From HUSTLER Magazine

The Propaganda Machine

Now that Democrats control the House and members of the Democratic Socialist camp have gained a prominent voice in Congress, the conservative oligarchs who control America are terrified, launching an all-out preemptive assault on initiatives like the Green New Deal. If you watch Fox News, it’s almost impossible to get through a show without one of their right-wing talking heads fearmongering that any attempt to rectify the gross economic inequality in America (the worst since the Great Depression) will result in Venezuela-like chaos and misery. They insist that any attempt to wean ourselves from fossil fuels and develop renewable energy sources will ruin the country.

Mention Medicare for All, and the wing nut propagandists studiously avoid mentioning nations like France, Sweden and Canada, with healthcare systems far more efficient, less costly and more equitable than our own. In fact, almost every advanced industrial nation has either a single-payer system or a mix of private plans with a public option. But we’re told that those systems “won’t work.” Medicare for All would eliminate parasitic health insurance companies, which suck enormous profits from our system. So those health insurance companies are mobilizing to fight tooth and nail against all reform with a blitz of ads and op-eds.

But they are not to be outdone by the oil barons, who are horrified a Green New Deal could catalyze the use of renewable energy sources and deplete their profit margins. The Consumer Energy Alliance and Clear Energy Alliance are two fronts for the fossil fuel dinosaurs, the latter broadcasting ridiculous, cartoonish scare ads against the Green New Deal on YouTube.

Energy In Depth is another astroturf group defending the fracking industry. It has a Facebook page, a Twitter feed and a YouTube channel. Funded by the Independent Petroleum Association of America and other oil industry organizations, it hires local bloggers and political organizers to combat efforts to regulate fracking and fight all attempts to expose the chemicals being used to pollute our groundwater.

Many of these PR jokers masquerade as grassroots groups, but they’re really well-financed propaganda arms of industry. With a bold new Congress in power and the voices of long disadvantaged peoples now being heard in the nation’s capital, we can expect a lot more of this manipulative agitprop from the vested interests driving our country and the whole planet toward a cliff. They do not give a rat’s ass how many Americans will be poisoned by fracking chemicals; killed by storms, heat waves and wildfires due to runaway climate change; or bankrupted by our scandalously backward healthcare system. They are naked liars motivated by insatiable, irresponsible greed.

So tune up your bullshit detectors, folks, because it’s going to be flying thick and fast in the coming years. Don’t be fooled!