We All Know What
Trump Means When He Says the Election Is Rigged
October 17, 2016
Rush Limbaugh
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me ask you a quick question here,
folks. If a Democrat campaign headquarters office, say a Hillary for
president campaign office, in a sizable left-wing university town, if it's
blown up, you think you'd hear about it? Nothing but that, right?
If a Democrat headquarters, a Hillary campaign headquarters had been blown up,
do you think the Drive-Bys would be blaming Hillary's rhetoric for it?
Kind of doubt that. Do you think that may be all you would be hearing
about?
If a Democrat headquarters were blown up, do you think
that you would hear anybody say, "Well, you know, Hillary's responsible.
She's out there saying all these irresponsible things, the Hillary
campaign." No. And then they'd be tracking down every
potential Republican suspect starting with Trump and then Trump's family and
then Trump's campaign staff and then some of Trump's redneck supporters and
some of these whoever, you name it.
They would be devoting every waking moment to finding out
if the Tea Party did it, if some conservative madcap group did it, if somebody
on the hate crime list did it. And then they would be wringing their
hands, and they'd been talking about the threat to democracy posed by all of
this. And if Hillary Clinton were claiming that the election were rigged,
do you think that they would be investigating her claim?
If Hillary Clinton or Tim Kaine, the eye, or anybody else
on the Democrat side were complaining of any aspect of the election being
rigged or if they discovered that the media was dramatically in favor of Donald
Trump, do you think that they would be talking about it? Damn right they
would. And if Hillary were claiming the election were rigged, they would
assume it is rigged, and they'd be looking for Republican suspects.
And Obama would be enacting the Justice Department to
conduct an investigation, the civil rights division would be impaneled, and
they would pull out all the stops to go out and find out who in fact is
rigging, and they would find somebody just like the guy that produced the video
that caused the uprising in Benghazi. They would find somebody, they
would charge somebody, try to put them in jail right now. They would find
their family.
They're doing none of that. And yet both of those
things have happened, except it was a Republican campaign headquarters, a Trump
headquarter office in North Carolina in the same county where you'll find the
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and just across the border boundary
line from Duke University. You can't find any reference to this outside
the so-called conservative media. The Drive-By Media is not concerned
with it at all. What they are concerned with is Trump's allegation the
election is rigged. They are acting like that this is the greatest threat
that our country has faced recently, this unhinged allegation challenging the
legitimacy, the authenticity, the sacrosanct nature of our elections, and
Trump's out there accusing them of being rigged.
And the Drive-Bys are righteously indignant, they are
offended, and they can't get over it. Meanwhile, people are wondering if
Julian Assange is alive. Supposedly his connection to the internet has
been terminated. I think Julian Assange is alive, but I'm gonna tell you
there's a 1% out there that everybody needs to refocus on, and it's been
exposed by WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks has exposed a vast left-wing conspiracy
made up of the Democrat Party, Wall Street, and the media.
That's the top 1% that Americans should worry about, instead
of the top 1% of the rich, which is a standard ploy every two years, every
election year. The Democrats yank out of their playbook the rich aren't
paying their fair share, but the 1%, the top 1% that Americans should worry
about as exposed by WikiLeaks, this vast left-wing conspiracy: Democrats, Wall
Street, media.
Now, back to this Trump charge the election is
rigged. Mr. Snerdley, interrupt for a moment your screening of calls. Let
me ask you off the top of your head, what do you think Trump is talking about
when he says the election is rigged? What is he talking about?
Exactly. He's talking about the media. He's talking about the fact
that 95% of the media is stacked against him. He's talking about all the
dirty tricks the media are playing, he's talking about that.
Rudy Giuliani's talking about the dead vote. It
can't be denied. Dead people vote, and they vote Democrat. They did
it for JFK in Illinois and West Virginia in 1960. But the righteous
indignation coming from the media and the Democrats as though some precious
thing has been violated here that's just unacceptable. I even saw on TV
today a Republican official lamenting this, that this is such an unnecessary
and such an unfortunate assault on one of the greatest God-given acts that
humanity engages in, that is the presidential election, and to taint it this
way is just -- you know, folks, I actually think so much stuff is out of
proportion.
