The Manufacture of Consent

excerpted from the book

If You Love This Planet

by Helen Caldicott

WW Norton, 1992, paper

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THE MANUFACTURE OF CONSENT

The story of corporate propaganda explains, I believe, the strange and powerful patriotism and nationalism of the American people, their ready acceptance of propaganda and media manipulation, and the reality that American workers are not represented by a broad-based, powerful union movement. It also explains why the minimum wage in 1991 was only $4.75 per hour and why there are insufficient occupational health and safety standards, no uniform free health care system, and no national system of free higher education.

By comparison, the people of my native country [Australia] are quite blasé about nationalism or patriotism; we rarely fly flags. But the minimum wage is $10 per hour, and the union movement is strong. The workers have excellent occupational health and safety standards, and we have a free health care system and an almost free university system.

... the work done by the late Alex Carey, an AustraIian psychologist who lived in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. He was fascinated by the origins of American culture and made an extensive study of the history of propaganda and its political effects.

From the beginning of this century, large-scale professional propaganda campaigns have been waged by American business in order to shape public attitudes to accept and endorse the capitalist system, and this propaganda has changed the direction of American society.

The campaign began between 1880 and 1920 in Britain and the United States when the right to vote was extended from 15 percent of the adult population to 50 percent. This popular franchise immediately posed a threat to the rich minority, because as real democracy was instituted, people would naturally be voting for laws that supported their own health, education, and welfare. For the first time, their tax dollars would be used to support the majority of the population and not just the rich. In 1909, two leading scholars-Abbott Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard, and Graham Wallas, a leading British student of democracy-warned that the consequences of those new laws might be dangerous. They said, "Popular election may work fairly well as long as those questions are not raised which cause the holders of wealth and power to make full use of their resources. If they do so, there is much skill to be bought, and the art of using skill for the production of emotion and opinion has so advanced, that the whole condition of political contests would be changed for the future." In other words, if the power of the rich is challenged, they will use their money to intimidate and coerce people, to buy votes, and to produce a mandate for themselves.

By 1913, a congressional committee was established to investigate the activities of an organization called the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which represented many U.S. businesses and had already begun disseminating vast quantities of literature with the apparent intention of "controlling" public opinion in the fledgling democracy.

But public opinion moved away from and did not support corporate philosophy during the First World War, which ended in 1918, because the American people were encouraged to work together for the good of the country. Women took equal jobs side by side with men, and a mood of unselfishness and generosity prevailed in the country.

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PROPAGANDA TECHNIQUES

The techniques of propaganda were developed during the First World War when the American people were reluctant to become involved in the war because at that time they had no specific animosity toward the German people, although Germany certainly antagonized many Americans when it sank the British passenger liner Lusitania, with the loss of 128 American lives. President Wilson and others initiated a large and very effective campaign, under the supervision of the Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel-a Denver newsman-to convince the nation that Germany, whose people were called Huns, was the seat of all evil.

Propaganda is "the organized spreading of ideas, information or rumour designed to promote or damage an institution, movement or person," and the First World War marked the first time in history that propaganda had been successfully conducted on a large scale. Within six months, the American people were devoted to hating the Germans and to defeating them in the war effort. (Does it sound familiar? Replace Germany with Iraq.) Public opinion at that time had been so aroused that grotesque campaigns of witch-hunting and Americanism abounded.

One of the creators of propaganda during the war was Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, whom he closely resembled. (I met him in 1981 on a cold rainy Boston day, and he offered to help in my anti-nuclear war campaign. In the end, he was unable to contribute, but I learned some rather remarkable facts. As we sat drinking tea, looking over a narrow Cambridge street, he told me proudly that he was the person who taught women to smoke, by dressing them in beautiful clothes, placing a cigarette in their hand, and adorning Vogue magazine with their photographs. I felt ill.) Bernays headed the transfer of wartime propaganda skills to the business arena. When the war ended, Bernays wrote, business "realized that the great public could now be harnessed to their cause as it had been harnessed during the war to the national cause, and the same methods would do the job."

p152
After the war, propaganda was recognized as a tool corporate America could use to further its own agenda. In 1919, some 350,000 U.S. steelworkers went on strike and demanded shorter working hours and higher pay. (They were working eighty-four hours per week.) Because they had felt proud of their work during the war, they naturally expected that they would be well treated. But they were not. Instead, the U.S. Steel Corporation bought full-page advertisements in newspapers to encourage the strikers to return to work and to accuse the strike leaders of being Bolsheviks and Reds (at a time when the Russian revolution was in its infancy) and of being Huns. They also told the American people that the price of steel would soar if the workers prevailed. How could the U.S. corporations call proud American workers Communists and Germans when they had rallied so staunchly behind the war effort?

Unfortunately, a gullible public was largely persuaded by this propaganda offensive. The strike was defeated by the artificial engineering of public opinion, which had been successfully turned against the workers. By the time the strike ended, twenty workers had been killed, the hours and wages remained the same, and the price of steel went up. So the steel industry won.

