Tuesday, November 13, 2007

The Campaign Contributors of the Media Anointed

The USA is controlled by the Corporatocracy, by the lobbyists and big business interests. The people that own these corporations are the people that own and run this country. They are not interested in making life better for you or me. They are only interested in their own money and power.

By controlling the mass media, they choose who the next president is. At the beginning of election campaigning, they immediately declare and anoint who the "top tier" are. This is the short list of whom they approve for the presidency. The 2-party system ensures that this list gets pared down to "Puppet A" and "Marionette B".

Of these corporations, the most powerful are the banking and finance corporations.

Now let's look at the largest campaign contributors of the media anointed presidential candidates.

The following info is taken from http://opensecrets.org/pres08. The site has an explanation
HOW TO READ THIS CHART: This chart lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2008 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate , rather the money came from the organization's PAC, its individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

Because of contribution limits, organizations that bundle together many individual contributions are often among the top donors to presidential candidates. These contributions can come from the organization's members or employees (and their families). The organization may support one candidate, or hedge its bets by supporting multiple candidates. Groups with national networks of donors - like EMILY's List and Club for Growth - make for particularly big bundlers.
Take note of how the "top tier" media anointed ALL have banking and finance corporations as their top contributors. To all the Hillary fans who think that she is different than the others in terms of not kowtowing to Big Business Interests, TAKE SPECIAL NOTE.

HILLARY CLINTON:


BARACK OBAMA:



RUDY GIULIANI:



MITT ROMNEY:


And now let's look at Ron Paul. He's consistently received the most donations from enlisted personnel. They probably understand first-hand what folly our foreign policy of empire-building is, and Ron Paul is espousing the Founding Fathers' admonition to stay out of internal affairs of other nations.

RON PAUL:

Sunday, November 11, 2007

The Truth about the Howard Dean Scream and the Power of the Media

From http://www.wanttoknow.info/howarddeansdemise


The Scream

by David Podvin

On December 1, 2003, Howard Dean was ahead by twenty points in the polls when he appeared on Hardball with Chris Matthews and said, "We're going to break up the giant media enterprises." This pronouncement went far beyond the governor's previous public musings about possibly re-regulating the communications industry. It amounted to a declaration of war on the corporations that administer the flow of information in the United States.

The media giants quickly responded by crushing his high-flying campaign with the greatest of ease.
This time, they didn't even have to invent a scandal in order to achieve the desired result; merely by chanting the word "unelectable" at maximum volume, the mainstream media maneuvered democratic voters into switching their support to someone who poses no threat to the status quo.

John Kerry is a member of a group of politicians whose disagreements with the mercantile elite tend to be merely rhetorical. Any doubts about Kerry's level of commitment to his stated progressive beliefs were answered in 1994 when he proclaimed himself "delighted" with the Republican takeover of Congress (Boston Globe, New York Times). The media oligarchy knows that a general election race between Kerry and George W. Bush will insure a continuation of its monopoly, regardless of who wins.

The news cartel had always been hostile to Dean. Independent surveys revealed that he had received the most negative coverage of any candidate except Dennis Kucinich (the only other contender who strongly favors mandatory media divestment). But after his statement on Hardball, reporting about Dean abruptly came to an end and was replaced by supposition.

By mid-December, the news divisions of the four major television networks were reporting as fact that Dean was unelectable. The print media echoed the theme; on December 17, the Washington Post printed a front-page story that posited Dean could not win the presidency. The Post quickly followed up with an onslaught of articles and editorials reasserting that claim. Before the month was over, Dean's lack of electability had been highlighted in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and every other major paper in the United States.

As 2004 began, Time and Newsweek simultaneously ran cover stories emphasizing that Dean was unelectable. In the weeks before the Iowa caucus, the ongoing topic of discussion on the political panel shows was that Dean was unelectable. National talk radio shows repeatedly stressed that Dean was unelectable. The corporate Internet declared that Dean was unelectable. And the mainstream media continued with the storyline that Dean was unelectable right up until Iowans attended their caucuses. Iowa Democrats could not watch a television or listen to a radio or read a newspaper or go online without learning that Howard Dean was unelectable.

