Propaganda: Psycho-Linguistics and Political Psychopathy

{A very thorough examination of the different methods employed in propaganda}

Propaganda is generally to be defined as a calculated, coordinated campaign carried out through media that are capable of reaching a large amount of people, to further a primarily political agenda, (although principles of propaganda can be applied equally to further a religious or commercial agenda also).

A number of techniques founded on social psychological research are used to generate propaganda. Many of these same techniques can be found under logical fallacies, since propagandists use arguments that, while sometimes convincing, are not necessarily valid.

A basic assertion is an enthusiastic or energetic proposition presented as a statement of fact, although of course it is not necessarily true. Assertions often imply that the statement requires no explanation or evidence, but that it should merely be accepted without question.

Examples of assertions can be found often in advertising propaganda. Any time an advertiser states that their product is the best without providing evidence, they are using an assertion. The subjects are supposed to simply agree with the assertion without searching for additional information, or applying any reasoning. Assertions, although usually simple to spot, are often dangerous forms of propaganda because they often include damaging falsehoods or lies.

“Glittering generalities” is one of the seven main propaganda techniques identified by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in 1938. It also arises very often in politics and political propaganda. Glittering generalities are words that have different positive meaning for individual subjects, but are linked to highly valued concepts. For example, when a person is asked to do something in “defence of democracy” or “freedom” they are more likely to agree. The concepts of democracy and freedom have positive connotations to them because they are regarded as highly valued principles by the majority of people.

The “lesser of two evils” technique is an attempt to convince us of an idea or proposal by presenting it as the least offensive option. This technique is often implemented during wartime or economic recession to convince people of the need for sacrifices. This technique is often accompanied by adding blame on an enemy country or political group.

In the UK, we currently have a Government that exercises an unhealthy and considerable control of the media. It’s often possible to predict when the next round of cuts and austerity measures are going to be inflicted on us because the announcement of policy is typically preceded by media justification prior to the event, usually involving the demarcation and scapegoating of the social group to be affected by the policy.

We usually have a few weeks of the press stereotyping immigrants as a “free-loading drain on the taxpayer”, or poor sick and disabled people as “fraudsters” and “con artists”. Or unemployed people are portrayed as feckless, idle “spongers”, or lone parents as immoral and irresponsible “burdens”. But how else could a corrupt and authoritarian Government attempt to justify taking so much money from the poorest and most vulnerable citizens, whilst rewarding the wealthy with enormous tax cuts?

The current Government are most certainly outrageous propagandists, on par with the Nazi Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, controlling the news media in particular, with the aim of shaping and controlling public opinion. They create and justify neo-feudal subordination, oppressive hierarchical social structures, and the end of our humanist ideal and practice of shared citizenship.

I almost forgot to mention Cameron’s one remarkable but accidental, blurted out truth: We are raising more money for the rich. That is verifiable fact.

We must challenge this and we must fight it.

Habitually search for the evidence that refutes what you are being told by any of the Coalition.

It’s worth bearing in mind that when someone speaks or writes, they are trying to convince you of something. Ask yourself what it is that they want you to believe, then analyse their basic proposition carefully. Examine what they are saying, look for consistency, coherence, reasoning and logic, and look for the evidence to support the proposition, of course.

Critical thinking is essential to spark cogent, rational, open debate and provide a framework to support and guide the public to participate in well-informed discussions on current issues responsibly. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis in the US arose “to teach people how to think rather than what to think.”

Ad hominem – A Latin phrase which has come to mean attacking your opponent, as opposed to attacking their arguments. David Cameron employs this strategy with considerable psychopathic expertise in Parliamentary debate. (See Prime Ministers Questions).

Ad nauseam – This approach uses tireless repetition of an idea. An idea, especially a simple slogan, that is repeated enough times, may begin to be taken as the truth. This approach works best when media sources are limited and controlled by the propagator. Joseph Goebbels, not known to be driven by the passionate inspiration of the moment, but by the result of sober psychological calculation, was particularly talented in utilising this approach. Iain Duncan Smith has a similar penchant for repeated mendacity. A serial offender.

