wrote in message
ups.com...
Cato, Rand, Booze Allen Hamilton and a number of other think/research
tanks solely exist to provide the politicians with material to
reference in their speeches that happens to correlate with their
pre-orchestrated platforms. Just who do you believe is paying salaries
of these researchers.

Well, that varies quite a lot. It's easy to find out who funds most of them,
because, even if they don't report it publicly, they all have enough enemies
with the means and the motivation to find out, and *they* report it.

Richard Scaife is big on Heritage Foundation, for example, mostly through
three "charitable" funds he and his wife set up.

As for Cato, the biggies are the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, the
Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, the Barre Seid Foundation, the Sarah
Scaife Foundation (Richard's wife), and the Lynde and Harry Bradley
Foundation, Inc. These are all well-known, right-wing provocateurs. Anything
with Scaife's sticky fingers attached to it, from the Washington Times to
the faux book (later renounced by its author) _The Real Anita Hill_, is a
guarenteed propaganda operation.

Still, even the right-wing..ah, captains of industry, need love. If they
need it bad, they buy it.


Business does the same thing to dazzle their shareholders and
customers, except for the fact that the research firms that they engage
deal in a different field than politics. For example, The Gartner
Group and D.H. Brown firms supply the computer industry with reports
justifying and/or praising any of the product that a particular
computer manufacturer wishes to promote (and who happens to be funding
the research). Similarly, J.D. Power supplies research reports on
'customer satisfaction' whose results alway support the customer
satisfaction superiority of the company funding them at that moment.

I dunno about J.D. Power. I'd have to see the evidence on that one.

There's a mixture out there, Harry. Some research firms are known for
playing it straight. The way that clients use them is to have them produce
private studies. I've bought some of those myself, for clients. If they like
the results, they make them public. But the research itself, from many of
them, is straight as an arrow.

Some companies want the truth. What they do with it is their own business.
If they want the truth, they go to a research firm that is known for
sticking absolutely to the truth.

I worked in the field for one year, and then couldn't stand it. The
firm was heavily funded by IBM, and when I once wrote a research report
praising the Silicon Graphics products over those of IBM on the basis
of price/performance, I found myself unemployed so I returned to the
world of real engineering work.

Getting back to Cato, their researchers and writers know who pays their
salary, and report accordingly. Having worked in a similar, but Wall
Street related environment, the analysts at Cato are not anxious to
halve their salaries and go back to working as the price of honestly
expressing what they actually believe, and I can't blame them for this.

That's true, and the political think-tanks now serve a further role, to keep
out-of-office politicos gainfully employed and producing propaganda until
they may get back into office. Bush's team contains many people who were in
that condition during the Clinton years. Among the gifts they gave the world
was the New American Century program: preventive wars, imposition of the
American poltical system...the whole works.


I personally could not live with the hypocrisy of writing and promoting
ideas/products that I knew not to be true, or that I believed not to be
true, just for money.. Still, many people can.

Working in advertising and publicity will test anyone on that point. The
ideal, if you're going to be working at marketing something with your
writing, is to be an advocate, like a lawyer, but never to let yourself get
caught up in telling lies. Having worked in that biz for over 12 years at
different times I've seen the gamut of ethics displayed. Some people play it
straight and change agencies or clients if they have to. They tend to be the
better ones, and they do better, in general, than the whores.

--
Ed Huntress