On January 19, Democratic caucus goers in Iowa - who were the initial intended audience for this propaganda disguised as reportage - overwhelmingly repudiated Dean, telling pollsters they believed he was unelectable. Later that evening, Dean yelled encouragement to his supporters at a pep rally, an incident that provided the pretext for the coup de grĂ¢ce.

During the week leading up to the New Hampshire primary, the media obsessed about Dean's "bizarre" rally incident, adding "un-presidential" and "emotionally unstable" to its descriptions of the governor. The unified message was that Dean had self-destructed. When he finished a distant second in New Hampshire, journalists and pundits hailed the defeat as confirmation of their premise that Dean had always been unelectable.

Yet there had been no tangible basis for that assertion. At the beginning of 2004, a poll conducted by Time magazine showed that Dean trailed Bush by only six points. That was a smaller deficit than Gore faced shortly before the general election in 2000, and he wound up getting the most popular votes. Undaunted by this evidence to the contrary, reporters adhered to the motif that Dean had absolutely no chance.

It is not what a politician does that creates a scandal. It is whether the television networks and major metropolitan newspapers respond to the incident with saturation coverage. When a presidential candidate who was committed to deregulating the corporate media got caught lying about breaking the law, the importance of the event was minimized. When a presidential candidate who was committed to breaking up the corporate media got caught shouting at a pep rally, the importance of the event was maximized.

Howard Dean's campaign now lies in ruins because he chose to confront the multinational conglomerates that run this country. If Dean is so resilient that he fights his way back into contention, the Fourth Estate will be ready to batter him again. In the United States of America, people who pose a threat to the reigning corporate establishment are destroyed. Or, as the Soviets used to put it, emotionally unstable individuals who deviate from the party line are guilty of engaging in "self-destruction".

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Engineering Talent, Regulation, and Housing Cost

I work in the Electronics industry. It is amazing to watch how rapid development progresses in Electronics - witness Moore's Law - how quickly memory, hard disk space, RAM, flash memory, and CPU speed are improving, and how quickly cost is going down.

The Electronics industry is incredibly competitive, despite the high degree of skill required to design and manufacture the products. I've worked in a few companies, and the competition is fierce. The strive to improve the products and reduce production costs is relentless; if a company slacks off one bit, significant market share will be lost almost immediately.

I believe part of the reason that the electronics industry pushes the state of the art so aggressively is that it seems to be very highly unregulated, resulting in very dynamic free market competition. This means that startup companies with some new technology or that spot a niche can very easily jump in and provide a new product.

I've written before about the history of government regulation, where a lot of so called pro-consumer regulation, is actually lobbied for by the big corporations, in order to legislate laws that actually protect them; in some cases, by setting up artificial barriers to startup competition. If you want to know the beneficiaries of such laws, follow the money. Who gets to laugh all the way to the bank? Here is a short list of examples:

The Bird Flu scare and $2B purchase of Tamiflu doses
The Medicare Prescription Drug Act of 2003
Sarbanes-Oxley Act
Bankruptcy Law of 2005


Even with respect to Safety regulations and standards, the electronics industry is quite self-regulating. One set of regulations that many electronics and electrical companies follow is that set by Underwriters Laboratories.

For the most part, the standards for a given product are written with the design engineers in the loop; as such the standards are very reasonable, don't cost much at all to implement, and UL doesn't charge very much for compliance testing. The system works well, such that a consumer who finds the UL logo on an appliance can be reasonably assured of product safety:








This is in contrast to say government regulatory bodies, such as the FDA, which is a government bureaucracy, whose kowtowing to Big Pharma is legendary. Here is one such article: http://www.smart-publications.com/nutrition/fda.php

And just try googling "FDA lies".