To justify his cruel and unwarranted welfare “reforms”, Iain Duncan Smith says that he has taken money that is essential for meeting the basic survival needs from the poorest people because “It’s fair to taxpayers.” Repeatedly.

Appeals to authority – this technique involves citing prominent figures to support a position, idea, argument, or course of action. The Tories, however, believe there are none who know better, or have more authority than the Tories. According to the Tories. See also Authoritarianism.

The Tories tend to “unload” or “neutralise” some of their language too, especially in discussion and debate about their policies. For example, using the word “reforms” rather than a more neutral word like changes, or a negative (and accurate) one like cuts. This is used to conceal the true aims and consequences of policies, and draws on Orwellian Doublespeak:  language that deliberately disguises, distorts, or even reverses the normative meaning of words.

Ad Horribilis – Appeals to fear seek to build support by instilling anxieties and panic in the general population. For example Goebbels exploited Theodore N. Kaufman’s Germany Must Perish! to claim that the Allies sought the extermination of the German people.

This strategy is often employed to justify racism.

Bandwagon – Bandwagon and “inevitable-victory” attempt to persuade the target audience to join in and take the course of action that “everyone else is taking.”

• Inevitable victory: invites those not already on the bandwagon to join those already on the road to certain victory. Those already, or at least partially on the bandwagon, are reassured that staying aboard is their best course of action.
• Join the crowd: This technique reinforces people’s natural desire to be on the winning side. See also Behaviourism.

Black and White fallacy – Presenting only two choices, with the product or idea being propagated as the better choice (e.g. “You are either with us, or you are with the enemy”). So this involves reducing complex issues to overly simplified and contrived oppositional dichotomies, and uncritically favouring one of the two schemata.

Big Lie – See also Disinformation. The repeated articulation of a complex of series of events that justify subsequent action. The descriptions of these events have elements of truth, and the “big lie” generalisations merge and eventually supplant the public’s accurate perception of the underlying events.

Common man – The ordinary folks or Common man approach is an attempt to convince the audience that the propagandist’s positions reflect the common sense of the people. It is designed to win the confidence of the audience by communicating in the common manner and style of the target audience. Propagandists use ordinary language and mannerisms (and clothe their message in face-to-face and audiovisual communications) in attempting to identify their point of view with that of the average person.

A common example of this type of propaganda is a political figure portrayed in a humble backyard, doing daily routine things. This image appeals to the “common person”. The Tories frequently try this one to attempt to shake off the solid, privileged, aristocratic and insular anti-social situation they inhabit, in vain attempts to appear “ordinary”.

Demonising the enemy – Making individuals from the opposing nation, from a different ethnic group, or those who support the opposing viewpoint appear to be subhuman. The systematic media demonisation of the recipients of any social support and welfare is an example. This is done to erode public sympathy and support for the poor, so that the Government can then remove such “costly” support and hand out taxpayer’s money to the wealthy and private companies instead.

Direct order – This technique is an attempt to simplify the decision-making process by using images and words to tell the audience exactly what actions to take, eliminating any other possible choices. Authority figures can be used to give the order, overlapping it with the Appeal to authority technique, but not necessarily.

Disinformation – The creation or deletion of information from public records, in the purpose of making a false record of an event or the actions of a person or organisation, including outright forgery of photographs, motion pictures, broadcasts, and sound recordings as well as printed documents. And in the case of the Tories, statistics (Iain Duncan Smith). See David “paying down the debt” Cameron also.

An example is Iain Duncan Smith’s lie about his education and qualifications, as stated in his biography on the Conservative Party website, his entry in Who’s Who, and various other places, which make the claim that he went to the Universita di Perugia in Italy. Mr Duncan Smith’s office has been forced to admit to Newsnight researchers investigating his academic background that he didn’t get any qualifications in Perugia, or even finish his exams. It’s easy to see why Mr Duncan Smith has made it his very own personal campaign to “monitor” the BBC for “left-wing bias.”

