“People should be awake to this tactic, and refuse to be fooled by it”

December 28, 2022

Stephen Gowans

Beijing’s abandonment of its zero-Covid policy has created a spate of propaganda. On one side, US sources use the surge in cases following Beijing’s volte-face on infection control to unfairly tarnish China’s reputation. On the other, pretend Marxists at the congregatio de propaganda fide sinae pump out flagrant “what about?” propaganda to deflect attention from China’s health care crisis.

The New York Times of December 27 offers an emblematic example of Covid-related anti-China propaganda.

Reporters Isabelle Qian and David Pierson write that “China’s hospitals were already overcrowded, underfunded and inadequately staffed in the best of times. But now with Covid spreading freely for the first time in China, the medical system is being pushed to its limits.”

This may be true, but it’s also true of high-income countries. Change the word China to Canada or any of a number of other G7 countries, and you have a serviceable description of the Covid crisis in countries better equipped than China to deal with medical emergencies owing to their greater wealth. That they haven’t used these resources to avert crises in their own health care systems condemns them more than China.

China—ranked 79th of 185 countries in GDP per capita, just below Iraq— is a fairly poor country in per capita terms. Poor countries necessarily have inadequately resourced medical systems, too few hospitals and a dearth of medical staff.

If hospitals in high-income countries are being pushed to the limits by Covid, would we not expect the same in a mid-income country?

Qian and Pierson fault Beijing for failing to use “the past three years” of virus suppression “to bolster its health system by stockpiling medicine and building more critical care units.” They argue that China “could have launched a major vaccination drive targeting the millions of vulnerable older adults who were reluctant to receive a jab or booster,” noting, however, that “China did little of that.”

But could the Chinese have realistically done what Qian and Pierson say they should have done? No country has unlimited resources, especially a middle-income one. At the time Beijing was incurring the costs of implementing zero-Covid, it’s unlikely that it could have taken on the additional fiscal burden of increasing the number of its critical care beds and broadening its vaccine roll-out. That would have been difficult even for a high-income country.

Many countries, including China, coped with Covid by calibrating mitigation measures to hospital capacity. China, with limited hospital capacity and few critical care beds, had to implement very stringent mitigation measures to prevent hospital overcrowding. As high-income countries did, it too followed the strategy of bending the curve, but its relative poverty meant that it had to bend the curve to zero, where G7 countries, with more money and more richly-resourced medical systems, had the luxury of never having to go quite so far.

What’s known now as “bend the curve” was originally known as “bend the curve and raise the line.” “Raise the line” refers to the necessity of expanding hospital capacity, something few countries did.

Here’s the idea: To cope with an increased burden on medical systems caused by the emergence of a novel pathogen, governments ought to reduce the spread of the pathogen through mitigation measures to limit the number of people who will require medical attention at any one time (bend the curve), and increase the capacity of the system to deal with the people who do need attention (raise the line.) Most high-income countries ignored the second part of the formula. Singling out China for the same failure, especially in light of its limited resources, is unfair.

If Qian’s and Pierson’s reporting is partial, the commentary of the avowed Beijing propagandist, Carlos Martinez, is pure diversion. Martinez fires back at criticism of Beijing for prioritizing profits over people in lifting its zero-Covid strategy, by emphasizing Washington’s poor performance in protecting its own citizens from the dangers of Covid.

But pointing out that Washington signed up as one of the killer’s henchman long before Beijing did, hardly absolves Beijing of blame for choosing to follow Washington down the same road. All the same, Martinez tries gamely to draw fire away from Beijing, with an article in China state media CGTN. The Friends of Socialist China, an avowed platform for propagating pro-China narratives, introduces Martinez’s propaganda piece this way:

“The following article … compares the rising hysteria in the Western media over China’s Covid situation with its near-total silence in relation to the ongoing public health crisis in the US. The US has just surpassed 100 million Covid cases; its Covid death toll exceeds 1 million; and its average life expectancy has dropped to 76.4 years – the lowest since 1999. What’s more, as a result of centuries of systemic racism, the impact of this crisis is multiplied for the black, Latino and indigenous population. The media prefers to sensationalize the wave of Covid cases in China – as a form of deflection and diversion, and as part of the generalized campaign of China-bashing. People should be awake to this tactic, and refuse to be fooled by it.”

The argument is that the US media are trying to divert attention from Washington’s execrable pandemic performance by emphasizing China’s challenges with Covid. The problem is that it is the US media themselves that have documented Washington’s Covid failures, from the 100 million cases, to the death toll north of 1 million, to the decline in US life expectancy. If the US media were really trying to obscure these facts, why would they have reported them in the first place? Indeed, the fact that Martinez even knows about “the ongoing health crisis in the US” contradicts his claim that there is “near-total silence” about it.

But then it comes as no surprise that an avowed pro-China propagandist would regard any reporting that casts China in a less than glowing light as sensationalistic and anything less than a total media obsession with developments that cast the United States in an unfavorable light as “near-total silence.” The reality is that the US media have not imposed “near-total silence” on the United States’ Covid struggles any more than they have “sensationalized” China’s. A more plausible account is that they have simply reported the struggles of both, and that propagandists on either side don’t like to hear bad news about their side and delight in hearing bad news about the other side. So, the propagandists try to draw attention to the other side’s bad news.

That’s what Martinez has done. In mentioning Washington’s bad conduct, he and his coreligionists at the congregatio de propaganda fide sinae hope to accomplish what they accuse the US media of trying to achieve: divert and deflect attention. Indeed, the passage from the Friends of Socialist China platform introducing Martinez’s CGTN article can be turned back on the congregatio:

CGTN, the Friends of Socialist China, and Carlos Martinez prefer to sensationalize the United States’ health care crisis as a form of deflection and diversion from Beijing’s struggles with Covid, and as part of the generalized campaign of US-bashing. People should be awake to this tactic, and refuse to be fooled by it.

Clearly, zero-Covid is unsustainable as a long-term project in a world where no other countries are pursuing the same suppression measures. At a certain point, Beijing would have had to transition to a new policy if it wanted to avoid the penalty of retarded economic growth and growing popular recalcitrance. Beijing abandoned zero-Covid for three reasons: pressure from the streets; pressure from business; and because the policy was unsustainable.

If zero-Covid was necessary in a country with limited resources to provide medical care to its citizens, in order to protect hospitals from overcrowding and the medical system from collapse, then the lifting of restrictions will have consequences as dire, if not more so, than those that beset the citizens of the United States, where greater US wealth provided the government with the capability to offer robust protection—a potential that was never realized.

China’s pandemic performance has reflected its nature: not that of a socialist country, which it clearly is not, notwithstanding the fantasies of various dreamers, but a middle-income capitalist country with limited resources, whose strength lies in a strong central government able to make the most of its limited resources in the pursuit of its central aim: the rejuvenation of the country, by means of capitalist development, as a great nation, capable of pushing back its economic frontiers in competition with rival powers—a project known in more flattering terms as championing the development of a multipolar international order, or more honestly, as the return of great power competition and inter-imperialist rivalry.

How an evidence-free CIA finding alleging Russian interference in the US election was turned into an indisputable ‘truth’

December 17, 2016
Updated December 18, 2016

By Stephen Gowans

Only a few days ago the New York Times acknowledged that the CIA finding that the Kremlin hacked the Democratic National Convention’s computers with the intention of influencing the US presidential election was based, not on evidence, but conjecture. Today, the newspaper’s reporters have forgotten their earlier caveats and have begun to treat the intelligence agency’s guess-work as an established truth.

Emblematic of the newspaper’s approach of acknowledging the uncertainty of many intelligence assessments only to quickly throw caution to the wind to embrace them as certain facts, was a December 15 report by Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo in which the two reporters wrote that the “hack influenced the course, if not the outcome, of a presidential campaign.” [1] The sentence is astonishing for not only stripping the CIA finding of its immanent uncertainty, but in venturing well beyond the intelligence agency’s judgement to aver what no one could possibly know, namely, whether the release of DNC e-mails influenced the presidential campaign.

