كيف استهدفت الدعاية المؤسسية النقابات والصفقة الجديدة

By the 1920s, US banking dynasties and robber barons had spent decades steering markets, breaking strikes, and lobbying to weaken regulatory oversight. It was their behavior that triggered that 1929 crash and caused the Great

Depression. This manufactured crisis cost millions of Americans their jobs, but left the key players with more capital and their networks intact. US banking families got used to steering markets to suit themselves.

They used speculation, price fixing, and lobbying to corner whole sectors. The crash that tore through the economy was the result of years of reckless finance and monopoly power, and it gave them an opening to tighten control.

Roosevelt's New Deal, the emerging trade unions, and visible public anger was putting threaten to their profits. And so in 1934, they create the National Industrial Information Committee. The entire goal of this committee was to turn public

opinion against trade unions and regulation. The people who sat on this committee were a circle of corporate barons, and their entire day job was to figure out how to propagandize people so that they

could keep making lots and lots of money. This is Ernest T. Weir, and he was the chairman of the NIIC committee. Despite his Wikipedia entry, he was not a self-made champion of free markets.

He got rich on government contracts. He had a monopoly over steel production. He was a businessman who built his wealth inside a state-protected bubble while vocally opposing the New Deal and fighting workers at every turn.

His company, National Steel, was actually a merger, a consolidation of Great Lakes Steel, Weirton Steel, and M.A. Hannah subsidiaries. Despite Justice Department lawyers being very, very against this and warning of dangerous

consolidation in a key sector, it went ahead, and he got fat, stinking rich. His company benefited directly from tariffs on steel. He had priority railway access, and he got concessions on cheap power from the Ohio River.

That is not the open market. That is a government-built wealth shelter. His entire business model relied on keeping labor protections weak. He fought unions with intimidation and force while drawing from the public coffers and leveraging public policy that kept

his competitors out. He was a hard-lined operator inside a state-backed industrial oligopoly, and he chaired this NIIC board. That name is deliberately dull, National Industrial Information Committee.

But behind the boring name and the boring paperwork was an organized publicity campaign. The goal was to make unregulated business look like patriotism. They were backed by five thousand corporate subscribers, and their headquarters were in Rockefeller Plaza.

They had five departments: mass media, group relations, company participation, regional offices, and fundraising. Three hundred and fifty million dollars in today's money on print, film,

education, clergy outreach, and radio, and when it became available, TV also. The boring suits with their National Industrial Council spending a lot of money on ads. Their staff ran mass media, school outreach,

clergy relations, regional fieldwork, and fundraising all under one roof. Some stats: forty-five thousand billboards, estimated seen by sixty-five million people every day. Millions of cartoons, newspaper columns,

employee leaflets, films that have been shown to an estimated eighteen million viewers. School kits and teaching aids that teach that free enterprise and patriotism are one of the same. They would send business-friendly materials to the houses of

pastors and priests and ministers, and they would pay for radio slots and commentators. Everything tied words like prosperity and personal liberty to unregulated, ungovernable big business.

NIIC was an organized attempt by oligarchs to bend the democracy to their interests. They poured money into advertising. For years, they flooded the information ecosystem with

one narrative: "Your personal freedom requires you to submit to corporate rules." It was a corporate propaganda bureau designed to make filthy private power look like your national destiny.