Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Think Tanks are PR Firms Trying to Control What We Think

Tags: Think Tanks Power and Wealth, Control Elections and What Elites Think, Trilateral Commission, Corporations Rule the World, Chomsky, Jimmy Carter, Samuel P. Huntington

In the book Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford. He got a Ph.D. degree at the University of Chicago in Political Philosophy, but could not get work at an University. So he headed a Think Tank which he refused to name in Washington DC, which he left because they are forced to by the funders to justify a conclusion they are given. He also said that mindlessly going to college which can put people in so much debt that it takes 20 years of payments at the high interests allowed in the Bush administration which Obama took back as a government function to give a loan at much lower interests.

My opinion is that we should make college education and worker training available for free or very low cost and make schools better by providing enough money so that the best and brightest will want to work at schools. Also prevent lawsuits by parents so discipline can be imposed on the students. Give all mothers to be and their children vitamin D to develop their brains. The latest Discovery Magazine has a long article about why human brains have decreased in size to about half way to Homo Erectus in the last 20,000 years. No one really seems to know but many theories abound.

On average those with the largest heads for their sex have the highest IQ confirmed by MRI and IQ tests so it is worrying. Take Jeb Bush verses George W. Bush brothers with an enormous difference in intellectual capability. Lots of brain cells are used to control muscles and memory. Perhaps a great drop in memory and fitness may shrink the hippocampus and muscle functions in the brain? It is worrying. Use it or lose it!

Jim Kawakami, August 11, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

History of the Powerful: ... The 1960-1970s antiwar movement and minority and women equality movements alarmed those with power and wealth. The Trilateral Commission met in 1975 in Washington to discuss “The Crisis of Democracy” with the English version published by Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington#The_Third_Wave_of_Democratization which were code words for “we don’t like what is happening and we need to reverse the current trend.” The Trilateral Commission is made up of the most powerful and wealthy individuals in America, Europe, and Japan.


A program is put in place to get back to initiative to bring profits back to those who really deserve them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateral_Commission … (You might be surprised who the members are and were. See List. Jim)


US Administration ties

In his book Radical Priorities, Noam Chomsky said this:

Perhaps the most striking feature of the new Administration is the role played in it by the Trilateral Commission. The mass media had little to say about this matter during the Presidential campaign -- in fact, the connection of the Carter group to the Commission was recently selected as "the best censored news story of 1976"-- and it has not received the attention that it might have since the Administration took office.

All of the top positions in the government -- the office of President, Vice-President, Secretary of State, Defense and Treasury -- are held by members of the Trilateral Commission, and the National Security Advisor was its director. Many lesser officials also came from this group. It is rare for such an easily identified private group to play such a prominent role in an American Administration. … —The Carter Administration: Myth and Reality, Excerpted from Radical Priorities, 1981 Noam Chomsky[4] See www.zcommunications.org .


(Note the same forces got together to elect Barack Obama as another Carter to take the brunt of the Financial Debacle which Greenspan knew was coming no matter what he tells us. He knew of the problem with these toxic mortgages back in 2001 when the leaders in Cleveland went to see him. Yes, 2001. When the Democrats tried to do something in 2006, they got rebuffed by the Bush administration. The Republicans even refused to agree to Paulson's efforts to save Lehman Brothers which might have stopped the liquidity Financial Melt Down.


It looks like Obama fooled them. That is why the media has been slowly trying to undermine him including the New York Times. Zeleny of the NY Times, originally from Nebraska, openly criticized Obama on television news! That is what the polls are doing now among the elites who pay attention so they will make up their mind in spite of the facts. Let's see what happens in September after Congress gets back. I can't wait to see how the Republicans act. Cooperatively or Not. Jim)


Wikipedia ... A Trilateral Commission Task Force Report, presented at the 1975 meeting in Kyoto, Japan, called An Outline for Remaking World Trade and Finance, said: "Close Trilateral cooperation in keeping the peace, in managing the world economy, and in fostering economic development and in alleviating world poverty, will improve the chances of a smooth and peaceful evolution of the global system." Another Commission document read:

"The overriding goal is to make the world safe for interdependence by protecting the benefits which it provides for each country against external and internal threats which will constantly emerge from those willing to pay a price for more national autonomy. This may sometimes require slowing the pace at which interdependence proceeds, and checking some aspects of it. More frequently however, it will call for checking the intrusion of national government into the international exchange of both economic and non-economic goods." … (The Far Right John Birch Society is now mainstream, but they were right about a world government of corporations. A 1995 book How Corporations Rule the World by Korten, former professor at the Harvard Business School.

