Elite Social Class

Power Elite Series

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, 1956, Excerpts

People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves ‘naturally’ elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.

In so far as the elite flourish as a social class, it will select and form certain types of personality, and reject others. The kind of moral and psychological beings these men become is in large part determined by the values they experience and the institutional roles they are allowed and expected to play.

The power elite is composed of men of similar origin and education, the careers and their styles of life are similar. There are psychological and social bases for their unity, They are of similar social type leading to easy intermingling. Behind such psychological and social unity are the structure and the mechanics of those institutional hierarchies over which the political directorate, the corporate rich and the high military now preside.

Skull and Bones

Mitt Romney Secret Video Transcript, Excerpts

17 May 2012

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like.

You know that I'm as poor as a church mouse. [Audience laughter]

Vote Propaganda

Public Opinion Series

Propaganda by Edward Bernays, 1928, Excerpts

In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. But the American voters soon found that without organizations and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens of hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. We have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four. To avoid confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to its attention through propaganda of all kinds. There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea.

An entire party, a platform, an international policy is sold to the public, or is not sold, on the basis of the intangible element of personality. A charming candidate is the alchemist’s secret that can transmute a prosaic platform into the gold of votes. It is asked whether, in fact, the leader makes propaganda, or whether propaganda makes the leader. There is a widespread impression that a good press agent can puff up a nobody into a great man.

Those whose position or ability gives them power can no longer do what they want without the approval of the masses. They find in propaganda a tool which is increasingly powerful in gaining that approval. The use of propaganda, carefully adjusted to the mentality of the masses, is an essential adjunct of political life. Given our present political conditions under which every office seeker must cater to the vote of the masses, the only means to lead is through the expert use of propaganda.

Fresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation is out of control’

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/04/cambridge-analytica-data-leak-global-election-manipulation

04 Jan 2020

An explosive leak of tens of thousands of documents from the defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica is set to expose the inner workings of the company that collapsed after it had misappropriated 87 million Facebook profiles. More than 100,000 documents relating to work in 68 countries that will lay bare the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on “an industrial scale” are set to be released over the next months. It comes as Christopher Steele, the ex-head of MI6’s Russia desk and the intelligence expert behind the so-called “Steele dossier” into Trump’s relationship with Russia, said that while the company had closed down, the failure to properly punish bad actors meant that the prospects for manipulation of the US election this year were even worse.

Brittany Kaiser, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower, who starred in the Oscar-shortlisted Netflix documentary The Great Hack, said there were thousands and thousands more pages which showed a “breadth and depth of the work” that went “way beyond what people think they know about ‘the Cambridge Analytica scandal’”.

“The documents reveal a much clearer idea of what actually happened in the 2016 US presidential election, which has a huge bearing on what will happen in 2020. It’s the same people involved who we know are building on these same techniques,” she said. “There’s evidence of really quite disturbing experiments on American voters, manipulating them with fear-based messaging, targeting the most vulnerable, that seems to be continuing. This is an entire global industry that’s out of control.”

Cambridge Analytica: The data firm's global influence

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-43476762

22 March 2018

The company accused of using the personal data of millions of Facebook users to influence how people vote is not shy about its international portfolio. Political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica is facing questions over whether it used personal data to sway the outcome of the US 2016 presidential election and the UK Brexit referendum. But its reach extends well beyond the UK and US, with its website boasting of supporting more than 100 campaigns across five continents.

Thirty countries use 'armies of opinion shapers' to manipulate democracy

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/14/social-media-influence-election-countries-armies-of-opinion-shapers-manipulate-democracy-fake-news

14 Nov 2017

The governments of 30 countries around the globe are using armies of so called opinion shapers to meddle in elections, advance anti-democratic agendas and repress their citizens, a new report shows. “Governments are now using social media to suppress dissent and advance an anti-democratic agenda,” said Sanja Kelly, director of the Freedom on the Net project. “Not only is this manipulation difficult to detect, it is more difficult to combat than other types of censorship, such as website blocking, because it’s dispersed and because of the sheer number of people and bots deployed to do it.”