By the way, Rush Limbaugh, I didn't tell you my name
because everybody knows who I am, and I didn't tell you the phone number
because you know what that is. 800-282-2882.
The proportion of people that think the election is over
and Trump's toast, these people are acting, I don't know, like they don't think
that. And look, I'm not the guy sitting here trying to offer you false
optimism. I don't engage in that. Something's not right here.
I can't put my finger on it. The left, for having something in the bag,
they're not happy. They're not pre-celebrating. They're not pre-popping
champagne corks. They're out there angrier than ever, which is not
new. I mean, they're angry all the time, and they do get angry as they
succeed. It's one of the craziest psychological things about them.
But there's a guy out there with an account on social
media. By the way, I need to add social media into this top 1% of deceit,
this intricately woven web of deceit, you have the Democrats, Wall Street,
media, and social media. I would throw them in. That's the top 1% that
everybody needs to be concerned about. There is an account on social
media from a guy claiming to work for the post office who is bragging about how
he is destroying Trump absentee ballots.
Let me ask you this. If a postal worker went on
social media, don't care whether it was Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit,
you name it, and was bragging about destroying Hillary absentee ballots, do you
think they'd be trying to hunt this guy down and put him in jail with the guy
who made the video that started Benghazi? They wouldn't be stopping.
They'd find this guy, they'd hunt him down, give him to Marilyn Mosby and say,
"Have at him." Charge him here, charge him there, put him in
the back of a Baltimore police van and let's see what he looks like when he
comes out. Whatever it takes. They would be unearthing everything
to find out who this guy is.
What Trump is talking about with rigged election is the
without doubt completely in the tank for Hillary media, which isn't media,
again, and it's not even journalism anymore. And that's the nature of
"rigged." Now, in terms of polling places and things being done
with early voting and this absentee ballot stuff here being destroyed, Trump
absentee ballots being destroyed, how would you know, by the way, when absentee
ballot cast for who, how would you know which ones to destroy, which ones not
to? I've never seen an absentee ballot, never filed one, never done one,
I've never been at the voting office when they come, so I don't know what they
look like. (interruption) So you'd have to open it?
So you've got a postal worker out there admitting he's
opening absentee ballots that have been mailed in and he's just destroying the
ones for Trump. What happens if he opens one up for Hillary, gotta reseal it? I
guess they don't care, what does it matter, as long as it says Hillary on it,
what do the Democrats care where it came from? It could be postmarked
Mars and they'll take it.
Anyway, how are you, folks? I can't tell you so
many people I know -- and I heard Newt say this on TV over the weekend.
He thinks that -- and I've got friends, smart, engaged friends who think that
everybody's gonna go to bed on election night prepared for a massive surprise
and shock and wake up to find one, and that is Trump winning. And they're
basing it on real evidence. Well, I don't know if you can call it
evidence. They're basing it on things that they see, Trump's
rallies.
By the way, in the Stack of
Stuff today I have a story from somebody, I think it's at
TheHill.com. If it's not The Hill; it's something like that.
Anyway, somebody, a writer there, actually went to a Trump event wanting to
document that it's a bunch of toothless, gummer, Deliverance types out there
shouting all kinds of insults at Hillary, basically hayseed hicks, combined IQ
at a Trump rally of a pencil eraser is what they think, and the guy or the
girl, whoever, was stunned and shocked at what she saw or he saw in terms of
the substance, in terms of Trump's supporters.
In other words, it was another glaring example of how the
media creates these images that they then believe and then when confronted with
reality they are in absolute shock and don't believe what they see. And
in this case the writer saw a Trump really that was at total variance of what
he or she expected on the plus side. In audio sound bite roster we've got
an infobabe who went somewhere and talked to a woman that loves this program,
and she said, "You know what, I've gotta find out why. I've gotta find out
why this woman --" and the reporter that you'll hear in the sound bite's
coming up was shocked at what she had heard.
