Propaganda Model

In their 1988 book 'Manufacturing Consent - The Political Economy of the Mass Media', Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky introduced their 'propaganda model' of the media. The propaganda model argues that there are 5 classes of 'filters' in society which determine what is 'news'; in other words, what gets printed in newspapers or broadcast by radio and television. Herman and Chomsky's model also explains how dissent from the mainstream is given little, or zero, coverage, while governments and big business gain easy access to the public in order to convey their state-corporate messages - for example, 'free trade is beneficial, 'globalisation is unstoppable' and 'our policies are tackling poverty'.

We have already touched upon the fact that corporate ownership of the media can - and does - shape editorial content. The sheer size, concentrated ownership, immense owner wealth, and profit-seeking imperative of the dominant media corporations could hardly yield any other result. It was not always thus. In the early nineteenth century, a radical British press had emerged which addressed the concerns of workers. But excessive stamp duties, designed to restrict newspaper ownership to the 'respectable' wealthy, began to change the face of the press. Nevertheless there remained a degree of diversity. In postwar Britain, radical or worker-friendly newspapers such as the Daily Herald, News Chronicle, Sunday Citizen (all since failed or absorbed into other publications) and the Daily Mirror (at least until the late 1970s) regularly published articles questioning the capitalist system.

The well-known journalist John Pilger joined the Mirror in 1963, and worked there for over 20 years. Pilger later claimed that 'The Mirror was the first popular paper to encourage working-class people to express themselves, for whatever reason, to their newspaper'. Luckily for him, 'Irreverence and a certain anarchy were encouraged'. Later, when Robert Maxwell took over ownership of the newspaper, Pilger was personally assured that his job was secure: 'Eighteen months later, after relentless interference from Maxwell, I was sacked.'

The media typically comprise large conglomerates - News International, CBS (now merged with Westinghouse), Turner Broadcasting (now merged with Time-Warner) - which may belong to even larger parent corporations such as General Electric (owners of NBC). All are tied into the stock market. Wealthy people sit on the boards of these major corporations, many with extensive personal and business contacts in other corporations. Herman and Chomsky point out, for instance, that: 'GE [General Electric] and Westinghouse are both huge, diversified multinational companies heavily involved in the controversial areas of weapons production and nuclear power.' It is difficult to conceive that press neutrality would not be compromised in these areas. But more widely, press freedom is limited by the simple fact that the owners of the media corporations are driven by free market ideology. How likely is it, then, that such owners would happily allow their own newspaper, radio or TV station to criticise systematically the 'free market' capitalism which is the source of his material wealth?

The second filter of the propaganda model is advertising. Newspapers have to attract and maintain a high proportion of advertising in order to cover the costs of production; without it, the price of any newspaper would be many times what it is now, which would soon spell its demise in the marketplace. There is fierce competition throughout the media to attract advertisers; a newspaper which gets less advertising than its competitors is put at a serious disadvantage. Lack of success in raising advertising revenue was another factor in the demise of 'people's newspapers' in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is clear, therefore, that for any publication or commercial radio or TV station to survive, it has to hone itself into an advertiser-friendly medium. In other words, the media has to be sympathetic to business interests, such as the travel, automobile and petrochemical industries. Even the threat of withdrawal of advertising can affect editorial content. A letter sent to the editorial offices of a hundred magazines by a major car producer stated: 'In an effort to avoid potential conflicts, it is required that Chrysler corporation be alerted in advance of any and all editorial content that encompasses sexual, political, social issues or any editorial content that could be construed as provocative or offensive.' In 1999, British Telecom threatened to withdraw advertising from The Daily Telegraph following a number of critical articles. The journalist responsible was suspended.

A 1992 US study of 150 news editors found that 90 per cent said that advertisers tried to interfere with newspaper content, and 70 per cent tried to stop news stories altogether. 40 per cent admitted that advertisers had in fact influenced a story. In the UK, £3.2 billion is spent on newspaper ads annually and another £2.6 billion on TV and radio commercials, out of a total advertising budget of £9.2 billion. In the US, the figure is tens of billions of dollars a year on TV advertising alone. An advertising-based system makes survival extremely difficult for radical publications that depend on revenue from sales alone. Even if such publications survive, they are relegated to the margins of society, receiving little notice from the public at large. Advertising, just like media ownership, therefore acts as a news filter.

The third of Herman and Chomsky's 5 filters relates to the sourcing of mass media news: 'The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest.' Even large media corporations such as the BBC cannot afford to place reporters everywhere. They therefore concentrate their resources where major news stories are likely to happen: the White House, the Pentagon, No 10 Downing Street, and other centralised news 'terminals'. Although British newspapers may occasionally object to the 'spin-doctoring' of New Labour, for example, they are in fact highly dependent upon the pronouncements of 'the Prime Minister's personal spokesperson' for government-related news. Business corporations and trade organisations are also trusted sources of stories considered newsworthy. Editors and journalists who offend these powerful news sources, perhaps by questioning the veracity or bias of the furnished material, can be threatened with the denial of access to their media life-blood - fresh news.

Robert McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, points out that 'Professional journalism relies heavily on official sources. Reporters have to talk to the PM's official spokesperson, the White House press secretary, the business association, the army general. What those people say is news. Their perspectives are automatically legitimate.' Whereas, according to McChesney, 'if you talk to prisoners, strikers, the homeless, or protesters, you have to paint their perspectives as unreliable, or else you've become an advocate and are no longer a "neutral" professional journalist.' Such reliance on official sources gives the news an inherently conservative cast and gives those in power tremendous influence over defining what is or isn't 'news'. McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy, warns: 'This is precisely the opposite of what a functioning democracy needs, which is a ruthless accounting of the powers that be.'

The fourth filter is 'flak', described by Herman and Chomsky as 'negative responses to a media statement or [TV or radio] program. It may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, law-suits, speeches and Bills before Congress, and other modes of complaint, threat and punitive action'. Business organisations regularly come together to form flak machines. Perhaps one of the most well-known of these is the US-based Global Climate Coalition (GCC) - comprising fossil fuel and automobile companies such as Exxon, Texaco and Ford. The GCC was started up by Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest public relations companies, to rubbish the credibility of climate scientists and 'scare stories' about global warming.

In her 1997 book Global Spin, Sharon Beder documented at great length the operations of corporations and their hired PR firms in establishing grassroots 'front movements' to counter the gains made by environmentalists. One such coalition, the Foundation for Clean Air Progress, is 'in reality a front for transportation, energy, manufacturing and agricultural groups'. The Foundation was established to challenge the US Clean Air Act by 'educating' the public about the progress made in air quality over the previous twenty-five years. As Beder notes, the Foundation's 'focus is on individual responsibility for pollution, as opposed to the regulation of industry to achieve further improvements.' The threat - real or imagined - of law-suits can be a powerful deterrent to media investigation. In the UK, environmental journalist Andrew Rowell notes that, 'Britain's archaic libel laws prevent much of the real truth about the destructive nature of many of [the] UK's leading companies from ever being published or broadcast. Very few people within the media will take on the likes of Shell, BP or [mining company] RTZ'.

The fifth and final news filter that Herman and Chomsky identified was 'anti-communism'. Manufacturing Consent was written during the Cold War. A more apt version of this filter is the customary western identification of 'the enemy' or an 'evil dictator' - Colonel Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, or Slobodan Milosevic (recall the British tabloid headlines of 'Smash Saddam!' and 'Clobba Slobba!'). The same extends to mainstream reporting of environmentalists as 'eco-terrorists'. The Sunday Times ran a particularly nasty series of articles in 1999 accusing activists from the non-violent direct action group Reclaim The Streets of stocking up on CS gas and stun guns.