That it did, and at Clinton’s expense, is, of course, the conclusion the Democrats, if not a faction of the US ruling class associated with the Clintons, would like the US public to arrive at. In this, the New York Times has provided signal assistance as the unofficial propaganda arm of the US ruling class’s Democratic Party wing. Yet, we don’t even know if the DNC e-mails were hacked let alone by agents of the Russian government. One alternative explanation is that the e-mails were leaked by someone inside the DNC. Nevertheless, Goldman and Apuzzo claim to know far more than anyone could possibly know: that the CIA’s analysis is true despite the agency’s own admission of uncertainty and that, additionally, the Russian government intended to influence the outcome of the campaign and that its efforts bore fruit.

New York Times reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and David E. Sanger were slightly more circumspect than the omniscient Goldman and Apuzzo, but nevertheless wrote of “Russia’s efforts to influence the presidential election,” as if this is not a matter of conjecture but established fact. They also mentioned Trump’s refusal “to accept Moscow’s culpability,” as if Moscow’s culpability is indisputable. [2] Sanger is a member of the Wall Street-directed foreign policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, of which most members of the Obama cabinet are also members, as were occupants of the most significant offices of the US state, going back to at least the Carter administration. [3] The CFR is likely the body through which the anti-Trump faction of the US ruling class organizes itself.

Let’s recall how much uncertainty underlies the CIA finding which the New York Times now accepts as fact, in the same way the newspaper quickly accepted as fact an equally tentative, and evidence-free US intelligence finding that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons in its war against Al Qaeda and the Islamist group’s allies, offshoots and auxiliaries. Today, “Assad’s use of chemical weapons” is bandied about in the Western media as if it were an incontrovertible fact, belying the reality that the US intelligence finding on the matter was based on belief, not evidence, and that there was, by Washington’s own admission, no “smoking gun.” What’s more, the idea that the Syrian military would use chemical weapons, which are less effective than conventional arms, when doing so would have crossed a redline drawn by Washington, and invited a more muscular US intervention in Syria, never made sense.

The US newspaper of record reported that “two Russian hacking groups” were “found at work inside the D.N.C. network,” “Cozy Bear” and “Fancy Bear.” Cozy Bear, according to the newspaper, “may or may not be associated with the F.S.B., the main successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B” (emphasis added.) Fancy Bear, it turns out, also may or may not be associated with the Russian government, in this case, “the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency.” Nevertheless, the New York Times revealed that both groups are “believed” by Washington to be Russian government operations (though they may or may not be.) [4]

How was this belief arrived at? Through a process the New York Times describes as attribution, “the skill of identifying a cyberattacker.” This is a fancy way of describing conjecture. Attribution is “more art than science,” the newspaper concedes, while acknowledging that it “is often impossible to name an attacker with absolute certainty.” [5] Finding water with a divining rod, and predicting the future with a Ouija board, are also more art than science, and both involve the process of attribution, the skill of identifying hidden water and hidden events, though it is often impossible to find water, and foretell the future, with absolute certainty. Divination and CIA analyses apparently have much in common.

Given that the CIA analysis appears to be more art than science, and more conjecture than evidence, how do we get from the multiple agnostic claims that a) the Russian government may or may not have initiated a cyberattack against the DNC; b) it’s impossible to say with certainty that it did; and c) it’s all guess work, to a definite declaration, as appeared in the New York Times on December 13? “Russian cyberpower invaded the U.S.”

The FBI began investigating the allegation that Russia meddled in the election over the summer. [6] The bureau doubted “the CIA had a basis for coming to (its) conclusions.” [7] As a consequence, the organization refused to “sign on to the public statement attributing the hacking to Russia.” [8]

The reasons for the FBI scepticism were outlined by the New York Times’ Mark Mazzetti and Eric Lichtblau on December 11. The reporters wrote that the CIA’s conclusion “is based on “circumstantial evidence…that others,” namely, the FBI and the CIA’s sister intelligence organizations “feel does not support firm judgments.” [9] “People familiar with the hacking investigation long have said that…it would be difficult to prove in court,” added the Wall Street Journal’s Shane Harris. [10] Intelligence “findings are more grounded in analysis” wrote Harris, as opposed to “the evidentiary standards the FBI typically uses.” [11] One of the “core realities of intelligence analysis,” reported Mazzetti and Lichtblau, is that they “are often made in a fog of uncertainty…based on putting together shards of a mosaic that do not reveal a full picture, and can always be affected by human biases.” [12] Echoing this, Washington Post reporters Ellen Nakashima and Adam Entous wrote that officials “are frequently looking at information that is fragmentary. They also face issues…that (make) it hard – if not impossible – to conclusively detect the Kremlin’s elusive fingerprints.” [13] (Note that in this sentence the truth of what is to be proved in already assumed, namely, that the Kremlin’s fingerprints are present—it’s just difficult to detect them.)

In short, the FBI “wants facts and tangible evidence.” The CIA “is more comfortable drawing inferences.” The FBI thinks “in terms of…can we prove this.” The CIA makes “judgment calls.” High confidence for the CIA “doesn’t mean they can prove it.” [14]

Other intelligence agencies, apart from the FBI, also doubted the CIA’s judgment call.

The CIA analysis “fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies,” reported the Washington Post, owing to “disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment.” [15] One disagreement related to the absence of “specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin” directing the hacking. It seemed that the people the CIA suspected of carrying out the hack were not employees of the Russian government. [16]

This called into question an earlier, October 7, finding from the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In a joint declaration, the US intelligence czars said they were “confident that the Russian Government directed the … compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.” But the intelligence community’s confidence didn’t rest on direct evidence. Nothing tied the suspected hackers to the Kremlin. The finding was, instead, based on a belief—“that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities” and that “the alleged hacked e-mails … are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.” [17] In other words, the intelligence community had no proof.

The October 7 statement also referred to the hacked e-mails as “alleged,” suggesting that despite its claimed confidence, Washington wasn’t even sure the DNC servers were hacked. The e-mails could have been leaked from within.

It is a reality of everyday life that decisions are made in the face of uncertainty. We can’t always defer action until evidence accumulates. For this reason, the US intelligence community’s efforts to arrive at a judgment based on fragmentary evidence and analysis is perfectly reasonable. But once decisions that are, in effect, working hypotheses become received doctrine—when “the DNC servers may or may not have been hacked, and the Kremlin may or may not be the perpetrator” becomes — “Russian cyberpower invaded the U.S,” as the New York Times put it— the process degenerates into propaganda.

None of this is to acknowledge the sheer hypocrisy of the US government accusing the Kremlin of interfering in the US election when no other country has as extensively meddled in the electoral outcomes of foreign countries as has the United States. The New York Times offered a token admission of US culpability. “The United States, too, has carried out cyberattacks, and in decades past the C.I.A. tried to subvert foreign elections,” wrote Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger and Scott Shane. [18] A few days later, Sanger expanded on US subversion of foreign elections. It “is worth remembering that trying to manipulate elections is a well-honed American art form,” Sanger noted.

The C.I.A. got its start trying to influence the outcome of Italy’s elections in 1948, as the author Tim Weiner documented in his book “Legacy of Ashes,” in an effort to keep Communists from taking power. Five years later, the C.I.A. engineered a coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected leader, when the United States and Britain installed the Shah.

“The military coup that overthrew Mosaddeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government,” the agency concluded in one of its own reports, declassified around the 60th anniversary of those events, which were engineered in large part by Kermit Roosevelt Jr., a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt.

