Netpardon,The Father of Spin and Palm Oil
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Edited by: Greg Crowley MO, Marc Brandon, San Diego, Matt Tortoso, Rick Lee Cycling Coach for: palmoiltruthfoundation
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Word Count Netpardon: Greg Crowley MO, 1968
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 Time: 1:55 AM
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Sponsors: Spy Software, Stem Cell Skin Care Bruce Allen Scheller,Israel Grossman, Rick Lee Cycling Coach. Netpardon. Scott T Hornung Wilmington Family Dental. Greg Crowley MO.
Widely known as "The Father of Spin" Edward Bernays was the nephew of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. From him Bernays learned all there was to know about the human subconscious. The nephew Edward became a master of spin and a spinner of lies.
In 1954, an American company called United Fruit went bananas over the antics of a democratically elected government in Guatemala that had taken some of its vast land to distribute to peasant farmers. United Fruit were a large banana growing American company, known in Latin America as "el pulpo" (the octopus) for its wide reaching tentacles. Bernays was called in to make the world safe for American capitalism, a mission that he set to do with vigour.
The Father of Spin, an appropriately named biography of Bernays written by Larry Tye sheds new and important light on the extent to which the Bernays' propaganda campaign for the United Fruit Company (today's United Brands) led directly to the CIA's overthrow of the elected government of Guatemala.
The term "banana republic" actually originated in reference to United Fruit's domination of corrupt governments in Guatemala and other Central American countries. The company brutally exploited virtual slave labor in order to produce cheap bananas for the lucrative U.S. market.
When a mildly reformist Guatemala government attempted to reign in the company's power, Bernays whipped up media and political sentiment against it in the commie-crazed 1950s.
"Articles began appearing in the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, Time, Newsweek, the New Leader, and other publications all discussing the growing influence of Guatemala's Communists," Tye writes. "The fact that liberal journals like the Nation were also coming around was especially satisfying to Bernays, who believed that winning the liberals over was essential. . . . At the same time, plans were under way to mail to American Legion posts and auxiliaries 300,000 copies of a brochure entitled 'Communism in Guatemala--22 Facts.'"
His efforts led directly to a brutal military coup. Tye writes that Bernays "remained a key source of information for the press, especially the liberal press, right through the takeover. In fact, as the invasion was commencing on June 18, his personal papers indicate he was giving the 'first news anyone received on the situation' to the Associate Press, United Press, the International News Service, and the New York Times, with contacts intensifying over the next several days."
Bernays understood the value of public relations, and indeed, he was hailed as its father; and although he's been dead for fifteen years now, he is still very much alive today. He sent in American journalists to visit Guatemala to understand the situation, and there, to meet the journalists were "demonstrations" and incidents that became the stuff of the journalists' copy. The country was under Communist threat, they wrote home.
Bernays staged demonstrations, wooed the press (he believed that the liberal media had to be won over -- sounds familiar?), and supplied first hand information to news agencies. It also helped, incidentally, that the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Alan, head of the CIA, were both former legal advisers to United Fruit. So airplanes were soon despatched to Guatemala to bomb its capital.
The result, tragically, has meant decades of tyranny under a Guatemalan government whose brutality rivaled the Nazis as it condemned hundreds of thousands of people (mostly members of the country's impoverished Maya Indian majority) to dislocation, torture and death.
Bernays relished and apparently never regretted his work for United Fruit, for which he was reportedly paid $100,000 a year, a huge fee in the early 1950s.
The sad fruit of propaganda is that even its perpetrators will soon believe in their own lies. And then there's its toll on the people. CIA operatives later recounted the ease of their intrusion into the lives of "these little brown people", and Iraq is now a seething mess, and there's more incidents of cancer, leukaemia, infant mortality and sexual mutations than happened in Horoshima and Nagasaki, according to a study done there in January and February 2010 (go here for a pdf copy: http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/7/7/ 2828/pdf).
If the above sounds familiar, the current bogus campaigns against palm oil by green groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth (FOE) are almost identical ploy by ploy replays of Bernay's disturbing and cynical demonization of a mildly reformist government (except in the case of palm oil read "mildly reformist commodity") whilst masking the true "motives of his clients, as part of a deliberate strategy aimed at keeping the public unconscious of the forces that were working to mold their minds."
Characteristically (and again paradoxically), Bernays was remarkably candid about his manipulative intent. "If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it," he argued in Propaganda, one of his first books. In a later book, he coined the term "engineering of consent" to describe his technique for controlling the masses.
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society," Bernays argued. "Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. . . . 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."
The people at Greenpeace and FOE are either ardent disciples of Bernays or are quick learners of the unconscionable propaganda techniques taken out of Bernay's playbook on how to influence policy through the dark art of deception and manipulating the minds of the masses!
Palm oil is no stranger to the sort of ridiculous and barefaced lies circulated by anti-palm oil lobbies on the health aspects of its consumption and its supposed deleterious effects on the environment, lies and propaganda laced tirades that would have made Bernays proud.
