22-12-2011, 04:52 AM
In kicking over rocks looking for something else, I discovered this post I'd made over five years ago:
There are several elements or points I'd make in response to [someone else's] question:
Why would corporations tolerate or support the imposition of martial law?
The first answer is that martial law, as many conceive it, would not be imposed.
While the "aura" or image of martial law is one of many troops in many neighborhoods, with housewives and pre-schoolers being rounded up and put in plastic handcuffs to be hauled away to some detention facility, that isn't what will happen.
They don't need to go that far.
"The implication or latent threat of force alone
was sufficient to insure that the people would comply..."
William Colby
They merely need to create an example that is widely publicized (the CNN effect), one with an aura of need, a "reason" that can be sold to the public...
thus the rationale for it having been developed for decades within the constructs of emergency management or disaster response (despite reams of sociological research done by the Disaster Research Center which demonstrates conclusively that the public rises to the occasion, engages in "emergent" or adaptive behavior to help each other, and in which there is a minimal amount of "insurrection", looting or crime).
But the sudden, harsh, focal and highly-publicized crackdown on a few will make sheep of the rest, chasing them back into their living rooms to sit in front of the TV, suggesting to them subtly and directly that they really ought not to pay attention to national politics, discussions about corruption and loss of liberty, or otherwise question the Powers That Be.
Secondly, by simultaneously creating a situation in which local governments will fail to meet local responsibilities by cutting funding, weakening planning, and centralizing authority (read the book Disaster: Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security for a decades-long review) and failing to respond effectively themselves, they also cause a high level of distrust and disdain for government, thus essentially forcing acceptance of radical change, loss of liberties, bigger budgets, more centralized control (or the old Hegelian dialect of problem response solution). Witness the recent conversations about whether we need a new or updated Constitution. It's quite clear, isn't it, that the old one is failing us…. Or at least some suggest that it is.
It's an old-fashioned criminal protection scheme, except that today's mobsters wear three-piece suits, have MBA's, and in some cases, once wore stars on their shoulder.
So the whole trend of incremental moves toward centralized powers, a unitary executive, a restricted and sharply similar media output, and the march toward reduction of liberties and increases in the presence of military power and authority, is to make us more docile, to be afraid, to ask for more security, and to give up our liberties and our choices in order to get that security.
--
It has been postulated that Orson Wells' broadcast was no mere show business stunt, but an Experiment in Fear, a psychological warfare test. Cited for support is this book, snd these quotes from the book (a source which I have not verified):
"America Under Attack" A Reassessment of Orson Welles War of the Worlds" by Paul Heyler of Willfrid Laurier University:
"A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to Princeton University helped create the Princeton Office of Radio Research. The director was Paul Lazersfeld, an Austrian Jewish émigré and a social psychologist whose expertise in quantitative methods was tempered by a humanist leaning. He teamed with two associates, psychologist Hadley Cantrell and CBS researcher Fred Stanton, a PhD in psychology who would eventually become network president."
"The broadcast was a psychological warfare experiment conducted by The Princeton Radio Project. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the project in the fall of 1937. An Office of Radio Research was set up with Paul F. Lazersfeld as director, and Frank Stanton and Hadley Cantrell as associate directors.
Using demographic data on the broadcast's audience gleaned from a 10-page interview questionnaire given to 135 people, they created a book, "Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic."
--
So martial law (I never watched the TV series of the same name…) need happen only in one or two places, or one or two events, and the rest of America will happily return to work, grateful for their job at Wal-Mart or McDonalds', grateful to shop at WalMart and dine at McDonald's because that's what their wages will allow them, or because that's what their culture tells them is of value. America will happily retire to the living room to watch television, and be happy to buy what the TV tells them they need, even if it's the latest in medication for a problem they don't have. (Ask your doctor if you suffer from ….) America will return to a place where it will not ask why we have privatized prisons, or how the manipulations of a single company can force the recall of a governor of a very large state. America will return to a place where they will not be interested in the myriad anomalies of 9/11, or ask their newspaper editors or Congressmen about them. America will be oblivious to the thought they we have participated in the destruction of several countries, the deaths of two-thirds of a million people, run up a debt of $8 trillion, failed to provide for the support of GI's and their families, or created such harm to the Constitution that it will take decades to return to where we once were.