There were similar interferences over the years in Guatemala, Chile and even in Japan, hailed as a model of post-World War II democracy, where the Liberal Democratic Party owes its early grip on power in the 1950s and 1960s to millions of dollars in covert C.I.A. support. [19]

Since World War II, Washington has grossly interfered in the elections of 30 foreign countries. Over the same period, the US government has attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments and attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders–different means to accomplish the same end, namely, interfering in the politics of foreign countries. [20]

And while in decades past it may have been that the “CIA tried to subvert foreign elections,” as the New York Times acknowledges, what isn’t mentioned is that in recent decades foreign election meddling has been transferred to the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy. The organization’s first president acknowledged that the NED’s role is to carry out overtly the task of influencing foreign elections that the CIA had once done covertly. The NED has been active in attempts to influence electoral outcomes in Serbia, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere. The NED interferes in the elections of countries in which the sitting government has refused to fall in behind the United States as self-appointed leader of the international order, preferring self-determination and sovereignty. So Washington has manoeuvred to install biddable governments in these countries that are amenable to acquiescing to US leadership, which is to say, submitting to the international dictatorship of the United States.

None of the foregoing is to suggest that Washington is getting its comeuppance. On the contrary, there’s no evidence that Russia intervened in the US election, much less that the DNC servers were hacked. (A group of former US intelligence officers believe the e-mails were leaked. [21])

The incident should remind us that the US government often makes allegations on the basis of nothing more than conjecture, which “can always be affected by human biases,” as the New York Times concedes, [22] or political pressure, as the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq affirms. No less worthy of our attention is the reality that the mass news media have agendas which comport with the interests of their owners, that their owners belong to the economic elite, and that the economic and political elites are intertwined. This explains why the mass media act as conduits of propaganda through which evidence-free intelligence findings are regularly disseminated to the public to manufacture consent for, or at least acquiescence to, elite agendas; Iraq’s non-existent WMD are emblematic of a fiction attributed to an intelligence “failure” that was used as a casus belli to rally support for war.

One can only guess—like the CIA guessing at who leaked the DNC e-mails and why—that there is a struggle within the US ruling class over the outcome of the US election, with the faction to which the Clintons belong resolved to prevent Trump from becoming president, or, at least, undermining his presidency. The reasons are likely due to intolerance of Trump’s promised departures from core US foreign policy tenets, especially his professed desire to treat Russia as a partner rather than adversary, his repudiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and other heterodoxies.

1. Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, “U.S. faces tall hurdles in detaining or deterring Russian hackers,” The New York Times, December 15, 2016

2. Julie Hirschfeld Davis and David E. Sanger, “Obama says U.S. will retaliate for Russia’s election meddling,” The New York Times, December 15, 2016

3. Laurence H.Shoup. Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014, Monthly Review Press, 2015

4. Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger and Scott Shane, “The perfect weapon: How Russian cyberpower invaded the U.S.,” The New York Times, December 13, 2016

5. Ibid.

6. Mark Mazzetti and Eric Lichtblau, “C.I.A. judgement on Russia built on swell of evidence,” The New York Times, December 11, 2016

7. Ellen Nakashima and Adam Entous, “FBI and CIA give differing accounts to lawmakers in Russia’s motives un 2016 hacks,” The Washington Post, December 10, 2016

8. Shane Harris, “Donald Trump fuels rift with CIA over Russian hack,” The Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2016

9. Mark and Lichtblau

10. Shane Harris, “Donald Trump fuels rift with CIA over Russian hack,” The Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2016

11. Harris, December 11, 2016

12. Mazzetti and Lichtblau

13. Ellen Nakashima and Adam Entous, “FBI and CIA give differing accounts to lawmakers in Russia’s motives un 2016 hacks,” The Washington Post, December 10, 2016

14. Ibid

15. Adam Entous, Ellen Nakaskis, and Greg Miller, “Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House,” The Washington Post, December 9, 2016

16. Ibid

17. “Joint Statement from the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security,” October 7, 2016

18. Lipton, Sanger and Shane

19. David E. Sanger, “Obama confronts complexity of using a mighty cyberarsenal against Russia,” The New York Times, December 17, 2016

20. William Blum, “The Anti-Empire Report,” No. 146, November 6, 2016

21. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, “US Intel Vets Dispute Russia Hacking Claims,” Common Dreams, December 15, 2016

22. Mazzetti and Lichtblau

The Limits of Progressive Thought: A Review of Donald Gutstein’s Not a Conspiracy Theory: How Business Hijacks Democracy

By Stephen Gowans

Progressive media analyst Donald Gutstein, a professor in the school of communication at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, and a former co-director of Project Censored, has written what appears to be a promising analysis of the state in contemporary capitalist society. Not a Conspiracy Theory: How Business Hijacks Democracy, examines the role of business in shaping public opinion, but is a disappointing farrago of misconceptions, faulty logic, and contradictions, whose prescriptions offer the left no way out of the cul-de-sac it finds itself in. Gutstein, a liberal with a hazily radical air, argues from a vaguely Marxist and radical standpoint, but his horizons are limited to targeting “radical” conservatives in an effort to restore the social welfare gains of the post-war period. Gutstein wants to relegate business to the role he imagines it once played: as just once voice in a pluralist society presided over by a neutral state.

In short, Gutstein’s argument is that “In Canada and the United States, corporate power and the free market were reined in after the Second World War” [1] in favor of building a mixed economy. “Business signed on to the welfare state because it feared working class activism and a return to Depression-era conditions. It supported nearly-full employment for males, expanded trade union rights and the construction of a social safety net.” [2] The mixed economy produced “unprecedented growth and prosperity,” but “in the 1970s…profits declined and inflation rose” [3] as oil prices skyrocketed and competition from a revived Japan and Western Europe intensified. This prompted business to launch a counteroffensive to restore profits. Business recruited and funded “radical” conservatives to build a propaganda machine to change people’s attitudes and beliefs about unions, the mixed economy and the welfare state. The propaganda worked astonishingly well, allowing business to hijack the media and government, both of which have become instruments of corporate power. Business needs to be reined in so that it is only one of many voices in a pluralist debate (as it was in the post-war period.) The way to accomplish this goal is for progressives to build their own propaganda machine to restore the credibility of the mixed economy and welfare state, relying on grassroots donations and funding from wealthy liberals.

Has business propaganda been successful?

Gutstein argues that business propaganda is used to shape public opinion in ways that favor the interests of business owners against the majority. Propaganda, in his view, keeps the majority from using its numbers to pressure governments to adopt policies that encroach upon business interests.

“A democratically elected government with a mandate from voters to protect jobs, regulate environmentally destructive industry and ensure business pays its fair share of taxes, presents great risks to businesses, limiting a company’s ability to produce ever increasing profits for its share-holders. The risk to business is that…the public…will conclude that business is too powerful and needs to be reined in. The purpose of business propaganda is to ensure that these ideas do not arise.” [4]

Has business propaganda worked? While Gutstein says it has, the examples he cites show it hasn’t. For instance, while he argues that one of the goals of business propaganda is to persuade the public that business isn’t too powerful, he writes,

“A poll commissioned by (Business Week) found that 72 percent of Americans said business ‘had gained too much power over too many aspects of their lives.’ Surprisingly to the Business Week editors, respondents seemed to agree with the sentiments expressed at the 2000 Democratic convention, when presidential nominee Al Gore declared that Americans must ‘stand up and say no’ to ‘Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the HMOs’.” [5]

Gutstein argues that the business “propaganda machine…was astonishingly successful in reversing the gains of the welfare state.” [6] But if business propaganda works by changing people’s attitudes and beliefs, it could only have achieved astonishing success in reversing the gains of the welfare state by changing the attitudes and beliefs of the majority about the welfare state. And yet, as Gutstein himself shows, the majority’s support of the welfare state has never wavered. “Despite thirty years of (business) propaganda for tax cuts,” he writes, “people still want spending on social programs.” [7]