The demonisation of enemies is useful, essential even, in justifying strategic geopolitical manoeuvring and the defence of corporate interests around the world, while mollifying home-based critics of such behaviour. The creation of an 'evil empire' of some kind, as in postwar western scaremongering about the 'Soviet Menace' or earlier talk of the 'Evil Hun', has been a standard device for terrifying the population into supporting arms production and military adventurism abroad - both major sources of profit for big business. Iraq's Saddam Hussein has been a useful bogeyman for US arms manufacturers who have notched up sales of over $100bn to Saddam's neighbours in the Middle East. The fifth filter also applies to media demonisation of anti-globalisation protesters - often described as 'rioters' - and anyone else perceived as a threat to free-market ideology.

This brief description of the propaganda model hardly does justice to the sophisticated and cogent analysis presented by Herman and Chomsky. The interested reader is urged to consult their book directly. Its particular relevance here is that it explains how and why the status quo of corporate power is maintained in modern society, the dominance of the neoliberal agenda of free trade with its automatic rejection of alternatives (Margaret Thatcher's 'There Is No Alternative'), and the emasculation of dissident viewpoints which are variously labelled as 'biased', 'ideological' or 'extreme'. How likely is it that anyone calling for radical change in society - whether environmentalists, human-rights activists or opponents of the arms trade - will be consistently and fairly reported by corporate news organisations? How much more likely is it that their arguments will be vilified, marginalised or simply ignored?

Garbage

If you have ever wondered, in the face of our ever-expanding landfills and increasingly elaborate packaging of consumer goods and consumption, what happens to the all the garbage, then Heather Rogers' informative and provocative new book, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, published by the New Press, is for you.

It is not a shock that the United States is the number one producer of garbage on the planet; with just 5 percent of the global population we generate 30 percent of the world's trash. The average American throws away a staggering 4.5 pounds of rubbish daily -- that's 1,600 pounds each year, according to Rogers. And garbage is also a global problem; today the middle of the Pacific Ocean is six times more abundant with plastic waste than zooplankton.

So how did we get to this point? Garbage production doubled in the U.S. over the past 30 years, yet waste is increasingly hidden, and the focus on recycling is fading along with it. Rogers says this situation came about through an alignment of manufacturing and marketing forces, combined with goals of the mega-garbage collection companies like Waste Management and Browning Ferris, and even some environmental laws which ended up helping the mega-companies.

Together, the persistent twin emphasis on growth -- our ever expanding consumptive society -- and the encouragement of easy disposal has made it seem painless for us to increasingly evolve to a virtually "throw away" society. With new technologies the impact is particularly pernicious and the impact is often on the Third World, our society's garbage dump. Just think for a moment about how many televisions, computers, screens, cell phones, iPods and other devices and gadgets you and your office have tossed out over the past decade.

Rogers' book, stuffed full of hundreds of fascinating factoids, combines a history of garbage collection with a political analysis of how social and economic forces have created a great garbage monopoly, in much the same way that a few companies dominate many key markets until the "free markets" are no longer remotely competitive.

Mixed in with Rogers' analysis, the reader will encounter fascinating garbage stories of incinerators and mega-dumps, of waste streams and marketing schemes, all aspects of today's waste-addicted culture. Rogers brings an emotional voice to the narrative as the garbage story is both fascinating and appalling, sharing her feelings of being both awe struck and disgusted. Garbage: it really is quite a story.

In the end, while there is plenty to be discouraged about, the book also has heroes and some smart garbage solutions from reformers, ideas to which municipal leaders, like New York's Mayor Bloomberg, are paying some attention.

Heather Rogers sat down with AlterNet in late September at a noisy Cosi's Cafe in Greenwich Village for the following interview. An excerpt from the book accompanies the Q & A.

So why did you write the book? Tell me a little bit about the experience.

I wrote the book because I wanted to know what happened to my garbage. I knew that it disappeared -- and I knew that it didn't. I also was interested in this system that, if it failed to work, whole cities could be brought to a grinding halt. I wanted to know more about what garbage collecting looked like and how it really worked -- something so integral to the way a city functions.

Once I started looking into garbage, I realized that it was this really great way to talk about the way the market works, and its relationship to labor and nature. Also, it was an excellent way to talk about the larger environmental crisis, just through this everyday substance of garbage.

What was your mood while writing it?

It was up and down. There were definitely periods of time when I was very depressed by it ... but also times when I felt good.

I noticed that some of the language you used: "mysterious," "oddly fascinating," "awesome eerie scenes," "metabolism of the market," led me to think you went through some kind of a journey in this sometimes fascinating, sometimes disgusting world.

Yeah. It's true. It was exciting because going to an incinerator, going to a landfill, I got to see these things that are normally hidden from view in our society; certain things are kept in hiding and garbage is one of them. Production is another. To get to go into that realm and see it is kind of exhilarating. You do feel like you're going into a place you're not supposed to be. And also it's horrifying. I had nightmares after I went to see this landfill in Pennsylvania that I write about in the book.

There are key metaphors that I'd like you to comment on. One of them is the massiveness issue -- the mega-facility in Morrisville, Pa. you mentioned -- the 6,000 acres of garbage. Tell me about that as a response to the garbage problem, how massiveness has become the way with which garbage is dealt.

That has everything to do with the corporatization of garbage handling, and the huge scale that's really evolved over the last 30 years. Basically, there's been a shift from the small local mom-and-pop hauling companies that would be contracted out by cities, or municipalities operating garbage collection and disposal themselves. Those have been what's sometimes called "rolled up" by these large corporations like Waste Management, Browning Ferris Industries -- there's a bunch of them now. Those were the first two.

They saw the potential basically because disposal facilities don't operate like a manufacturing facility where you can easily change economies of scale. You can't do that in the same way with garbage handling because of the relationship between collection and proximity. Your garbage has to come from the surrounding area and the costs are fixed with the trucks, etc. But these corporations could start achieving economies of scale by building these mega-fills. That's why it's gone in that direction.

Those companies have the capital to build big and put the other, smaller people out of business with predatory pricing like Wal-Mart?

Predatory pricing has been their main mechanism for driving other businesses out of markets. But it's interesting, because environmental controls passed in the early 1990s played a really key role in the further consolidation and corporatization of the garbage industry. Tighter controls were required for landfill liner and monitoring systems implemented in 1991 by the EPA, that was part of a law that was passed in 1976, called the Resource Conservation Recovery Act (RCRA).

Waste Management, Browning Ferris and these other large companies supported stricter environmental controls because it created barriers to entry for smaller businesses and for municipalities, and it allowed the corporations to come in and absorb up all these landfills that municipalities couldn't afford to upgrade.

So that's an irony, that corporatization has made the environment more healthy; is that fair to say, because the standards were raised?

Well, to some degree, except that the monitoring systems that are in place, many would argue, are completely inadequate. And yet we're told that they're flawless and that this is a great system and what Waste Management is doing in Pennsylvania at their Morrisville landfill is environmentally sound and it's not.

You write a lot about the PR capacities of the big corporations. Has PR played a big role in helping the public forget about garbage and think that it's being taken care of?

It's been very effective and what's interesting is that in the last couple years, there's been a decline in the recycling rate. People's attention and the political pressure on companies like Waste Management to recycle is waning because people do think our wastes are being handled in an environmentally sound fashion. The big companies come up with these schemes like drilling down into their closed landfills to collect the methane, the landfill gas -- under the 1991 E.P.A. rule they have to collect these gases. So they capture some portion of the gases and then direct them to a power generator, an electric company nearby and sell it to them. And they call it green energy. It's not green energy. It's totally wasteful to create that, but it's better to capture it than to release it.

Right, but they make money selling it?

They don't really make money selling it; They make some money, but it's negligible. It's not a real source of income. It's really a great way for them to put another layer of green-washing on what they do.

In the "Corporatization of Garbage" chapter, you describe how in the mid-'90s in NYC, big corporations like Waste Management and Browning Ferris wrested control of garbage collection in New York City from the Mafia. The Mafia were charging exorbitant prices. Then the big companies came in, the prices went down, but then as soon as the corporations got control of the market and the Mafia got squashed, the prices went up to where they were when the Mafia was in charge. Who would be better -- Waste Management, or Don Corleone -- at collecting the garbage?

