Same As It Always Was

Most people are familiar with the Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Sinclair was a socialist and author, perhaps best known for revealing the facts about the working conditions in the meat packing industry in The Jungle [the Polish sausage could include real Poles].

In 1919 he wrote: “Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters.” Sound familiar?

With that in mind, go to Rook’s place and watch this video of a New Yorker explaining the con game that is Wall Street, especially the role of the ‘shill’ in the game.

It should surprise no one that when the station that actually produces World of Opera refused to fire Lisa Simeone for her activities on her own time, NPR dumps opera show over D.C. protest. When you’re a shill, you can’t allow people to question the game. I assume that people have noticed that NPR has produced almost no coverage of the Occupy movement.

Of course, the dealer doesn’t always win, as Kevin Drum notes at Mother Jones.

University of California-Berkeley physicist Richard Muller doubts the ability of anyone except him to understand analysis, a common trait among physicists. He doubted the methods of the climatologists who were reporting global climate change, despite the peer review of their articles, and decided to analyze the data himself.

Big Oil, including the Koch Brothers, rushed to finance his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST), thinking he was a ‘true believer’ in their cause.

Muller, alas, was just a contrary physicist who accurately reported the results of his analysis – global climate change is real, and humans are doing it.

The salaries of tenured professors are not dependent on much more than a pulse. They are like Federal judges in that regard.