In Gutstein’s view, if the majority recognizes that business is too powerful, it will act to rein business in. But popular action doesn’t always or even often follow a correct understanding of a problem. That’s because more than a correct understanding is needed before people take action. Also important is motivation, understanding of what action can be taken, and a belief that the action will make a difference. Furthermore, the action of the majority doesn’t always or even often change public policy. A majority of the world’s population opposed the US-UK invasion of Iraq, and filled the streets in protest on the eve of the invasion in the largest demonstrations in human history. Public opinion was elevated to the status of a second superpower. Yet public opinion turned out to be a rather feeble superpower. The invasion went ahead. Seven years later, Iraq remains under military occupation. Polls show a majority in Canada, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Britain and even the United States either oppose deployment of their countries’ troops to Afghanistan or favor withdrawal [8], and yet the missions continue, and the U.S. mission will likely continue indefinitely. It could be argued that U.S. President Barack Obama was elected by voters because they believed he was committed to ending the war, yet there are more U.S. troops deployed abroad in combat zones today than under former U.S. president George W. Bush. Public policy seems to have little to do with the attitudes and beliefs of the majority, much less its actions, or votes. Gutstein’s belief that putting the business genie back in the bottle depends on the majority recognizing that business is too powerful is unduly optimistic.

What’s more, a majority of the world’s population already favors progressive policies, despite decades of business propaganda, and yet progressive policies continue to be dismantled. A GlobeScan poll conducted in 27 countries from June to October, 2009, and representing 70 percent of the world’s population, shows that most people in the world are social democrats, while a sizeable number are anti-capitalist, in their attitudes and beliefs. The poll found that a clear majority of the world’s population favors policies traditionally associated with socialism, including public ownership of major industries, redistribution of wealth, and an active role for government in regulating enterprises. [9] Gutstein himself acknowledges that “most people believe…that the acquisition of civil, political, and social rights is an inherently good thing”, [10] and that despite intensive propaganda against Medicare, “the public still backs the system.” [11] Business propaganda, it seems, has been astonishingly unsuccessful. All the same, the welfare state in advanced capitalist countries has been greatly weakened. To understand why, we have to look beyond business propaganda.

Is business propaganda new?

Gutstein can’t seem to decide when business propaganda began. Was it in the 1970s, when declining profits galvanized business to try to get out from under the burden of the welfare state, strong unions and rising popular demands, or did it begin earlier? The answer depends on which page of Gutstein’s book you consult. At one point he writes that the business propaganda machine was first established in the early seventies [12] but points to earlier business-directed campaigns aimed at winning support for a public policy climate favorable to business. He cites a 1949 American Medical Association campaign “to defeat attempts to create universal, federally-insured health care” [13] and a “massive, pro-capitalism grassroots campaign” carried out by “the Advertising Council and the PR industry” between 1945 and 1950. [14] “In 1947 alone,” he writes, the Advertising Council “spent over $100 million to ‘sell’ the American people on the wonders of the American economic system. The campaign, which continued into the 1950s, had two aims: to re-win the loyalty of the workers who had switched to the union, and to halt ‘creeping socialism.’” [15] Gutstein also points out that after World War I many people involved in the propaganda effort to mobilize support for the U.S. entry into the war “turned their efforts to a new crusade: making the world safe for business.” [16] According to Gutstein’s own review, then, the origins of business propaganda date to the period immediately following World War I and not the seventies. [17] If business propaganda has been around since at least the end of World War I, could it be that the domination of government and the media by business began much earlier than 30 years ago?

Have the media and government been hijacked?

Gutstein seems to think that the media and government have been hijacked by corporate interests, rather than created by them (the media) or dominated by them (government.) He misrepresents Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s propaganda model, outlined in their Manufacturing Consent, as one in which “the prevailing power elites co-opt intellectuals and large media companies and transform them into instruments of shaping public opinion.” [18] (Chomsky and Herman describe media corporations as businesses, whose very nature as businesses, structure their reporting. They have not been co-opted.) Similarly, Gutstein speaks of the corporate agenda becoming the government agenda, as if governments in capitalist society are capable of escaping the imperative of aiding business in its pursuit of profit. Gutstein’s thinking, then, implies that the media and government are capable of playing a neutral role in the clash of labor and business, with government mediating the conflict and the media siding with neither labor nor capital. But the media, for one, are clearly not independent of corporate interests, a point Gutstein himself makes: Media corporations, he writes, are “profit-seeking businesses owned by very wealthy families and by other companies. Owners are generally very conservative politically and favour the dominant North American private enterprise ideology.” [19]

For all of his optimism that business can be relegated to the role of one of many participants in a pluralist debate, [20] Gutstein recognizes that business “has significant influence over government, and controls the debate” [21] because it is able to use its wealth to press for a public policy climate favourable to its interests. Business-sponsored think-tanks, he writes, have,

“greater financial resources. Business sponsored think-tanks can hire more staff, fund more scholars, cover a wider range of topics and produce more studies and reports (than progressive think-tanks, with more limited financial resources, can.) They are also more effective because they have the ear of a sympathetic corporate media far more frequently than progressive think-tanks.” [22].

However, Gutstein focuses too much on the role business think-tanks play in shaping public policy, and too little on the movement of the same individuals back and forth between top corporate and government jobs, [23] the overwhelming role corporations and the wealthy play in funding major political parties, and the work of lobbyists on behalf of individual corporations and business as a whole. [24] He also ignores the limited room for manoeuvre of governments that work within the framework of capitalism. Unless they mobilize the energies of a significant portion of the population to overthrow the system, governments in capitalist society are constrained to act in ways that do no harm to the interests of business. If they do cause harm, business will stop investing, either because it is no longer profitable to do so, or to sabotage the government’s anti-business policies. Capital strike, or the flight of capital to business-friendly jurisdictions, will either bring the government back in line, or prompt voters to change the government. Either way, no government that willingly works within a capitalist framework can privilege lower classes at the expense of business for long without being reined in or replaced. It’s highly likely that governments in capitalist society would act to continue to defend and promote business interests whether business think-tanks – and business propaganda — existed or not.

The counteroffensive

At times, Gutstein seems to paint a picture of a world in which ideas are disconnected from the material world. At other times, he seems more firmly grounded in reality. But always ideology has primacy in his analysis. Ideas, if skilfully expressed by able and well-funded propagandists, have the power to compel action. For example, he attributes the Canadian government’s abandonment of social welfare policies and adoption of a neo-liberal program to a single report by Harvard professor Michael Porter. “After the Porter study (on Canada’s competitiveness in the world) made the rounds of senior officials, the corporate agenda became the government agenda.” [25] This supposes that the government’s agenda hadn’t always been the corporate agenda. An alternative view is that the Porter study didn’t cause the Canadian government to adopt a new agenda. The imperatives of the capitalist system did. What the Porter study did was justify the new agenda.

Gutstein’s emphasis on ideology is also expressed in his discussion of class conflict. Progressive movements, he notes, have “been followed by ideological counterthrusts of extraordinary force … sponsored by the entrenched interests of the day, fighting to protect their privileges and wealth, block progress toward a more just, equal and enlightened society, and undo the reforms already achieved.” [26]

It’s true that progressive movements have been followed by ideological counterthrusts, but more importantly, they have been followed by changes in policy. These changes have occurred when business’s ability to turn a profit has been damaged by a crisis of the capitalist system or by the insupportable encroachment of the demands of progressive movements on business interests.