Euphoria – The use of an event that generates euphoria or “feel good”, happiness, or using an appealing event to boost morale, such as the Olympic games. Euphoria can also be created by declaring a holiday, or mounting a military parade with marching bands and patriotic messages. Royal weddings and births are elevated and spotlighted by the media for this purpose.

Flag-waving – An attempt to justify an action on the grounds that doing so will make one more patriotic, or in some way benefit a group, country, or idea. The feeling of patriotism which this technique attempts to inspire may not necessarily diminish or entirely omit one’s capability for rational examination of the matter in question.

In the most recent budget announcement by the Chancellor George Osborne, a measure was declared that proposes people who have “unfavourable English language skills should have their benefits cut”. A shallow, populist appeal to the shallow “common man” Daily Mail readers. Those who frequent the far-right saw this as a moment of national pride: “keeping Britain for the British”.

Intentional vagueness – Generalities are deliberately vague so that the audience may supply its own interpretations. The intention is to move the audience by use of undefined phrases, without analysing their validity or attempting to determine their reasonableness or application. The intent is to cause people to draw their own interpretations rather than simply being presented with an explicit idea. In trying to “figure out” the propaganda, the audience forgoes judgement of the ideas presented. Their validity, reasonableness and application may still be considered.

Not to be confused with “completely ignoring questions”. This is something of a speciality technique of David Cameron. He also mastered the technique of “getting away with it”, but that tends to come with experienced, psychopathic, aristocratic authoritarians.

Labeling – A Euphemism is used when the propagandist attempts to increase the perceived quality, credibility, or credence of a particular ideal. A Dysphemism is used when the intent of the propagandist is to discredit, diminish the perceived quality

Name-calling – Propagandists use this technique to incite fears and arouse prejudices in their hearers with the intent that the bad names will cause hearers to construct a negative opinion about a group or set of beliefs or ideas that the propagandist would wish hearers to denounce. The method is intended to provoke conclusions about a matter apart from impartial examinations of facts. Name-calling is thus a substitute for rational, fact-based arguments against the an idea or belief on its own merits.

Obtain disapproval or Reductio ad Hitlerum – This technique is used to persuade a target audience to disapprove of an action or idea by suggesting that the idea is popular with groups hated or feared by the target audience.

Red herring – Presenting data or issues that, while compelling, are irrelevant to the argument at hand, and then claiming that it validates the argument. Or if you are Iain Duncan Smith, invention of statistics is the preferred sub-set technique here.

Repetition – This type of propaganda deals with a jingle or word that is repeated over and over again, thus getting it stuck in someone’s head, so they can buy the product. The “Repetition” method has been described previously. A good example is “making work pay”, which has also become something of a Tory slogan, (see below). The phrase has come to mean stripping social security, and welfare provision, whilst driving down wages at the same time. Another example is Cameron’s unconvincing “Big Society”. There is definitely Orwellian Doublespeak going on there.

Slogans – A slogan is a brief, striking phrase that may include labeling and stereotyping. Although slogans may be enlisted to support reasoned ideas, in practice they tend to act only as emotional appeals. Opponents of the US’s invasion and occupation of Iraq use the slogan “blood for oil” to suggest that the invasion and its human losses was done to access Iraq’s oil riches. On the other hand, “hawks” who argued that the US should continue to fight in Iraq use the slogan “cut and run” to suggest that it would be cowardly or weak to withdraw from Iraq. Similarly, the names of the military campaigns, such as “enduring freedom” or “just cause”, may also be regarded as slogans, devised to influence people.

A Tory slogan of epic farce value is: “we are all in it together”. We know that whilst the majority endure austerity, and life changing cuts to our basic income, the minority of very wealthy individuals are enjoying an increase in their already considerable standard of living, at our expense.

