The Lie Factory: How politics became a business
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
He also invented advertising as we now know it. Before Bernays it was "Brand X doesn't wear out", after it was "Brand X: the man's choice". Among his works are "The Business of Propoganda" and "Engineering of Consent" (hmm... that sounds familiar).
Bernays is only on my intellectual radar because of this mesmerizing Adam Curtis documentary: http://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/
That doesn't preclude it from being a great read.
There follows an excerpt from it to give you the gist -
"The strategy adopted by the AMA would be professional to the core. The center of gravity for decision making was altered significantly, and the “mom and pop” feel of past Association decisions was eliminated. This was done in two ways. First, a San Francisco public relations firm, Whitaker and Baxter, was hired to coordinate the anti- health insurance initiative.
As a result, a proactive “National Education Campaign” was designed to make the AMA’s case against the Ewing Report and subsequent national health insurance legislation in Congress At its core, the National Education Campaign would focus on connecting “national health insurance” with “socialized medicine” in the public’s mind.
Second, Morris Fishbein, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), was removed. Fishbein had been an important voice within the AMA for three decades; he was, however, a reactionary thinker, and his public methods lacked the precision and flair of the new Whitaker/Baxter proposal.
To promote their National Education Campaign, Whitaker and Baxter first went about assembling a war chest. The internal legislative body of the AMA, the House of Delegates, voted in December 1948 to assess each member $25, for the purpose of raising $3.5 million – money that would support the Campaign’s goals.
Within two months, Baxter and Whitaker had sufficient resources (around $1.5 million) to begin implementing their strategic plans, which included “distributing millions of pamphlets, making wide use of the press and radio, mobilizing additional pressure groups against government health insurance, writing letters to congressmen, and organizing speakers’ bureaus throughout the country.”
In addition, the AMA would use physicians themselves as assets; while waiting for their family doctors, patients would be exposed to pamphlets – one of which was titled “The Voluntary Way is the American Way” – that detailed the dangers of compulsory health insurance."
This is rubbish. Plenty of nations (i.e. all first world nations) have implemented national schemes of some sort, and none of them suffer from the stuff that you read about coming from the right's bullshit machine. Maybe you're right though, maybe the fact that the US is one of the most corrupt nations on Earth and that its citizens are remarkably comfortable with this fact, means they can't do health care. That's got nothing to do with the concept of nationalized health care and definitely not with regulation in general, but is rather a consequence of an irresponsible citizenry and their terrible social organization.
Straw man/false dilemma.
Being cognizant of the danger of unnecessary concentrations of power in our society does not mean that there's no reason to concentrate power.
It means having a healthy understanding of the side-effects of that concentration of power and gives yet another reason to keep government's focus on the narrow side.
Plenty of nations (i.e. all first world nations) have implemented national schemes of some sort, and none of them suffer from the stuff that you read about coming from the right's bullshit machine.
Broad generalizations. Actually, many first world nations have had huge problems with their national schemes from poor medical services and poor availability of actual treatment to larger economic issues resulting from overspending on social programs like health care.
The bottom line for me is that the health care law passed is a huge and complicated power grab of a mess that did nothing to address the main issues that needed to be addressed: Reduction of the middlemen and price-hiding tactics standing between healthcare providers and consumers. The government had a real opportunity to cut the ties between place-of-work and healthcare. They had a real opportunity to give consumers the tools and rights they needed so that they could be informed purchasers of healthcare services.
We can argue whether other approaches would have worked for new health care legislation, but the whole point of any reforms is that it can actually be achieved. Universal health care systems and privatization schemes do not have enough support politically to be feasible, which has a lot to do with other political and social issues in the US.
> So we should do away with all regulation then?
The parent didn't say that and nobody outside of the former Paul campaign has ever suggested. This is exactly what I'm talking about.
> Anyway we can sort out the details ... after the election
Stop using month-old Democratic talking points for your arguments and maybe people would take you more seriously.
> Plenty of nations ... have implemented national schemes ... and none of them suffer from the stuff that you read about coming from the right's bullshit machine.
So there it is, the right's "bullshit machine" as you put it. Let's ignore the fact that the US is several times the size of any western European country, much less homogenous and with a greater income disparity even between the 2nd and 4th quintiles. But yes, because it works for 62 million Britons, clearly if someone doesn't think it will work for 312 million Americans they (a) are racist; (b) are stupid; (c) hate poor people; (d) all of the above.
It's implied. It's what always comes after that part. I nipped it in the bud. You're welcome.
> Stop using month-old Democratic tal...
You're an idiot.
> But yes, because it works for 62 million Britons, clearly if someone doesn't think it will work for 312 million Americans they (a) are racist; (b) are stupid; (c) hate poor people; (d) all of the above.
I agree.