Study Shines Light On The Disturbing Oligarchic Tendencies Of Congress

[Purveyor]

Study: Popular movements strangled by influence of the wealthy elite in Congress

By Travis Gettys
Friday, April 18, 2014 12:19 EDT

A forthcoming study found that ordinary citizens exert little influence on the political process, even when they form coalitions to compete against corporate interests.

A co-author of the study, which will be published later this year, said he was particularly surprised to quantify the limits of “majoritarian pluralism.”

“The basic idea is that maybe ordinary citizens don’t have a whole lot of influence on their own, but they’re represented by groups,” said co-author Benjamin Page, a Northwestern University political science professor.

He said, in theory, everyone ought to be represented “pretty well” in the U.S. political system, but “it turns out that’s just not true.”

“Mass-based interest groups have much less influence than corporations and business-oriented groups,” Page said. “If you like the idea of democracy, it’s got to be a little disturbing.”

more...

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/18/study-popular-movements-strangled-by-influence-of-the-wealthy-elite-in-congress/

[IDemo]

1. In other news,

brilliant object seen in Eastern sky each morning.

[Octafish]

2. Money Talks.

One big reason why not many are aware of the situation:

The Lewis Powell Memo - Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy

Greenpeace has the full text of the Lewis Powell Memo available for review, as well as analyses of how Lewis Powell's suggestions have impacted the realms of politics, judicial law, communications and education.

Blogpost by Charlie Cray - August 23, 2011 at 11:20
Greenpeace.org

Forty years ago today, on August 23, 1971, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., an attorney from Richmond, Virginia, drafted a confidential memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that describes a strategy for the corporate takeover of the dominant public institutions of American society.

Powell and his friend Eugene Sydnor, then-chairman of the Chamber’s education committee, believed the Chamber had to transform itself from a passive business group into a powerful political force capable of taking on what Powell described as a major ongoing “attack on the American free enterprise system.”

An astute observer of the business community and broader social trends, Powell was a former president of the American Bar Association and a board member of tobacco giant Philip Morris and other companies. In his memo, he detailed a series of possible “avenues of action” that the Chamber and the broader business community should take in response to fierce criticism in the media, campus-based protests, and new consumer and environmental laws.

SNIP...

The overall tone of Powell’s memo reflected a widespread sense of crisis among elites in the business and political communities. “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack,” he suggested, adding that the attacks were not coming just from a few “extremists of the left,” but also – and most alarmingly -- from “perfectly respectable elements of society,” including leading intellectuals, the media, and politicians.

To meet the challenge, business leaders would have to first recognize the severity of the crisis, and begin marshalling their resources to influence prominent institutions of public opinion and political power -- especially the universities, the media and the courts. The memo emphasized the importance of education, values, and movement-building. Corporations had to reshape the political debate, organize speakers’ bureaus and keep television programs under “constant surveillance.” Most importantly, business needed to recognize that political power must be “assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination – without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/news-and-blogs/campaign-blog/the-lewis-powell-memo-corporate-blueprint-to-/blog/36466/

We the People without cash can take a hike for all Wall Street on the Potomac cares.

[Scuba]

4. +1

[Octafish]

10. This OP should have a million Recs.

Instead, DUers seem wary. Hmm. I wonder why that could be? NSA Spying Not Very Focused on Terrorism: Power, Money and Crushing Dissent Are Real Motives Ops

[MisterP]

6. the 70s saw a huge and coordinated (I've seen the newsletters!) rightward backlash

Dow, the NRA, the Baptists, EvoPsych, even astrophysicists all were swung hard over to push the national atmosphere into full corpo control--not just economically but ideologically

anarcho-capitalism was made "the Oneanonly Merkin Way," so we get Rothbard saying it's more moral to let a retarded child die than tax anyone for their care, Friedman saying we need five Pinochets, and Greenspan saying derivatives shouldn't be regulated because they're beyond human understanding

so when any president praises Reagan for undoing "all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s, and government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating"--as the very epitome of a "sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing," removed by the "welfare state"--that president's gonna ream us

[Octafish]

9. Witness, MisterP! You know why We the People really don't know squat?

For those interested in the subject of right wing tax avoiding media ownership and its impact on Democracy: Corporate McPravda owns the airwaves.



And Corporate Tee Vee is still where most Americans get most of their information, including their ideas about these two statues. Wonder what people would think were they to learn from the tee vee what pater and fils have really done with their power?

The Propaganda System That Has Helped Create a Permanent Overclass Is Over a Century in the Making

Pulling back the curtain on how intent the wealthiest Americans have been on establishing a propaganda tool to subvert democracy.

Wednesday, 17 April 2013 00:00
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, AlterNet | News Analysis

Where there is the possibility of democracy, there is the inevitability of elite insecurity. All through its history, democracy has been under a sustained attack by elite interests, political, economic, and cultural. There is a simple reason for this: democracy – as in true democracy – places power with people. In such circumstances, the few who hold power become threatened. With technological changes in modern history, with literacy and education, mass communication, organization and activism, elites have had to react to the changing nature of society – locally and globally.

From the late 19th century on, the “threats” to elite interests from the possibility of true democracy mobilized institutions, ideologies, and individuals in support of power. What began was a massive social engineering project with one objective: control. Through educational institutions, the social sciences, philanthropic foundations, public relations and advertising agencies, corporations, banks, and states, powerful interests sought to reform and protect their power from the potential of popular democracy.

SNIP...