So the Trump rallies continue to be huge. I can't
tell you the number of emails I get from people who are either at these rallies
or watching them on the Web and who say if the media were covering these, Trump
would be up by 10 points. If the media were televising these rallies of
what Trump is saying and the way the public is reacting to him, then it would
be an entirely different campaign. And by contrast, Hillary is in
hibernation, Hillary's hiding, can't find anybody that can find her.
She's not out there doing personal appearances anywhere. The outward
signs, you got the polling data -- by the way, Washington Post/ABC poll, latest
one out, Hillary up by four. That is margin of error. In fact, you
could call it a dead heat given the margin of error in the Washington Post
poll.
I think when the Washington Post reports their poll they
discredit their own poll in a way by calling our attention to other polls that
show Hillary much farther ahead. But this poll has to have some of the
people in the media distressed. Here we are three weeks out and the
ABC/Washington Post poll shows Hillary leading Trump by four. Even if
that were outside the margin of error, stop and think of this now. This
is four points. Here's what the Washington Post says.
"The poll was conducted during one of the most
tumultuous periods of Trump's candidacy, after the release of a video in which
he spoke about taking sexual advantage of women and during a time when numerous
women have accused him of sexual misconduct. ... Nonetheless, the controversy
appeared to have had only a minimal impact on his overall support."
Let me translate that for you. "We thought we
had him this time. We made him out to be the next Bill Cosby, not
Clinton. Sorry. The timing was perfect, the same kind of October
surprise we used to destroy Romney, Bob Dole, Herman Cain, you name it. We
turned that Goody Two-shoes Mitt Romney into a monster. If it wasn't for
9/11 we could have taken out Bush 43 like we did his dad."
In other words, if Trump is at four points after withstanding
this barrage, then they have to be scratching their heads. Now, I want to
remind you of one more thing. We're getting close now to the period of
time where the pollsters are going to have to start showing the race as it
is. Now, I'm of the opinion they're not yet. I'm of the opinion
that they're still using their polls to make news, to shape public opinion,
rather than reflect it.
But as we get closer to the election -- we're not there
yet, by the way. But as we get closer to the election, all of these
polling companies are gonna want to be right when it's all over. So the polls
that we get a week prior, the last polls before the election from all of these
different outfits probably will be closer to what they really think is gonna
happen, and because they have their reputations to protect after the election
is over. Of course, they may not care about that anymore, it's such a
one-sided thing. Nothing is gonna happen to them if the blow it.
But there still is this professional reputation. So
we'll see if other polls start to tighten and get closer as we near Election
Day. But the conventional wisdom is that Trump's toast, he's had it, he's
unhinged. He won't stop talking about these women. He won't stop reacting. He
won't stay on issues. Except when you go to one of his rallies he's
totally on issues. And the people are as revved as they've ever been, and
more people are showing up at Trump rallies than ever before, and more people
are being turned away because they can't fit in than ever before.
And everybody tells you, "You can't judge it by
that, Rush. That's not scientific data. That's anecdotal. That's
just people talking." Well, it's not just people talking; we see
it. "Yeah, but we don't know who those people are. We don't
know how many of them are actually Hillary supporters that are just
rubbernecking." I doubt that is the case.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. So ABC News/Washington Post has
the race at Hillary plus four. NBC News is just out with a new poll with
the Wall Street Journal. Hillary Clinton ahead of Trump by double
digits. It's 11 points with just over three weeks until Election
Day. This according to a brand-new national NBC News and Wall Street
Journal poll conducted entirely after the second debate.
"In a four-way race, Democrat Clinton holds an
11-point lead over Republican Trump among likely voters, 48 percent to 37
percent, with Libertarian Gary Johnson at 7 percent and the Green Party's Jill
Stein at 2 percent. In a two-way contest without Johnson and Stein, Clinton is
ahead by 10 points, 51 percent to 41 percent."
I have a little bit of a question, it's obviously
rhetorical, but, you know, the Drive-Bys are prohibited from announcing the
winners in various states on Election Day 'til the polls close, right?
