by Jim Marrs
Such signing statements convey a president’s view toward the law and his own power. Bush’s use of the term “unitary executive,” according to Van Bergen, is merely a code word for a doctrine “that favors nearly unlimited executive power.”
“In [Bush’s] view, and the view of his administration, that doctrine gives him license to overrule and bypass Congress or the courts, based on his own interpretations of the Constitution—even where that violates long-established laws and treaties, counters recent legislation that he has himself signed, or (as shown by recent developments in the Padilla case) involves offering a federal court contradictory justifications for a detention,” Van Bergen wrote.
Charlie Savage, writing in the Boston Globe, said Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, thus giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. (In late 2007, Bush’s veto of a $23 billion water resources bill critics claimed was laden with pork projects was overridden by both the House and the Senate, marking the first time in a decade that Congress passed legislation over a presidential veto.) Bush often invites the bills’ sponsors to signing ceremonies, at which he lavishes praise upon their work. But Savage noted: “Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files ‘signing statements’—official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register. In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills—sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill.”
Van Bergen took particular note of Bush’s signing statement while he was signing into law legislation curtailing torture on prisoners. “When President Bush signed the new law, sponsored by Senator [John] McCain, restricting the use of torture when interrogating detainees, he also issued a presidential signing statement,” said Van Bergen. “That statement asserted that his power as commander in chief gives him the authority to bypass the very law he had just signed.”
Portland State University law professor Phillip Cooper told newsmen Bush and his legal team spent the past five years quietly working to concentrate ever more governmental power in the White House. “There is no question that this administration has been involved in a very carefully thought out, systematic process of expanding presidential power at the expense of the other branches of government. This is really big, very expansive, and very significant,” Cooper said.
Little is said of such things, because the Bush White House is more closed-mouthed than any previous administration. In the Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and both Bush administrations, loyalty has been seen as a requisite for those serving the White House. Many people working with the highest levels of power in the United States see their superiors as public servants, only looking after the best interests of America. Such unquestioning loyalty and allegiance was a hallmark of the Third Reich.
Many loyalists around Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and the two Bushes truly saw their leader as a paragon. They appeared blinded to their leader’s actions, as happened to so many in the Third Reich. “I admit, I was fascinated by Adolf Hitler,” recalled Traudl Junge, the last surviving occupant of the Fuehrerbunker, shortly before her death in 2002. She was twenty-two years old when, in 1942, she was selected to become a secretary to Hitler. “He was a pleasant boss and a fatherly friend,” she recalled. “I deliberately ignored all the warning voices inside me and enjoyed the time by his side almost until the bitter end. It wasn’t what he said, but the way he said things and how he did things.”
Soon after the War on Terror got underway, the Germans, who should know, could see the parallels between their Nazi era and modern America. The attacks of 9/11 and the Reichstag fire, Bush’s PATRIOT Act and Hitler’s Enabling Act, the use of German Army reserves to attack Poland and Bush’s use of reserves in Afghanistan and Iraq to avoid a military draft must have seemed quite familiar to them. German justice minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin brought heated criticism from President George W. Bush in September of 2002, when, in criticizing Bush’s policy in Iraq, she stated publicly, “Bush wants to distract attention from his domestic problems. That’s a popular method. Even Hitler did that.” For her remark, Daeubler-Gmelin was asked to resign by German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, an attendee of Bilderberg meetings.
And it is not just politicians who must be careful of voicing their opinions in the new American empire. Demonstrators are routinely herded into fenced “free speech zones,” or arrested for speaking out. Thanks to the Internet, millions witnessed twenty-one-year-old Florida university student Andrew Meyer screaming in pain after being tasered by campus police on September 17, 2007, after simply asking John Kerry why he had not challenged the 2006 presidential election.
On top of the ubiquitous nature of surveillance technology and the intimidation of dissenters, there is very real control through the print and electronic matrix we know as the mass media.
CHAPTER 16
PROPAGANDA
ONE TOOL OF PUBLIC CONTROL QUICKLY UNDERSTOOD AND WELL utilized by the Nazis of the Third Reich was propaganda. And even the definition of commonly used words can change. Many still remember when “gay” meant “happy.”
The 1952 edition of The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language defined propaganda as “The dissemination and the defense of beliefs, opinions, or actions deemed salutary to the program of a particular group; the propagation of doctrines and tenets of special interests, as an effort to give credence to information partially or wholly fallacious.” A more diluted definition was given in the 1996 edition of The Reader’s Digest Oxford Complete Wordfinder, which merely stated it was “an organized program of publicity, selected information, etc., used to propagate a doctrine, practice, etc.” So, where the definition of propaganda once included allegations and false information, today it is just “organized” and “selected” information, of the type seen daily in the mass media.
A noteworthy component of propaganda is not just false or spun information, but the omission of critical material that is essential to enable the reader or viewer to place the presented information in a meaningful context. Critics see the single greatest failing of the modern corporate mass media as that while it daily bombards its audience with facts, figures, and statistics, it rarely attempts to bring coherence or meaning to this data.