Using proxies such as the infamous Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) and diverse organizations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth (FOE) and, in recent times, even zoos such as the Melbourne Zoo and the Auckland Zoo ( who, of all people conducted a campaign to protect one of their exhibits, the orang utan from the "relentless expansion of palm oil plantations"), the lobbies have invested in various ploys to stop the growth of palm oil in its tracks.
First CSPI launched a campaign in the mid eighties alleging that palm oil was largely saturated fat and thus unhealthy. When tons of scientific studies were conducted and the results published in peer reviewed journals showing that a palm oil rich diet was, in fact heart friendly as it lowered serum cholesterol and increased HDL (good) cholesterol (see: "The Truth About Palm Oil"
http://www.palmoiltruthfoundation.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=329&Itemid=811), CSPI beat a hasty retreat and bided their time whilst planning a new mode of attack against palm oil.
Almost 2 decades later, CSPI thought out a new stratagem.
This time, in a report called "Cruel Oil: How Palm Oil Harms Health, Rainforest and Wildlife", CSPI sought to paint a picture of utter devastation of pristine rainforest by the palm oil industry and hence causing massive deforestation and threatening the extinction of the orang utan.
Before long, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth joined the bandwagon issuing "reports" with such emotive tiles as "Cooking the Climate", "The Oil for Ape Scandal" and "Rainforest in your Shopping".
Both outfits organized loud and theatrical demonstrations often dressed in orang utan suits.
They were quickly joined by a disparate group of "environmental" organizations with the inevitable alphabet soup abbreviations such as RAN (The Rainforest Action Group) and the POA (Palm Oil Action Group) together with others carrying such exotic names as "Treehugger", Mongabay, etc.
The trouble with the anti-palm oil campaigns, and this is their Achilles heel, is that they totally ignore the fact (or they're ignorant of the fact) that palm oil is an inherently sustainable crop with the highest productivity and thus most efficient land use factor amongst all edible oilseeds. With a yield of close to ten times the yield of other oilseed crops, palm oil requires ten times less land to produce the same unit of edible oil as its nearest competitor.
This explains why, Malaysia, which had been the world's largest producer of palm oil for over a century still has an enviable forest cover of more than 55%, which is one of the highest forest cover prevailing in the world today.
Further, palm oil cultivation takes up less than 1% of the total world agricultural area, with Malaysian palm oil plantations occupying less than 0.5% of it. How can it then be credible to claim that palm oil is causing "massive deforestation" and is responsible for 20% of global carbon emission? However, the green groups have never shown than they were ever overly concerned with the veracity of their "facts"and "reports".
If conservation is truly a concern, these green NGOs should propose that palm oil be cultivated in place of the current oilseed crops such as soy, corn, sunflower and rapeseed (weather permitting) in view of its superior efficient land use!
It is obvious that if palm oil cultivation is curtailed or taken away altogether from the trade equation, the world would be scrambling for more oil which , in turn, would see ten times more land being opened up for other oilseed cultivation to fill the gap left by palm oil.
In those circumstances, perhaps the CSPI, Greenpeace and FOE's claims of massive deforestation may then have a modicum of credibility and become a stark reality!
The Palm Oil Truth Foundation is compelled to ask: Could the extreme productivity of palm oil be the real reason for the irrational and concerted attacks launched against the commodity by the likes of CSPI, Greenpeace and FOE? Could Greenpeace and FOE be paid agents for competing oilseed lobbies to launch their senseless anti-palm oil campaigns to ensure that palm does not continue to make inroads into the traditional oilseed markets in the Northern Hemisphere?
Fredrik Erixon, the Director and Chief Executive of ECIPE seems to think so. In a well researched paper presented in Kuala Lumpur on 4th August 2010, Erikson pointed out that a complaint can be filed in the WTO against the EU for violating WTO rules in issuing its Renewal Energy Directive which deliberately set out to discriminate against palm oil in an effort to protect its uncompetitive biofuel producers. According to Erixon, the process, the directive itself and the policy behind it are "revealing structures" that reveals the EU's real intentions behind the directive. Says Erixon: "The directive itself appears to be a goss violation of Gatt Articles I, III and XI."(go here for a pdf copy of EU_Green_Protectionism_Biofuels_Fredrik_Erixon.pdf)
Evidence has also emerged in recent months that Friends of the Earth Europe has been receiving funding from the EU for up to 75% of their annual budget and curiously the level of anti-palm oil propaganda emanating from FOE increased concomitantly with the rise in the EU funding for FOEE. THE END.
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About the Author
Rick Lee Cycling Coach. Scott T Hornung Wilmington Family Dental. Bruce Allen Scheller,Israel Grossman. Netpardon. Greg Crowley MO. Edited for:Palm Oil Truth Foundation is an international non-governmental and not-for-profit organisation, without strings to the world of commerce and power. We are a people organisation, organised for the people and founded upon the principles of integrity and responsibility as a global citizen with the sole purpose of representing TRUTH to the global community about health, environmental and economic benefits of palm oil.
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