Hopefully we'd have more options than that.

The Mafia was dislodged because there was this comprehensive undercover investigation led by a New York police officer named Rick Cowan. He infiltrated the garbage cartel -- it was called Operation Wasteland. For three years, he collected audio recordings of the Mafia describing how the cartel worked, implicating themselves, and it was a result of his work that brought the Mafia down.

But all the smaller companies that weren't Mafia but had to kind of pay to protect their turf, they all got squashed, too, right?

Yeah. The thing is that the leadership in New York City wanted the corporations to come in, in part because of business connections. And they did need the garbage to picked up. Giuliani wanted to close Fresh Kills landfill, in Staten Island, and he needed another option.

Morrisville, P.A.?

Exactly. The big waste corporations had the solutions. By 1997, Browning Ferris and Waste Management owned enough disposable capacity to handle all of New York City's garbage. So, there were real benefits that these corporations brought to the table politically and logistically to keep the city running. It was an opportunity for the city to really rethink its waste disposal practices, which they absolutely didn't do at all.

What should they have done?

They could've implemented a municipal composting program. Sixty percent of household garbage that gets thrown away in landfills in the U.S. are compostable items. That would've taken a huge chunk out of what needed to get thrown away in the first place.

So, why has recycling gone down and why isn't there more composting?

Recycling underwent its real renaissance in the late '80s and early '90s because the E.P.A. in the mid and late '80s started implementing a provision in the RCRA which said landfills have to meet a certain safety level in order to operate. Most landfills in the U.S. didn't meet those standards. So two-thirds of the U.S. landfills were shut in the late '80s. It created a disposal crisis. That's when you had that garbage barge [the Mobro 4000] that was full of ash, floating up and down the east coast trying to find a place to dispose of the ash and went to Haiti. It then dumped 10,000 tons of it on a beach illegally in Haiti, and offloaded it somewhere in the ocean.

That was a moment of real crisis over where to put the garbage. At first, local government and also the old-line environmental groups like the Sierra Club endorsed incineration. So there was this huge push to build more incinerators. Except that in New York City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, neighborhoods got together and said "no, we don't want incinerators in our neighborhoods. They're not safe, they're not clean, we don't want to breath in the smoke and the ash coming out of the stacks.

But the garbage had to go somewhere. So these municipalities, where residents fought incineration, were forced to adopt mandatory municipal curbside recycling programs.

Because of the corporatization of waste handling and disposal, because we have these mega-fills now -- there's an overcapacity of space, so there isn't the pressure for recycling When there isn't the pressure, people aren't thinking about it as much.

Bloomberg even stopped recycling for a while in New York,

Yes, but that was instructive in that when he stopped recycling, it pissed people off. He had to start it again. People really like recycling. The same is true in DC. They stopped it twice there and they had to reinstate because people got so angry.

So there is massiveness and monopoly control; what about the notion of garbage flow ... it seems like garbage is flowing 24/7 all around world.

Shit and gold are constantly flowing. [laughing]

Shit and gold, is that it? [laughing] What do you make of that? It is described as the "waste stream."

It's interesting about that term, the "waste stream." It sanitizes the idea of discard, it's like, it's just this "stream" ... it's just an innocuous thing that's sort of naturally occurring. The levels of waste that we produce in a free market system are by no means the natural outcome of some organic process. They're the product of choices that have been made in many ways by manufacturers to boost consumption and to boost profits. In terms of these flows, you don't have consumption if you don't have wasting. You don't have expanding markets if you don't have increasing levels of consumption. So, in order to have continued intensified growth, you have to have continued, intensified wasting.

But how do you intervene into that system and slow it down or reverse it? Does it require a total paradigm shift into the way people think? Is it possible under capitalism to do that?

I think that one of the downfalls of the environmental movement is that it has tried to separate issues of environmental health from the economic system that those issues exist in. I think that people have witnessed it long enough to know that that approach is flawed.

Tell me more about the enjoyment of throwing things away.

I think there's a gratification there that people get. It's different for different people. The system that we have wasn't just thought of by huge manufacturers. It was something that was shaped by real human desires that came into play; certain choices were made. We can address this kind of gratification that people get out of the shiny packaging and when something breaks, getting to throw it away and getting a new, fancier one that takes pictures, has lights and plays music. We can try to address those desires in a different way.

Because I think again the environmental movement has, like I say in the book, this sort of pinched, austere approach that isn't that fun for a lot of people. There are so many ways, when I think about what the possibilities. For example: people are building biodiesel cars with old car bodies. They're totally efficient, great vehicles, but they have these old bodies. They don't get 10 miles to the gallon, they get much more.

Here's a big question: garbage is connected to global warming, toxic dumps, exploitation of poor neighborhoods and shipped off to third world countries. Garbage seems like a worthy metaphor for much of what is wrong in the world. Is there any trend to suggest that these problems can be addressed, that third world countries aren't going to be stuck with all this dangerous crap you describe in the book being dumped on them.

Unfortunately, Hurricane Katrina revealed that all of these issues are very much at the forefront of what's going on. What happened in the Gulf Coast is awful to see, but it lays bare the reality of the situation. Toxic wastes are being dumped on the poorest communities, and often they're communities of color, and those problems are exacerbated by global warming. All these issues are connected to issues of poverty and inequality. They produce each other. They exacerbate each other.

The stance of green capitalism is that consumption can kind of go on unabated, but you're pretty cynical about these developments: poor product to manufacturing design, bioplastics are a technical fix, etc. What you rail at in the book is: if we can make all these technical fixes, why can't we stop producing so much garbage?

Yes, why can't we change the production process so that it's less wasteful? I do think that industrial production can be made better. I do think that it's incredibly wasteful the way that it operates now. There's so much room for improvement. But I don't think that we have to get rid of industrial production.

Is it happening better in other parts of the world, in Europe or ... ?

Yes. For example, one really simple thing that we could do is switch back to refillable bottles for beverages. It would accomplish a number of things. They use this system in Germany, and 72 percent of all their beverage containers have to be refillable. That's the law. The beverage makers in that country continuously try to break that law, and the government has enforced it. They penalize the beverage producers and enforce the law, and it works. It's profitable and people like it.

They have to take their bottles back to the store; the bottles get washed out and refilled. They leave a deposit and they get it back -- a system that we used to have here, that was phased out in the '70s, because it was more profitable to have disposable containers for the beverage industry and it also facilitated the consolidation of the beverage industry.

We talked about the gratification that people get out of wasting, but there's also a psychological toll that it takes. People don't like to waste. There's another side of it too -- I think it really causes people a lot of concern. There are so few moments where we can directly affect the production process, like the process that brings us this plastic cup. There are so few points at which we can have real contact with that process. And people taking their bottles back to the store, is one of those moments. I think it gives people some hope.

What other suggestions do you have about solutions?

One example is the movement called Zero Waste, which I write about in the last chapter They advocate for a lot of the same things that the Green Capitalists advocate for, which is redesigning the production process and designing waste and designing out toxics. The difference is that the Zero Waste movement says that those things should be mandated by law and they should be enforced because producers won't do it themselves if they don't have to. There's a Zero Waste campaign right now in New York City and they're lobbying city officials. New York City has to come up with a new solid waste management plan.

Mandated?

Yeah, it's mandated by the state. It's at least 10-year plan, with a 20-year timeframe; it's a long-term vision on how the city is going to manage its waste. So, this group of people has been active in influencing this discussion. It's not getting a lot of attention -- they're not getting the attention they deserve.

But Bloomberg has adopted some of their ideas, one of them being that transfer stations which is where garbage gets taken between getting collected and getting taken to the dump or the incinerator should be spread around. The Zero Waste campaign said that transfer stations had to be dispersed around the city and not just concentrated in the South Bronx and in Greenpoint.

Are the neighborhoods still fighting it?