Organized unions, I believe, are the best and only vehicles for the representation of the true interests of the working people of America-health care, occupational and safety standards, wages, working hours, and so on. They constitute the sole force that can take on, and to some extent control, corporate power. But since 1919, U.S. corporations have systematically worn down, demoralized, and destroyed organized labor by using the techniques of propaganda, Red-baiting, and intimidation.

PUBLIC OPINION

The successful propaganda campaign that ended the steel strike was then extended to American public opinion at large. Corporate America started the rumor that American workers and their leaders wanted to overthrow the federal government. It introduced this unsubstantiated notion through a public relations campaign in the media that led to an intense period of virulent anticommunism, in the years 1919-21. The witch-hunts and blatant Americanism also continued after the war, and people were actually jailed for practicing their right of free speech. As a result, many American citizens felt persecuted and alienated within their own country. This propaganda campaign proved to be very effective, and the American public was persuaded to support the rights of rich citizens and corporate power, while support for civil liberties, social reform, and the labor movement declined.

In the 1920s, Edward Bernays called this use of propaganda "the engineering of consent," and Harold Lasswell, for fifty years the leading American scholar of propaganda, said in 1939 that propaganda had become the principal method of social control. Lasswell remarked, "If the mass will be free of the chains of iron, it must accept the chains of silver. If it will not love, honour and obey, it must not expect to escape seduction." In other words, if ordinary people gain power in a democracy through the vote, then the rich will find another way to maintain control.

Everything went well for corporate America during the 1920s, but the country suffered during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Tens of millions of people lost their jobs, the banks collapsed, and people starved. Among the poor and indigent arose a great wave of hostility and animosity directed toward big business and corporate power, and people demanded a more equitable distribution of wealth.

In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president, and his administration launched the New Deal, which cared for and gave succour to millions of unemployed, depressed people. Mass employment schemes were initiated to rebuild cities, bridges, and roads, as were other public works. The common people of America loved and trusted FDR, many being mesmerized by his "fireside chats," broadcast on the radio. It became morally and politically acceptable to advocate government ownership, government programs, and socialism as such.

But business people never liked or accepted President Roosevelt, because they had temporarily lost the public's loyalty, so they set out once again to recapture the minds of the people.

How did they do this? Well, they spent millions of tax-deductible dollars on public "education" programs and on polls. They also taught "human relations" to their own workers in order to control their thinking.

In 1935, the by then renowned National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) organized another massive propaganda campaign. The president of the NAM told business leaders in 1935, "This is not a hit or miss program. "It is] skillfully integrated ... to ... blanket every media.... It pounds its message home."

In 1939, the La Follette committee of the U.S. Senate reported that the NAM had blanketed the country with propaganda that relied on secrecy and deception. The NAM employed radio speeches, news cartoons, editorials, advertising, motion pictures, and many other propaganda techniques that did not disclose its sponsorship. One business-sponsored agency distributed a steady supply of canned, ready-to-print editorials to twelve thousand local newspapers, and some 2.5 million column inches of this material were published.

POLLING

By the late 1930s, public opinion polling had been invented, and it turned out to be highly useful to business. It was employed, according to Alex Carey, as an "opinion sensitive radar beam," which continually assessed ideological drift in the population. The polling data were used by the industrial propaganda institutions to provide continual flow of data and feedback, so that they could define and redefine their probusiness messages to make them more effective. It was also used to evaluate public response to product marketing.

NATIONALISM

In 1945, the corporations invented a new method to sell their capitalistic philosophy, which they called "techniques for community ideas." They discovered that the American people were not very excited by the rather sterile concepts of capitalism or free enterprise but that they did exhibit a rather positive emotional response to the notion of "Americanism." From this new information, the corporations devised a formula that tied many fundamental values together:

free enterprise = freedom = democracy = family = Christianity = nationalism = God.

The equal and opposite formula they devised went something like this:

egalitarianism = equality = government interference = socialism = unions = communism = Satan

These two formulas became the backbone of corporate philosophy and profit-oriented activities and propaganda, and they have been used ever since with undiminished success.

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STRIKEBREAKING AND PUBLIC RELATIONS

In 1937, a steel strike erupted at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, when Bethlehem Steel refused to acknowledge the steel union. At that time, the corporations needed to gain control of a restive population, after the years of the Depression and the New Deal. So the local chamber of commerce joined with the NAM and Bethlehem Steel to orchestrate another propaganda campaign using the steel strike as the fulcrum. The National Citizens Committee was organized and launched by local businessmen; it engaged an advertising agency and a public relations council. The committee broadcast its antistrike messages of "Americanism" twice over a national network, and two full-page ads appeared in thirty newspapers in thirteen states. The campaign was once again successful.