So how do the corporations benefit? Well, we're less likely to ask about the financial shenanigans in the front office, or why our leading banks are laundering drug monies, or what happened to their pensions, or why the CEO of their health insurance plan earns $57,000 an hour when they can't earn that much in a year.
It's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" taken to the highest level.
When a few outspoken people who dare to ask a few questions are hauled off, people will no longer bother to do the homework that will instruct them that $15,000 in funding for FEMA involvement in the final and critical phases of localized hurricane response planning for New Orleans was pulled in favor of anti-terrorism efforts. (Some other city got air-conditioned garbage trucks to combat terrorism in their locale.) (al-Qaeda sure did a number on New Orleans, don't you think?)
When people buy what top-level corporate America is selling them (through their ads on TV and their ownership of the networks), they won't bother to ask why their sons and daughters are failing in school, why two kids in the immediate neighborhood fell victim to meth, why the 7th Street bridge hasn't been replaced in four years, or how it is that people in 22 states can get sick on the spinach (contaminated by wild pigs?) after it was washed in a treated water solution and then packaged at high-speed in plastic bags. They won't bother to ask why Pentagon contractors are involved in sex crimes (but they'll want to know the lurid details). When troops show up on Main Street somewhere and bash in the doors of a start-up independent Internet publication, they won't ask again the questions the publication asked about the computerized theft of billions of dollars from Federal agencies. They won't ask why the collapse of WTC7 was never mentioned in the Commission Report. They won't bother to do the homework to discover the role that Nicholas Chertoff played in squelching critical investigations pertaining to 9/11.
When power is vested in the small handful of people at the corporate/Executive level (did you know that FEMA maintains an emergency communications system with the top 100 companies in the nation but which wasn't utilized in the Katrina response despite the need for rapid mobilization of supplies?), then corporations benefit because they control the machinery of surveillance and information management. (Did you know that Chertoff earned his DHS role after having squashed an investigation into PTECH's PROMIS-like software?) Are you truly aware of the incredible capacities of information technology to know everything about you, collectively or individually, in ways that is predictive of how you will respond to your TV, in ways that will drive you to a market for a product you don't need to spend money you don't have at exorbitant interest rates (bordering on usury)? Why does a former director of the CIA sit on the board of the largest bank in America? It's not what's in your wallet… now, it's who's in your wallet.
So the martial law thing is not about masses of troops in the streets rounding up average Americans. It is, in part, about bringing troops from states two time zones away to your neighborhood and asking them to police and patrol your neighborhood under the command of a fellow who didn't grow up in your town and doesn't know its mores, its people, its history or its culture. It's about intimidation, and fear. You'll have freedom to roam the streets under martial law if you carry the new mandatory RFID-chipped national ID card due out soon. (The law hass already passed. You knew that, didn't you?)
You learned about Public Law 109-364 on CNN and Fox News, didn't you?
The Military Commissions Act received a thorough discussion on ABC amidst l'affaire Foley, didn't it?
Why is it that we see corporate media bashing truth-tellers?
--
"There is a strongly held myth in America. The myth says that large corporations are efficient. They have big profits. They have lots of capital to hire the best people, the best accountants and the best law firms. Everyone looks so spiffy. Their technology is the latest. The best thing for the economy, sings the siren song, is for inefficient government to defer to corporate leaders and corporate 'survival of the fittest.' Powerful corporations, the myth goes, earned their power through performance in the marketplace by providing the best services and products.
"The real truth on the corporate model is far darker, however, and can be found by understanding our current central banking-warfare economic model and the resulting total economic return of activities. That means not just looking at the corporate profits and growth in stock price, but the true cost to people, the environment and government of a particular corporate activity. This necessitates understanding the economy as an ecosystem that is a dynamic living system in places. If corporate profits come from laundering narcotics trafficking used to destroy communities, and from government contracts used to build expensive prisons crammed full of small time non-violent drug distributors and customers, then they are part of a 'negative return on investment' economy. This is an economy where the real cost of things is hidden behind secret black budgets, complex government finances, under-the-table deals, market manipulations and economic and military warfare, until they finally show up in the most irrefutable ways: environmental destruction and the exhaustion and death of communities."
--
So what's next?
They'll inform us that there really are little grey men in saucers hovering overhead?