“The media may not always be able to tell us what to think, but they are strikingly successful in telling us what to think about,” stated media critic Michael Parenti.
Many people complain that the major media are superficial, conformist, and subjective in their selection of news. A Pew Research Center poll showed respondents who thought news reporting unfair and inaccurate ranged into the 60 percentiles. A survey by the news industry publication Editor & Publisher showed that journalists themselves do not disagree. Nearly half of its participants indicated their belief that news coverage is shallow and inadequate. “Much of what is reported as ‘news’ is little more than the uncritical transmission of official opinions to an unsuspecting public,” wrote Parenti. Fox news commentator Brit Hume stated, “What [the mass media] pass off as objectivity, is just a mindless kind of neutrality.” Hume added that reporters “shouldn’t try to be objective, they should try to be honest.”
Hitler understood propaganda intuitively. He wrote in Mein Kampf: “[O]ne started out with the very correct assumption that in the size of the lie there is always contained a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of people may fall victim to a great lie rather than a small one, since they themselves also lie sometimes in little things but would certainly be too ashamed to tell a great lie. Thus, it would not enter their heads to tell a great lie, and they would not believe that others could tell such an infamous lie; indeed, they will doubt and hesitate; even after learning the
truth, they will continue to think there must be some other explanation; therefore, just for this reason, some part of the most impudent lie will remain and stick, a fact which all great lying artists and societies of this world know only too well and therefore villainously employ.” Hitler was stating that most people are honest and would never tell a great lie; therefore, it is hard for them to believe that anyone—especially an admired leader—would tell one. This presents a great weapon to unprincipled officials.
For example, during the Nuremberg trials, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering explained how to persuade the public to go to war. He told one of his interrogators, “Why of course the people don’t want war…. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship…. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” Conspiracy researchers believe such methodology has been used on the American public.
Ubiquitous propaganda remains a prime method for controlling public thought and worldviews. The use of the public media to frame the issues of the day and bolster support for the government was quickly understood by Hitler and his top lieutenants. “It is no coincidence that the Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment became so important, or that Hitler was personally closest to Joseph Goebbels, the expert manipulator of mass opinion,” explained Professor George Mosse, author of Nazi Culture.
In America today, there are thousands of persons working in the advertising agencies, public relations firms, and programming departments of the TV networks and cable/satellite channels—all under the command of their corporate owners—toiling unceasingly to present the corporate worldview to their viewers. They weave an electromagnetic “matrix” around our society, which is difficult to break with even for the most sophisticated and educated.
BY 2008, SIX multinational corporations controlled almost everything the average American reads, sees, or hears. The Internet has done a marvelous job of bringing alternative news and information but only to those who own and can use a computer. Everyone else is at the mercy of the corporate-controlled mass media.
A cursory look at the six major media corporations reveals:
Time Warner Inc. made history in 2000 by its $112 billion merger with America Online. Time magazine, one of the corporation’s media assets, noted, “The combination will be, for better or worse, the world’s biggest media conglomerate. (Of which Time will be a part.) It’s a vast empire of broadcasting, music, movies and publishing assets, complemented by AOL’s dominant Internet presence, all fed to consumers, ultimately, through Time Warner’s cable network. Think of it as AOL Time Warner Anywhere, Anytime, Anyhow…. Time Warner is in the traditional media business; AOL is an Internet company. Because the two didn’t overlap, antitrust lawyers saw no need for concern. But the more people looked, the more they thought this was not just a marriage of two companies in different arenas. It was potentially game changing.” The AOL–Time Warner conglomerate involved twelve film companies, including Warner Bros.; multiplex theaters; Hanna-Barbera cartoons; the CNN network; the HBO cable system; twenty-four book brands, including Time-Life Books and Little, Brown and Company; fifty-two record labels and the Turner Entertainment Corporation, which includes the Turner Broadcasting System and four national sports teams; theme parks; and Warner Bros. studio stores in thirty countries. It is the leading magazine publisher in the world, with approximately thirty periodicals, including Time and Fortune magazines. AOL–Time Warner president and CEO, Richard Dean Parsons, and at least one other director are members of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Walt Disney Company, in a far cry from its Mickey Mouse origins, has grown into one of the largest media and entertainment corporations in the world. Disney now owns ABC TV network as well as the film studios of Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, MGM, Miramax, Buena Vista, and Pixar Animation Studio; magazines and newspapers; Disneyland and Disney World theme parks; almost twenty online ventures; six music labels; Disney Book; the ESPN, Soap, and Lifetime cable networks; Jim Henson’s Muppets; and several baseball and hockey teams. “In 1998, ABC News discarded an investigative report that raised embarrassing questions about hiring and safety practices at Disney World,” noted Leo Bogart, illustrating the dangers of cross-media ownership. Bogart is a Media Studies Center fellow and former general manager of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau.
