What People Want

[Hyman Blumenstock <hystock@xxxxxxxxx>]

Doug:

We have been persuaded innumerable times in the past, and particularly
emphasized this last election, that People Want a Balanced Budget. This
is a deliberate diversion of the real truth.  People Want to Maintain
an adequate Security for themselves by retaining as much Money as possible,
but everyone has been persuaded the lie that this can be achieved by
a "balanced budget."

The lie has been with us for ages that Money that the government needs
to run must come only from the "Taxpayer," and ergo, cutting down on
government expenditures means reducing taxes, and relieving the "taxpayer."

That this is a patent fraud upon us all should be evident on the logic of
taxes in the Agrarian era (directly in Scarce Food), versus the total
illogic of taxes in the Post-Agrarian era (of Food abundance) of Money,
that only emanates from the Federal Reserve.  No "taxpayer" is generator
of Money, under very strict penalty for doing so.  Money only passes
through through the "taxpayer's" hands momentarily as it circulates,
so why bother to emphasize "taxpayer's Money, except to perpetuate a fraud
upon us all.

The purpose of "budget balancing" by curtailing spending is a venal one,
to deliberately create an inevitable depression or recession, so that
the lay person's savings will have to be relinquished without further
money income, for the Money Mongers to get their hands on.

The other form of "budget balancing" seems never to be thought of,
INCREASING the budget until there is enough for every last one of us
to get a decent job at decent wages, in work beyond mere GDP production,
on the false premise of INFLATION, an impossibility in a truly free
market wherein Supply MEETS Demand, (for Food, as we've had for the
last century).

Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> At 12:08 PM +0100 3/3/97, Trond Andresen wrote:
>
> >While I said in an earlier message
> >
> >> When i "admit" in my analysis (last message from me) that there is a
> >> large sector of the public (for simplicity lumped together by me under
> >> the label "type I") that is "content" (in the sense that when asked
> >> they see no need to change things), i do not mean to imply that this is
> >> mainly because of their "nature" (even if I used that term also). I
> >> consider their passive acceptance more a case of being socialized to
> >> accept today's media state of affairs. Feed people shit their whole
> >> life, and they will consider the least worst shit to be fair cuisine.
> >
> >So Doug's accusation of being "patronizing", may possibly also be
> >directed against me.
>
> No, Trond. I entirely agree that people have been socialized to swallow
> huge amounts of crap. The producers of this crap rationalize their dirty
> work by saying that's what people want, ignoring all evidence to the
> contrary.
>
> It's instructive to read histories of broadcasting, advertising, and PR, to
> realize that back in the 1920s, when the modern consciousness industry was
> taking shape, the crafters had a very conscious, every explicit political
> and economic agenda: to shape opinion and to transform human beings into
> "consumers." All that is lost today, since it's so embedded in the
> landscape, but you can recover it if you read, say Robert McChesney's book
> on early radio or Walter Lippmann's book on public opinion. I've just
> gotten a review copy of Ellen Garvey's new Oxford book, The Adman in the
> Parlor, on the creation of the early gendered consumer; it looks quite good.
>
> Doug
>
> --
>
> Doug Henwood
> Left Business Observer
> 250 W 85 St
> New York NY 10024-3217 USA
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