2005: New Zealand’s Right Wing Populist Moment

The Hollow Men

Directed by Alister Barry (2008)

Film Review

This documentary, based on leaked emails cited in Nicky Hager’s 2006 book of the same name, the delivers a blow-by-blow account of New Zealand’s 2005 election campaign. In that year, pro-corporate New Right champion Don Brash nearly became prime minister via shrewd “populist” anti-Maori, anti-welfare, Islamaphobic campaign messaging

The film mainly focuses on Australian political consultant Bryan Sinclair (whom Brash hired as a personal assistant) and Australian social research strategy group Crosby Texter (which adapted the shrewd negative campaigning style of Bush advisor Karl Rove) in crafting deceptive political messaging to make Brash’s his pro-corporate ultra-right wing leanings appear mainstream.

The infamous Orewa speech Brash delivered in January 2004 was based on a cynical  Crosby Texter strategy to boost poll ratings by tapping into white resentment towards Maori.

In a second Orewa speech in January 2005, Brash blamed New Zealand’s “entrenched” social welfare system for increasing crime and domestic violence. Because National had already won over all the country’s rightwing biggots, it produced only a slight improvement in National’s polling.

Likewise a July 2005 Whanganui speech aimed at stoking Islamophobic sentiments produced only a slight temporary polling blip

The two most egregious events of Brash’s 2005 campaign were a Washington DC visit in which he promised a National campaign victory would see New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policy “gone by lunchtime” – and the secret collaboration between the Brash campaign and the NZ Christian fundamentalist group Exclusive Brethren. Although their religious beliefs forbids them to vote, Exclusive Brethren are allowed to campaign and lobby for parties with a compatible moral perspective.* In 2005, they spent nearly $2 million on leaflets attacking both Labour and the Green Party. Because the leaflets made no mention of the National Party, this expenditure fell outside the party’s electoral spending cap.**

Despite polling six percentage points above Labour the day before the election, National ultimately lost to Labour by one seat.

Nicky Hager published The Hollow Men on November 21, 2006. Nine days later Brash resigned as National party leader.

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*The Exclusive Brethren opposed Labour’s proposed civil partnership legislation (because it extended to gay couples). Although Don Brash initially supported it, he reversed himself on learning it could help him win votes among Christian fundamentalist.

**Brash’s campaign team rewrote the leaflet to ensure it didn’t violate NZ electoral law.

Public library members can view the film free at https://beamafilm.com

The History of Wikileaks

WikiRebels

Directed by Bosse Lindquist, Jesper Huor (2010)

Film Review

WikiRebels is a documentary about the history of Wikileaks. It traces Julian Assange’s early history from his first arrest for computer hacking at 21. A short time later, posting a secret Church of Scientology manual on-line would lead to a run-in with with a private investigator they hired to track him down in Australia.

Convinced that disclosure of government corruption could serve as a preventative against abuse of power, he and a global network of hactivists registered Leak.com in 1999. Inspired by the collaborative nature of Wikipedia, they changed their name to Wikileaks in 2006. Their goal was to publish evidence of government criminality while simultaneously guaranteeing whistleblowers absolute anonymity.

Some of Wikileaks’s earliest disclosures include the Kenyan president who was embezzling funds and organizing death patrols to target political opponents; the private company dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast; email messages from the private account Sarah Palin used to conduct government business; and lists of websites being censored by China, Thailand and Iran.

Enter Bradley Manning

In early 2010, Private Bradley Manning leaked over 100,000 classified military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks.  These files provide an hour by hour chronicle of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including details of casualties (on both sides) that the Bush and Obama administration had deliberately concealed.

Recognizing he had no way of releasing such a massive amount of data in in a meaningful way, Assange shared the leaked documents with the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, in the hope of widely publicizing them.

The most famous file Manning released is the July 12, 2007 “Collateral Murder File” showing US attack helicopter personnel deliberately firing on unarmed civilians in Baghdad.