It's pretty much settled. They're going to reopen the transfer station on the Upper East Side, which those people definitely did not want ... but they lost. So there's going to be a transfer station on the UES, they're opening a transfer station on the Westside in the 50s, and that's going to be for commercial construction and demolition debris. They're spreading the burden out in a more equitable way, which is really good. That's something that the Zero Waste put together. They have other ideas.

The other thing I wanted to just mention is that ... I think it's important to acknowledge what's happened on the cultural level in terms of indoctrinating people to disposability. A lot of effort has been made to teach people to throw things away. It's not something that that comes natural to people. It's just use something and discard it, that's something we've had to learn how to do. One of the cultural institutions that has made it its business to normalize disposability is this beautification group called Keep America Beautiful. They were started in 1953.

They've normalized disposables? Are they supported by commercial interests?

Yes, they have shaped the normalization a very sophisticated way, and they were started by the beverage container industry, the packaging industry, and manufacturers. They share members and leaders with the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). They got their public relations strategy from the NAM, it seems to me.

In 1953, the state of Vermont passed a law that banned disposable bottles. It wasn't an environmental law, it was because people were throwing their disposable bottles out their car windows and it was landing in the hay and the dairy cows were eating the glass and dying. Well there were dairy farmers in the state legislature, and they said, okay we'll put an end to that.

Within months, the beverage container industry and the packaging industry created this group Keep America Beautiful. The idea behind of it was to stop any further bans like the one in Vermont and they were totally, totally successful. Can you imagine a law like that today? No disposable bottles allowed? That's so radical. And they've also been successful in blocking bottle deposit laws -- there's only 11 states that have deposit laws.

And it's because Keep America Beautiful and their allies have fought those laws. They work on the policy level, and they also work on the cultural level., Their "great" accomplishment was that they constructed garbage as the product of individual choices. As an individual responsibility, and not one connected to the production process.

Keep America Beautiful

In the aftermath of magazine ads promoting beverage cans as "throwaways", Keep America Beautiful (KAB) was founded in 1953 by a group of businessmen from the beverage and packaging industries. Their purported interest was to curb the growing problem of litter. Coincidently, 1953 was the year Vermont passed the nation's first bottle bill, banning the sale of beer in non-refillable bottles.

Litter was a visible problem nationwide and the bottlers and packagers were concerned that government would make them responsible for solving the litter problem by regulating their industries. That concern was the catalyst for founding KAB. The organization launched its first campaign theme, "Every Litter Bit Hurts" and the most visible environmental organizations joined KAB's war on litter.

"People start pollution"

In the early 1970's KAB mounted a splashy new campaign aimed at making individuals responsible for cleaning up litter that was a blight on parks, playgrounds, country roads and city landscapes. The now legendary image of the Native American with a tear angling down his face caught the attention of the public, but many environmental organizations serving as advisors to KAB were offended by the "People Start Pollution, People Can Stop It" theme.

Environmentalists thought the theme implied that individuals were solely responsible for pollution. Environmental organizations including the Sierra Club, National Audubon Society and National Wildlife Federation wanted KAB to join them in working for strategies such as bottle bills, that focused on preventing litter and making producers responsible for their packaging waste. But the industry backers of the KAB strongly objected.

KAB publicly opposes bottle bills

In 1972 Oregon and Vermont enacted the nation's first bottle bills requiring a 5-cent deposit on beer and soft drink containers. By 1974, when the California legislature began to debate whether to enact a container deposit law, KAB made a strategic decision to publicly oppose the bottle bill. Roger Powers, President of KAB testified against the California bottle bill before the state legislature in Sacramento.

Some Advisory Committee members saw this public opposition to bottle bills as an indication that KAB was serving its own interests and not those of the broader environmental community and as a result threatened to quit the advisory board. In order to keep the environmentalists on board KAB, agreed that it would not take a position, either for or against deposit legislation.

As public support for bottle bills grew and aggressive bottle bill campaigns were waged in Maine and Michigan, the brewers needed an alternative response to litter, otherwise more states might soon adopt bottle bills. In 1975 the U.S. Brewers Association (USBA) developed a sophisticated campaign called the "Clean Community System" (CCS), which they touted as an alternative to bottle bills. As the parent organization, KAB kicked off the new Clean Community Campaign at its annual meeting in 1975.

In a memo several months later, the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Thomas Williams explained the underlying purpose of the CCS. It is a public relations campaign, he wrote, used by the industry " in an attempt to focus the attention of hundreds of communities on anti-litter campaigns . . . When successfully inaugurated, it tends to abort any local efforts to institute beverage container deposit systems, placing emphasis on street-cleaning and other litter control activities."

The final blow to environmentalists was dealt during a speech at a July 1976 KAB Board of Directors meeting at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, when American Can Company chairman William F. May labeled bottle bill proponents "Communists" and called for a total KAB mobilization against the four bottle bill referenda on the ballot in November. Present during the speech were KAB's Advisory Committee members, many of whom were the subject of May's attack.

The story was picked up by Jack Anderson and aired on his national television show. On August 12, 1976, the EPA resigned from KAB's board and by October 1976 more than a dozen environmental and citizen groups, including National Audubon Society, National Wildlife Federation, League of Women Voters and Sierra Club disaffiliated from KAB. In November of that year voters approved bottle bills in Michigan and Maine.

KAB proposes ineffective bottle bill alternatives

Industry opponents of deposit legislation recognized that simply 'opposing' legislation was not enough. Since 1976 hundreds of CCS and similar KAB programs have been proposed in cities and counties across the U.S. as a direct alternative to local container deposit ordinances. Funding, however, has strings attached, as one environmental group in New York discovered. In New York City, the Environmental Action Coalition (EAC) received $350,000 in support over three years from Pepsi-Cola, the Can Manufacturers Institute and the Aluminum Association for anti-litter education. EAC lost industry funding in 1975 when it endorsed the proposed New York bottle bill.

The most effective statewide strategy used to convince legislators that bottle bills are not needed has been litter taxes. These alternatives generally involve a small annual tax on all manufacturers and retailers. The taxes are then used to create a government agency that addresses litter issues. Litter taxes were passed in Colorado, Kentucky, Arkansas, Connecticut, California, Ohio and Virginia as alternatives to bottle bill proposals.

Bob Warrick, farmer and President of the Nebraska chapter of the Sierra Club said of KAB's programs, "I'm tired of pumping money into front organizations whose goal is to educate and plant flowers. My ditch is filled with cans and bottles. Legislation mandating deposits would stop litter before it starts, but KAB never supported a bottle bill."

Warwick's disappointment echoes that of Newark's Mayor, Sharpe James who said of the KAB program, "The Clean Communities alternative to a bottle bill offered by the industry in New Jersey has been a failure."

With increased public interest in recycling and waste reduction in the 1980's, KAB's emphasis shifted from litter cleanups to recycling. KAB's Clean Community Systems grew to more than 400 local groups and its list of financial supporters expanded to include a broader range of manufacturing industries and companies in the waste disposal industry such as Waste Management, Inc and Browning Ferris.

In the 1990's, KAB adopted yet another campaign slogan - "Let's not waste the 1990's" - which stressed the need to encourage citizens, municipal officials and civic leaders to "re-examine recycling's capabilities and limitations." The new campaign presented a 5-pronged solution to solving the problem of solid waste - source reduction, recycling, composting, incineration and sanitary landfilling.

KAB's 1990's slogan was new, but the message had changed little since Iron Eyes Cody warned that "People Start Pollution - People Can Stop It." The promotional materials made no mention of policies such as recycled content requirements, mandatory recycling rates, bottle bills or other measurers that shift the burden of waste management and waste reduction from government to the producers of waste.

KAB alienates other environmental groups

On April 5, 1993 KAB hosted a nationwide videoconference "Recycling Realities: A National Town Meeting." In announcing the conference, KAB President Roger Powers said, "While recycling can be an important method of dealing with our waste in some communities; it is not the only option. In order to safely and effectively manage trash, the public must be informed of every alternative." Powers was of course referring to the waste management options of landfilling and incineration.