"They came from a distant planet sixteen light years away named Llewsor."
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/f...ntry639082
There are several elements or points I'd make in response to [someone else's] question:
Why would corporations tolerate or support the imposition of martial law?
The first answer is that martial law, as many conceive it, would not be imposed.
While the "aura" or image of martial law is one of many troops in many neighborhoods, with housewives and pre-schoolers being rounded up and put in plastic handcuffs to be hauled away to some detention facility, that isn't what will happen.
They don't need to go that far.
"The implication or latent threat of force alone
was sufficient to insure that the people would comply..."
William Colby
They merely need to create an example that is widely publicized (the CNN effect), one with an aura of need, a "reason" that can be sold to the public...
thus the rationale for it having been developed for decades within the constructs of emergency management or disaster response (despite reams of sociological research done by the Disaster Research Center which demonstrates conclusively that the public rises to the occasion, engages in "emergent" or adaptive behavior to help each other, and in which there is a minimal amount of "insurrection", looting or crime).
But the sudden, harsh, focal and highly-publicized crackdown on a few will make sheep of the rest, chasing them back into their living rooms to sit in front of the TV, suggesting to them subtly and directly that they really ought not to pay attention to national politics, discussions about corruption and loss of liberty, or otherwise question the Powers That Be.
Secondly, by simultaneously creating a situation in which local governments will fail to meet local responsibilities by cutting funding, weakening planning, and centralizing authority (read the book Disaster: Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security for a decades-long review) and failing to respond effectively themselves, they also cause a high level of distrust and disdain for government, thus essentially forcing acceptance of radical change, loss of liberties, bigger budgets, more centralized control (or the old Hegelian dialect of problem response solution). Witness the recent conversations about whether we need a new or updated Constitution. It's quite clear, isn't it, that the old one is failing us…. Or at least some suggest that it is.
It's an old-fashioned criminal protection scheme, except that today's mobsters wear three-piece suits, have MBA's, and in some cases, once wore stars on their shoulder.
So the whole trend of incremental moves toward centralized powers, a unitary executive, a restricted and sharply similar media output, and the march toward reduction of liberties and increases in the presence of military power and authority, is to make us more docile, to be afraid, to ask for more security, and to give up our liberties and our choices in order to get that security.
--
It has been postulated that Orson Wells' broadcast was no mere show business stunt, but an Experiment in Fear, a psychological warfare test. Cited for support is this book, snd these quotes from the book (a source which I have not verified):
"America Under Attack" A Reassessment of Orson Welles War of the Worlds" by Paul Heyler of Willfrid Laurier University:
"A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to Princeton University helped create the Princeton Office of Radio Research. The director was Paul Lazersfeld, an Austrian Jewish émigré and a social psychologist whose expertise in quantitative methods was tempered by a humanist leaning. He teamed with two associates, psychologist Hadley Cantrell and CBS researcher Fred Stanton, a PhD in psychology who would eventually become network president."
"The broadcast was a psychological warfare experiment conducted by The Princeton Radio Project. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the project in the fall of 1937. An Office of Radio Research was set up with Paul F. Lazersfeld as director, and Frank Stanton and Hadley Cantrell as associate directors.
Using demographic data on the broadcast's audience gleaned from a 10-page interview questionnaire given to 135 people, they created a book, "Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic."
--
So martial law (I never watched the TV series of the same name…) need happen only in one or two places, or one or two events, and the rest of America will happily return to work, grateful for their job at Wal-Mart or McDonalds', grateful to shop at WalMart and dine at McDonald's because that's what their wages will allow them, or because that's what their culture tells them is of value. America will happily retire to the living room to watch television, and be happy to buy what the TV tells them they need, even if it's the latest in medication for a problem they don't have. (Ask your doctor if you suffer from ….) America will return to a place where it will not ask why we have privatized prisons, or how the manipulations of a single company can force the recall of a governor of a very large state. America will return to a place where they will not be interested in the myriad anomalies of 9/11, or ask their newspaper editors or Congressmen about them. America will be oblivious to the thought they we have participated in the destruction of several countries, the deaths of two-thirds of a million people, run up a debt of $8 trillion, failed to provide for the support of GI's and their families, or created such harm to the Constitution that it will take decades to return to where we once were.