US Government Retaliation

The US government instantly retaliated against Assange by leaning on Visa, Mastercard and PayPal to discontinue payment services on the Wikileaks website. This was in addition to threats made in Congress to either assassinate him or kidnap him and try him for espionage.

In August 2010, Assange receives a rock star welcome in Sweden when he arrives for a speaking tour. Within days, he finds himself accused of sexual assault. After comparing notes, two female fans approached Swedish police about compelling him to have an HIV test. After bringing him in for questioning, the police release him without charge.

Filmed in 2010, the documentary ends here – before Assange leaves Sweden for England, a second prosecutor reinstates the charges, a British court orders his extradition to Sweden and he seeks sanctuary in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy. Assange fears, as do his supporters, that the Swedish authorities will extradite him to the US, which has laid the groundwork to try (and execute) him on espionage charges.

According to Mother Jones, the sexual assault charges are extremely murky, especially since the woman he’s accused of raping has asked to have the charges dropped. Assange denies forcing either woman to have sex with him. In both cases, the actual accusation is that he had sex without a condom. In one instance, the condom broke. In the other, after having sexual intercourse with a condom, he allegedly initiated intercourse a second time while the woman was half asleep and refused to put on a condom.

In Sweden, the official term is “withdrawal of consent.” Without knowing all the facts, it’s impossible to ascertain, it’s impossible to ascertain whether one or both women did, in fact, withdraw consent.

However the timing of the charges, the fact that one woman has CIA links and the possible role Republican puppet master Karl Rove (a long time adviser to Swedish Swedish Prime Minister Fredric Reinfeldt) Karl Rove played in the affair all suggest Assange may have been framed.

Recently it was announced  that the Swedish prosecutor has finally agreed to come to London to question Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy.

 

How Big Money Controls the White House

Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters

by Andrew Kreig (Eagle View Books 2013)

Book Review

Presidential Puppetry is a comprehensive expose of the wealthy corporate interests who are the real power behind the federal government. Kreig orients his book around Obama and Romney, the major presidential candidates in the 2012 elections. However in discussing Mitt Romney’s hidden ties to the financial oligarchy, he also explores the Bush family’s Wall Street connections, the history and structure of the Mormon Church (especially as it relates to corporate America) and Karl Rove’s role in orchestrating Republican dirty tricks and voting fraud. Presidential Puppetry is meticulously researched and sourced, with a 17 page bibliography and 110 pages of footnotes and references.

Kreig, a lawyer and respected Washington DC journalist, takes the 2012 presidential debates as his point of departure, noting the deliberate secrecy of both candidates around their personal background. This deliberate secrecy should have been a campaign issue. Yet neither raised it in the debates – there seemed to be a gentleman’s agreement not to do so. Kreig is also scathingly critical of the mainstream media’s failure to challenge either the secrecy or corrupt corporate influences it concealed.

Obama Was Groomed

For his part, Obama refused to release any of his university transcripts, as well as having his passport records secretly scrubbed at the State Department. According to Kreig, this refusal to release educational records is unprecedented, especially for a candidate with virtually no public record of their political background or views. Kreig believes there are two reasons for Obama’s secrecy about his records from Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School. The first was to conceal his early links to the CIA, via a CIA front organization he worked for called Business International Corporation (BIC). The second was to hide his early “grooming” for political office by Zbigniew Brzesinski and possibly other members of Bilderberg, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission. All three are secretive round table groups that allow wealthy financial elites access to major public officials.

By tracing the background of the Bush, Carter, Clinton and Reagan presidencies, Kreig makes a very compelling case that the ruling elite selects and grooms individuals it offers up to us as presidential candidates. What’s more, of our past five presidents, only George W Bush has no documented history of working for US intelligence. Krieg alleges Reagan secretly passed information to the FBI about Hollywood leftists, Bush senior performed various services for the CIA as founder and director of Zapata Oil Company, and Clinton informed on anti-Vietnam War protestors as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.