The development of psychology, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines increasingly portrayed the “public” and the population as irrational beings incapable of making their own decisions. The premise was simple: if the population was driven by dangerous, irrational emotions, they needed to be kept out of power and ruled over by those who were driven by reason and rationality, naturally, those who were already in power.

The Princeton Radio Project, which began in the 1930s with Rockefeller Foundation funding, brought together many psychologists, social scientists, and “experts” armed with an interest in social control, mass communication, and propaganda. The Princeton Radio Project had a profound influence upon the development of a modern "democratic propaganda" in the United States and elsewhere in the industrialized world. It helped in establishing and nurturing the ideas, institutions, and individuals who would come to shape America’s “democratic propaganda” throughout the Cold War, a program fostered between the private corporations which own the media, advertising, marketing, and public relations industries, and the state itself.

CONTINUED...

http://truth-out.org/news/item/15784-the-propaganda-system-that-has-helped-create-a-permanent-overclass-is-over-a-century-in-the-making

Thankfully, to help spread light when the protectors of the First Amendment won't, Maria Galardin's TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) Radio. The podcast helps explain how we got here and what we need to do to move forward, starting with putting the "Public" into Airwaves again:

Alex Carey: Corporations and Propaganda
The Attack on Democracy

The 20th century, said Carey, is marked by three historic developments: the growth of democracy via the expansion of the franchise, the growth of corporations, and the growth of propaganda to protect corporations from democracy. Carey wrote that the people of the US have been subjected to an unparalleled, expensive, 3/4 century long propaganda effort designed to expand corporate rights by undermining democracy and destroying the unions. And, in his manuscript, unpublished during his life time, he described that history, going back to World War I and ending with the Reagan era. Carey covers the little known role of the US Chamber of Commerce in the McCarthy witch hunts of post WWII and shows how the continued campaign against "Big Government" plays an important role in bringing Reagan to power.

John Pilger called Carey "a second Orwell", Noam Chomsky dedicated his book, Manufacturing Consent, to him. And even though TUC Radio runs our documentary based on Carey's manuscript at least every two years and draws a huge response each time, Alex Carey is still unknown.

Given today's spotlight on corporations that may change. It is not only the Occupy movement that inspired me to present this program again at this time. By an amazing historic coincidence Bill Moyers and Charlie Cray of Greenpeace have just added the missing chapter to Carey's analysis. Carey's manuscript ends in 1988 when he committed suicide. Moyers and Cray begin with 1971 and bring the corporate propaganda project up to date.

This is a fairly complex production with many voices, historic sound clips, and source material. The program has been used by writers and students of history and propaganda. Alex Carey: Taking the Risk out of Democracy, Corporate Propaganda VS Freedom and Liberty with a foreword by Noam Chomsky was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1995.

SOURCE: http://tucradio.org/new.html

If one finds a moment, here's the first part (scroll down at the link for the second part) on Carey.

http://tucradio.org/AlexCarey_ONE.mp3

It's important for there to be more than a handful of companies providing "news." Democracy depends on it.

[MisterP]

13. aaagh! how'd I forget Reagan and Clinton's media consolidation!

but that's why I made my sarky sigline: "anti-woo" was, from the get-go, as much about "debunking" women's equality and insisting the Third World had nothing to teach us (because if they did we'd've accepted it already, natch) as it was about fighting Ernst Zündel or Shirley MacLaine

it distorts how science is actually done, the real Angst and uncertainty many scientists like Oppenheimer and Carson experienced, and history in general (I've had it with Giordano Bruno being turned into some goody-two-shoes who opened the way for technocracy: he was a friggin' magus)

[rhett o rick]

7. I am surprised that the Conspiracy Theory police havent come to get you.

The CT is that Corporation have a blueprint to dominate our government. This memo spells it out very clearly. Note: Not all CT are crazy woo.

[Octafish]

8. Funny you should mention that.

Cass Sunstein helped get Bush and Cheney off the hook...

Government Nanny Censoring "Conspiracy Theories" Is Also Responsible for Letting Bush Era Torture and Spying Conspiracies Go Unpunished

Washingtons Blog, Oct. 7, 2010

EXCERPT...

Prosecuting government officials risks a “cycle” of criminalizing public service, (Sunstein) argued, and Democrats should avoid replicating retributive efforts like the impeachment of President Clinton — or even the “slight appearance” of it.

SOURCE w links n details: http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2010/10/main-obama-adviser-blocking-prosecution.html?m=1

[rhett o rick]

12. Good Grief. Thanks for that. nm

[erronis]

11. And this is only what we can currently see

The big boys have been very careful to take their close-to-the-vest conversations away from public scrutiny, at least for the most part.

The smoke-filled back room discussions such as Tamany Hall critters are now conducted on golf courses, in gated communities, in invitation-only presentations. Usually (excepting rare 47% tapings) these aren't recorded anywhere that the popple can see/hear.

The grandstanding that we see in congress or other places of puffoonery are well-scripted and have already been vetted by the group (ALEC, DRC, RNC, etc.) I long for the old days of old men screaming at one another with puny fists brandished. Guess CPAN wouldn't cover it...

[octoberlib]

14. Thanks for the info, Octafish!

I didn't know this but I'm not surprised.

[Octafish]

15. You are welcome, octoberlib! Corporate McPravda doesn't want to have an informed public.

Makes it harder to run things "right."

Oh, how many blank stares I've gotten bringing up Edward Bernays with journalists:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...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 understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

― Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda

SOURCE: http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/481391-propaganda

Professional Strength Lies.

[Zorra]

3. Recommend. nt

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

5. Gosh. Fancy that. I wonder why many people don't bother to vote?