They’re wrong.

They keep sending these mail pieces to a Union household.

By the way, who’s paying for this crap?

Right wingnut millionaires or billionares don’t fund propaganda mail pieces to your household telling you…

…which church you should join or support.

…which charity you should join or support.

…which YMCA (seriously, WTF?) you should join or support.

If they were truly concerned about the welfare of working people and their families in Missouri you’d think they would, right?

Nah, they just believe that peeple in misooree our stoopit.

Previously:

Astroturf propaganda (August 1, 2017)

Since when is an astroturf right wingnut organization truly concerned about the economic welfare of working people? (August 30, 2017)

Astroturf. You know, fake grassroots.

They sent this to a union household:

“Union bosses” are elected by their members. Are billionaires? Just asking. Yeah, right, billionaires and multi-millionaires are going to choose to pay working people higher wages.

Previously:

Astroturf propaganda (August 3, 2017)

Since when is an astroturf right wingnut organization truly concerned about the economic welfare of working people? (August 30, 2017)

No, Americans aren’t ‘fine with torture.’ They strongly reject it.

By Paul Gronke, Darius Rejali and Peter Miller December 11

[….]

What it’s called matters – a fact not lost on the Bush Administration, which coined new phrases to call practices “not-torture.” It redefined the meaning of legal words and concepts, and described specific interrogation techniques as vaguely as possible….

[….]

EITs it is, then.

A picket sign from around 2002.

As if anything has changed in the last decade.

Previously:

A Small Clique Of Legal Extremists… (February 24, 2008)

We have already determined what we are… (December 9, 2014)

“…to otherwise commit moral and national suicide by euphemism.” (December 10, 2014)

The world remains the same (December 11, 2014)

Remember when GOPer Roy Blunt ran for the Senate by harping on the “failed” stimulus?

Remember when Rep. Todd Akin (R-2) took to the floor of the U.S. House to denounce the Recovery Act (i.e., the stimulus) as a failure, and Obama and the Democrats for turning the Bush recession into a depression?

Remember when Rep. Billy Long (R-6) demanded that Congress “admit they made a mistake and vote to repeal the Stimulus Act in order to reduce our deficit”?

These examples offer a very small subset of the disrespect that our GOP delegation lobbed at the Recovery Act. Almost every Missouri GOPer has a small archive of similar statements. They are usually accompanied by recipes for budget cuts, deficit reduction and similar austerity measures.

Which is what makes this chart (h/t Maddow blog) so sweet (for those of us in the U.S. at least).  Look at what happened to Great Britain and the Eurozone countries that took the austerity message so deeply to heart:

Britain, whose austerity policies many GOPers urged the administration to emulate, has officially entered a “double-dip” recession, while the U.S., where our President and his Democratic allies managed to push a small stimulus past GOP obstructionists, shows slow but consistent growth ever since the stimulus package began to take effect in the second half of 2009.

Don’t forget, either, that many economists have faulted the Recovery act only for being too small. Most realize,  though, that a larger stimulus would have been impossible given the Republican’s hide-bound, seemingly ideological opposition to the Keynesian approach that proved so effective in the 1930s and 40s.

Ed Kilgore, reporting on Robert Draper’s new book on the 111th Congress, quotes several passages that indicate that the GOP war on the stimulus may have been motivated by political considerations as much or even more than ideological concerns. Draper recounts the almost immediate mobilization of key Republican policy makers, at a dinner on the night of the Obama inauguration no less,  to devise ways to “submarine” the Obama presidency. Kilgore summarizes the strategy they devised:

In Draper’s account, these schemers decided on three very immediate steps: a campaign of villification [sic] aimed at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, an effort to obtain a unanimous vote in the House against economic stimulus legislation, and an early initiation of attack ads.

So political has the attack on the stimulus been and so divorced from fact, that I doubt whether the dire effects of the austerity crash across the Atlantic will penetrate GOP rhetoric in the slightest degree. I predict we’ll continue to hear the same tired canards about the “failed” stimulus” from the same cast of characters from now until November. Maybe then, if we’re lucky, the players will change for the better – in a few cases at least.

First: I know this is supposed to be a blog about Missouri politics and politicians, but on the grounds that, judging from polls and the virulence of local Tea Party crowds, lots of Missourians form their views of the political firmament based on Fox reporting and opining, this report by Eric Boehlert of Media Matters is, if not exactly enlightening, at least validating. It is based on interviews with a former Fox News employee and is worth reading in its entirety.

Second: My apologies for offering little or no commentary, but the following highlights from Boehlert’s article say it all:

– On Fox’s Republican bias:

It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats,” says the source. “They’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.

– On Fox’s political role:

The real story, and the real danger posed by the cable outlet, is that over time Fox News stopped simply leaning to the right and instead became an open and active political player, sort of one-part character assassin and one-part propagandist, depending on which party was in power. And that the operation thrives on fabrications and falsehoods

– On employee attitudes:

My internal compass was to think like an intolerant meathead,” the source explains. “You could never error [sic] on the side of not being intolerant enough.

