Corporate expenditures for hiring the "PR psychiatric manipulation industry"(public relations firms) exceed $10 billion each year. Our federal government spends over $2.3 billion to do the same. Both figures are considered underestimates.
Rampton and Stauber (authors of Trust Us, We're Experts') refer to the news media as the "disinfotainment industry" since they claim 40% of all news stories are planted by PR firms for paying clients; in other words, corporate propaganda. The news media creates the limits on public discussion and on public policy debate. What is excluded can be significant.
As an example, each year the number of cases of occupational illness (800,000) exceeds that of AIDS and approximately equals the totals for cancer and all circulatory diseases. But do you hear about it?
Work-related illnesses kill 80,000 workers each year, twice the toll from auto accidents. In 1991, it was reported that 200,000 workers had died on the job since passage of the OSHA Act in 1970 and another 2 million workers had died from diseases directly caused by working conditions. That is 273 work-related deaths a day, each and every day of the year. Also during the same 1970-1990 period, 1.4 million workers were permanently disabled in workplace accidents. Do you hear about it?
Corporate propaganda involves buying scientific opinions and placing them in scientific journals. "It's a systematic effort to pollute the scientific literature," says professor of medicine Stanton Glantz. A 1996 survey found that 34% of articles in major life science and biomedical journals had authors with identifiable financial connections to the research. "Science, like democracy, depends crucially upon the free flow of information."
"Corporate funding creates a culture of secrecy that can be as chilling to free academic inquiry as funding from the military." "Tax cuts" remove government funding of such public services as medical research and replace it with corporate funding which affords the opportunity to influence both the research agenda and research results. In 1999, the editor of JAMA said that private funding of medical research was causing "a race to the ethical bottom. . . The behavior of universities and scientists is sad, shocking and frightening."
PR experts and their corporate masters "deceive the courts, the legislatures, the media, educators and the public." Their goal is to discredit public decision-making and replace it with control by corporate elites. Trust them, they're experts. (Rachel's Environmental and Health News, #725, 5-24-01)
An increasing number of baby boomers are burning out and walking away from high-powered jobs in search of greater fulfillment elsewhere. "I think people have come to the realization that money is not the end-all," says one. Said another, when asked for advice to give fellow burned-out boomers, "Do what you enjoy — the hell with the money." (Associated Press, 3-10-02)
"Spotlight on a New Normal" is a handbook recently distributed to the entertainment industry's members counseling Hollywood's role regarding the war on terrorism. It wants members to draw on government resources for character and story line development. Some in the industry are expressing uneasiness about acting as government propagandists. (AP, 3-11-02)
While America is being distracted by its war on terrorism, the Bush administration is attacking public lands with mining, drilling and logging. With no vote yet on its energy policies, the administration has handed sensitive public lands to energy corporations. Twelve oil and gas leases have been approved around Utah's Redrock canyons without environmental reviews as the law requires. The BLM is scouring public lands for additional lease opportunities, reversing its past efforts to protect resources.
Secretary Gail Norton has surrendered the Interior Department's veto power against environmentally damaging mining on federal land. She has cleared the way for a Canadian company to create a mile-wide, cyanide-leach, open pit gold mine on ancestral lands of the Quechan Tribe. The mine will create a 30 stories tall pile of toxic tailings and destroy dozens of sacred and archeological sites. (Nature's Voice, NRDC, 3/4-02)
The Department of the Interior has also acknowledged that its Bureau of Indian Affairs has misplaced between 4 and 10 billion dollars that legally belong to members of various tribes. The money, generated from sales of oil, natural gas, coal, timber and other resources, was in 300,000 various accounts being held in trust to protect native Americans from being cheated or abused yet one more time.
The principle chief of the Cherokees says it's just a "part of a bigger picture." In 1785, the US promised the Cherokees a delegate to Congress in exchange for 6 million acres of their land. Again in 1836, the same promise was made in exchange for an additional 81 million acres. The agreement was ratified by two-thirds of the U.S. Senate but the Cherokee are still waiting for the agreement to be honored. (Morning News, Jack Moseley editorial, 2-02)
An upcoming UA symposium will focus on reducing people's resistance to persuasive arguments and offers. This area of social psychology is "a new and potentially more effective approach to the field of social influence." In addition to the field of psychology, the symposium is relevant to marketing, sociology, communication, advertising and public relations. (Morning News, 3-9-02)