More than a dozen environmental and public interest groups, in a letter to KAB President Roger Powers, charged that the panel of waste experts addressing the videoconference was void of representation from the environmental community. The groups wrote, "It is clear that the perspective of your corporate members will be effectively articulated by such panelists as Jane Witheridge of Waste Management, Inc. and Melinda Sweet of Lever Brothers Company. We are dismayed that you have chosen to exclude advocates and experts on successful source reduction and recycling initiatives."

Rick Hind, Executive Director of Greenpeace and one of the co-signers of the letter said, "KAB continues to put the blame for waste generation and the responsibility for waste management on the public sector, when the real polluters are the industries that manufacture, sell, bury and burn the waste."

At least one local KAB organization broke ties with Keep America Beautiful as a result of the videoconference. The board of directors of Arlingtonians for a Clean Environment (ACE) voted to disaffiliate with KAB after ACE director Steve Coffee attended KAB's Recycling Realities Meeting in April 1993. Coffee was dismayed to find no environmental groups on the panel and turned off by what he believed was a deliberate effort on the part of KAB to avoid questions on deposit legislation.

When Powers was asked why no environmental groups were members of KAB, Powers said he had "no idea." "Our members are a good cross-section of the Fortune 500 corporations. They are working on enlightened self-interest. We are helping to educate 495 American communities on what the options are. I don't go hat in hand seeking out environmental groups."

Eighteen months after the videoconference KAB funded a report titled "The Role of Recycling in Integrated Solid Waste Management to the Year 2000". The $400,000 report concluded, among other things, that "recycling and composting as currently practiced have limits that will be reached in this decade." The study drew fire from recycling advocates and environmentalists who felt that it painted recycling in a negative light, focusing on the limits of curbside recycling and advocating alternative waste management technologies such as landfilling and incineration.

At KAB's annual meeting in December 1994, Mark Lichtenstein, President of the National Recycling Coalition (NRC) told KAB meeting attendees, "After reading the study and talking with many respected leaders in our industry, I find myself asking what exactly is the agenda of the KAB national office? I have to ask. . . can the NRC count on the KAB national to help in our mutual war on waste?"

In an article in Biocycle , Former President of NRC and Manager of Market Development for Weyerhaeuser Recycling, Pete Grogan, wrote, "I find myself questioning the agenda behind the study. . . The report reminds us that it is 'cheaper' to send solid waste to the landfill. Well, I can easily argue that tossing solid waste in the river is even cheaper."

In the spring of 2000, Keep Washington Beautiful (KWB) sponsored a cosmetic cleanup in Anacostia, a densely populated community in Washington, DC. Volunteers biked and cleaned up trash at four predetermined sites. The sites included two parks, an area along the Anacostia River and a mini dump that had grown up beside a short stretch of railroad track. During the four-hour cleanup, volunteers working with members of the newly formed Keep Washington Beautiful -- a KAB clone -- culled tires, miscellaneous litter and lots of beverage containers from the four sites. Beverage containers accounted for fifty per cent of the collected materials.

Keep Washington Beautiful is one of the newest big-city KAB affiliates. Like most other KAB affiliates, KWB grew out of industry opposition to a proposed bottle bill referendum.

Boycott Diamonds

The English word “diamond” comes from the Greek αδάμας (adamas), meaning “invincible.” The mythical substance of “adamantine”—what Milton’s god bound Satan, and death itself, with—was at one point inspired by the hardness of diamonds. Diamond is the hardest material on earth, made of pure carbon packed into a crystalline structure so tightly that it becomes clear. This gives diamonds some very useful applications with optics, or diamond-edged blades that can cut through anything. What would likely surprise the average person most is to know that diamonds aren’t actually rare at all. Our cultural attitude towards diamonds, and even their supposed “rarity,” have little or nothing to do with the stone itself, and everything to do with one of the most vile corporations to ever afflict the human race—and its campaign to shape our very culture to its own ends.

Cecil John Rhodes, in many ways, epitomized the merciless European exploitation of the colonial era. He colonized Rhodesia, and named it for himself—and made a fortune by exploiting the rich resources of South Africa. He used his fortune to start the Rhodes Scholarship, largely in the hopes of putting the United States into the hands of philosopher-kings who would be wise enough to repent of their country’s ill-considered rebellion and rejoin the glorious British Empire, and once famously declared, “all of these stars… these vast worlds that remain out of reach. If I could, I would annex other planets.” He was a blatant racist who dedicated his life to expanding the empire, in order to serve the great destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race. In his time, the Boers in South Africa were setting up the colonial system of exploitation that would eventually be epitomized in the system of apartheid. Rhodes’ entrepreneurship was a major boon to that enterprise, and much of it was financed by the profits he made from the diamond mining activities he began when he bought a farm where diamonds were showing up. He named his company after the settlers who owned that farm: Nicolaas and Diedrick DeBeer.

In the mid-1890s, Rhodes founded the aptly-named Diamond Syndicate, which eventually morphed into the Central Selling Organization. As Rhodes was discovering in South Africa, diamonds are actually fairly common.

The diamond invention—the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem—is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.

The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa. As De Beers took control of all aspects of the world diamond trade, it assumed many forms. In London, it operated under the innocuous name of the Diamond Trading Company. In Israel, it was known as “The Syndicate.” In Europe, it was called the “C.S.O.”—initials referring to the Central Selling Organization, which was an arm of the Diamond Trading Company. And in black Africa, it disguised its South African origins under subsidiaries with names like Diamond Development Corporation and Mining Services, Inc. At its height—for most of this century—it not only either directly owned or controlled all the diamond mines in southern Africa but also owned diamond trading companies in England, Portugal, Israel, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland.

Nature had not provided the scarcity necessary to sell diamonds at such high prices, so Rhodes decided that an artificial scarcity was required.

De Beers has managed the remarkable feat of operating a 17th century economic model in a 21st century world. Fluctuations of supply and demand are not tolerated. Three floors beneath us are a series of vaults that contain the world’s largest stockpile of unpolished diamonds—the best estimates put it at half a billion dollars. To De Beers, they remain much more valuable right where they are. The continuing stability of the diamond industry depends on an artificial scarcity that De Beers has worked hard to create.

Without De Beers’ warehouses, the diamond industry would collapse overnight; if diamonds were fairly traded, their abundance would make them quite cheap indeed. That is why De Beers has put such efforts into buying up all the diamond mines it can find; not to sell them, but to lock them away to make sure than no one else is selling them.

The Syndicate got its first strong competition in the first decade of the 20th century, when new mines were discovered in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia). Ernest Oppenheimer’s Anglo-American Corp. began with those mines, and continued acquiring mines in the early 1920s. Oppenheimer bought a seat on the De Beers board in 1926, and became chairman in 1929. The Oppenheimer family still controls Anglo-American and De Beers today.

In the United States, De Beers operates primarily via “Sightholders” who purchase their diamonds from De Beers—thus remaining outside the purview of U.S. anti-trust laws. With the shifting of the post-colonial period, De Beers has adapted as well, but it has remained true to the ruthless, exploitative spirit of its founder. During apartheid, De Beers was one of the few multinational corporations that remained loyal to the South African government despite international pressure, supplying funds that helped the government maintain its programs of repression and torture on the native black majority. De Beers has made arrangements with African governments (as with Botswana’s “Debswana”), as well as rebel factions—and just as often, both. This practice, and De Beers’ artificially maintained high prices, made diamonds the currency of choice among warlords, with “blood diamonds” or “conflict diamonds” financing some of the most cruel atrocities ever committed in Africa. De Beers even played a role in helping to keep the nuclear arms race going.

Most spectacularly, after geologists in the Soviet Union came across a huge field of diamonds in the Siberian tundra in 1956, De Beers made an unprecedented offer: it would buy the entire run at a guaranteed price. The profits—estimated at $25 million a year—bolstered the Kremlin’s treasury and helped fund the buildup of nuclear arms. The Russian gems went into the vaults under Charterhouse Street. When the Soviet Union unraveled in 1990, De Beers went back to Moscow, offering the transitional government $1 billion in exchange for part of the nation’s stockpile of Siberian diamonds.