– On the Bush years:

We were a Stalin-esque mouthpiece.  It was just what Bush says goes on our channel. And by that point it was just totally dangerous.  Hopefully most people understand how dangerous it is for a media outfit to be a straight, unfiltered mouthpiece for an unchecked president.

– On the Fox news strategy:

… If one controversy faded, goddamn it they would find another one. They were in search of these points of friction real or imagined. And most of them were imagined or fabricated. You always have to seem to be under siege. You always have to seem like your values are under attack. The brain trust just knew instinctively which stories to do, like the War on Christmas.

And best of all:

The former insider admits to being perplexed in late 2009 when the Obama White House called out Murdoch’s operation as not being a legitimate new source, only to have major Beltway media players rush to the aid of Fox News and admonish the White House for daring to criticize the cable channel.

You don’t say.

Remember how Tom Sawyer managed to get out of the onerous job of painting Aunt Polly’s fence? He just employed a little misleading rhetoric and persuaded his friends that it was the best fun ever, and if they would only pay him for the privilege, he would surrender the paint brush and let them paint to their hearts content.

Isn’t this exactly what the GOP and their media supporters have managed to do in reverse? That is, take a long lineup list of Democratic legislative achievements that will make our lives better, persuade a big swath of not so savy Americans that the list is a criminal indictment, and if they’ll only fork over their votes, they’ll get in on the fun and get to lob some figurative stones at the responsible malefactors.

Let us be clear – Republicans have done nothing for two years but try to stamp their sclerotic old feet on the brakes. It was Democrats who stabilized the economy and staved off another Great Depression. Democrats gave us health care reform that will provide millions of previously uninsured people with protection, rationalize medical spending and ultimately contribute to lowering the deficit. In spite of massive lobbying efforts to stop them, Democrats took on the broken regulatory system and passed a major financial oversight bill. There are dozens of smaller achievements.

But just today we read in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that Robin Carnahan hid from the Vice President when he visited here on Friday.  The report details the ways she tries to brush off any association with the successes of the past two years. If you read Michael Bersin’s recent Claire McCaskill Q&A posts, you’ll note that she’s definitely on the defensive also. Which leads one to ask: Why aren’t our Missouri Democrats on the attack instead of on the run? Don’t they know that if you run, you’re gonna get chased down and the end isn’t usually pretty?

I don’t mean to be too hard on our Missouri Democrats – who would probably love to do the right thing. They are no different from the rest of the party. As a group, they’ve been outclassed by the Tom Sawyers of the GOP, who have joined up with the media arm of their right-wing noise machine to blast heavy-duty flim-flam from coast to coast – and Americans sure do like them some flim-flam.

In part, this is an issue of what George Lakoff calls framing although I prefer to talk about hijacking. Republicans use simple, frequently dishonest, often manufactured refrains, repeated incessantly and aimed at the gut in order to hijack perceptions. They’re cynical enough, crazy enough, or stupid enough to do this without qualms. And how should Democrats respond to being hijacked by crazed morons? Certainly not by pretending to be just as cynical, crazy or stupid.

Remember the Maersk Alabama hijacking? The ship’s crew didn’t jump overboard – they threw the hijackers off. Before Democrats can successfully reframe their agenda, they have to stand up to Republicans. If they jump off the boat, it’s lost.

Instead of hemming and hawing about her previous  support for health care, why doesn’t Carnahan demand to know how Blunt could vote against the welfare of the millions of Americans? Why aren’t Carnahan, McCaskill and other Missouri Democrats demanding that the Republican zealots stand up and face a few unpleasant facts? Why are they all so dammed nice and quiet, only speaking up when they think they might be able to claim a Republican brownie point? Instead of running in the direction that the polls point, why aren’t they out there planting the direction signs? Where are our leaders?

* Third from last paragraph edited for clarity. The phrase “frequently dishonest, often manufactured” was added to the second sentence .

From the recent events unfolding off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico, it now becomes clearer that pursuing dirty forms of energy, fossil fuels, increasingly more difficult and dangerous to bring to market, should be a practice that we, as a nation, need to leave behind.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday,

“Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said their worst fear is that the well could leak at 100,000 barrels a day, if the well head breaks. Friday, industry experts estimate the spill rate at 20,000 barrels a day to 25,000 barrels a day. If those rates are accurate, the spill could already rival the 11-million gallon Valdez (Exxon) slick that economically and environmentally devastated part of Alaska.”

This moment is a clarion call to ramp-up the immediate diversification of America’s energy portfolio.

Energy efficiency, wind, solar, geo power are clean and smart. This energy revolution will create millions of jobs, foster US energy independence, be environmentally friendly, reduce our national trade deficit–the justifications are legion. We now need the collective will to move past looking to the ground for our brighter future when its above our heads. I advocate for natural nuclear power — the nuclear fusion reactor that’s 93 million miles away, it’s called the Sun.