They observe this. It started back in 1980, by the way, I'll tell you
why. My question is, how come they can run article after article after
article claiming that Hillary has won certain states already when early voting
is already taking place? But you can't report on election returns before
a state is closed, yet early voting doesn't have any prohibition.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Folks, I want to remind you again what is happening
here with this obvious out-of-balance media coverage of Trump. I'm not trying
to do a See, I Told You So, but I have mentioned countless times that this is
what it's always gonna look like whenever an outsider attempts to defeat and
oust the establishment. It's gonna look like this no matter who the
nominee is, if the nominee is a genuine outsider.
The establishment owns the establishment. They are
the media. They are Wall Street. They are some major corporations
in terms of donors. They are elected officials in both parties and they
have worked hard. The establishment's been around as long as
humanity. Every organization of human beings has its elite members, from
a town, to a town council, to a sports team, there are always the special few
elites. They know it and they work hard to protect it. And they work very
hard building walls to keep people out of it, particularly people who want to
overthrow it.
So this is what it's always going to look like. The
people who are members of the establishment, the elite 1% here that make up the
establishment are going to circle the wagons and join forces, and they're just
not gonna trust their fate to a normal, everyday, standard-operating-procedure
election taking place under the auspices of democracy. They're just not
going to. They didn't get power by randomly winning things. They
didn't keep their power by hoping that random events continue to fall in their
favor.
They got power by taking it. They keep power by
engineering the outcome of events that keeps them in power. It's the
nature. You could almost say the human nature, the psychological aspects
of this. So it's understandable in that sense that they're not just going
to sit by and watch a campaign happen and then deal with whatever the results
are, especially if they lose.
They're not even gonna give that a chance. They're
going to go to every length possible to eliminate any possibility that any
outsider is going to succeed. So they have, in this case, done so.
They've joined forces and it's all-out destruction: personal, career, political,
you name it, all-out destruction of anybody who joins the outsider in his, in
this case Trump's, effort.
Now, even within the establishment you have groups. Even
within the establishment you've got your top dog ruling class and then people
that are not yet at that level, but they're still in the group, and they want
to stay in the group. And they want to climb the ladder that exists in
that group to get to the pinnacle. Some of them do. In this case
I'm describing Republican members of the establishment. They want to stay
there. They don't want to be ousted.
That's why they're not in any way, shape, manner, or form
supporting Trump because they don't want outsiders to take over the vaunted
positions of power that run the world. And that's what these positions do.
People in the establishment, the elite establishment of the United States not
only run America, they run the world in consort with other establishment
members around the world -- United Nations and various other friendly nation
states.
They all circle the wagons for each other, and they will
protect each other when they're under assault. When they have staved off
an assault, they'll go back to internecine battles among their own selves and
their own group, but their circling the wagon. This is what it looks
like. It was never gonna be easy. It was never going to be
fair. The media was never gonna roll over and just let this happen.
They're part of it. The media is part of what I call the
media-establishment complex or the top 1%.
I think a lot of people would have crumbled by now if
they had been dished the treatment Trump has gotten. I think a lot of
people would have caved and said, "You know what? I've got a life
after all of this is over and I don't want these people destroying what I'm doing
here." They would have caved. They would have quit. They would have ceded
or what have you.
Trump has not done that and I think the establishment is
kind of surprised and shocked and a little not sure what's going on here.
Because the one thing they know is that their hold on power is, as this is
demonstrating, they are a minority. They govern against the will of the
people. Once it is discovered who and what they are, it's very obvious
that they are not us and that they do not share our concerns and that they're
not nationalistic Americans the way we are.
They view America in an entirely different way as part of
a global organization and arrangement. Their power goes way beyond their
positions in the United States. So here comes an outsider, and they're gonna
destroy the outsider whoever he or she is. This is what it looks
like. And it is always going to look like this, until it happens.
And if it does happen, if an outsider ever really wins, I shudder to think what
the aftermath is going to be. We'll deal with that, should it
occur. But I just want to remind everybody that's what this is.
There's no pretense of fairness, and there never was
gonna be. There's no pretense of objectivity, and there was never gonna
be. There's no pretense of anything but rigged. You know, in the
sense that Trump means it, he's right. When I say rigged, the
establishment is using every asset it has to ensure that they win this.