So how do the corporations benefit? Well, we're less likely to ask about the financial shenanigans in the front office, or why our leading banks are laundering drug monies, or what happened to their pensions, or why the CEO of their health insurance plan earns $57,000 an hour when they can't earn that much in a year.
It's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" taken to the highest level.
When a few outspoken people who dare to ask a few questions are hauled off, people will no longer bother to do the homework that will instruct them that $15,000 in funding for FEMA involvement in the final and critical phases of localized hurricane response planning for New Orleans was pulled in favor of anti-terrorism efforts. (Some other city got air-conditioned garbage trucks to combat terrorism in their locale.) (al-Qaeda sure did a number on New Orleans, don't you think?)
When people buy what top-level corporate America is selling them (through their ads on TV and their ownership of the networks), they won't bother to ask why their sons and daughters are failing in school, why two kids in the immediate neighborhood fell victim to meth, why the 7th Street bridge hasn't been replaced in four years, or how it is that people in 22 states can get sick on the spinach (contaminated by wild pigs?) after it was washed in a treated water solution and then packaged at high-speed in plastic bags. They won't bother to ask why Pentagon contractors are involved in sex crimes (but they'll want to know the lurid details). When troops show up on Main Street somewhere and bash in the doors of a start-up independent Internet publication, they won't ask again the questions the publication asked about the computerized theft of billions of dollars from Federal agencies. They won't ask why the collapse of WTC7 was never mentioned in the Commission Report. They won't bother to do the homework to discover the role that Nicholas Chertoff played in squelching critical investigations pertaining to 9/11.
When power is vested in the small handful of people at the corporate/Executive level (did you know that FEMA maintains an emergency communications system with the top 100 companies in the nation but which wasn't utilized in the Katrina response despite the need for rapid mobilization of supplies?), then corporations benefit because they control the machinery of surveillance and information management. (Did you know that Chertoff earned his DHS role after having squashed an investigation into PTECH's PROMIS-like software?) Are you truly aware of the incredible capacities of information technology to know everything about you, collectively or individually, in ways that is predictive of how you will respond to your TV, in ways that will drive you to a market for a product you don't need to spend money you don't have at exorbitant interest rates (bordering on usury)? Why does a former director of the CIA sit on the board of the largest bank in America? It's not what's in your wallet… now, it's who's in your wallet.
So the martial law thing is not about masses of troops in the streets rounding up average Americans. It is, in part, about bringing troops from states two time zones away to your neighborhood and asking them to police and patrol your neighborhood under the command of a fellow who didn't grow up in your town and doesn't know its mores, its people, its history or its culture. It's about intimidation, and fear. You'll have freedom to roam the streets under martial law if you carry the new mandatory RFID-chipped national ID card due out soon. (The law hass already passed. You knew that, didn't you?)
You learned about Public Law 109-364 on CNN and Fox News, didn't you?
The Military Commissions Act received a thorough discussion on ABC amidst l'affaire Foley, didn't it?
Why is it that we see corporate media bashing truth-tellers?
--
"There is a strongly held myth in America. The myth says that large corporations are efficient. They have big profits. They have lots of capital to hire the best people, the best accountants and the best law firms. Everyone looks so spiffy. Their technology is the latest. The best thing for the economy, sings the siren song, is for inefficient government to defer to corporate leaders and corporate 'survival of the fittest.' Powerful corporations, the myth goes, earned their power through performance in the marketplace by providing the best services and products.
"The real truth on the corporate model is far darker, however, and can be found by understanding our current central banking-warfare economic model and the resulting total economic return of activities. That means not just looking at the corporate profits and growth in stock price, but the true cost to people, the environment and government of a particular corporate activity. This necessitates understanding the economy as an ecosystem that is a dynamic living system in places. If corporate profits come from laundering narcotics trafficking used to destroy communities, and from government contracts used to build expensive prisons crammed full of small time non-violent drug distributors and customers, then they are part of a 'negative return on investment' economy. This is an economy where the real cost of things is hidden behind secret black budgets, complex government finances, under-the-table deals, market manipulations and economic and military warfare, until they finally show up in the most irrefutable ways: environmental destruction and the exhaustion and death of communities."
--
So what's next?
They'll inform us that there really are little grey men in saucers hovering overhead?
"They came from a distant planet sixteen light years away named Llewsor."
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/f...ntry639082
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"