The USA is Broken, can we fix it?
Through my reading of the news the last few months and the headlines that have jumped out at me, one underlying thread has emerged in my mind. The US of A is Broken. And if we don’t fix it, then the future is bleak indeed.
When did the initial Crack in the structure of US society and culture appear? According to an article by Daniel Haggard about why Neo-Cons consistently come out against Net Neutrality, it all started in the 1920’s with a man named Edward Bernays, who was a nephew of Sigmund Freud. Yes, that Sigmund Freud.
. . .telecom companies are all preparing to evolve into media companies. What is a media company? It’s a company that creates, and determines content. With net neutrality in place these media\telco companies will have no power to channel users into seeing the content they want them to see. Hence, right at the point these companies were looking to expand themselves into a huge, new growth opportunity, which is being taken away from them by these various web based competitors.
None of this explains why the neo-conservatives over on Capitol Hill want to defend the Telco companies. After all they preach the virtues of democracy as much as everybody else. Certainly they want to prevent users from accessing content that doesn’t match the conservative standards they think we should aspire to. But it’s also because they want to protect the economic system they believe is the basis to a safe, prosperous society.
To realise why this is so we need to understand a little about the revolution in public relations that occurred in the nineteen twenties. A man by the name of Edward Bernays invented the industry of public relations. He was the nephew of Sigmund Freud - and like Freud, he believed that people were governed by deep seated irrational forces that if left unfettered could lead to the collapse of democratic societies. They were confirmed in this belief when they watched the horror of events like the first world war and the stock market crash of 1929.
Edward Bernays developed techniques which he believed could be used to control people - to satisfy their primal irrational urges and turn them into passive consumers. These methods involved techniques which are common today - but were totally innovative in the twenties. Bernays discovered that you could make people want something by associating a product with a symbol that represented the irrational drive that people wanted to satisfy . . .
The large corporations were captivated by these new techniques. In the twenties and thirties they had become worried that in America people were reaching a point of prosperity whereby they had come to have just about everything they needed. Unless they could be made to buy things they didn’t need - the economic basis underpinning capitalism would collapse. The companies that produced the goods would not be able to make enough sales, the main drivers of growth and wealth creation would disappear. Bernays provided the solution to this problem.
Hence two massive problems were solved with one solution. If people could be turned into passive consumers then the engine of wealth and economic prosperity could be assured - and the dark, irrational forces of human beings would be satisfied and made passive.
Throughout the twentieth century - marketing programs were developed to manage consumers in this way. The advent of mass media made it even easier to control people through the marketing techniques that Bernays invented.
Now, let’s look at what else was developed during the early part of the 20th Century at about the same time– the concept of Planned Obsolescence. Simply put, an item you buy may have a limited life because it is engineered to break after a certain amount of time or supplies you need to continue to use the item may no longer be available. An example of this is a perfectly good Epson printer I had that, when I upgraded from win98 to win2k, didn’t have drivers available in win2k since Epson chose not to make driver available, thus forcing customers to scrap a perfectly good printer and buy a new one. Couple the concept of Planned Obsolescence with the new marketing tools provided by the psycho-sociological phenomenon of mass media Public Relations and Marketing, and permeate every aspect of society with it by consolidating the Media over time and making it dependent on the revenue generated by the marketing of goods planned to self destruct, and you’ve got a Culture that is UNSUSTAINABLE. Why? There are only so many resources available to us on this earth. And the waste products generated by our throwaway economy are going to kill us. The only question is which will kill us all first.
This Corporate Culture that has developed around the economy formed to take short term advantage of these two killer concepts is a powerful one,. The message is always there front and center, whether it be of items we don’t need or services we only need because the media tells us so, and whether it’s being pushed on TV, radio or by Corporate Lobbyists and Astroturf groups in the halls of Congress. And it starts at an early age as our kids are indoctrinated early on through TV, and made into “good little consumers”. I’m sure every one of us has experienced first hand the temper tantrum of a kid in a store who wants his or her mother to buy something they saw on TV. This message has completely engulfed our MainStream Media, whose sole purpose seems to be the creation of more and greater ad revenue instead of the dissemination of accurate information, to the point where even news reports have become infomercials.
Which brings me to the news articles that socked me in the eye this week that showed the bias that exists and is killing our Country.