Romney’s Cayman Island Tax Shelters

Romney’s big secret was his tax returns. It’s standard for presidential candidates to release ten years of returns. What the Republican candidate sought to conceal, according to Kreig, was systematic tax avoidance that included a Swiss bank account and tax shelters in the Cayman Islands. Both the Democrats and the corporate media failed in their duty to the public by refusing to bring any of this to light.

Broken Campaign Promises and a Trail of Bodies

Kreig goes on to examine Obama’s first term in light of his hidden history. The American people thought they were voting for a progressive community organizer but ended up with someone even more pro-Wall Street and pro-war than his Republican predecessor.

The most disturbing aspect of the book relates to cases Kreig details in which both Republican and Democratic insiders have tried to expose corporate interference with specific federal office holders. Largely owing to the refusal of the corporate media to support these whistleblowers, many have ended up dead under suspicious circumstances or in prison on trumped up charges.

Kreig tries to finish on an optimistic note by reminding us of all the brave independent journalists (on whose work Presidential Puppetry is based) whose investigative work is beginning to give us a true picture of how our so-called democracy really works. He encourages people (I assume he means whistleblowers) to send him tips (i.e. leaks) via his Justice Integrity Project website.

A recent post there is a moving tribute to the late John Judge, past president of the Coalition on Political Assassinations. The latter archives and promotes scholarly research offering alternatives to official accounts of the JFK assassination and other high profile political deaths, including those of Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Originally published in Dissident Voice

The Art of Cult Branding

The Persuaders

PBS Frontline (2005)

Film Review

Unlike The Century of the Self, The Persuaders focuses more on contemporary public relations techniques. This PBS documentary begins by examining growing industry concerns that consumers are becoming “immune” to the unconscious messaging Edward Bernays perfected.

Pseudo-spiritual and Cult Branding

Pseudo-spiritual and cult branding are two of the latest mass marketing techniques. Pseudo-spiritual marketing is designed to convince consumers that brand loyalty will provide identity and meaning in their lives. The stellar success of Starbucks and Nike are given as examples. Starbucks (allegedly) creates meaning in peoples’ lives by offering them a “third place” (not home or work). While Nike offers consumers “transcendence”* through sport.

Inspired by Starbucks’ and Nike’s phenomenal “branding” success, marketing analysts went out and interviewed cult leaders to understand how they won the loyalty of their followers.

Volkswagen, Mac, Harley Davidson, Linux and Saturn are the leading examples of cult brands. By offering a sense of belonging and community, they successfully pitch their brands to consumers longing for the community values which have been lost in contemporary society.

I find this incredibly ironic. First the corporate public relations industry connives to systematically dismantle labor unions and other community groups and institutions. Then they cynically package and market luxury consumer goods to satisfy our unmet needs for civic engagement.

Aiming for “Visceral Appeal”

One of the marketing gurus the film profiles is Frank Luntz, a political consultant renowned for his expertise in using language to promote the “visceral appeal” of political campaigns. His goal is to hit voters at an emotional level that motivates them to act.

Luntz’s credits include helping Newt Gingrich devise the Contract with America to help the Republicans win control of Congress in 1994. Luntz is also responsible for helping Republicans win points on specific issues by reframing them, e.g. by changing “tax cuts” to “tax relief,” “estate tax” to “death tax” and “global warming” to “climate change.”

The Technique of Narrow Casing

The Persuaders concludes by examining “narrow casing,” a campaign technique first developed by John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. Narrow casing is largely credited for Obama’s victory in 2008. It involves data mining the vast amount of information corporations collect on our purchases (mainly via loyalty and credit card records). This data is used to categorize people into demographic groups based on specific issues (health, education, immigration, gun control) that are most likely to appeal to them. This allows campaign teams to beam issue-related advertising to specific groups (via email, direct mail and doorbelling), rather than relying on the more general messaging of mass marketing.

Republican political consultant Karl Rove has been highly successful in using narrow casing around issues such as gun control, immigration and the confederate flag to persuade blue collar white males to vote Republican.

*Transcendence is defined as existence or experience beyond the normal or physical level, as in spiritual transcendence.

