The Big Omission

Hometown papers have a nasty habit of skewing the news, editorially, to support self-serving notions. My hometown paper, the Altoona Mirror recently decided to describe the Obama administration’s economic stimulus package in the framework of the 1950’s concept of “The Big Lie”. Joe McCarthy would have been proud. Here’s a link to the original editorial, and my response, below:

Why is anyone so surprised that government might engage in the “Big Lie” approach to making statistics look good? Private industry does it all the time. That’s why local furniture stores, week after week, are able to stage the same old “biggest ever”, “last chance” “all inventory must go” “largest sale in our history”, “you can’t miss this incredible once in a lifetime deal” advertising promotions. New car dealers do the same. So do local banks who offer “incredibly high” interest rates of below 1% on savings accounts or certificates of deposit, while loaning out the same money at 70% rates of return. (That’s called “fractional reserve banking". Isaac Newton gave us the idea after he gave us the laws of gravity -- really).

America’s economy is built on lies. We are a nation of liars. We lie about both the quality of goods we sell one another and the actual need for them by creating an artificial demand through advertising and public relations. We lie about threatened homeland security so that those who make tanks, airplanes, and the machinery of war can continue to make billions of dollars at the expense of American lives. And then we lie to the families of dead soldiers that they died defending freedom, when they, in fact, died so that the rich can continue to waste our resources on larger cars, bigger yachts, more remote and exotic vacations, personal jets and lower taxes for themselves and higher taxes for the working class.

The system was purposefully created that way by the “founding fathers” who were themselves simply rich land owners afraid that real democracy would threaten their wealth. And it is continued in modern times by men like Edward Bernays, who created the modern public relations industry. And that industry is nothing but a vehicle for keeping the public stupid while fleecing them of the worker-generated gross national product.

So, why be surprised that government employs the “big lie”? The “big lie” is as traditional as Thanksgiving Day -- which Native Americans will gladly explain to you is just another “big lie” in itself.! The Altoona Mirror is not uncomfortable with the “big lie” at all. Without the advertising it generates there would be no Mirror. What it is uncomfortable with is the notion that the stimulus package did indeed help the economy and that what is needed now is even more stimulus. The reason it’s uncomfortable with that is that it wants the stimulus package to fail, so that the democrats will fail along with it. Their concerns have absolutely nothing to do with the welfare of the country or it’s people. They’re not pointing that out to readers might be called, charitably, “The Big Omission”.



The Big Omission by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at malarkyspond.blogspot.com.
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