The same Trilateral Commission, corporations, and the wealthy, put a basketful of money into the Presidential Election to elect a weak Democrat for President, Jimmy Carter who would likely take the brunt of blame for the expected economic troubles and high inflation leading their real pick, Ronald Reagan, who was able to almost everything that helped the rich and powerful. He even eliminated the requirement that television give equal billing to all candidates which made elections much more expensive and profitable for corporations.


Reagan used his gift of gab enormous amounts of money needed for his second term even though he was already suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. But in many ways, he was already a lackey for business interests so they did not really need him to govern. Papa Bush then became President and supported money laundering, continued the economic wars in Latin America, but realized that Reagan’s profligate spending has led to still the largest deficits and passed a tax increase which caused him to lose the election.


Jim Kawakami, August 11, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com


Source Watch A Wiki-Like Source of Decrypting Political Lies http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=SourceWatch

… "In 1970, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a fateful memo to the National Chamber of Commerce saying that all of our best students are becoming anti-business because of the Vietnam War, and that we needed to do something about it. Powell's agenda included getting wealthy conservatives to set up professorships, setting up institutes on and off campus where intellectuals would write books from a conservative business perspective, and setting up think tanks. He outlined the whole thing in 1970. They set up the Heritage Foundation in 1973, and the Manhattan Institute after that. There are many others, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which date from the 1940s." --George Lakoff [1]

Think tanks are funded primarily by large businesses and major foundations. They devise and promote policies that shape the lives of everyday Americans: Social Security privatization, tax and investment laws, regulation of everything from oil to the Internet. They supply experts to testify on Capitol Hill, write articles for the op-ed pages of newspapers, and appear as TV commentators. They advise presidential aspirants and lead orientation seminars to train incoming members of Congress.

Think tanks may have a decided political leaning. There are twice as many conservative think tanks as liberal ones, and the conservative ones generally have more money. One of the important functions of think tanks is to provide a way for business interests to promote their ideas or to support economic and sociological research not taking place elsewhere that they feel may turn out in their favor. Conservative think tanks also offer donors an opportunity to support conservative policies outside academia, which during the 1960s and 1970s was accused of having a strong "collectivist" bias.

"Modern think tanks are nonprofit, tax-exempt, political idea factories where donations can be as big as the donor's checkbook and are seldom publicized," notes Tom Brazaitis, writing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. "Technology companies give to think tanks that promote open access to the internet. Wall Street firms donate to think tanks that espouse private investment of retirement funds." So much money now flows in, that the top 20 conservative think tanks now spend more money than all of the "soft money" contributions to the Republican party.

In the wake of the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 Democratic-inclined supporters sought to bolster funding for centre-left think tanks. "Scores of the US's richest people have pledged $1 million or more towards a new attempt to reinvigorate the American left and counter the powerful Republican political machine," writes David Teather in The GUardian (UK). "The money will be funnelled through an organisation called the Democracy Alliance which, according to a report in the Washington Post, will help fund a network of thinktanks and advocacy groups seeking to halt the shift to the cultural and political right." Democratic strategist Rob Stein, who organized the effort, thinks "there is a big imbalance in the amount of cash that goes into left and rightwing thinktanks. Over the past two years, he said, think tanks pushing the conservative agenda had received $295 million, while leftwing institutions were given just $75 million." [2]

A think tank's resident experts carry titles such as "senior fellow" or "adjunct scholar," but this does not necessarily mean that they possess an academic degree in their area of claimed expertise. Outside funding can corrupt the integrity of academic institutions. The same corrupting influences affect think tanks, only more so.

Think tanks are like universities minus the students and minus the systems of peer review and other mechanisms that academia uses to promote diversity of thought. Real academics are expected to conduct their research first and draw their conclusions second, but this process is often reversed at most policy-driven think tanks. As writer Jonathan Rowe has observed, the term "think" tanks is a misnomer. His comment was directed at the conservative Heritage Foundation, but it applies equally well to many other think tanks, regardless of ideology: "They don't think; they justify."http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Think_tanks


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