They're not leaving it up to just a vote, like you're taught in civics 101 that
elections take place and the winners win, the losers lose, and you have
campaigns, fundraising, they're not leaving it up to any of that. And
they were never going to.
So in that sense, if the powerful, using every aspect of
their power to hold on to their power equals rigging the game, I mean, there's
no doubt that that's happening. But it's also not surprising.
Shouldn't be, anyway. I mean, many of the people in the establishment are
not there because of the democratic process. The elected ones are, but
there are vastly many more people within the elite, the establishment, that
have never been elected to anything.
They got there in an entirely different way, they stay
there entirely different ways, and many of them have much more power over
elected officials, as we are seeing.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Just now, John King -- we're talking about polls,
we got the ABC News/Washington Post poll, which was taken after the debate,
second debate and with all the allegations from these women. Many of these
allegations, by the way, are being blown smithereens. Many of the
allegations from women saying Trump abused them have been blown to
smithereens.
The Drive-Bys are not covering any of that. They're
sticking with the original theme which is that Trump is a reprobate and doesn't
matter what Bill Clinton did. The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll is
out showing Hillary up 11, same time frame as the Washington Post/ABC poll that
shows Hillary up by four. Here is, just moments ago, John King Inside
Politics on CNN.
KING: Battleground state of Ohio, good news for
Donald Trump: Trump up 48% to 44%. North Carolina, poll shows
Hillary Clinton with the narrowest of lead, a one-point lead. So
statistically a dead heat. Go west to Nevada. This one's a bit of a
surprise. 46-44, again a very narrow Clinton lead. The
statisticians would say that's a dead heat. If you look at those numbers
right there and you're a Trump supporter, well, after a tough couple of weeks
reason to see the glass is half full, right? But if you look the other
map, the electoral map, Clinton's state-by-state advantage is still pretty
overwhelming heading into the stretch. The hard truth for Trump is, she
can afford to lose all three of those states and still win election.
RUSH: So you see how this works. They have
new polling data, great news for Trump in all these states, but it doesn't
matter, because Hillary is still gonna win. I think they're not sure of
that. In fact, I know they're not sure of that because that's what's
shaping the way they are continuing to report on this. And if you look at
the polling data, there's an interesting aspect to all of these polls, and that
is that Hillary Clinton is not at 50% in any of them.
And nobody's talking about that aspect I think largely because
in many of these polls now there are four people. Hillary and Trump and then
Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. So you got four people there and it divvies the
vote up. I know Bill Clinton didn't win with 50%. But they're making
Hillary out to be slam dunk massive landslide winner. She's not at
50%. She's back below it. She hasn't been at 50% or over.
They really ballyhooed that. I think, what was it, the Reuters/Ipsos when
she was up 11 and they had her at 50 over, they just went bonkers. They
were ecstatic, 51%. But she's back below it now.
The people that pay attention to polling, that's
weird. That doesn't jibe with somebody running away with this. And
the fact that she is projected to be this landslide winner and she can't get to
50% I think might give some of them on her side pause, might concern some of
them, because she's not demonstrating any upward movement. You might say
that whatever polls are being taken show is that Trump is losing ground.
But she's not gaining any. She's not likable. She doesn't have
charismatic type personality. I don't know, folks. I don't know
anything. It just doesn't seem that the people on the winning side of
this who think they've already won it in a landslide, they just don't seem
happy. I don't know.
END TRANSCRIPT
HITLER'S LEGACY
The power of the press can be used to deliberately lead
people astray, and to make them believe whatever propagandists want them to
believe. In honor of the first man to use them I call modern propaganda and
information-management techniques "Hitler's Legacy".
When Adolph Hitler took power in Germany he also took
over the media, and he used it to shape a modern, civilized country to his
ends. With full control of the national press his propaganda minister Paul
Josef Goebbels developed sophisticated and very effective tools of propaganda
to control public opinion in Germany, and even in other countries.
