Screenshot from the movie 'Wag the Dog.' (photo: New Line Cinema)
he entire premise of the 1990s movie "Wag the Dog"
was a few powerful elites feeding a complicit media a made-up story
about a war in Albania to distract from a president involved in a
child-sex scandal. Today, politicians are happily feeding a complicit
media a made-up story about a "fiscal cliff" and a nation that is too
broke to pay the bills. Don't believe the hype.
The hype is definitely chugging along full-steam. In "Wag the Dog," the media manipulators hired by the government brought in a choir to record a patriotic song to rally Americans behind the fake war effort. They even found an ex-con to play the part of the returning war hero held captive behind enemy lines, and expertly staged a scene
where an actress played an Albanian refugee running away from
manufactured gunfire. In this new version, there's a fake grassroots
effort (re: astroturf) dubbed "Fix the Debt," which uses social media
to push out photos of everyday, red-blooded, by-God-Americans complete
with quotes about how fixing the debt should be at the top of the
agenda. The end goal of this effort is to convince real Americans that
the debt, which they allege is caused by Social Security, Medicare and
Medicaid, is the one problem that needs fixing before anything else.
While everyday Americans have all but laughed Fix the Debt out of the room,
Congress has bought it hook, line and sinker.
What Fix the Debt doesn't tell you is that it's a campaign financed and staffed by war profiteers who don't want to lose their multi-billion dollar Pentagon contracts.
38 of Fix the Debt's leaders have ties to 43 companies with more than
$43 billion in defense contracts. And while the CEOs who make up the Fix
the Debt campaign are all gung-ho
about cutting healthcare and benefits, Fix the Debt oddly never
mentions the fact that the United States spends more on its military
than the next 26 biggest military
spenders combined. Or that most of our debt was made possible when President Bush used China's credit card to wage two wars that have cost us over a trillion dollars and counting. Or that we've doubled defense spending since 2001 and are showing no signs of slowing down.
spenders combined. Or that most of our debt was made possible when President Bush used China's credit card to wage two wars that have cost us over a trillion dollars and counting. Or that we've doubled defense spending since 2001 and are showing no signs of slowing down.
At the end of "Wag the Dog," the president easily won
re-election as the news about his sex scandal was drowned out in the
cacophony of news about the made-up war and the made-up war hero. And
while we've all been hearing non-stop about the "fiscal cliff" and how
our budgetary woes can only be solved through tax hikes or gutting
Social Security, the Senate unanimously approved a whopping $631 billion
Pentagon budget in early December. The fact that Republicans and some
Democrats are still hell-bent on telling us there's a budgetary crisis
that can only be averted by cutting New Deal and Great Society programs
shows that their true allegiance lies not with their constituents, but
with the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower, a former 5-star general, warned us about more than 50 years ago.
It remains to be seen whether or not the backbone of
progressivism will be sacrificed in this manufactured "fiscal cliff"
fiasco. But nonetheless, we have, as a nation, let ourselves be
thoroughly played by the politicians, the corporations and the media so
they can keep their goodies. To tell the truth, the history books must
document how easily manipulated people can be when enough fear has been
injected into the conversation.
Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut,
a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of
thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts
in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and
other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Old Lyme, Connecticut. You can contact Carl at
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carl@rsnorg.org.
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