Is it time to Occupy Think Tanks?

Occupy Wall Street began as a movement targeting the crooks on Wall Street. For over a month now, people have taken to the streets and created camp sites in protest to illustrate the extent of their frustration.

What began in New York City as a movement deeply angered specifically at the financial district has now spread to 462 locations in the United States and the World and has broadened its scope to include every political and economic actor belonging to or serving the Corrupt Establishment and their unfair policies. The following is a list of issues/movements that have spawned from the Occupy Wall Street Protests (note - some of the names given below were invented here for convenience):

• Occupy Congress
  
• Occupy Corporate Media
  
• Occupy the FED
  
• Occupy Marines
  
• Occupy Homelessness
• We Are the 99 Percent
• Occupy Together
• Occupy Student Debt

So far there has been no serious outcry levied towards those that frame the corrupt political and economic policies in a a dishonest manner that misleads the general public into supporting the messages and strategies advocated by our government and media. Simply stated, think tanks study how to best present policies and issues to the public to gain the most support. They do so through the use of Focus Groups and Polling in which they present an issue/policy in many different ways by packaging different words and phrases that essentially mean the same thing, and then evaluating how people react to the different word and phrase packages. Finally, after having collected the data, the think tanks use the information to craft the message and strategy using the terms and phrases that are most likely to lead to the most support.

A simple example of how think tanks operate can be seen in the October 24, 2011 episode of the Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert invites the conservative messaging guru Frank Luntz to help him communicate his message that "Corporations are People" for an advertisement for his Colbert Super Pac. Luntz uses a focus group for the study, and defines them as having "25 people" that "react on a second to second basis, to visuals, to words, and it is the most precise methodology for understanding what communication works and what doesn't."

Luntz presents the focus group with the blunt form of Colbert's message and asks them to raise their hand if they agree with the statement "Corporations are People." After nobody raises their hands, he asks them what they think and receives responses such as "corporations pay-off our politicians" and the entities "are getting away with murder." The Study Group unequivocally rejects the message.

After conducting the study testing the reactions of people to different ways of phrasing the message, Luntz crafts the following phrases/slogans:

• Corporations are human
• Corporations are people, but the question is will they be American people or Chinese people
• People are corporations

As can be seen, the underlying policy remains the same, however, the message is crafted differently and in a way that is more agreeable by the general public. In the first new phrase, he simply changed the word people to human. In the second suggestion, he creates a distraction from the actual message by playing with people's patriotic sense and creating an imagined threat that if the corporations don't become American people, then America will lose them to the Chinese. All Luntz does in the third suggestion is reorder the phrase which makes the actual message's intent more vague. So even though people reject the message "Corporations are people," they can still be steered into supporting something they disagree with by merely repackaging the message in less blunt terms.


Two other practices that think tanks help our government get support for their corrupt and morally bankrupt policies is by priming the public into believing or supporting an issue before the politicians begin advocating it, and then once our politicians begin advocating it the members of the think tank serve as experts in the media on the issue. In the video provided, Bill Maher explains how it was think tanks that incubated the necessity of having to go to war with Iraq and how easy the war would be. Specifically, neoconservative think tanks, The Heritage Foundation and The Project for a New American Century strongly advocated for invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein for many years prior to the actual Buch administration taking office. For example, in 1998, The Project for a New American Century wrote President Bill Clinton a letter pushing him to start the war.

For at least four or five years, neoconservative think tanks were trying to nudge the US President into invading Iraq. At the same time, they were selling the myth of an imminent threat of attack on US soil by Saddam Hussein to the American public. The reason this is so vital is because of the influential role their constant drumming of an impeding war played on the American psyche. After repeatedly hearing what a threat Hussein was, Americans came to accept this as fact. So after 9/11 happened, it was easy for the think tanks, many of the members of The Heritage Foundation and The Project for a New American Century had now become a part of President Bush's cabinet, to fabricate a link between Al Qaeda, 9/11, and Saddam Hussein. Americans had been primed to accept this as fact by the think tanks due to their role as "expert" on the issue in the media, and after listening to all the "experts" on our news repeatedly warn us of Saddam's imminent threat it made that link seem perfectly logical. "Of course Saddam had something to do with 9/11. He has been threatening to attack us for all these years according to the 'experts' and media."

So basically what made it so easy for Americans to get behind an unnecessary and very costly war in Iraq was because they had been primed with false information, and because of the roll the same think tanks play as issue experts in our media.

The purpose and roll of think tanks is to study and develop policies to be later advocated by Politicians. They study the effect of using different words and phrases to say the same thing and then use the arrangement that was supported most by the public. They also serve to prime the public into believing or thinking a certain way on issues. And finally, the members of these think tanks play the roll of "expert" on certain issues in the media.

Essentially a think tank's purpose is to deceive the public into supporting their cause through the use of word choices or groupings arranged in a manner that is already known to be receptive by the public, and then flooding the public with constant arguments in favor of and that support their position on the issue. They play the role of intermediary between the public and the politicians, but play on the side of the Politicians while pretending to advocate policies that are good for all.

In layman's terms, they figure out how to craft a message to get the public to support terrible and often unethical policies. They are directly involved in and are actually the primary institutions responsible for getting the public to support horrible polices that go against the public good. It is because of this that the Occupy Wall Street movement needs to include a position against think tanks.

It is time to Occupy Think Tanks!!!

Occupy Think Tanks