He proved that if you repeat a lie often enough in mass
media, most people will accept it as the truth.
That's powerful stuff, and propaganda may be the most
dangerous weapon developed in the Second World War. The atom bomb scared so
many people that we had mass movements trying to control it, but the general
public seems to have missed the significance of the power of propaganda.
While governments spent billions to improve nuclear
weapons and to test a very few of them in isolated areas, private companies in
the advertising industry spent even more money to develop new propaganda
techniques and they tested and used them on all of us.
Now some advertising agencies have bigger budgets and
more actual power than Goebbels did. Their power is not as naked as his but,
because they control the money, they control the media.
And while Goebbels controlled relatively few radio
stations, newspapers and billboards, the power of advertising is exerted over a
much more powerful and efficient net of media.
We like to pretend that advertising agencies use their
power only to sell commercial goods, but we know they also plan election
campaigns for politicians, and "manage" public perception of
governments. Politicians pretend that their advertising managers have no
political power, but it's obvious that the man who controls the election also
controls the politician.
There are some limitations on advertising -- it's
supposed to be illegal to use subliminal advertising on movies and TV, for
example -- but the limits are not enforceable.
When Vance Packard thought he saw subliminal imagery in
magazine advertisements, he wrote a book about them. {Hidden Persuaders} was a
best seller, but the images are still there.
Are there other techniques we don't know about? It sounds
paranoid, but we have to assume there are techniques that even some advertising
people don't know about. We are talking about a multi-billion dollar business
in which one agency's secret technique can give it an advantage over another.
The only thing we can be sure of is that they have millions of dollars a year
to fund research, and that they have good reason to keep their discoveries
secret.
But even without secret techniques, advertising in
general has effects the advertisers do not plan and may not understand. The
problem is that the best way to sell something is to make people unhappy with
what they already have.
If I want to sell you a new car my first move is to
convince you that your old car -- or whatever form of transportation you're
using now -- is no longer adequate for your needs.
It does me no good to prove that the Drof car I am trying
to sell is better than the Egdod that someone else offers unless I have already
convinced you that you need a new car.
So first I have to convince you that you need a new car,
and so do the people who sell Egdods, Kcuibs and other cars.
Meanwhile the people who sell appliances tell you that
your refrigerator is inadequate, and so-forth. The message is buried in each ad
but it's always there, and the effect is cumulative.
And because of that it's very powerful. With a dozen or
more other car makers making conflicting claims I may not be able to convince
you that a Drof car is better than the others, but between us all we can
probably convince you that your present form of transportation is not adequate.
Other advertisers' claims conflict too, but the one point
on which they all agree is that whatever you have now, you need more and will
not be happy until you get it. The message is buried as a secondary part of
each ad but it is there and, because the media is controlled by the
advertisers, it also pervades the supposedly non-advertising component of the
media.
Many salesmen will spend more to have some
"responsible" journalist spread a message than they will for
advertising. A "puff" article is a good investment because a reader
may be suspicious of advertising, but may accept the journalist's comments as
an honest judgment. That's why some advertisements are disguised to look like
news stories.
North American public relations agencies have more
employees than North American news media have reporters, and in 1990 a study
found that nearly 40% of the contents of American newspapers began with press
releases or other information from public relations agencies.
Most reporters would say that the media is not controlled
by advertisers and they would think they were telling the truth. When I worked
as a newspaper reporter, I wrote what I believed.
But as a reporter I have had some very pleasant vacations
in Europe, Mexico and resort areas of the U.S.A. and Canada, and dozens of
expensive meals, at the expense of advertisers. They didn't buy my opinions,
but they did spend a lot of money to make friends.
And I have seen deliberate manipulation of the news. In
the late 1960's I shot free-lance newsfilm for several TV stations in southern
Ontario. At that time a pressure group wanted the Canadian military to lend a
Hercules transport plane to a group that was trying to get aid to one side or
the other in the Nigerian civil war.
