Margaret Thatcher transformed British political life forever. So did Ronald Reagan in the United States. Now Canada has experienced a similar, dramatic shift to a new kind of politics, which author Donald Gutstein terms Harperism.
To welcome in the 2012 U.S. election year, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum gave a New Year’s Eve speech in Ottumwa, Iowa, in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. By rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline, Santorum warned, U.S. President Barack Obama was “pandering to radical environmentalists who don’t want energy production, who don’t want us …
On Sept. 1, 2010, the term “ethical oil” didn’t exist except as the title of a soon-to-be-released book by conservative political activist Ezra Levant. Four months later, ethical oil was Harper government policy, or at least an official government talking point. On January 5, his first day on the job, newly-minted environment minister Peter Kent …
Pretend to speak for poor Africans, lie about true causes of disease. That’s how you get the news media to love a lethal pesticide. [Editor’s note: This article is excerpted from Not A Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy, by Donald Gutstein, Key Porter (2009).] News is not propaganda, but the success of propaganda …