Through most of the 20th century, De Beers controlled something between 85% and 90% of the world’s diamond supply—Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and Gates’ Microsoft briefly flirted with such astonishing dominance, but De Beers maintained this strangle hold for a full century—making it the most dominant monopoly in history. But in 2000, Ernest Oppenheimer’s grandson, Nicky Oppenheimer, announced that De Beers would be relinquishing its monopoly. Many heralded it as the end of the De Beers’ unprecedented monopoly, but others recognized a reorganization to avoid more stringent European Union laws against monopolies.

Why would a company voluntarily abandon the hegemony it had held for more than 100 years? This is the question I set out to answer over three months of reporting this winter. I traveled through the company’s mining operations in Africa; toured the diamond-laden sorting rooms of its sales and marketing hub in London; and interviewed more than a dozen senior De Beers executives and innumerable other players in the secretive diamond business. And gradually I realized that I needed to ask an altogether different question: Was De Beers really changing at all? Or had it crafted a tale designed to seduce and appease worried antitrust regulators in the U.S. and Europe–a tale that concealed the fact that the company’s new initiative might make it as dominant in the future as it ever was?

My suspicions were confirmed by an announcement on Feb. 1, a shock that caught the industry by surprise: Anglo American PLC, the South African mining giant that is also controlled by the Oppenheimers, was in talks to buy De Beers. …

When Ernest took control of De Beers’ board in 1929, he initiated a cross-holding arrangement that has since grown immensely complicated. Currently De Beers owns 37% of Anglo’s stock, while Anglo holds 33% of De Beers–a setup stock analysts say distorts the earnings of both companies. The Oppenheimer family controls a large percentage of each company’s shares. So even if a buyout goes through, with Anglo American CEO Anthony Trahar as nominal chief of the company, the Oppenheimer family will retain a controlling influence–especially over the diamond business.

The so-called “Supplier of Choice” program may get around anti-trust laws in the European Union, and presents just enough of a legal fiction to make DeBeers no longer technically a monopoly, but the genius of the program is that it actually increases DeBeers’ control of the diamond industry.

From 2002 through the beginning of 2005, DeBeers has reduced the number of sightholders from approximately 120 to 80, as a part of it’s “Supplier of Choice” program. Under this program, DeBeers will try to consolidate the diamond market from rough production through retail, eliminating many of the current participants in diamond production and sales. The impact on the diamond cutting industry and jewelry retailers (among others involved in the diamond trade) could be enormous. Does this mean that the price of diamonds will come down? Not on your life! It means that DeBeers and it’s sightholders will probably make a greater percentage of the total take from the diamond market than it currently does.

Even so, ruthless domination of the market by any means necessary and global price-fixing were only one half of what De Beers needed: the other half was a cultural engineering project on the grandest scale, to reinvent the Western notion of love in its own consumerist image, and to mold an entire culture to suit its needs. The De Beers’ “A Diamond is Forever” marketing campaign is one of the most astonishingly successful examples of demand creation in history.

The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life. To stabilize the market, De Beers had to endow these stones with a sentiment that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them. The illusion had to be created that diamonds were forever—”forever” in the sense that they should never be resold.

The techniques used by De Beers are of course quite common now, but De Beers was one of the pioneers in the new field of “public relations,” as Edward Bernays called it, noting that “propaganda” had taken on a negative connotation (which he disagreed with). In his famous book, Propaganda, Bernays wrote, “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.” He called this scientific technique of opinion-molding the “engineering of consent.” Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and though the psychoanalytic approach Freud advocated has largely fallen out of favor for the theraputic ends he intended it, it has proven fundamental—thanks to Bernays—to the manipulation of mass psychology via marketing. Bernays relied heavily on Freud’s theories, and considered his own work as the application of Freudian psychology to large groups. In fact, much of Freud’s renown in the United States is due to Bernays’ promotion—before him, Freud’s work was not even translated into English. In Propaganda, Bernays not only justified such manipulation, but made the argument that such deceptions were essential to the maintenance of orderly society.
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our world. … We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. … In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

To suggest Bernays’ power, despite the fact that he is almost completely unknown to most Americans, one need only list some of the common tropes he introduced, which we normally take for granted as simply part of American culture: the importance of Sigmund Freud already mentioned, “bacon and eggs,” the cigarette as a symbol of rebellion and independence, the automobile as a symbol of freedom, and even the practice of presidents meeting with entertainment celebrities were all first introduced by Edward Bernays. Bernays was also aware of the formative role his work played for the Nazi party.

Bernays revolutionized the concept of the commercial, from simply informing one’s audience that a product exists, to manipulating subconscious desires to link deep-seated emotional needs unmet by civilization, to the consumption of goods. Many saw through to the madness of such an idea; then Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote to FDR to warn him about Bernays, calling him and Ivy Lee “professional poisoners of the public mind, exploiters of foolishness, fanaticism and self-interest.” Nonetheless, the economic potential of such large-scale manipulation of the public’s emotions was too great to pass up.

Though the first diamond engagement ring was given to Mary of Burgundy in 1477, up until the emergence of De Beers, engagement rings were adorned with any number of gems. It was De Beers’ marketing campaign that created the diamond engagement ring as we know it today.

Oppenheimer suggested to Lauck that his agency prepare a plan for creating a new image for diamonds among Americans. He assured Lauck that De Beers had not called on any other American advertising agency with this proposal, and that if the plan met with his father’s approval, N. W. Ayer would be the exclusive agents for the placement of newspaper and radio advertisements in the United States. Oppenheimer agreed to underwrite the costs of the research necessary for developing the campaign. Lauck instantly accepted the offer.

In their subsequent investigation of the American diamond market, the staff of N. W. Ayer found that since the end of World War I, in 1919, the total amount of diamonds sold in America, measured in carats, had declined by 50 percent; at the same time, the quality of the diamonds, measured in dollar value, had declined by nearly 100 percent. An Ayer memo concluded that the depressed state of the market for diamonds was “the result of the economy, changes in social attitudes and the promotion of competitive luxuries.”

Although it could do little about the state of the economy, N. W. Ayer suggested that through a well-orchestrated advertising and public-relations campaign it could have a significant impact on the “social attitudes of the public at large and thereby channel American spending toward larger and more expensive diamonds instead of “competitive luxuries.” Specifically, the Ayer study stressed the need to strengthen the association in the public’s mind of diamonds with romance. Since “young men buy over 90% of all engagement rings” it would be crucial to inculcate in them the idea that diamonds were a gift of love: the larger and finer the diamond, the greater the expression of love. Similarly, young women had to be encouraged to view diamonds as an integral part of any romantic courtship.

Since the Ayer plan to romanticize diamonds required subtly altering the public’s picture of the way a man courts—and wins—a woman, the advertising agency strongly suggested exploiting the relatively new medium of motion pictures. Movie idols, the paragons of romance for the mass audience, would be given diamonds to use as their symbols of indestructible love. In addition, the agency suggested offering stories and society photographs to selected magazines and newspapers which would reinforce the link between diamonds and romance. Stories would stress the size of diamonds that celebrities presented to their loved ones, and photographs would conspicuously show the glittering stone on the hand of a well-known woman. Fashion designers would talk on radio programs about the “trend towards diamonds” that Ayer planned to start. The Ayer plan also envisioned using the British royal family to help foster the romantic allure of diamonds. An Ayer memo said, “Since Great Britain has such an important interest in the diamond industry, the royal couple could be of tremendous assistance to this British industry by wearing diamonds rather than other jewels.” Queen Elizabeth later went on a well-publicized trip to several South African diamond mines, and she accepted a diamond from Oppenheimer.