Viacom is a media conglomerate created from the remerging of Viacom and CBS Corporation in 1999. The corporation’s properties include CBS with its two hundred affiliates, Blockbuster, Paramount Pictures, MTV Films, Nickelodeon Movies, Dream-works, United International Pictures (a joint venture with Universal Studies), Republic Pictures, MTV and Nickelodeon cable networks, TV Land, CMT, Spike TV, VH1, BET, Comedy Central, book publishers, almost two hundred radio stations; and Infinity Outdoor, the largest advertising company in the world. According to the Center for Public Integrity, “Viacom broke U.S. rules controlling media ownership when it bought TV network CBS. Within a week, Senator [John] McCain had proposed a change to those rules. Viacom is McCain’s fourth biggest ‘career patron.’”
Vivendi Universal, best known as one of the largest owners of privatized water in the world, also is one of the giant media/entertainment corporations. Through subsidiaries, Vivendi supplied water-related services to 110 million people in more than one hundred countries. Vivendi Universal Entertainment was created by the 2000 merger of Vivendi media with the French-based Canal + television and the purchase of Universal Studios from the Seagram Company of Canada. By 2006, with the sale of Vivendi Universal Entertainment to General Electric, it was reformed as NBC Universal. The corporation owns Universal Music Group, which holds 22 percent of the world’s music market with labels like Polygram and Motown; TV series; movie theater chains; five Universal Studio theme parks; two mobile phone companies; Connex, a U.K. rail line; and Havas, the world’s sixth largest advertising and communications group, which was renamed Vivendi Universal Publishing with its acquisition in 1998 (now known as Editis, it owns sixty publishing houses selling 80 million books and 40 million CD-ROMS yearly).
News Corporation, a creation of Australian news magnate Rupert Murdoch, originally was incorporated in Australia, but in late 2004, it was reincorporated in the United States under the laws of the State of Delaware. News Corporation owns Fox TV, Fox News, and seven other U.S. news networks; Sky TV in the U.K.; Foxtel in Australia; Star TV, which reaches some 300 million Asian viewers; more than a third ownership in HughesNet, the largest American satellite TV system; 20th Century Fox movie studio; 20th Century Fox Television; Fox Searchlight Pictures; Internet properties including MySpace, Photobucket, Flektor, Grab.com, and IGN Entertainment; thirty-four magazines, including TV Guide; HarperCollins Publishers and seven other publishers; a global network of newspapers, including the New York Post, the Times in the United Kingdom, and the Daily Telegraph and the Australian in Australia; as well as several sports teams, including the Los Angeles Dodgers. With his media conglomerate reaching tens of millions each day, Murdoch remarked in an older News Corporation annual report, “Our reach is unmatched around the world. We’re reaching people from the moment they wake up until they fall asleep.”
Bertelsmann AG, the world’s largest publisher in the English language, is a multinational media corporation based in Gutersloh, Germany, which employs more than 88,000 employees in sixty-three countries. Bertelsmann controls BMG Music Publishing, the world’s third largest music publisher; in 2002, it bought the Internet music-sharing firm Napster; fourteen music labels, including Arista Records, BMG, RCA Records, RCA Victor Group, and Windham Hill; ten television networks; seven radio stations; five production houses, five newspapers;
twenty-one magazines, including Family Circle, Parents, Geo, and Stern. Bertelsmann’s real power comes from their ownership of publishing houses, which include Random House, Ballantine Books, Del Rey, Fawcett, Bantam, Delacorte Press, Dell, Delta, Spectra, The Dial Press, Bell Tower, Clarkson Potter, Crown Publishers, Harmony Books, Broadway Books, Doubleday, Doubleday Religious Publishing, Main Street Books, Harlem Moon, Alfred A. Knopf, Anchor, Everyman’s Library, Pantheon Books, Vintage, The Modern Library, Random House Children’s Books, Fodor’s Travel Publications, Living Language, RH Puzzles and Games, RH Reference Publishing, and The Princeton Review, to name just a few. It also owns YES Solutions, a large provider of creative, media, and operational services. A partnership between Bertelsmann and Time Warner in 2002 produced Bookspan, the parent organization of Doubleday Entertainment, which directs the world’s largest book clubs, including Arvato, Book-of-the-Month Club, Black Expressions, Children’s Book-of-the-Month Club, Behavioral Science Book Club, Computer Books Direct, Architects and Designers Book Service, Country Homes & Gardens, Crafter’s Choice, Discovery Channel Book Club, Doubleday Book Club, History Book Club, Intermediate & Middle Grades Book Club, The Literary Guild, The Military Book Club, Mystery Guild, Primary Teachers’ Book Club, Scientific American Book Club, Science Fiction Book Club, and various foreign book clubs. In April 2007, Directgroup Bertelsmann acquired a 50 percent share of the Bookspan partnership.
