Fiddling (With Its P.R. Campaign) While Rome Burns → Washingtons Blog
Fiddling (With Its P.R. Campaign) While Rome Burns - Washingtons Blog

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Fiddling (With Its P.R. Campaign) While Rome Burns

http://i.imgur.com/b94YI.jpg

Instead of putting out the fire, or even changing things so that they are less likely to catch fire in the future, the Obama administration (like the Bush administration before it) is just fiddling with it's P.R. campaign.

With everything from the financial crisis to the Gulf oil spill, the government didn't actually help so much as launch a campaign to convince Americans that:

(1) Things aren't really that bad (when they were. See this, for example)

(2) The big companies that caused the mess are good guys who just made some wee little mistakes (when they committed fraud and criminal negligence. See this)

(3) Big changes have been made (when meaningless changes were made - primarily written by the big companies themselves - and loopholes built in so that the companies don't really have to comply with them anyway. See this)

and

(4) The government (and the above-described companies) care and have been doing a lot for the little guy (when the little guy continues to get gouged and shafted. See this, for example)

If you run down the list of programs implemented by the government in response to the financial crisis and the oil spill, you will see the same thing over and over.

And see this and this.

2 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Call me cynical, but this is pretty worrisome, though not unexpected:

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703396604576088272112103698.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsTop

    And thank you for your great blogsite, GW; I visit daily, and link to you in my diaries often.

    wendy davis

    ReplyDelete

→ Thank you for contributing to the conversation by commenting. We try to read all of the comments (but don't always have the time).

→ If you write a long comment, please use paragraph breaks. Otherwise, no one will read it. Many people still won't read it, so shorter is usually better (but it's your choice).

→ The following types of comments will be deleted if we happen to see them:

-- Comments that criticize any class of people as a whole, especially when based on an attribute they don't have control over

-- Comments that explicitly call for violence

→ Because we do not read all of the comments, I am not responsible for any unlawful or distasteful comments.