DeBeers even worked to promote the notion that the engagement ring should be presented as a surprise—specifically to ensure that there would be no discussion, and no chance for the bride-to-be to say that spending $10,000 or more is unnecessary. Of course, as De Beers’ inventory changed, they needed to update the criteria of what made a diamond valuable—since its value had nothing to do with the stone itself, and everything to do with De Beers’ extensive cultural engineering project.

In the mid-1950s De Beers was overwhelmed by a flood of small diamonds pouring out of recently discovered mines in the Soviet Union. After nearly a decade and a half of convincing America of the importance of larger stones, suddenly the company needed to create a virtue out of the previously disparaged small diamonds.

Where previously DeBeers had convinced people to buy bigger diamonds, the influx of smaller stones from Russia in the 1950s (the Siberian mines that, you’ll recall, helped keep the nuclear arms race going) led DeBeers to start emphasizing “the four C’s” that are still hoisted by jewelers as the primary means of judging a diamond’s worth. Besides its size (carat), DeBeers also promoted cut, clarity and color, in order to convince the public that a smaller diamond (like their diamonds from Russia) could be just as valuable as the larger diamonds they’d previously bought.

In so doing, DeBeers created the perfect currency for every warlord and rebel faction in Africa: valuable, small enough to smuggle (as the gun runner in the movie Lord of War tells the Liberian president based on Charles Taylor, “I’ll take the stones—I don’t think I can fit a tree trunk in my brief case), and not only something that is actually quite common in nature, but is found most easily in Africa itself. “Blood diamonds” first emerged in Angola’s civil war, but have been used in Sierra Leone and Liberia, the Ivory Coast, and the Congo by such butchers as Charles Taylor. In Africa, diamonds are no longer simply financing wars; they are the cause of war themselves.

We must be clear about who is involved. Barbaric, drug-crazed and dragooned by the warlords as they may be, armed and desperate young men could not have brought Unamsil to its knees all on their own. The UN has been ensnared by something different, something newer and more insidious: by a struggle between two rival groups supported by businessmen intent on gaining control of mineral wealth. By refusing to declare an embargo on diamonds from Sierra Leone, or indeed the economic exclusion zone that many experts have been calling for, the Security Council and UN Secretary General have left the field wide open for a mafia-like conflict in which their soldiers have become pawns in the game.

As media attention has grown on the issue of blood diamonds—including a Leonardo di Caprio movie being released this weekend—DeBeers has grown genuinely frightened. After all, with little intrinsic value, the diamond industry is almost entirely a carefully constructed cultural delusion that DeBeers maintains through marketing alone. Comemmorating one’s love with the currency used to pay for atrocities is the kind of revelation that could threaten DeBeers’ house of cards, so they have introduced a number of programs to “prove” to customers that their diamonds were never part of a gun runner’s payment.

While the company seems to be winning this particular PR battle, its uneasy effort to tiptoe through the Angolan minefield exemplifies the problem De Beers faces as it simultaneously tries to open up and to wield the monopolistic powers of the old De Beers. Throughout my trip to Africa, I was confronted with evidence of this schism. Even as the company openly exhibited its expansion plans and granted access to its mining operations, it displayed the secrecy and stifling control for which the old De Beers was famous. Every minute of every day was rigidly scheduled. There was little room to escape, to veer from the confines of De Beers’ yellow-brick road and seek the company behind the curtain.

To counter the release of the movie Blood Diamond, DeBeers has launched a campaign to tout the “Kimberley Process,” a certification program they use to prove that a given diamond has come directly from the mine. Unfortunately, the “Process” is little more than a rubber stamp. While DeBeers has put a great deal of effort into pacifying the conscience of the public, they have done nothing to address the issue itself.

In July 2000, after millions of deaths fueled by diamonds, Global Witness created enormous pressure on the global diamond industry to force their participation with other NGOs, governments, and the UN to create a policy toward “conflict diamonds" called the Kimberley Process Certification System. This system was formally adopted in 2003 to decrease the number of “conflict diamonds" entering the legitimate diamond supply chain. Participating countries belonging to the Kimberley Process claim that rough diamonds originating within their borders are not directly used to finance rebel militias. There is little to no oversight for these “recognized" governments, and often little incentive for governments to claim otherwise. Some estimates say that up to 30% of the rough output of some diamond mines is smuggled out illegally.

The diamond industry also adopted a voluntary System of Warranties with no independent monitoring to claim that their diamonds do not originate from conflicts. These warranties are rarely kept - in a survey conducted in February 2006, Amnesty International found that only 18% of retailers had a policy toward ensuring their diamonds were compliant with the Kimberley Process.

Of course, even if the “Kimberley Process” were effective at its stated aims, it would only ensure that a specific diamond was not actually part of a warlord’s cache at some previous point in its history. It would still do nothing to change the fact that the purchase of the diamond supports the cultural construction of the diamond that DeBeers has so carefully created. Purchasing a diamond—any diamond—adds to the social pressure and prestige that DeBeers created from whole cloth, and in so doing, any diamond purchase increases the value of all diamonds.

The Shock Doctrine

One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was the late Milton Friedman, grand guru of unfettered capitalism and credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hyper-mobile global economy. Ninety-three years old and in failing health, "Uncle Miltie", as he was known to his followers, found the strength to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke. "Most New Orleans schools are in ruins," Friedman observed, "as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity."

Friedman's radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans' existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions.

In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans' school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.

The Friedmanite American Enterprise Institute enthused that "Katrina accomplished in a day ... what Louisiana school reformers couldn't do after years of trying". Public school teachers, meanwhile, were calling Friedman's plan "an educational land grab". I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, "disaster capitalism".

Privatising the school system of a mid-size American city may seem a modest preoccupation for the man hailed as the most influential economist of the past half century. Yet his determination to exploit the crisis in New Orleans to advance a fundamentalist version of capitalism was also an oddly fitting farewell. For more than three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock.

In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism's core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as "the shock doctrine". He observed that "only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change". When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the "tyranny of the status quo". A variation on Machiavelli's advice that "injuries" should be inflicted "all at once", this is one of Friedman's most lasting legacies.

Friedman first learned how to exploit a shock or crisis in the mid-70s, when he advised the dictator General Augusto Pinochet. Not only were Chileans in a state of shock after Pinochet's violent coup, but the country was also traumatised by hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy - tax cuts, free trade, privatised services, cuts to social spending and deregulation.

It was the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere, and it became known as a "Chicago School" revolution, as so many of Pinochet's economists had studied under Friedman there. Friedman coined a phrase for this painful tactic: economic "shock treatment". In the decades since, whenever governments have imposed sweeping free-market programs, the all-at-once shock treatment, or "shock therapy", has been the method of choice.

I started researching the free market's dependence on the power of shock four years ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. I reported from Baghdad on Washington's failed attempts to follow "shock and awe" with shock therapy - mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized government. Afterwards I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating 2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts, blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.

Most people who survive a disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed. "When I rebuild the city I feel like I'm rebuilding myself," said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans' heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what once was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called "reconstruction" began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere.

When I began this research into the intersection between super-profits and mega-disasters, I thought I was witnessing a fundamental change in the way the drive to "liberate" markets was advancing around the world. Having been part of the movement against ballooning corporate power that made its global debut in Seattle in 1999, I was accustomed to seeing business-friendly policies imposed through arm-twisting at WTO summits, or as the conditions attached to loans from the IMF.

As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of Friedman's movement from the very beginning - this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance. What was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine.

Seen through the lens of this doctrine, the past 35 years look very different. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the intent of terrorising the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for radical free-market "reforms". In China in 1989, it was the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the arrests of tens of thousands that freed the Communist party to convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone, staffed with workers too terrified to demand their rights. The Falklands war in 1982 served a similar purpose for Margaret Thatcher: the disorder resulting from the war allowed her to crush the striking miners and to launch the first privatisation frenzy in a western democracy.

The bottom line is that, for economic shock therapy to be applied without restraint, some sort of additional collective trauma has always been required. Friedman's economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy - the US under Reagan being the best example - but for the vision to be implemented in its complete form, authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian conditions are required.