Social welfare capitalism succeeded laissez faire capitalism as a result of the Great Depression, (though it was the massive spending on the war that brought the United States out of the crisis.) North America’s post-war growth and prosperity was largely caused by pent-up demand following the restraint and shortages of the war, the Marshall Plan, the Cold War, the space race and the rise of the automobile industry, (with its ramifying effects in touching off the growth of steel, glass, petroleum and rubber industries, and the construction of highways and the suburbs.) [27] Additionally, having escaped any major war damage, North American industry enjoyed a virtual monopoly for the greater part of the post-war period, as its competitors rebuilt. At the same time, ideological competition with the Soviet Union dictated that the working class in North America be granted concessions to meet the social welfare standards set by the Communist countries, with their full employment and robust social wage. [28] Strong unions and expanding social programs were easy for business to tolerate as the economy expanded, the price of raw materials was low, and foreign competition was modest.

By the mid-1970s, growth was slowing, the creation of the OPEC cartel sent oil prices skyrocketing, labor had become increasingly militant, and popular demands were being made for further expansion of the welfare state. The top shareholders and executives of major corporations decided that social democracy had gone too far. They used advances in transportation and telecommunications to shift production to non-union areas and later to low-wage countries, to escape the limits strong unions and minimum wage laws imposed on capital accumulation. Publicly-owned assets were sold off, generating new opportunities for profitable investment. Corporate taxes were slashed to fatten bottom lines, reducing the tax revenue base needed to fully support social programs. The welfare state capitalism of the post-war period was being dismantled. But the reason it was being dismantled was not because “radical” conservatives had organized themselves into corporate-funded think-tanks, which had then hijacked the media and government, but because business interests could no longer tolerate the social welfare gains of the post-war years. It was this that caused business to use its agents to both implement and justify a new agenda.

A false solution

Gutstein believes that progressives can achieve success by aping conservatives. Where conservatives identify liberals and leftists as their enemies, “progressives have to make…radical conservatives…the enemy” [29] abandoning their historical focus on “poverty, homelessness, inequality, poor healthcare, racism and sexism.” [30] These evils should never be lost sight of, he writes, but at the same time, they shouldn’t get in the way of targeting “radical” conservatives.

One of the implications of targeting “radical” conservatives is to vote strategically to stop their rise to elected office. But strategic voting by left-wing voters strengthens conservatives by pushing politics increasingly to the right. This happens in two ways. First, those who would otherwise vote for an authentic left alternative throw their weight behind a party which represents a position to the right of their views, in order to defeat conservatives who are even further to the right. This alone represents the skewing of political positions in electoral contests to the right of the base of political positions held by the voting population. Second, the parties that receive the votes of left-wing strategic voters (Labour in Britain, the Democrats in the United States, the Liberals and NDP in Canada), are given permission to move further to the right, in an effort to expand their appeal to cover right-wing voters, since they know that no matter how far right they move, left voters will move with them, so long as there are conservatives even further to the right who must be blocked. Targeting “radical” conservatives, then, rather than promoting authentic left-wing positions, is a self-defeating strategy that only guarantees further migration to the right.

In elaborating this approach, Gutstein urges progressive foundations to take a leaf from the playbooks of conservative foundations. Progressive foundations, he says, spend their money on “thousands of grassroots groups disconnected from one another and from national politics,” while conservative foundations fund a smaller number of “well-chosen think-tanks and advocacy organizations.” [31] Conservatives have “demonstrated that a successful political movement required building multi-issue organizations,” while progressive foundations spread their resources thin, distributing their more limited funding on “organizations engaged in one or a few issues.” [32] Gutstein assumes that once this truth is apprehended, progressive foundations will change their funding practices. But what he misses is the possibility that progressive foundations fund a multiplicity of disparate, single-issue organizations, by design. What wealthy liberals want no more than wealthy conservatives is an effective multi-issue political movement capable of challenging the privileges of corporations and the wealthy. Keeping the left fractured and disorganized, by doling out small donations to disparate groups working on single issues, is one way of preventing the rise of an effective, multi-issue organization. [33]

A multi-issue movement of the left that united its fractured parts would be more effective than the current agglomeration of single-issue groups, but what would it be united in pursuit of? In Gutstein’s view, it would unite to discredit “radical” conservatives, an enterprise which, if successful, would force governments to see the light and rein business in, so that business would be forced to return to the status of equal player in a pluralist debate mediated by a neutral government. This, however, flies in the face of reality. Business has always dominated the state in capitalist society. It may have appeared at certain points to many members of the corporate elite that the state was encroaching upon business interests more than was necessary to stabilize the society and secure the support of the working class, and at the same time, it may have appeared to members of the working class that the state was trying to balance the interests of labor and business, but there has never been any doubt that in a capitalist society the interests of capital are pre-eminent. There may be disagreements among the top shareholders and key executives of major corporations about the best way forward. Some may favor government intervention to stabilize the economy and to secure a basic level of economic security for the working class in order to build a stable society conducive to capital accumulation. Others may regard these interventions as unnecessary and prohibitively costly. Still others may look to permanent war, the mobilization of society against external threats (real or fabricated) and the promotion of religion, nationalism, racism and patriotism as alternatives to class, as the best way to stabilize society and perpetuate the rule of business. But in all cases, it is capital that is the dominant force.

Who is in the driver’s seat – and who ought to be?

Gutstein believes that there has been a fundamental shift in the balance of power over the last 30 years, where business, once reined in by government, has since slipped its reins, hijacked the government and media, and turned the corporate agenda into the government agenda. Let us accept Gutstein’s view for the moment, that it is indeed only in the last three decades that business has emerged to dominate government and the media. Whether corporate domination is inherent in capitalist society or only of recent origin, it remains the case that the present reality, as Gutstein notes, is that “Corporate power is in the driver’s seat. It has the money, organization and access to the media.” [34] How, then, does Gutstein propose that business be pushed from the driver’s seat? And who should replace it?

It would seem that the surest way to solve the problems of “poverty, homelessness, inequality, poor healthcare, racism and sexism” that Gutstein lists as the historical concerns of the left, is to replace business in the driver seat with the class that suffers most from these afflictions: the working class. Indeed, where the working class was, and currently is, in the driver’s seat, these evils were and have been nearly eliminated, if not abolished. In Cuba today and the socialist bloc before its demise, homelessness, poor healthcare, racism, sexism and extremes of income were largely eliminated, if not eradicated altogether. Since it is in the interest of the working class to deal with these problems but not in the interests of business to do the same, (except insofar as these problems threaten to destabilize society and business’s ability to accumulate capital), it would seem that the working class is the agent for this change. But that is not Gutstein’s view. As a pluralist, he wants to replace business in the driver’s seat with “neutral” elected politicians who will reconcile the clash between labor and capital. But can politicians be neutral in capitalist society? Since electoral success is highly sensitive to how much money and media support a candidate for elected office can command, and because business is in the best position to furnish candidates with the resources and media support they need to get elected, the capitalist system does not tend toward the production of neutral politicians. On the contrary, it tends toward the production of errand boys for business. What’s more, as already mentioned, politicians who operate within the framework of capitalism have no option but to make capitalism work, and that means, in the first instance, ensuring that the profit-making requirements of business are met above all else. This is true whether the government is conservative, centrist or social democratic. No government that operates within a capitalist framework is neutral.

If business is in the driver’s seat, “the money, organization and access to the media” that allowed it to move into the driver’s seat in the first instance, allows it, at the same time, to maintain its position and beat back challengers. How then does Gutstein propose that business be forced from its commanding position at the apex of society? The answer he offers is for progressives to unite to discredit “radical” conservatives and restore the credibility of the mixed economy and social welfare. This is shallow.

