NYT: Editorial Observer - The Story Behind a New York Billboard...

[mcscajun]

...and the Interests It Serves

July 24, 2005
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Ever since May, a small black-and-white billboard has looked south into Times Square from the top of a building on Broadway. It says simply: "PETA Kills Animals.com." You would think that the visual chaos of Times Square would hide a modest black-and-white sign. But if anything, the colliding planes of color in the foreground - the pulsating staircase of signage - make this reticent billboard all the more visible.

(snip)

It turns out that this is one of a series of Web sites sponsored by the Center for Consumer Freedom, which describes itself as "a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the full range of choices that American consumers currently enjoy." We live in an age of organizations with anodyne names that conceal their real agenda, and the Center for Consumer Freedom is one of them. We're all consumers, and what could be better than freedom? But C.C.F. was founded by a Washington lobbyist named Richard Berman and is financed, according to at least one watchdog group, by many of the same meat, fast-food, restaurant and beverage companies that have hired him as a lobbyist. Seed money came from Philip Morris.

(snip)

In fact, the language of the Center for Consumer Freedom is as Orwellian as it is possible to get. Its basic linguistic strategy could have been taken directly from George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," still the most important single essay on how to lie without seeming to. It would hardly work for C.C.F. simply to tell the truth - to say to consumers, on behalf of the food and beverage industries, "Activists and watchdog groups are trying to stop us from selling you anything we want to sell you." Much better to say, "These groups are trying to prevent you from buying anything you want to buy." Then it becomes a matter of sustaining freedom, protecting individual rights and keeping the prairie of consumer choices unfenced.

The blurring of the distinction between corporate interests and the individual and collective rights of humans is one of the central tropes of our time and the source of much purposeful confusion, of the kind that the Center for Consumer Freedom exploits. It may have its root, philosophically, in the legal fiction that a corporation is a person. But it is used again and again to hide from people exactly how their interests are being abused. It also keeps people from seeing the delicate balance that must be struck between their individual rights and the rights of the community at large. When you hear someone howling about freedom, it is worth asking whose freedom he means.


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/opinion/24sun3.html

Best Universally Applicable Quote of the Day Award

goes to:

"When you hear someone howling about freedom, it is worth asking whose freedom he means."

[starroute]

1. There are a lot of groups like that out there

Many of them are listed at http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/listorganizations.php because their anti-environmentalism brings in the money from Exxon. Others are supported by the tobacco industry. And they're not just in the US -- these free enterprise extremists show up in Europe and elsewhere too.

This is largely a stealth operation so far -- we're all too preoccupied with the Bushies and with the religious right to notice them much. But they're going to be increasingly important over the next 5-10 years, so it wouldn't hurt to start being aware of them might now.

[mcscajun]

2. It certainly wouldn't...I've only been aware of this particular group

for the last year or so. They're becoming more and more overt in their actions now, and getting some serious press notice.