CFTO-TV assigned me to cover the group's
"demonstration" outside the Air Transport Command station at Trenton,
Ont. By the time I got there several other TV crews were waiting, but there
were no "demonstrators". On schedule, a car and a couple of small
vans arrived. A PR man from the car spoke to us, then to the guards outside the
station, then waved his people out of the vans.
For about five minutes about a dozen
"demonstrators" marched in circles, waved signs and chanted slogans
in front of the gate while we of the press took pictures, choosing our camera
angles to make the dozen people look like a mob. Then the PR man asked if we
had enough.
The others said okay but I pointed out that there was a
Hercules plane parked in the airfield across the road. If I used a long lens
and the "demonstrators" marched in exactly the right place, I could
get a shot of them marching with the plane in the background.
I did and they did, until I got the shot. Then they all
climbed into the vans and went home. The marchers didn't give a damn about the
planes or about Nigeria, all they cared about was that they had all been paid
to march in front of the cameras.
I told the news editor about this when I handed in my
film. He told me that he already knew about it, and that it had all been
properly "arranged". So much for the integrity of the press.
That was deliberate manipulation by a pressure group, but
the media is mostly controlled by the big advertisers who control it because
they control the money. And it's hard to fault them because they spend money
where they think it will do the most good, on media that appeals to people who
may buy their products. If I advertise cars, I will use media that I think will
appeal to people who might buy the kind of cars I want to sell.
If the media looks good to me that's because the
publisher shares my view of the world, and he hires editors and reporters who
share his view of the world. There is no need for an organized plot because the
advertisers hold the purse strings and they decide which media will prosper,
and therefore which view of the world will be disseminated.
The view of the world that advertisers like is the one
that says you can't be happy until you have bought every single thing they have
to sell. Obviously you will never succeed but that's no problem for the
advertisers, because you will keep trying.
And you can bet that you will not be content for long
with anything you buy, because most modern products have flaws built into them.
In earlier years skilled craftsmen built deliberate flaws into their work
because the gods might become jealous of perfect craftsmanship. Modern
designers do it to avoid the fate of Singer and Underwood.
For more than 100 years Singer made some of the best sewing
machines in the world and at one time it was probably the biggest maker of
sewing machines in the world. The hitch was that the original Singer sewing
machines were so good they almost never broke down or wore out, and after they
filled their market with sewing machines the business faded. Singer was taken
over and another company now operates under the Singer name. The original is
gone.
Until the arrival of computers in the late 1970's and
early 1980's newspaper reporters around the world used Underwood typewriters
made in the 1930's and 40's. The "number five", made in the 1940's
was a special favorite. Underwood typewriters dating back to the 1920's may
still be in use, but the company was taken over by Olivetti in the 1960's.
Tire makers did very well in the days when good tires for
cars and trucks lasted perhaps 30,000 miles each. Now car tires last 50,000 to
100,000 miles and with retreads some truck tires will last several hundred
thousand miles. One-time industry giant Firestone has been taken over by
Bridgestone, most small tire companies are dead or dying and some of the big
ones are in trouble.
Most manufacturers have learned the lesson and some
modern products will last very well, but they won't give satisfaction for long.
In some cases that takes careful design because car
makers, for example, can't afford basic flaws in their products. Cars with
serious flaws must be recalled, and recalls cost millions.
Car manufacturers can't afford to skimp on basic
durability either, because if they did some cars would fail within the warranty
period and be very expensive to maintain. In fact modern cars last so long that
car makers would have real problems if they didn't build in some petty flaws
and minor inconveniences to make their products less than perfect.
Your car may work perfectly well but as it ages some
unimportant function will fail and fail again. Petty inconveniences will add up
and media hype of the latest gizmos will make you look at the ads for new cars.
The classic example of hype and flaws is the fashion
industry. Designers know that almost any change can look good if it's presented
in a fashion show with media hype and they all offer completely "new"
lines every year. Some do better than others but most prosper, thanks partly to
a barrage of magazine articles and TV "news" items which in fact add
up to free advertising for the fashion industry.
Mass market clothes follow the same trends, with a bit of
a twist. Basic designs may not change much but some products have petty flaws
built into them to make sure they do not last, or do not give satisfaction for
too long.