We have already seen, and Gutstein himself has shown, that social welfare, regulation, and public ownership never lost credibility with the bulk of people in capitalist society. The majority continues to regard these things as desirable, and yet these things are no longer part of the government agenda. This is so because public ownership, regulation and social welfare, lost credibility with business, and with its media and government agents, beginning in the mid-1970s. Indeed, the fundamental shift in the balance of power that Gutstein claims happened 30 years ago was really the loss in credibility of the welfare state among business and its representatives who dominate the state. This is why a conservative agenda was implemented despite continuing popular support for social welfare. Calling for a campaign to restore the credibility of the mixed economy and the welfare state can only mean restoring the credibility of social welfare capitalism among members of the ruling class, since this is the only class for which the credibility of public ownership, income redistribution and regulation, was lost. In other words, what Gutstein is proposing is that the public petition business and its agents in government to recreate the world as it was in North America from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s.

Since business and its agents will only implement a welfare state if it’s in their interests to do so, and since objectively, it’s not always or even often in their interests to grant a full panoply of concessions and reforms, the likelihood of this approach being successful is entirely dependent on the interests of business. If there are times when it would suit the profit-making imperatives of business to strengthen social welfare, concede advances in unionization, and allow a measure of public ownership, these reforms and concessions will be made…but at the discretion of the same business interests that are in the driver’s seat. Reform and concessions will, therefore, be contingent and revocable, and will be taken back at the earliest moment the welfare state is no longer judged by business to be in its interests. The lesson of the last three decades for the left is not to work to restore the credibility of social welfare capitalism, but for the working class itself to take control of the economy and to replace business in the driver seat. This is the only way to permanently end the evils that Gutstein calls the historical concerns of the left.

It should be noted that Gutstein’s views are representative of those of progressives who aim to persuade business and its agents that income redistribution, strong unions, and robust social programs are a pathway to growth and prosperity, not burdens which reduce profit-margins. This Panglossian view, which also seeks an equal status for, or partnership between, labor and capital, holds that social democracy is a win-win for both classes. This view carries little weight with business, which recognizes that an irreconcilable antagonism exists between its interests and labor’s, and that if it can get away with paying less tax and lower wages, so much the better. The progressive argument that business could reap higher profits if it paid more taxes and raised wages is, not surprisingly, dismissed by business as nonsense. As to the view that a partnership between business and labor is democratic, this can be dismissed as nonsense too, for even if we were to suppose that labor and capital could have an equal status in capitalist society, it would be a strange democracy in which the 90 percent or more of the population that makes up labor had a voice only equal to the 10 percent or less that constitutes capital.

The limits of progressive thought

To summarize the problems with Gutstein’s analysis:

1. The post-war period may have been a time of robust growth and prosperity in Canada and the United States, but it does not follow that robust growth and prosperity were caused by a mixed economy, expanded union rights and the construction of a social safety net. What’s more, the United States economy has never been mixed, and the Canadian economy has only ever been mildly so. Pent-up demand following the restraint and shortages of the war years, the stepped up military spending of the Cold War, the space race and the expansion of the automobile and allied industries, contributed to making the post-war period a time of growth and prosperity. The role these factors played in creating growth and prosperity, alongside the industrial monopoly enjoyed by North American business for the greater part of the post-war period, allowed a social safety net to be built. The ideological imperative of meeting the social welfare standards established by the Communist countries provided the impetus to do so. The smaller size of the global capitalist workforce prior to its doubling with the collapse of the socialist bloc and the opening of China and India to foreign investment, checked the strong downward pressure on wages that would soon follow. The location of production in advanced industrial countries prior to the advances in telecommunications and transportation that allowed production to be relocated to non-union areas and low-wage countries also supported strong unions and higher wages.

2. While business recruited “radical” conservatives to promote neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideologies, the business propaganda machine has not been the astonishing success Gutstein say it has been. On the contrary, it has failed miserably in changing the beliefs and attitudes of the majority about social welfare, regulation and public ownership. And yet, the social welfare state has been largely dismantled and unions weakened. Business and is errand boys in government didn’t manufacture consent among members of the working class for these changes; they simply went ahead and made them.

3. Business did not hijack the media and government after profits declined and inflation rose in the 1970s. Media corporations, business themselves, are by their very nature corporate agents, while governments have long acted in the interests of business, because they have regularly been led by ambitious lawyers (typically), recruited, trained and financed by the corporate rich, and often by the corporate rich themselves, and because any government that willingly works within the context of capitalism must accommodate the profit-making interests of business, or risk its rule being destabilized.

4. By virtue of its ownership and control of the economy, business is in a position to use its immense wealth to undermine laws intended to rein in it, and to tilt the playing field in its favor. In a capitalist society, business wields too much power for it ever to be but one voice in a pluralist contest mediated by a neutral state. Business control of the economy and the wealth it allows it to accumulate furnishes business with the means to buy the media, lobbyists and politicians to undermine regulation.

5. Wealthy liberals are no more interested in building effective movements to challenge their wealth and privileges than wealthy conservatives are. While a coordinated, organized and disciplined multi-issue organization is necessary to successfully advance left-wing goals, the role traditionally played by liberal philanthropists in their relationship with the left has been one of co-opting moderates and splintering the left into disparate, single-issue groups, organized around concerns other than class (gender, race, poverty, environmentalism, and so on.) Any serious effort to secure advances for the working class will not be funded by those most likely to be adversely affected.

While each of the above issues is important alone, all can be more readily addressed within a publicly-owned, rationally planned economy than within the framework of capitalism. Progress in eliminating racism, sexism and in providing basic economic security came much faster and went much further in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries than in advanced capitalist countries. While progress toward the resolution of important problems does happen within capitalism, it happens in a slow, fitful manner, without the determined energy that has characterized the history of socialist countries. A commitment to building socialism is a more certain and rapid path to eliminating these scourges than attempting to secure gradual, piecemeal change within capitalism. With the world being driven headlong into environmental disaster by the competitive lash of capitalism, gradual, piecemeal reforms are not an option.

Conclusion

Contrary to Gutstein’s thesis, government and the media weren’t hijacked three decades ago. They have always been agents of corporate rule. However, three decades ago, the welfare state lost credibility with business and its representatives in government and the media because it no longer served business interests. Strong unions, labor militancy, rising popular expectations and demands for the expansion of the welfare state, and the crisis of stagflation, combined to encroach upon business interests to a degree business was no longer willing to tolerate. In a backlash against labor, unions were attacked, social safety nets were shredded, and the taxes of corporations and the wealthy were slashed. The backlash was facilitated by advances in shipping and telecommunications, which allowed production to be relocated to non-union areas and low-wage countries. The doubling of the global capitalist workforce, which occurred as a result of the opening of China and India to foreign investment, and the collapse of the Warsaw Bloc, helped to drive wages down. [35] The ideology propagated by “radical” conservatives who organized themselves into corporate-funded think-tanks justified the new agenda, but didn’t cause it.

Gutstein and other progressives think it’s possible to turn back the hands of time. They want to return North America to a post-war capitalism. But returning to the post-war welfare state means recreating the material conditions of the post-war years, something no amount of counter-hegemonic progressive propaganda can achieve. Those days are gone, and while they may have been comfortable for white, male workers in the United States and Canada, they were not a nostalgic period for women and racial minorities in the global north, nor for the greater part of humanity in the global south whose oppression the social welfare gains of the north partly defrayed.

The lesson of the last three decades for the left is not, as Gutstein concludes, to work to restore the credibility of welfare capitalism, but to face up to the reality of what happens when working class movements fail to take the driver’s seat themselves, and allow business to keep its hands on the wheel. Left in place to drive the car, the major shareholders and board members of the top corporations steer in the direction that suits themselves, veering only slightly off course when the passengers, or the conditions of the road, leave them no other choice. But the road of capitalism is narrow, and business absolutely will not steer off the road, though it is in another direction that the interests of the car’s working class passengers lie. As Gutstein points out, “poverty, homelessness, inequality, poor healthcare, racism and sexism” are the traditional concerns of the left, and it is in societies in which the working class has come to power that these evils have been greatly reduced, if not eradicated altogether. By contrast, in societies in which business has been left in the driver’s seat or where labor attempts to share power with business, progressive gains, if they’ve gone far at all, are almost always temporary, revoked the moment business needs to take them back and is strong enough to do so. No, the lesson of the last three decades for the left is not to work to restore the credibility of social welfare capitalism, but for the working class itself to take control of the economy and to replace business in the driver seat. This is the only way to permanently secure the benefits business temporarily ceded to one section of the global working class during the post-war period, and to make them a reality for all.