Until recently, these conditions did not exist in the US. What happened on September 11 2001 is that an ideology hatched in American universities and fortified in Washington institutions finally had its chance to come home. The Bush administration, packed with Friedman's disciples, seized upon the fear generated to launch the "war on terror" and to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that has breathed new life into the faltering US economy. Best understood as a "disaster capitalism complex", it is a global war fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with the unending mandate of protecting the US homeland in perpetuity while eliminating all "evil" abroad.

In a few short years, the complex has already expanded its market reach from fighting terrorism to international peacekeeping, to municipal policing, to responding to increasingly frequent natural disasters. The ultimate goal for the corporations at the centre of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary functioning of the state - in effect, to privatise the government.

In scale, the disaster capitalism complex is on a par with the "emerging market" and IT booms of the 90s. It is dominated by US firms, but is global, with British companies bringing their experience in security cameras, Israeli firms their expertise in building hi-tech fences and walls. Combined with soaring insurance industry profits as well as super profits for the oil industry, the disaster economy may well have saved the world market from the full-blown recession it was facing on the eve of 9/11.

In the torrent of words written in eulogy to Milton Friedman, the role of shocks and crises to advance his world view received barely a mention. Instead, the economist's passing, in November 2006, provided an occasion for a retelling of the official story of how his brand of radical capitalism became government orthodoxy in almost every corner of the globe. It is a fairytale history, scrubbed clean of the violence so intimately entwined with this crusade.

It is time for this to change. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a powerful reckoning with the crimes committed in the name of communism. But what of the crusade to liberate world markets?

The desire for godlike powers of creation is precisely why free-market ideologues are so drawn to crises and disasters. Non-apocalyptic reality is simply not hospitable to their ambitions. For 35 years, what has animated Friedman's counter-revolution is an attraction to a kind of freedom available only in times of cataclysmic change - when people, with their stubborn habits and insistent demands, are blasted out of the way. Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture - a flood, a war, a terrorist attack - can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world.

Torture: the other shock treatment

From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade. Chile's coup featured three distinct forms of shock, a recipe that would re-emerge three decades later in Iraq. The shock of the coup prepared the ground for economic shock therapy; the shock of the torture chamber terrorized anyone thinking of standing in the way of the economic shocks.

But torture is more than a tool used to enforce unwanted policies on rebellious peoples; it is also a metaphor of the shock doctrine's underlying logic. Torture, or in intelligence parlance, "coercive interrogation", is a set of techniques developed by scientists and designed to put prisoners into a state of deep disorientation.

Declassified manuals explain how to break "resistant sources": create violent ruptures between prisoners and their ability to make sense of the world around them. First, the senses are starved (with hoods, earplugs, shackles), then the body is bombarded with overwhelming stimulation (strobe lights, blaring music, beatings). The goal of this "softening-up" stage is to provoke a kind of hurricane in the mind, and it is in that state of shock that most prisoners give their interrogators whatever they want.

The shock doctrine mimics this process precisely. The original disaster - the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown - puts the entire population into a state of collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the pounding winds serve to soften up whole societies. Like the terrorised prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect.

Magic By Misdirection

Why was Michael Jackson’s court case covered so closely? Because it’s as good a way as any to distract you from substantive issues. As some say, “Go back to sleep people. Your government is in control.” This essay explains precepts of magic in an attempt to explain how media affects our perception.

In today’s free-market economy, newspapers have become advertising delivery mechanisms and ethnic media profit through the divisions they perpetuate. Mass media is misdirecting the focus of civilization. By understanding how magic works, we may better understand media’s influence on our perception.

Magic is not a thing or a physical act, but a state of mind that approaches the sublime but is more aptly referred to as phantasmagorical. Magic occurs at the intersection of a performer and an audience. There is intentionality to the perception. A stone that looks like an eagle is not magic, regardless of whether or not it is carved to represent the physical traits of an eagle. A sculpture maybe a catalyst to an altered state of mind, but I am reticent to call a sculpture magical. Some panoramas feel almost magical to me, but real magic is dynamic and ephemeral. Magic is the process of engineering an experience where reality emerges as it cannot be, and yet the audience is compelled to set aside their disbelief and flow with the experience as long as it lasts.

Creating an illusion entails tweaking our visual prejudices. We drop a coin, and it falls. We know this to be true; we have seen the force of gravity pull objects to Earth since before we had words to articulate the phenomena. What most non-perceptual psychologists DON’T recognize is the extent that our mind projects our expectations, our visual prejudices, onto our sight.

The Theater of The Mind

If a magician creates the physical gesture of dropping a coin from one hand to another, yet palms the coin so it doesn’t actually fall into the second hand, most minds will see the coin fall. The term for this sight projection is sight retention. A normal mind will literally “see” the coin fall. This specific visual hallucination is called a projection, our mind projects its expectation of reality onto our sight. The magician makes note of the triggers that cause these visual breaks from reality and assembles a presentation that often includes a series of these triggers, often strung together through a narrative known as patter. A person who engineers a magical frame of mind, phantasmagoria, for an audience may or may not be a performer on a stage. If the person who engineered a magical experience is not the actor presenting the feats, they are the puppet-master of the experience, where the magician is a marionette, performing in the puppet-master’s phantasmagorical production. Clock makers of the 17th Century created automatons, mechanical men whose gears and riggings could be activated to perform the tricks of magicians. These clock makers were not magicians; they were the puppet-masters of their metal figurines that could perform magic, even in the absence of their creators.

Managing Perceptions

Creating magic requires the recognition of stages within stages, seeing micro-stages within macro-stages. The macro-stage is the physical place the audience encounters the magic. A magician may perform on a traditional proscenium stage, in a parlor, at a dinner table or on a street corner—whatever location the magician interacts with their audience becomes the macro-stage. The micro-stages emerge as the audience shifts their attention. David Copperfield regularly performs coin tricks in front of audiences in excess of 2,000. How? He manages the micro-stages, the focus of his audience. By focusing his own attention, with all his body, on a silver dollar, he can command the attention of 2,000 sets of eyes, whose minds enjoy the representation of a miracle as he makes the coin vanish. Copperfield directs the focus of his audience. Site retention won’t work unless the audience’s mind is engaged. The mind must not only see the cues that trigger the mental projections, but the mind must be so immersed in its focus that the mind accepts the magician’s cues as real. The creation of these cues, the intentional use of projection triggers, is the keystone to invoking illusion.

Misdirection is the magician’s ability to secretly do one thing by directing the audience’s attention on something else. Direction is the root of misdirection. Managing the micro-stages of an audiences focus is at the heart of misdirection—movement hides movement. When the puppet-master doesn’t want the audience to see the magician load the dove in a scarf, he choreographs the magician-puppet to “steal” the dove-load during another movement. Sound impossible? Harry Blackstone used to have an elephant walked on stage, up-stage-left, while he commanded attention down-stage-right. When Blackstone gestured up-stage-left, the audience was amazed to suddenly see an elephant.Why Call Mass Media Magic?

When I use the word magic, I’m not speaking about supernatural powers. In this manifesto, magic is the act of facilitating a phantasmagorical experience, the acceptance of a world where natural laws do not apply, presented as though the magical act is a “normal” reality. There is a difference between being fooled and being entertained by a magician. Being fooled simply leaves the audience feeling duped, but a magician engages the audience and makes it okay for the audience members to live inside the illusion. The role of the magician is to enchant the audience, to facilitate their willing suspension of disbelief, allowing the audience to flow with the magical presentation, and blinding them from seeing the mechanics of how things are really working. If the role of the magician is to enchant the audience, to facilitate their willing suspension of disbelief, then I hold that mass media is the greatest magician of all time. Mass media focuses our attention on the sensational, blinding our perception from what supports the reported phenomena. Marketing drives mass media. The primary role of media is to market reality, to present our reality as normal.

World media is a magic show.