Some products are just plain cheap, but modern
merchandising can sell them too. In mass-market stores many goods are
blister-packed, so you can't actually tell what you're buying. If it looks good
it will sell, and you won't find out what it's really like until too late.
These are all petty annoyances but they add up and they
help set the stage for another development of propaganda. In a country of happy
Germans Hitler might never have taken power but, thanks to economic problems
created by the Treaty of Versailles, most Germans were poor and desperate for a
change.
We have no Treaty of Versailles but the general low-level
malaise and discontent created by the advertising industry and by
"creative" merchandising makes us more vulnerable to manipulation.
This next bit is speculation, but it's speculation on the
level of "if I jump out of the window I may fall to the ground."
Through the late 1960's and most of the 1970's the US
fought a hot war in Vietnam and a cold war throughout the world. We know that
there was considerable opposition within the States to the Vietnam War, and we
know that Russian intelligence services had access to some very powerful
propaganda and persuasion techniques and a spy network that spread through most
of the free world.
I have no proof or even evidence that Russian undercover
agents taught propaganda techniques to activists at American universities, but
if they did not the Russian intelligence service did not do its job.
Idealistic professors also taught propaganda techniques
during this period and probably some semi-secret techniques leaked out of
advertising agencies. One way and another, the science of persuasion and
manipulation made a quantum leap in the years from 1960 to 1980.
And however they learned their techniques I also know
that since the 1970's some of the people who protested the Vietnam War have
done very well in the social action business. Organizations that began as
idealistic crusades for equal rights or to save the whales or the seals or
other animals now have budgets of tens of millions of dollars a year.
They're all non-profit, of course, but what does that
mean? A private company works for profit, and the management of the company
turns that profit over to its shareholders. A non profit organization has no
shareholders and is not allowed to make a profit -- so management is required
to spend all the income on wages, staff perks and other expenses.
One of the few politicians to worry about
propaganda-based businesses is Hamilton-Wentworth MP John Bryden, who published
one report on the funding of special-interest groups in 1993 and another on
charities in 1996.
The 1996 report says Canada has 73,000 registered
charities and another 66,000 non-profit organizations, with total revenues that
Bryden estimates at more than $100 billion. The report has to estimate the
total because financial information on the 66,000 non-profit organizations is
"confidential" -- bureaucratic for secret -- but numbers for the
73,000 "charities" are available.
Between them they share a total income of about $86
billion dollars -- about 13% of Canada's total economic activity -- they have
about $109 billion in assets and they employ about 1.3 million people, or about
12% of Canada's total work force. The numbers are not quite so mind-blowing
when you remember that hospitals and universities are "charities",
but they are still pretty big.
We expect governments to contribute to hospitals and
universities but most of the 73,000 registered Canadian charities are neither
universities nor hospitals, and some of them are open to serious question. By
definition a charity helps people in need but some Canadian charities confine
their activities to special groups.
In 1990 the Auditor General reported that one Canadian
corporation had donated $5 million to several foundations whose directors were
related to the corporation, and that the foundations had immediately loaned the
money back, plus interest charges. Because the money was given to registered
charities the gifts were deductible for tax purposes, and loans are not
taxable.
Financial records for most non profit organizations are a
closed book -- Revenue Canada sees them but the information is privileged --
but the salaries paid to top executives of Canadian charities are supposed to
be public information. Bryden reports that about 25% of Canadian charities --
more that 18,000 organizations -- do not report the salaries they pay to top
executives.
By law a public charity is supposed to devote 80% of the
money it receives in donations to charitable works, but most Canadian charities
get most of their money from the government or from business, rather from
donations, and there is no control on how they spend it.
Bryden reports that in 1994 The Standards Council of
Canada received $33,000 in donations, $6 million in funding and $3 million as
payment for services. Gross revenues were $8,877,974, management and
administration costs were $8,515,864 and the council spent $8,916 on "charitable
activities".
A non-profit organization can run on a lean budget and do
good work but it can also take very good care of the people who run it. Anyone
who understands propaganda techniques can make a very good living at good
works, and some do.
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