But the answer is the same as it was in the 1930’s, and the 1890’s, and the 1850’s, and the 1770’s. Organize, build messaging capacity, and form a coalition. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it fails … but its the only thing that ever has worked in this country for anything remotely resembling progressive change.

    People thinking that the new social media changes that are like the people in the late 1990’s who thought the Internet meant that business models did not actually have to have the “and then sell something for more than it costs” part anymore.

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