Must Read: Rigging The Marketplace Of Ideas

[malaise]

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/05/30/rigging_the_marketplace_of_ideas.php
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What other kind of stories did NAM push? The argument, as the chairman of their executive committee put it, that faith in government's role in prosperity was "childlike." As he put it in 1942, "It is not government that has wrought the miracle that is being accomplished today in the production of war materials but the initiative, ingenuity and organizing genius of private enterprise." As anyone who knows anything about World War II defense production knows, this notion is a childlike fairy tale in itself; America outproduced its enemies by a factor of three to one, a process for which government-business cooperation was responsible from start to finish. Good thing NAM had a lot of money with which to push it. It was a lie that couldn't have survived unless it was bought and paid for.

Harmless? Not if you consider the John Birch Society harmless. Several NAM past presidents were among the founders. My favorite is Milwaukee foundry-owner Bill Grede, whose name was pronounced like the word Merriam-Webster defines as "having or showing a selfish desire for wealth and possessions." So profoundly had their madness infested the organization, historian Jonathan Soffer has discovered, the board resolved it would "not knowingly be associated with any organization that questions the loyalty and integrity of President Eisenhower." That was one of the John Birch Society's principles: that Eisenhower may have been a "conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy." Grede denounced this new "leftish trend" in the NAM board of directors represented by the anti-Birch resolution.

So there you have it: Mike Baroody's people. And a demonstration, our first, of a Big Con principle: there's no set of ideas so dangerous, inhumane, antidemocratic, or stupid that a big enough right-wing infusion of cash can't make look like it's sound.