1. Donald Gutstein, Not a Conspiracy Theory: How Business Hijacks Democracy, Key Porter Books, 2009, p. 315.
2. Gutstein, p. 59.
3. Gutstein, p. 57.
4. Gutstein, p. 17.
5. Gutstein, p. 315.
6. Gutstein, p. 58.
7. Gutstein, p. 304.
8. Jennifer Agiesta and Jon Cohen, “Public opinion in U.S. turns against the war,” The Washington Post, August 20, 2009; John F. Burns, “Brown pledges to maintain Britain’s Afghan forces,” The New York Times, September 5, 2009; Julian E. Barnes, “Doubt raised on troop boost in Afghanistan war,” The Los Angeles Times, September 11, 2009; Linda McQuaig, “NATO is an unwelcome wedding guest,” The Toronto Star, July 28, 2009; “Just 40% of US back Afghan conflict,” The Morning Star (UK), October 8, 2009; Eric Schmitt and Steven Erlanger, “U.S. seeks 10,000 troops from its allies in Afghanistan,” The New York Times, November 26, 2009.
9. GlobeScan, “Wide Dissatisfaction with Capitalism — Twenty Years after Fall of Berlin Wall,” November 9, 2009, http://www.globescan.com/news_archives/bbc2009_berlin_wall/bbc09_berlin_wall_release.pdf
10. Gutstein, p. 80.
11. Gutstein, p. 303.
12. Gutstein, p. 58.
13. Gutstein, p. 66.
14. Ibid.
15. Gutstein, p. 92.
16. Gutstein, p. 63.
17. Ibid. One of the people involved in the post-World War I campaign was Ivy Ledbetter Lee who “helped John D. Rockefeller clean up his reputation.” This was done by establishing the Rockefeller Foundation. Being liberal, Rockefeller’s philanthropy escapes Gutstein’s critical gaze.
18. Gutstein, p. 70.
19. Ibid. It’s curious that Gutstein considers private enterprise ideology to be uniquely dominant in North America. While it’s true that social programs and unions are stronger in other places (Western Europe, for example), it would be an exaggeration to say that private enterprise ideology isn’t dominant among mainstream journalists and media commentators, top level civil servants and political parties, including labor, socialist and social democratic parties, outside of North America. It is not, however, dominant among the majority, as shown above.
20. Gutstein, p. 315.
21. Gutstein, p. 11-12.
22. Gutstein, p. 73.
23. Paul Sweezy, “Power elite or ruling class?” Monthly Review Pamphlet Series, No. 13.
24. G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? Power, Politics and Social Change, McGraw-Hill, 2005.
25. Gutstein, p. 30.
26. Gutstein, p. 56.
27. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, Monthly Review Press, April, 2009.
28. Fred Goldstein, Low-Wage Capitalism: Colossus with Feet of Clay, World View Forum, New York, 2008.
29. Gutstein, p. 309.
30. Ibid.
31. Gutstein, p. 318.
32. Ibid.
33. Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism, State University of New York Press, 2003; See also Michael James Barker’s web-log, http://michaeljamesbarker.wordpress.com/. Barker has written extensively on liberal philanthropies and their role in manipulating democracy.
34. Gutstein, p. 292.
35. Goldstein.

The bootstrap theory of propaganda

By Stephen Gowans

The New York Times and U.S. politicians are, through assertion and repetition, attempting to create as common knowledge the idea that Iran has a nuclear weapons program and that the last presidential election in Iran was fraudulent, even though there is no evidence to back either claim.

In today’s (November 23, 2009) New York Times, reporter Alexei Barrionuevo writes that “Brazil’s ambitions to be a more important player on the global diplomatic stage are crashing headlong into the efforts of the United States and other Western powers to rein in Iran’s nuclear arms program” (my emphasis.)

This treats the existence of a nuclear arms program in Iran as an established finding.

Yet, Tehran denies it has a nuclear weapons program and the U.N nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, says it “‘has no concrete proof’ that Iran ever sought to make nuclear arms…” [1] The 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate disagrees, in part, claiming that Iran had a nuclear weapons program in 2003, but says that Iran has since disbanded it. In February, “US officials said that…no new evidence has surfaced to undercut the findings of the 2007 (estimate).” [3]

According to the head of the I.A.E.A, Mohamed ElBaradei, the agency has

“not seen concrete evidence that Tehran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program… But somehow, many people are talking about how Iran’s nuclear program is the greatest threat to the world… In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped. Yes, there’s concern about Iran’s future intentions and Iran needs to be more transparent with the IAEA and the international community… But the idea that we’ll wake up tomorrow and Iran will have a nuclear weapon is an idea that isn’t supported by the facts as we have seen them so far.” [3]

Barrionuevo isn’t alone in asserting, without evidence, that Iran is building nuclear arms. U.S. Representative Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, told Barrionuevo that “the world is trying to figure out how to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons,” assuming, as a given, that Iran is trying to have nuclear weapons.

Engel also says that Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “is illegitimate with his own people,” a reference to the disputed presidential election Iran’s opposition claims Ahmadinejad won through fraud. Barrionuevo points to critics who worry that a planned visit to Brazil by Ahmadinejad will “legitimize” the Iranian president “just five months after what most of the world sees as his fraudulent re-election.”

Yet there is no evidence the election was stolen. All that backs the allegation is the assertion of the opposition that the election was fraudulent and “what most of the world” believes, this being based on the Western media treating opposition claims as legitimate.

This is a circular process. Most of the world believes the election was fraudulent because that’s what the principal source of information on this matter, the media, led it to believe. Now the New York Times offers the fact that the assertion is widely believed as evidence it is true. This might be called the bootstrap theory of propaganda: legitimize an assertion by treating it as true, and when most of the world believes it’s true, offer the reality that everyone believes it to be true as evidence it is.

The only relevant evidence that would allow us to determine whether the outcome of the election was crooked or fair is provided by the sole methodologically rigorous poll conducted prior to the election. It was sponsored by the international arm of the U.S. Republican Party, the International Republican Institute, hardly a booster of Ahmadinejad. Carried out three weeks prior to the election, the poll “showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin – greater than his actual apparent margin of victory”. [4] The pollsters, Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, concluded that “Ahmadinejad is who Iranians want.”

The process of creating commonly held beliefs that have no evidentiary basis, and doing so through assertion and repetition, is not new. To justify an illegal war on Yugoslavia, Western politicians, and the Western media in train, asserted without evidence that a genocide was in progress in Kosovo in 1999. Tens of thousands of corpses were expected to be found littering the “killing fields” of the then-Serb province. But when forensic investigators were dispatched to Kosovo after the war to document the genocide, the bodies never turned up. By frequently repeating unsubstantiated claims, people were led to believe that systematic killings on a mass scale were being carried out, and that the West had a moral obligation to intervene. The public was duped.

Similarly, Western politicians “sexed up” intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Western media went along, acknowledging only after public support for the war had been engineered by the media’s propagation of U.S. and British government lies, that it got it wrong. The politicians said they had been misled by the C.I.A. The C.I.A said it was pressured by the politicians. All that mattered was that many people believed that Saddam Hussein was hiding banned weapons. When none were found, a new pretext for dominating Iraq militarily was trotted out, and acceptance of the pretext was aided by the repetition of more unsubstantiated assertions.

