Wanna Know Why We the People Really Don't Know Squat?

[Octafish]

32. You are welcome. I first learned about his important work on DU...

...no one in Corporate McPravda ever brought him to my attention.

Review of Alex Carey, Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Propaganda in the US and Australia

(University of NSW Press, 1995. 214 pp., $19.95)

Reviewed by Alex McCutcheon in Green Left Weekly

As Alex Carey sees it, "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''.

Throughout this book of collected essays with its unified theme, Carey succeeds in showing the reader that far from being a natural outcome of "market forces'' or some natural "law of nature'', the present hegemony that corporations enjoy has been the result of a consciously pursued goal whose origins lie within corporate America.

Carey makes the crucial (and often forgotten) point that in a technologically advanced democracy, "the maintenance of the existing power and privileges are vulnerable to popular opinion'' in a way that is not true in authoritarian societies. Therefore elite propaganda must assume a "more covert and sophisticated role''.

In the US, corporate propaganda has played upon the high level of religious beliefs in the community, beliefs which leave its citizens predisposed to see the world in "Manichean terms''. This outlook leads towards a preference for action over reflection, a "pragmatic orientation'' that is perfectly suited to the corporate aim of identifying positive symbols with business, while assigning negative values to those that oppose them, such as labour unions and welfare provisions.

CONTINUED...

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/25/006.html

Wish they had.