Ideological engineering for the top one percent

Editor RWER

Extracted from Finance as Warfare by Michael Hudson:

“ The economy is polarizing owing to the way in which the top one percent use their wealth. If they invested their fortunes productively as “job creators” – as mainstream textbooks describe them as doing – then there would be some logic in today’s tax favouritism and financial bailouts. Rentier elites would be doing what governments are supposed to do. Instead, today’s financial oligarchy lends out its savings to indebt the economy at large, and uses its gains to buy control of government in order to extract more special privileges, tax favouritism and rent-extract- ion opportunities by political campaign financing in the United States (unlimited since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling) and by lobbying.

“ The political and legal systems have become part of the market economy in the sense of being up for sale. As in consumer advertising, ideological engineering is used to “manufacture consent,” using the mass media to broad- cast an anti-tax and anti-regulatory ethic. Thorstein Veblen described the tactic a century ago in Higher Learning in America (1904). Business schools have been endowed, economic prizes awarded and public relations “think tanks” staffed with credentialed spokesmen in order to shape popular perceptions for the acceptance of widening financial inequality as being natural and even desirable.”

Source: Real World Econ Rev blogs, 24 June 2021 https://rwer.wordpress.com/2021/06/24/ideological-engineering-for-the-1/