First up is an article on the Results of Outsourcing the Illegal and Immoral Iraq War. It’s bad enough that we’re over there at all, but to see a function that should belong rightly to the US military being outsourced to a bunch of Corporate Drunken Bums for PROFIT, is the perfect example of all that’s wrong with US Corporate Culture.
Second one up is an article that appeared today in the NYTimes about Medicare recipients being the victims of “deceptive sales tactics and had claims improperly denied by private insurers that run the system’s huge new drug benefit program and offer other private insurance options encouraged by the Bush administration, a review of scores of federal audits has found.” The Insurance Corporations are a powerful example of this whole Bernays PR tactic. Telling people they need insurance, and even legislating MANDATORY insurance, then denying claims is the fast road to profit for insurance providers. The whole insurance industry is a layer of middleman profit that exists between US Citizens and health care. Whether it really needs to be there or if there are alternative ways of approaching things is a question that always gets shunted off by Corporate Lobbyists and the Republican Congresspeople who have reasons to push that agenda.
In fact, if you look at the way the whole “health” industry has been eroded by increases in Malpractice Insurance, increases in health insurance, and the privatization of much of our health care structure to the detriment of both health care providers and the patients they care for, you realize that the whole structure is an unsustainable mess. Health care costs in other countries are a fraction of what they are here in the US. When you look at the countries that come out ahead of us, many of them do not rely on Health Insurance as a way to ensure health care for all. Yet the data from the OECD on health care has been used by the Insurance industry, through the press, to push the idea of US Federal Health Insurance, which could very well make the whole mess much worse instead of better, based on how there is precious little oversight on the insurance industry compared to the abuses that have been perpetrated by that industry. Oddly enough, the article about the OECD data doesn’t at all point to the reasons that US Health costs are spiralling out of control and why the level of care had dropped, which can, in many cases, be attributed directly to the cost of malpractice insurance for doctors, liability insurance for hospitals and other care facilities, and price caps put on care by those same insurance companies, resulting in people not getting the care that physicians may deem best for patients.
Next up is OIL and Biofuels, which, surprisingly, go hand in hand, since they’re both being sold to the American People by powerful Corporate interests who wish to reap short term profits at the expense of our long term survival as a country, and wring every last bit of profit possible out of a failed and unsustainable business model, up to and including prolonging an illegal and immoral war to obtain an increasingly scarce resource. Instead of increasing fuel efficiency in cars like other countries have done, US car companies are moving in reverse, since research and development into new models is more expensive than simply re-engineering old and lobbying Congress to hold off on new CAFE standards. Meanwhile Oil Corporations flaunt their influence by neglecting to pay royalties on oil from US Federal Lands, thus ripping off US Taxpayers. And more efficient diesel vehicles that are sold in Europe and have no problem meeting European Air Quality standards, don’t meet the same air quality standards in the US because of the difference in the quality of the refining of diesel fuel in the US to much lower standards, another example of Corporate influence.
So what’s with Ethanol, the big savior the current administration is pushing as our salvation? It’s unsustainable. When you tie the cost of food to the cost of fuel it’s an unsustainable disaster. China already realizes it, why can’t US politicians? Yet farmland in the MidWest continues to rise in price to the point where farmers growing food can’t afford it. And US taxpayers are paying for all this numerous times- in the taxes that go to support the farm subsidies for corn and in the lower gas mileage they get when ethanol is mixed with gas. Meanwhile the dough would be better spent on research into sustainable energy resources.
I can probably come up with dozens more examples, but these are bad enough. And in order to keep supporting these broken and unsustainable business models the Telecomm and Media Corporations are consolidating to control the Message. This is what the Net Neutrality fight is all about.
So don’t be a good little corporate Sheeple. Wake up. Smell the Organic Fair Trade Coffee. Throw out your TV. And start voting against Entrenched Corporate Controlled Incumbent Candidates in Office. (Senator Specter, your ears should be ringing on this one . . . )
Technorati Tags: The USA is Broken, Net Neutrality, Health Care, Oil, Biofuel, Iraq, CAFE standards, Health Insurance, Planned Obsolescence, PR, Marketing
10/9/07, 12:35 AM |
The USA has been “broken” for a long, long, long, long time. Since long before Bush II came along. It’s been broken since shortly after its founding, but no one realized it then. It just keeps getting worse and worse.