Stereotyping (Name-Calling or Labeling) – This technique attempts to arouse prejudices in an audience by labeling the object of the propaganda campaign as something the target audience fears, hates, loathes, or finds undesirable. For instance, reporting on a foreign country or social group may focus on the stereotypical traits that the reader expects, even though they are far from being representative of the whole country or group; such reporting often focuses on the constructed and amplified negative traits.

Testimonial – Testimonials are quotations, in or out of context, especially cited to support or reject a given policy, action, program, or personality. The reputation or the role (expert, respected public figure, etc.) of the individual giving the statement is exploited. The testimonial places the official sanction of a respected person or authority in a propaganda message.

Transfer – Also known as Association, this is a technique of projecting positive or negative qualities (praise or blame) of a person, entity, object, or value (an individual, group, organisation, nation, patriotism, etc.) to another to make the second more acceptable or to discredit it. It evokes an emotional response.

Unstated assumption – This technique is used when the propaganda concept that the propagandist intends to transmit would seem less credible if explicitly stated. The concept is instead repeatedly assumed or implied.

An example of this is the current Tory notion of the “trickle down” effect. This is to justify tax breaks or other economic benefits provided by Government to businesses and the wealthy, on the basis that this will benefit poorer members of society eventually by improving the economy as a whole.

The term has been attributed to humorist Will Rogers, who said, during the Great Depression, that “money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy.” Worth remembering that the term was originally mostly used ironically or as pejorative. So to clarify the implicit Tory policy directive, money is taken from the poorest, and handed to the wealthiest, with the hope of it being “trickled” back down to the poorest at some point in the future.

Virtue words – These are words in the value system of the target audience which tend to produce a positive image when attached to a person or issue. Peace, happiness, security, wise leadership, freedom, “The Truth”, striver etc. are virtue words. In countries such as the U.S. religiosity is seen as a virtue, making associations to this quality effectively beneficial.

Straw man – This type of argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. To “attack a straw man” is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the “straw man”), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.

Excerpted from: From Psycho-Linguistics to the Politics of Psychopathy. Part 1: Propaganda.  by Kitty S. Jones, July 2013

 

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America Gone Mad

 

“The price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilence.”

– Thomas Jefferson –

Many people become uncomfortable when anyone criticizes their country. Patriotism, to them, means accepting whatever your country does… period. “My country, right or wrong” is the best expression of this blinkered kind of patriotism. But such simple-minded, blind faith has had a down side, for it has allowed corrupt people and nefarious interests to steer our country down some very dark paths.

It’s understandable to love your country unconditionally, even as you would love a child. But loving someone does not mean we should ignore when that person does something wrong. Likewise, loving our country should not mean that we shouldn’t recognize, and hold it accountable, when it does not live up to the principles and ideals upon which it was founded.

So here are 7 ways in which our country and our government has gone terribly wrong;

The Government is Controlled by Big Money, Corporate and Military Interests

It has probably always been true to some extent that big money interests have exerted considerable interests on all levels of government. As long as there are people who can be bought for money, gifts or opportunities, there will be politicians who are happy to work for the interests of the elite. But at least in the past, these types of political vermin were recognized as corrupt, if not outright criminals. Today, we have institutionalized the co-opting of politicians, and made the selling of their services to the highest bidder the de facto manner in which the electoral process works.

The Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United Decision declared that corporate campaign donations are the legal equivalent to speech and therefore freed up corporations to make unlimited contributions to the candidates of their choice. This distortion of the concept of free speech is an egregious example of how the interests of the elite have even taken over the highest court in the land. And what we should all be asking ourselves is, now that they can “speak” to the government with massive voice of their millions of dollars… is it even possible anymore for our puny little voices to be heard at all?

