Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values
By Sharon Beder
Earthscan, 2006
260 pages, $56
Wollongong University academic Sharon Beder is almost a one-person industry exposing the pretensions of globalised capital. With nine books to her credit since 1989, her work has become a standard of excellence for those probing into how authority is wielded by the great and powerful.
Her latest is an in-depth history of how corporations have orchestrated a multi-billion dollar propaganda assault to convince us that their interests, those of the big end of town, are everybody's interests. Beder describes this as the conscious manipulation of community values to suit private profit and she traces the origins of this PR juggernaut back to the 1920s.
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society", said Edward Bernays, the so-called father of modern public relations in 1928. "Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
The first organisation assembled by capitalists for this purpose was the US National Association of Manufacturers, which campaigned against Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s. In 1939 a US senate investigation slammed NAM in a report entitled "Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor" — but that didn't stop the free market crusaders.
By the 1940s, other organisations, cashed up by big business, set out to "educate" the US people about capitalism, or, as they politely renamed it, "free enterprise".
The Advertising Council got corporate donations of US$100 million for what it called a "driving, hard-hitting ten-year campaign to sell and tell, and keep understood and sold, the positive and worthwhile principles of the American way ... Our job is putting the easily teachable definition of the economic system between the ears of 143,000,000 Americans."
"Ironically", Beder observes, "the individualistic message of competition and self-interest was sold through a campaign that sought to promote industrial harmony and the idea that we should all cooperate and work together to protect the system and achieve the prosperity it promised".
By the late 1970s US business was spending a billion dollars each year on such propaganda and the right-wing "think tank" industry was born. Beder delves into the murky connections of a seemingly endless list of these bodies that now go beyond just influencing public opinion; they are policy makers!
The media treats think-tank spokespersons like they are independent experts. Think-tank operatives provide opinion pieces for newspapers and are trained in the art of sound-bite TV journalism, always on hand for a quotable quote. In reality, of course, they are just sleazy lobbyists pushing a line for their big business masters.
US think tanks play the role of developing policy, which they inject into the public sphere. The US Democratic and Republican parties are really just electoral vehicles for these lobbies, not forums for debate.
The think tanks form a "shadow government", Beder says, ready to provide talent when a new administration takes office. Some 150 of Ronald Reagan's administration officials came from the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute alone.
Australian and New Zealand politics are following the same path. As Beder ably shows, US free market think tanks had a shattering effect on New Zealand in particular.
They operated through the Labour Party minister for finance Roger Douglas in the 1980s. Douglas' infamous "Rogernomics" followed free market ideology to the letter. As a result the NZ economy stagnated.
Between 1985 and 1992 total growth across OECD countries averaged 20%. New Zealand's economy shrank by 1% in the same period. As New Zealanders fell below the poverty line, unemployment soared, inflation skyrocketed and overseas debt quadrupled. People fled New Zealand in droves.
When the electorate dumped Labour in disgust the incoming Nationals delighted in smashing NZ unions!
In Australia, Beder traces a similar line of influence from US think tanks through their Australian acolytes into both the ALP and the Liberal parties. When Labor took office in 1983 it was promising to expand the budget to increase demand and build the economy. What it delivered was what the "free market missionaries" wanted.
So pleased was the "international finance community" that Douglas was voted the world's top finance minister by Banker magazine in 1986 and Paul Keating was named International Finance Minister of the Year in 1987 by the Economist.
John Howard, of course, has followed on with his campaign to make Australia "the greatest share-owning democracy in the world".
Beder sees all this as amounting to a "revolutionary shift ... from democracy to corporate rule ... as significant as the shift from monarchy to democracy".