 

 

Has the Left Abandoned the Working Class?

Liberals and progressives frequently bemoan the absence of blue collar workers in their meetings and protests. It’s pretty hard to organize a movement large enough to take the streets with only 20% of the population. Estimating the size of the US working class is difficult. According to the Department of Labor, roughly 60% of Americans work for an hourly wage. Approximately 2/3  of them work for less than a minimum wage worker earned in 1968. Add roughly 20% to those figures, the true proportion of Americans who are either temporarily or permanently unemployed.

Traditionally the unemployed and working poor opt out of politics, though roughly half will vote every four years during presidential election years. Those who do vote mainly choose right wing fundamentalists who enact policies (such as cutting unemployment benefits, scrapping public services, and gutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security) that are harmful to their economic interests,.

As Wilhelm Reich notes in his 1933 Mass Psychology of Fascism, fascism and reactionary politics have always exerted a powerful attraction for men (and some women) from authoritarian working class families. Karl Rove and the spin doctors behind Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and Fox News all know this and cleverly play on these sentiments. They are also masters at painting liberals and progressives as politically correct intellectuals whose main goal in life is to moralize and dictate lifestyle choices for low-income Americans.

The late Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting with Jesus, feels the organized left plays into the hand of right wing demagogues. Based on my own working class background, I agree. Because progressives fail to recognize the firmly entrenched US class divisions, they always end up on the wrong side of lifestyle campaigns. By jumping onto the anti-smoking, anti-obesity and anti-gun bandwagon, they only solidify their reputation as the politically correct lifestyle police.

The US Class Divide: the Real Culture War

The corporate media likes to depict the US as a profoundly polarized nation consisting of red and blue states. Red states are supposedly populated by highly religious, family-centered conservatives, and blue ones by social libertines who value community welfare over individual liberty. The concept, which total misrepresents the broad diversity of American society, is yet another example of mind-bending propaganda designed to keep us from uniting against our real enemy: the corporate state.

I agree with Bageant that the real cultural divide is between the college educated and the 80% who don’t attend college. Owing to limited social contact between these two groups, many educated Americans fail to appreciate the existence of discrete working class culture, with its own distinct values and language. Spin doctors like Karl Rove know all about working class culture. Why else would he remake George W Bush into a plain talking simpleton who refused to read books?

What many on the Left also fail to recognize is that it’s not just the police and slick ideological propaganda that keep the capitalists in power. These two forces are aided by an army of middle class “helping professionals” – teachers, lawyers, religious leaders, social workers, doctors, psychologists, etc – who play a crucial role in instructing the working class in appropriate and politically correct behavior.

This dynamic frequently gives blue collar Americans the sense that educated professionals are demeaning them – particularly when they moralize about smoking, junk food, changing lightbulbs and the evils of guns.

Courting the Working Class

Can progressives and liberals win the working class back from the New Right? I believe they can, but only if they’re genuine in their desire to do so.

They will definitely need a totally new approach to organizing that prioritizes the nitty gritty hardships faced by low income Americans. People struggling with joblessness, homelessness and/or starvation wages will find it really hard to get excited about climate change and electoral reform.

Moreover, low income and unemployed activists are going to have real time survival needs that more well-off activists will be forced to address. In the 1930s, coalitions that incorporated the unemployed formed welfare committees to help fellow activists with food, clothing, child care and even temporary accommodation.

Progressives will also need to be far more sensitive to the cultural differences associated with social class. In the early feminist movement we did this by conducting meetings in fishbowls. Low income and minority women began the meeting at the inside of the fishbowl, while more affluent educated women sat in the outer circle and observed and listened.

Finally progressives need to take a hard look at their association with “lifestyle” campaigns that low income workers view as personal freedom issues. They will also need to reexamine their dogmatic stance around non-violence. Non-violent resistance is an alien concept in most working class communities. This relates in part to authoritarian family life and, particularly in minority communities, constant exposure to police violence.

photo credit: Tymtoi via photopin cc