Wall Street’s  So-Called Free Market Operates More like a Crooked Casino

A Free Market is supposed to be a system where prices are determined purely by the laws and forces of supply and demand – but today’s financial markets bear little resemblance to that. In recent years our banking and financial markets have been exposed as little more than criminal enterprises where the only operating imperative is to fleece the most amount of people possible. From the LIBOR interest rating scandal, to the manipulation of gold pricing, to high-frequency, front-running stock trading, to allowing banks to borrow money at 0% interest to artificially inflate stock market and prop up the failing market for US Treasury Bonds… these and many more fraudulent practices have destroyed any semblance of a free market and exposed the truth that what is erroneously called ourFinancial Markets are in fact closer to  crooked casinos – but in these rigged games not only does the house always win, but the casino owners are allowed to sit at the table and take your money directly.

“Free Trade” Agreements have Allowed Multinational Corporations to Destroy our Domestic Economy

For the past 50 years big, multinational corporations have had one major goal – to put their operations, agendas and practices outside the control of pesky government authorities. They have systematically achieved this goal through the implementation of so-called Free Trade Agreements, such as The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the pending Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), and many others. These complex legal agreements, typically written by corporate lawyers, are sold to us as ways to improve our domestic economy by opening up foreign markets to U.S. exporters by eliminating barriers to trade.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth is that Free Trade agreements are instead directly responsible for the shuttering of thousands of American factories and the loss of tens of millions of jobs as Multinational Corporations – now freed from the danger of having import taxes levied on their foreign-produced goods – have been allowed to place their production facilities in whatever countries offer the lowest labor costs, the cheapest resources and most lax environmental and safety regulations. This off-shoring of American productive capability, this undermining of the earning potential of millions of American workers, this expatriation of hundreds of millions in annual tax revenues has all been very good for corporations and the owner class – but devastating to our country.

America is Addicted to War

For decades, U.S. military spending has outstripped all other countries combined – and several times over. These hundreds of billions of dollars have paid for the most lethal weapons in the world and made our military industrial suppliers extremely profitable and influential. Due to their critical role in our national security, military suppliers are the only industry that by law cannot outsource their production capabilities to other countries and therefore it is the only domestic industry that our government protects… and boy do they protect it!

With the fall of the  Soviet Union – and the subsequent crash in U.S. military budget – the neocons in the government were desperate to identify a new enemy – one which would allow them to justify increases in military spending. In a white paper entitled The Project for a New American Century, they proposed the need to increase our military might so that no other country could every pose an existential threat to America’s dominance in the world – but they realized that this could not happen “without a catalyzing event, such as Pearl Harbor.” So they created an new existential threat called Terrorism and they aided and abetted the required catalyzing event, which was 9/11. Armed with a boogeyman for their new century, the neocons and their friends in the military industrial complex entered a new golden age of military spending.

American arms manufacturers today sell a total of $235 billion in material and weapons each year – supporting millions of people in an otherwise declining economy. We have 16 spy agencies employing 100 thousand employees, another million people employed by military and national security law enforcement agencies. As Jonathan Turley, Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washing University writes, in America “we don’t just endure war, we need war.”

America’s Tax Code Enslaves the Masses while Giving Rich & Corporations a Pass

The current tax code is 70,000 pages long. For most Americans the rules that pertain to us, those for paying taxes on our income, investments, property etc. could easily be be summed up in less than a hundred pages. So what’s in the remaining 60,900 pages? These remaining pages contain the arcane loopholes, dodges and tax avoidance instruments which were specifically inserted into the code so that the wealthy and powerful could protect their riches and avoid paying taxes like the rest of us.

The cost of tax breaks for corporations has been escalating for the past few decades, totaling $176 billion in 2013 alone. Tax for individual taxpayers are heavily tilted in favor of the top income earners, and in 2013 amounted to more than $770 billion – in that year 4,000 of America’s top 1% owed no income tax at all due to loopholes in the tax code.