The bootstrap theory of propaganda is at work again, this time in connection with Iran.

1. William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, “Report says Iran has data to make a nuclear bomb,” The New York Times, October 4, 2009.

2. Greg Miller, “US now sees Iran as pursuing nuclear bombs,” The Los Angeles Times, February 12, 2009.

3. William J. Cole, “UN nuclear watchdog says Iran threat hyped,” The Boston Globe, September 2, 2009.

4. Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, “Ahmadinejad is who Iranians want,” The Guardian (UK), June 15, 2009.

U.S. imperialism: Hidden in plain sight

By Stephen Gowans

The dominant U.S. approach to exercising influence over people in foreign countries is to operate through locals who are committed to U.S. imperialist values or fiercely oppose U.S. enemies. Locals, whether rulers, politicians, military officers, journalists, scholars or activists, are provided with opportunities, funding, training, equipment and support in exchange for assuming leadership roles on behalf of U.S. interests or against U.S. targets. The sine qua non of the paradigm is the appearance of independence. While locals may express admiration and support for U.S. positions, their own pro-U.S. stances, or opposition to U.S. enemies, are to be understood to have been arrived at independently. And, in many, if not most, cases, this is true. Locals who assume leadership roles on behalf of U.S. interests are often educated or trained in the United States, where they have absorbed pro-imperialist values. At the same time, the ubiquitous U.S. mass media convey pro-imperialist values to locals who haven’t been educated in the imperial nerve center. And some may, for their own (often class) reasons, be passionate opponents of individuals, groups or movements the United States government would like to eliminate. What matters is not how pro-U.S. positions, or anti-U.S.-enemy passions, are arrived at, only that some locals have them and that U.S. funding and support provide them with a platform to influence the political, military and informational landscape of their home country.

A recent example of how this paradigm operates is provided in an August 16, 2009 New York Times article by Thom Shanker (“U.S. turns to radio stations and cellphones to counter Taliban’s propaganda.”)

Shanker quotes Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. proconsul in Afghanistan and Pakistan, who acknowledges that the United States is losing the information war to the Taliban. In this, Holbrooke reminds us that war is multi-faceted, comprising not only military action, but other elements, as well. Warfare may be waged concurrently with or independently of military action: through economic means (trade sanctions, blockades and financial isolation); through non-violent warfare (destabilization); through sabotage; through cyber attacks; and through what concerns Holbrooke, information. Information warfare is “variously named public affairs, public diplomacy, strategic communications and information operations.” In plain language, it’s propaganda, a term invariably applied to the other side’s public affairs, public diplomacy, strategic communications and information operations, but propaganda all the same.

U.S. officials say they’re losing the information war because their “efforts to describe American policy and showcase American values are themselves viewed as propaganda.” The other reasons, unacknowledged by Holbrooke, are that the U.S. military has created considerable hardship, fear, and bloodshed in its efforts to quell opposition to its attempted conquest of Afghanistan and because, as the New York Times reported on July 28, 2009, the Taliban has bolstered its popularity by pursuing “a strategy intended to foment a class struggle,” rewarding “landless peasants with profits of the crops of the landlords,” the Taliban has ousted. To counter the Taliban’s growing popularity, Washington plans to “amplify the (anti-Taliban) voices of Afghans speaking to Afghans, and Pakistanis speaking to Pakistanis” by spending up to $150 million per year to “step up the training of local journalists and help produce audio and video programming, as well as pamphlets, posters, and CDs denigrating militants and their message.” By operating through locals, Washington hopes to conceal the “‘Made in the U.S.A.’ stamped on the programming.”

There’s little new here. For decades the C.I.A amplified the voices of citizens talking to citizens by funding anyone who had anything negative to say about the Soviet Union and Communism. As Frances Stonor Saunders revealed in her book The Cultural Cold War, anti-Communist leftists were particularly favored with C.I.A lucre, often channelled through philanthropic foundations – foundations parts of the Western left continue to receive funding from today. Just as Shanker reports that U.S. officials say they’ll amplify the voices of Pakistanis and Afghans who “denigrate the enemy”, so too did the C.I.A amplify the voices of Westerners who denigrated the Soviet Union and Communism. Since social democrats, Trotskyites and anarchists were already fiercely opposed to the Soviet Union, and being leftists could be presented as credible critics of Soviet Communism, they received the bulk of covert funding from the U.S. state, funding whose origins many were unaware of or chose to turn a blind eye to. Their mission: denigrate the U.S.S.R and Communism. This they were already doing, but C.I.A funding allowed them to do it more visibly, to a wider audience, and therefore more effectively. By doing so they justified U.S. engagement in the Cold War and, acting knowingly or unwittingly as U.S. agents, used Uncle Sam’s money to denigrate a shared enemy. Today, the common understanding of the Soviet Union and Communism carries over from the C.I.A amplifying the voices of Communism’s, the U.S.S.R’s, and Stalin’s political enemies. The amplification of categorically critical voices so thoroughly polluted scholarly histories of the U.S.S.R that historians have had to discard what was produced in the Cold War period and start afresh. It’s time too that Western leftists did the same. The fear of British historian E.H. Carr — that only the worst aspects of the Soviet experiment with socialism would be remembered, while the astonishing achievements would be forgotten – has been realized, thanks in no small part to the C.I.A and the anti-Communist leftists whose voices it amplified. Advances in human progress as significant as those achieved by the Soviet Union (full employment, free health care and education through university, no inflation, gender equality, mild and shrinking income inequality, low-cost housing and transportation, worker participation in enterprise management, support for national liberation movements, industrialization of underdeveloped regions) should no longer remain concealed behind the muck of C.I.A-backed Cold War propaganda.

While the paradigm is a long-standing one, what’s different today, from when the C.I.A covertly channelled funds to voices that served Washington’s interests, is that funding is no longer provided covertly. Washington learned a lesson when C.I.A support for anti-communist, anti-socialist and anti-national liberation movements came to light. Washington’s revealed hidden hand immediately undermined the legitimacy of these movements, setting back U.S. efforts to counter opposition to the unchecked spread of U.S. financial, military and corporate domination. From that point, greater openness was injected into funding individuals, groups and movements working against U.S. enemies. Rather than concealing Washington’s hand, Washington’s objectives would be concealed behind a rhetorical screen. Funding would be targeted at democracy promotion, international development, and public diplomacy – carried out openly, so that no one could say the hidden hand of U.S. imperialism was involved (though the overt hand of U.S. imperialism certainly was.) By dressing up U.S. imperialism in clothing that appealed to the sartorial preferences of the non-Communist left, the overt hand of U.S. imperialism was concealed behind honeyed phrases. Social democrats didn’t see imperialism; they saw humanitarian intervention, democracy promotion and the responsibility to protect vulnerable populations. Anarchists and Trotskyites didn’t see U.S. efforts to dominate other countries on Wall Street’s behalf; they saw the fight against tyrants, dictators and Stalinists.

And so it is that U.S. imperialism is concealed in plain sight. Washington’s funding of fifth columns, quislings, phoney ‘independent’ journalists and overthrow movements may be on the public record, but few know it, and even fewer are prepared to spend the time to make it widely known. Those who do are dismissed by social democrats, Trotskyites and anarchists – unwilling to rock the boat of U.S. imperialism under its humanitarian, anti-despot guise – as revealing nothing of significance. The money, training, equipment and support that flow in cataracts from the hands of Western governments, wealthy financiers and corporate foundations make no difference, they counter weakly. In this milieu, U.S. officials are now able to openly talk in the pages of the New York Times about how they plan to win the information war against the Taliban by enlisting locals as their mouthpieces – and openly acknowledge they are doing so to conceal the “Made in the U.S.A” stamped on the programming – without fear the exercise will be seen as illegitimate.

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