In the electronics industry, legions of talented engineers work hard to make the next generation of products better and cheaper. Often an engineer will spend weeks knocking $0.10 or 5% off the cost of a design.

This makes me wonder. It looks like the free market has created the demand for engineers to spend their talent doing such cost reduction exercises. However, if one were to look at the typical budget of a household, the single largest expenditure, after taxes, is probably the home mortgage. Of the cost of a home, perhaps 1/3rd or 1/2 is the construction of the house itself. Definitely much more than that spent on electronics.

So why isn't all this engineering talent expended on reducing the cost of a typical family's largest single expense? Why aren't legions of engineers developing better and lower cost housing materials, and homebuilding robots to reduce labor cost? Why haven't design-it-yourself lego-like building block homes catching on?

A possible answer is that the construction industry is heavily regulated and is unionized. Both of which are meddling in the free market. There is still some belief in the myth, that automation and labor saving devices, reduce employment and is bad for the economy.

Or maybe it's part of the mass media's perpetuation of consumerism - consumption of overpriced shoes, bags, watches, furniture, weddings, and homes. I've written before about the mass media pounding people incessantly to be good little consumers.

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Media Bias In Action - NYT Propaganda

Presidential Candidate Ron Paul raised a stunning $4.2M in one day, in an event organized by one of his supporters on the internet.

You would think that the Mass Media would be all over it, talking about it on the front page, and digging in to what the man is about, and his stands, informing the public.

Nope.

If Hillary so much farts, it's front page news.

Ron Paul beats one-day fund-raising records, it gets a few paragraphs on page 11. Worse, they subtly manipulate the reader to have a negative opinion of him.

Here’s some practice reading through the mass media drivel. It's a carefully crafted piece of propaganda:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/us...8be&ei=5087%0A
  • Look how much space is used up about Guy Fawkes, and “V for Vendetta” – around 40%, instead of informing the reader what Paul's stands are.
  • Look at the Ron Paul picture they chose… an angry face.
  • One of the paragraphs starts with “Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York holds the record..”, in order to make the reader feel “Oh, Hillary is still 'leading'”.
  • “..he argues that the fight against terrorism is threatening American democracy”, instead of "the War on Terror" is threatening American democracy” - the reader might pick up the illogic of a "War on Terror" Note also that they are pushing the lie that the USA is supposed to be a democracy.
  • Mr. Benton clarified that Mr. Paul did not support blowing up government buildings." -- this may make the reader assume that his supporters do.
  • He wants to demolish things like the Department of Education,” ---- they picked the one department abolishment that most people would instantly react negatively to, with no explanation. ("What about the children?!")
  • They repeated Hillary's lie that she raised $6.2M in one day

Some interesting comments from the www.ronpaulforums.com on this topic:

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“Mr. Benton clarified that Mr. Paul did not support blowing up government buildings. “ -- may make the reader assume that his supporters do.
This is such a basic trick, it always works though and it never is included in articles about the Mass Media Anointed candidates.
For example, they'd never ask Fred Thompson if his campaign supported cocaine trafficking since one of his aids quit yesterday because of his criminal drug dealing past.

It's such a joke, yet people fall for this kind of crap reporting all the time.
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Absolutely it's propaganda. Without a doubt. Any major media outlet employs psychologists who understand that how a person sub-consciously processes a story is much more important than it's outer facade.

Spot-on. This was a carefully crafted propaganda piece. Association, connotation, and implications abound in this article.
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I completely agree with this. Most major media news is propaganda, and once you start to understand how they craft it, you see it everywhere.

The father of PR is a man named Edward Bernays and he is the reason people think bacon and eggs is breakfast food and that the neurotoxin flouride is good for your teeth.

Click here to familiarize with Bernays. All of the media is carefully crafted propaganda. They have been creating reality for us for the better part of a century. The internet has finally set us free and empowered us to seek out the truth and take our freedom back.
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And look at the things the media DON'T tell us about their anointed candidates.
Click the youtube video in this link, about Hillary's campaign contribution fraud:
http://www.peterfpaul.com/