What’s important to remember is that these tax breaks & loopholes have the very same effect as any other kind of government spending – and should be subjected to serious consideration and oversight. Currently our government looses over $1 trillion per year in lost revenues. If recovered, these losses would erase the federal budget deficit with a few hundred billion to spare! But with our elected officials in the pocket of the billionaires, bankers and corporations, tax code reform is unlikely to ever receive any serious attention.

Our Elected Officials No Longer Represent We The People

You could make a case that our system has never been quite as democratic as information ministers would have had us believe. Big money and industrial interests have always had a great deal of influence on our government. Congress has a long tradition of pork barrel politics, where constituent industrial interests are rewarded with pork in the form of plush government contracts or advantageous legislations, sneakily embedded into otherwise innocuous bills. Legislators have gotten away with this sort of light corruption because it was easily spun as necessary for the creation jobs for the people in their districts.

But this deference to big money interests is not always in the interests of the people. Tax havens and loopholes add untold millions of dollars to corporate coffers, tightening government budgets and shifting the tax burden onto ordinary people. The increasing globalist agendas of multinational firms – and their desire to be free of any governmental restrictions or oversights – has eliminated millions of jobs and dismantled many of our traditional worker’s rights and benefits, off shored millions of American jobs and given rise to corporate excesses like genetically modified foods and fracking.

But the nail in the coffin of our democratic process had to be the Supreme Court’s unbelievableCitizens United decision which conferred citizen status on corporations and with it the right to free speech – which in the case of corporations means the right to donate as much money to the campaigns of politicians as they wish. This single decision has singlehandedly overturned America’s long tradition of protecting the election process against the undue influence of big money. Now the only politicians we will even be allowed to vote for are those already in the pocket of bankers, billionaires and corporations. Your vote, essentially, serves only to legitimize an electoral process – and rubber stamp the candidates – that have been purchased by the money elite.

And the worst thing is… the only way to overturn this hideous Supreme Court decision is through the excruciating process of Constitutional Amendment – the last such amendment, the 27th, was originally proposed in 1789 and only ratified in 1992.

Our Bill of Rights has been Systematically Dismantled

The greatness of America has been owed in large part to the protection of individual freedoms and liberties guaranteed to its citizens by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These rights were meant to make this a country where the Rule of Law reigns supreme – where the people are protected against the governing class’s historical tendencies toward tyranny and despotism. So accustomed are Americans to these unique freedoms that we take them for granted, never imagining that we could ever be subjected to a system where we would lose things like the presumption of innocence, the right to a speedy trial, the right to privacy or protection against illegal search or seizure.

Yet thanks to the unprecedented attacks on freedom contained within the villainous Patriot Act and it’s co-conspirator the National Defense Authority Act, the possibility of just such a dystopian reality is a very real and present danger.

Thanks to the Patriot Act, we now live in a security state where we have lost the right to privacy in our homes, in our person and in our communications. The government is now constantly recording our calls and emails, watching and tracking us as go about our lives, checking our papers at illegal checkpoints and subjecting us to invasive groping and scan technologies when we travel.

The NDAA has overturned 200 years of law which has kept the military out of domestic policing and ushered a new police state where the military is now allowed to conduct operations against the American people, and where someone who might simply have been at the wrong place at the wrong time can be detained without charges or representation, held indefinitely and transported anywhere in the world for a trial in a tribunal of the government’s choosing.

So there you have it, 7 things really wrong about this country.

Now you might say that this is too negative, that it doesn’t consider the many good and fine things about this country… and you’d be right. But the point is that much of what’s good and great about this country is directly attributable to the rights and freedoms that we have only recently lost. The uncomfortable truth is that our government has given itself the powers of a fascist state – but so far they have kept a friendly face on it. There is no way of knowing for sure if this campaign against freedom will be reversed, or if it will evolve into something ever more dark and sinister. But we must all be careful about a government who asks us to trade our freedom for security. For as Plato recognized ages ago, “This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.”

