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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 4 - 2005
Bush seeks propaganda sweepstakes by R Landauer 
Bush seeks propaganda sweepstakes The Oregonian, Saturday, March 05, 2005 ROBERT LANDAUER Social scientists, I sense, are already outlining articles on George W. Bush's legacy. Their topic: Persuasion vs. Manipulation in the Bush Presidency. Not since the collapse of the Soviet Union over 13 years ago has an administration produced so much material for a case study on governmental propaganda techniques. Case-building arguments and conclusions by President Bush and his surrogates regarding Social Security reform repeatedly redraw the line between fact and fiction, between information and indoctrination. Propaganda in this case involves deliberately withholding relevant facts and spreading misinformation in order to reach preconceived ends that don't solve the declared problem and don't stand up to fact-based scrutiny. Government propaganda campaigns typically include creating overblown fears and inflated desires or expectations; exaggerating the urgency of an issue in order to deflect attention from more pressing or unpopular issues; and attacking the motives and integrity of messengers of differing views rather than refuting the evidence they bring and the conclusions they draw. These and other propaganda techniques are essentially opposed to education in aim and style because they are intentionally geared to indoctrination, manipulation and control rather than persuasion based on fair, full disclosure and informed judgment. Social Security's problem, if nothing is changed, is that the system eventually will face funding difficulties to meet its long-term promises. The issue is important, but the evidence shows that it is far from the bankruptcy crisis that the president has portrayed. The challenges are surmountable. Over a long transition, they probably require increasing money coming into the system in contributions and earnings, reducing the cost of some benefits being paid out or (most likely) some combination of both. There are many ways to do both, and informed, honest discussions of the issues and the evidence -- along with rebuttals of disinformation -- can be found at sites of the Center for Economic and Policy Research ( ), the Century Foundation () and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities ().
The Bush reform push is for Social Security privatization, usually called "private accounts" or "personal ownership." A difficulty is that diverting Social Security contributions into personal accounts won't solve the long-term fiscal problem if plausible assumptions are made about economic growth, how much workers will invest and what the rates of return will be, the evidence shows. (As economist Paul Krugman writes, Social Security will be fine as it is for the foreseeable future if the economy grows as fast in the next 50 years as in the last 50. If it doesn't, stock returns will be too low to let privatization work.) If you follow the money, it appears that Wall Street firms, not workers and their families, are likely to be the biggest winners. Until recently, Bush & Co. has cited Britain's system of personal accounts as a model it hoped to copy. But the Bush team has shamefacedly retreated from that stance because compelling evidence shows that the brokers have been gouging the British public, siphoning up to 30 percent of workers' lifetime savings in expenses and management fees. One of the most aggravating propaganda techniques of the president is his misdirection ploy. He feigns reasonableness -- "an open mind" -- in his public statements while simultaneously taking options off the table. For example, no Social Security tax increases or substitutes for individual accounts can be considered even though plausible ideas have been offered. Surrogates then routinely characterize those who question these ground rules as rigid, obstructionist or naive. The deception most irksome to me is the administration's unwillingness to face up to the fiscal effects of one of its plan's most grave shortcomings -- the need to borrow $1 trillion-plus in the first 10 years to create the individual-account system and $3.5 trillion in the next 10 years to sustain it. This would vastly increase budget deficits and the national debt, putting a squeeze on all other government programs. Borrowing $4.5 trillion over 20 years to deal with a 75-year Social Security shortfall that is far less than that looks like a cure worse than the disease. Robert Landauer: 503-221-8157 or robertlandauer@news.oregonian.com |