In 2004, I wrote a scathing article on BP’s marketing plan to reform their dirty fossil fuel image by concocting a more clean and sustainable rubric from which they would do business: BP became “Beyond Petroleum” instead of British Petroleum.  In this era of rampant green washing, it is high time to put real teeth into holding our energy corporations accountable towards moving our nation and world forward into what we need our future energy sector to be. ~ Byron

Public, Propaganda and Profit — The History of PR (Byron DeLear / 2004)

So I’m reading in Foreign Affairs about how out of the 20,000 oversea storage containers coming into American ports daily, only 400 are inspected by federal authorities – and if all 400 contained shielded nuclear weapons – only 40 of them would be detected. This “10% rate of detection” would not include the 19,600 containers not even looked at. If we are to believe Bush’s portrayal of a “decades long global war on terrorism”, spending Billions over in Iraq to defend Billion dollar Halliburton contracts seems like it’s missing the point a little doesn’t it?

It’s National Security, stupid.

Course what kind of security are we paying for? So I’m considering all these obvious signs of the interests of the people not being served, and I come across an ad by British Petroleum – you know, “BP.” Well it turns out that BP – British Petroleum – is no longer British Petroleum – it’s “Beyond Petroleum”. Beyond Petroleum? The same British Petroleum that re-infested Iran in 1953 following a CIA-sponsored coup d’tat?

Yep, that one.

Well, what are we to understand from this face change right before our ad-laden eyes? If we take the advertisement’s word for it, “The world’s energy needs aren’t diminishing. But at BP, we see a future that can be cleaner, brighter and more powerful than ever. It’s a start.”

Now, if I hadn’t worked in media and the entertainment industry for twenty years, I just might think, “Wow, look at that, a multi-national conglomerate with a conscience…”

But I know better.

I know better because only living things have a conscience, and the corporate entity that has arisen in the midst of civilization – having been brought to monolithic stature by its legal definition of having all the rights of a live person – is not alive. And its undead-like rapacious appetite for profits has every living system on Earth in decline.

Every living system.

I know that BP’s renaming itself is not true corporate reform – it’s just an example of a PR campaign at work – I know that someone or some team has been paid money to re-form public opinion about oil — to reeducate the public as to the mighty conglomerate’s benign influence and vision of, “…a future that can be cleaner, brighter and more powerful than ever”

Give me a break — “Beyond Petroleum”

Let’s take a little ride into history to see the origins of the modern PR campaign to illuminate just what is behind the designs of this light and sound show we all almost constantly bathe in.

Here’s a quote: “It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas in disguise.”

Sounds a little like a innocent word game, “British Petroleum” becoming “Beyond Petroleum”, doesn’t it?

Well it ain’t no word game – PR is thought control and propaganda and that quote was from Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister of Nazi Germany.

Again, “It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas in disguise.”

Hitler’s “Genocide” became “solution” – is this too harsh an indictment against BP?

Not considering the genocide being methodically conducted against every living system on this planet.

Our solutions need to be more than just mere words.

Where did this media-method of controlling public opinion come from?

Newspaper mogul Randolph Hearst was delighted to wield American public opinion and lead popular support for the Spanish-American war through the unfounded accusation against Spain after the US warship Maine exploded and sunk. Hearst proclaimed to newspaper illustrator Frederic Remington, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war. President McKinley got his, “Splendid little war” – as the ambassador to England, Teddy Roosevelt called it — and the public turned bloodthirsty through Hearst’s “yellow journalism” made it all the easier. It soon became apparent that in a democracy the controlling interests need “thought control” — because they couldn’t take what they wanted by force.

A few years later this “control of the thought of the world” through media reached new heights during WWI in America, when reported tales of the German “Huns” committing atrocities like tearing off the arms of Belgian babies – or the illustrations of impaled and bayoneted babies — again turned the pacifist populace into raving warmongers–through propaganda.

Noam Chomsky explains to us that, “Hitler was very impressed with the successes of Anglo-American propaganda during World War I and felt, not without reason, that partly explained why Germany lost the war (WWI).”

The WWI propaganda machine of England was called “The Ministry of Information” – in America it was the “Committee on Public Information”. One of its members was Edward Bernays, founder of the Public Relations industry – Also known as PR.

It was called Propaganda back then, but I guess “propaganda” became a dirty word – for the obvious nefarious reasons – but it was just a “mere” word, wasn’t it?

So “propaganda” is now euphemistically reformed…Voila!

“Public Relations” – sounds cozy, huh. Like a distant branch of the family tree you never knew. Kissin’ cousins.

Edward Bernay’s pivotal book was simply called, “Propaganda” and as the father of PR, he reveals the technology to regiment “the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.”

Fast forward to today and we see how this PR technology has evolved to become the chief component in a system of control — the ability for the Governments of the world to control their citizens, for Corporations to create their consumers, and for the Establishment to manufacture public opinion like a product rolling off an assembly line.

So next time you see that touchy-feely BP ad with sun-drenched yellow and life-giving green, think twice about who got paid and
why to bring this “corporate transformation” before your eyes.

This is BP – but it’s not “Beyond Petroleum”…

It’s “Beyond Propaganda”.

It’s time to take BP, nay, the entire fossil fuel industry to task, and move our planet beyond petroleum. A decent and survivable future demands us to fundamentally transform the way we power our global economy. You can do your part by joining the chorus of sane voices calling for this Copernican shift to build a truly brighter reality for a more sustainable expression of civilization.