Excerpt from “7 Things REALLY Wrong with America”  on Vote-Revolt.com May 2015

 

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TPP [The Psychopathic Partnership]

 Meet the TPP: Crony capitalism on a global scale

The TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), because of fast track, bypasses the normal legislative process of public discussion and consideration by congressional committees. The House and the Senate, which have to vote on the TPP bill within 90 days of when it is sent to Congress, are prohibited by the fast-track provision from adding floor amendments or holding more than 20 hours of floor debate. Congress cannot raise concerns about the effects of the TPP on the environment. It can only vote yes or no. It is powerless to modify or change one word.

“It is a global corporate coup d’état. Corporations will become more powerful than countries. Corporations will force democratic systems to serve their interests. Civil courts around the world will be replaced with corporate courts or so-called trade tribunals. This is a massive expansion that builds on the worst of NAFTA rather than what Barack Obama promised, which was to get rid of the worst aspects of NAFTA.” – Attorney Kevin Zeese of the group Popular Resistance

“It was written by them [the corporations], it is for them and it will serve them,” Zeese said of the TPP. “It will hurt domestic businesses and small businesses. The buy-American provisions will disappear. Local communities will not be allowed to build buy-local campaigns. The thrust of the agreement is the privatization and commodification of everything. The agreement has built within it a deep antipathy to state-supported or state-owned enterprises. It gives away what is left of our democracy to the World Trade Organization.”

“In Malaysia one-third of tech workers are essentially slaves,” Zeese said. “In Vietnam the minimum wage is 35 cents an hour. Once these countries are part of the trade agreement U.S. workers are put in a very difficult position.”

“This is a continuation of the global race to the bottom,” said Dr. Margaret Flowers, also from Popular Resistance and a candidate for the U.S. Senate. “Corporations are free to move to countries that have the lowest labor standards. This drives down high labor standards here. It means a decimation of industries and unions. It means an accelerated race to the bottom, which we must rise up to stop. This agreement [the TPP] is sold to us with the same deceits that were used to sell us NAFTA and other trade agreements.”

The economist David Rosnick, in a report on the TPP by the Center for Economic and Policy Research(CEPR), estimated that under the trade agreement only the top 10 percent of U.S. workers would see their wages increase. Rosnick wrote that the real wages of middle-income U.S. workers (from the 35th percentile to the 80th percentile) would decline under the TPP. NAFTA, contributing to a decline in manufacturing jobs (now only 9 percent of the economy), has forced workers into lower-paying service jobs and resulted in a decline in real wages of between 12 and 17 percent. The TPP would only accelerate this process, Rosnick concluded.

Fifty-one percent of working Americans now make less than $30,000 a year, a new study by the Social Security Administration reported. Forty percent are making less than $20,000 a year. The federal government considers a family of four living on an income of less than $24,250 to be in poverty.

“Half of American workers earn essentially the poverty level,” Zeese said. “This agreement only accelerates this trend. I don’t see how American workers are going to cope.”

The assault on the American workforce by NAFTA—which was established under the Clinton administration in 1994 and which at the time promised the creation of 200,000 net jobs a year in the United States—has been devastating. NAFTA has led to a $181 billion trade deficit with Mexico and Canada and the loss of at least 1 million U.S. jobs, according to a report by Public Citizen.

There is more than enough evidence from past trade agreements to indicate where the TPP—often called “NAFTA on steroids”—will lead. It is part of the inexorable march by corporations to wrest from us the ability to use government to defend the public and to build social and political organizations that promote the common good. Our corporate masters seek to turn the natural world and human beings into malleable commodities that will be used and exploited until exhaustion or collapse. Trade agreements are the tools being used to achieve this subjugation.

The only response left is open, sustained and defiant popular revolt.

Excerpts from “The Most Brazen Corporate Power Grab in American History” by Chris Hedges, November 2015

Pic courtesy DonkeyHotey

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