I had posted this on GOS earlier today. It didn’t get much traction. Pearls before swine, I’m afraid. So I’m reposting a more extensive and franker version here. Hope you guys like it.

Short version:

We can fight the messages of Money Talking without attacking the messengers.

Money Talks. Money has bought and controls our media, and is talking to us constantly, whether we are listening or not. Money Talking has learned the lesson of Goebbels:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it…”

It finds a thousand ways to be heard. Money Talking never gets tired, it never gets hoarse. Money shouts. It wants to drown out all other voices. It is hard to follow the thread of honest discussion against the constant din of Money Talking.

To quote jfromga in the comments over there (You here too, j?):

…When one understands the motives, one knows where to go to look for facts that would reveal the bias and purpose behind those motives and even reveal the frauds created with ‘facts’ that have been cherry picked.
Propaganda works well beyond facts, by creating ‘fact’ out of fiction. The OP spoke to the purpose of the big lie. One simple example, out of today’s headlines, the oil companies had scientific evidence, believable evidence, that the current course of climate change would happen close to 40 years ago. They buried and deliberately set out on a disinformation campaign so effective in the US that many people still believe climate change isn’t real, isn’t related to human activities and there is nothing that can be done about it. The people who believe the disinformation campaign will cite facts from reports bought and paid for by fossil fuel companies to obfuscate the facts. The same thing with the tobacco industry. They had scientific evidence for decades that their product was addictive and harmful and they hid it and paid for disinformation ‘factual’ studies that denied the truth.
Facts can be bought if you pay enough money. And in today’s world a tiny handful of people control the money and the facts…

It takes a sustained effort to continue to hear the voice of money talking behind all the information we consume. We don’t always succeed. We can’t help unconsciously internalizing the accepted wisdom that Money wants us to believe to be the truth.

For us who call ourselves progressives, this phenomenon is easy to see on the right: We are very conscious of how Fox News, the Koch Brothers etc. brainwash people with ideas we on the left clearly perceive as false. We have antibodies against theocracy, climate change denial, homophobia, the war on women, and other Right ideas.

But Money has messages tailored for us, my friends. Money also feeds us ideas meant to keep our system of inequality intact, to accept the world order. Money talks to us, and it sounds so very reasonable. All of us carry around unexamined viewpoints that Money Talking has told us are true.

Let me give a personal example. I was listening to a news broadcast about the political crisis in Brazil on NPR. I heard about Dilma Roussef’s corruption with having public funds used to remodel her house and her attempt to elevate her predecessor to a ministerial position to shield him from prosecution. Brazil’s congress was moving against a corrupt prime minister. For a few days I accepted this at face value, thinking, oh that’s nice, democracy in action in Brazil. Yay democracy. Boo, corruption.
Then I did some more reading. It turned out that all the politicians wanting to impeach Roussef were at least as corrupt, and that Lula’s and Roussef’s administrations were left-leaning and not making Brazil’s elites or Wall Street happy. Now it made more sense to me.

But for those few days, I had bought unquestioningly into the narrative I had heard on NPR. I would have defended it in discussion. Why shouldn’t I? I don’t know much about Brazil, it was NPR after all and not Fox, and the narrative of democracy vs. corruption was familiar and comforting.
This happens to us all the time. There’s no shame in it. We tend to believe what we hear because it would be too fatiguing to always question everything.

It can go further. We may, through confirmation bias or our own allegiances, passionately believe repeated lies. We may be moved to disseminate these lies as part of our search for affirmation and self-worth. We may be moved to spend time online on this site and elsewhere correcting everyone we consider to be “wrong on the internet” peddling what Money Talking has planted in our brains.
On a deeper level it does not matter one iota whether someone repeating what the 1% want us all to think is a paid shill or not. What matters is whether someone is repeating the propaganda that the rich and powerful have crafted for the little people’s consumption.

Kos is sensitive to people accusing others of being shills on his site. Fine. It strikes a nerve with him. I’m guessing he is sensitive because there is truth to it. What I will say here, and didn’t say there is that is has been as clear as day to many of us that GOS was being flooded with paid operatives intent on shutting down any progressive conversation. Kos’ call for Bernie to drop out and his 3/15 edicts certainly created the impression that he wanted to steer both the dialog and the primary to HRH. We kept being told that it was verboten to call (or as of today, even imply that) someone was a paid shill and that we should take concerns to admin. However when I pressed elfling on this, she admitted that they were never going to ask a suspected shill to prove who they were IRL. How the hell else would you prove or disprove someone was a paid operative for chrissakes! I’m sorry, but it looks like there was a round file placed under that particular complaint box. At best GOS admin didn’t have the time to pursue it (never mind how much damage these characters were doing to to the site), perhaps they were allowed to be there even though Kos knew what they were up to, and at worst Kos was encouraging them to post.

Even if all this is true, calling people out as shills in a discussion isn’t the best strategy. We have better ones.
Rather than say, “You’re a paid shill for…(fiil in the blank), we can call out the corporate-promoted lies by saying something like, “You’re saying what (fill in the blank interest) wants us to believe.”

Here is an example: The nuclear power industry would like us to believe that building new nuclear plants is essential to combating global warming. Suppose user “CesiumIsYummy” comes online and quotes all sorts of “definitive studies” –paid for by nuclear industry groups—trying to show that a carbon-free electrical grid is impossible without more new nuclear power plants. Suppose I happen to passionately believe this is wrong-headed. I can respond by saying “You are saying the same thing as nuclear energy lobby is saying”. I don’t have to say, “The nuclear energy industry must have paid you to say that.” CesiumIsYummy may well be defending nuclear power because she believes in it, or her favorite uncle was a nuclear engineer.

We can fight the messages of Money Talking without attacking the messengers.
As an aside, I am concerned about this wonderful haven also being flooded with trolls and shills if it becomes as large and successful as we would like it to be. I have some thoughts about this and will share them in another diary.
Peace!