At the end of the strike, James Rand, of the Remington Rand Corporation, proudly announced, "Two million businessmen had been looking for a formula like this, and business had hoped for, dreamed of and prayed for such an example as you have set.'' This antistrike tactic was called the Mohawk Valley formula, and since that time this scientific strikebreaking technique has been used in every major strike in the United States.

The Senate-based La Follette committee criticized the propaganda tactics of the NAM in the 1930s, building up to the 1940s, in the following way: "The leaders of the association resorted to 'education' as they had in 1919-21. They asked not what the weaknesses and abuses of the economic structure had been, and how they could be corrected, but instead paid millions to tell the public that nothing was wrong and that grave dangers lurked in the proposed remedies.''

But the NAM continued to use its propaganda campaigns in the fight against labor unions. The corporations fought the most important strikes in 1945-46 in the press and over the radio, not in the picket lines. In effect, business owners bypassed the workers and went over their heads to appeal to the public, using false and unfair statements.

Fundamentally, these corporate campaigns were designed to achieve three objectives: (1) to minimize wage rises and to maximize profits, (2) to oppose decent working hours, a minimum wage, occupational health and safety standards, and employee health coverage, and (3) to prevent government regulations from interfering with their activities.

Over the years this corporate philosophy prevailed, so the workers of today are almost totally unprotected, with the minimum wage set at only $4.75 per hour. By comparison, unions in Australia have always been very strong, and as a result Australian workers have a decent minimum wage of approximately $10 per hour and are protected with good health care systems and safe working conditions. By and large, the Australian public and businessmen are tolerant of strikes because they understand that civilized negotiations will always be conducted and everyone will eventually benefit. However, U.S. corporate propaganda is now starting to infiltrate Australia and to affect its union structure. It is imperative that Australians learn from the past mistakes of American society, before our relatively compassionate society is degraded and changed forever.

The propaganda barrage by U.S. corporations continued through the years 1946-50. During this time, the NAM distributed 18,640,270 pamphlets that vehemently pushed anticommunist, antisocialist, antiunion, and anti-New Deal sentiments versus free enterprise and capitalization. Some 41 percent of these pamphlets were sent to employees, 53 percent to high school and college students, and 6 percent (over one million) to community leaders, such as ministers and women's club leaders.

In 1946, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce distributed a million copies of a fifty-page article entitled "Communism in the United States." In 1947, a similar distribution occurred for a pamphlet entitled "Communists within the Government," which alleged that about four hundred Communists held important positions in the government.

The most effective propaganda weapon for both employees and college students was found to be a comic booklet. The National Association of Manufacturers News of February 1951 proudly proclaimed, "If all NAM produced pamphlets ordered for distribution to employees, students and community leaders in 1950 had been stacked one on top of the other, they would have reached nearly four miles into the sky-the height of sixteen Empire State Buildings, a record distribution of 7,839,039 copies."

The American Advertising Council, which was established fourteen days before the United States entered World War II to combat people's enthusiasm about the New Deal and their disaffection with the free-enterprise system, represents large corporations and advertising agencies. In 1947, it announced a twelvemonth, $100 million campaign, one of numerous related campaigns to "sell" the American economic system to the American people. Daniel Bell, a professor of sociology at Harvard, said in 1954, "The output is staggering. The Advertising Council alone in 1950 inspired 7 million lines of newspaper advertising stressing free enterprise, 400,000 car cards, 2,500,000,000 radio impressions.... By all odds, it adds up to the most intensive 'sales' campaign in the history of industry." The campaign was used to "rewin the loyalty of the worker which now goes to the union and to halt creeping socialism, with its high tax structure and quasiregulation of industry.''

Fortune magazine in September 1950 carried an editorial saying, "The Free Enterprise Campaign is shaping up as one of the most intensive 'sales' jobs in the history of the industry-in fact it is fast becoming an industry in itself"

This deluge of brainwashing paved the way to the shameful era of McCarthyism in 1950-54, when Senator Joseph McCarthy intimidated, hounded, discredited, shamed, and destroyed the lives of hundreds of his fellow American citizens, until finally one man, Joseph Welch, was brave enough to confront him in a Senate hearing and speak the truth. Soon thereafter McCarthy died. From 1950 to 1965, corporate power was again safe from the threat of a freethinking skeptical democracy.

In 1955, Fortune magazine estimated that there were five thousand U.S. companies supporting public relations departments, at an annual cost of about $400 million.

Do you see how the cold war was a logical spin-off from these successful initiatives to control domestic thinking? The somewhat contrived threats of Russia and communism, not innocuous by any means, of course, were used primarily to intimidate and silence the freethinking working people of America, but the deadly nuclear arms race was a result of this domestic manipulation.

DESTRUCTION OF PRICE CONTROL

The same tactics combining public relations with corporate political ideology were also used by big business to obtain uncontrolled price rises. The campaign I am about to describe was a prototype of techniques that continue to be used to "manage" democracy in the interests of American business.

After World War II, President Harry S. Truman was worried about rising prices because goods were in short supply. He decided to keep prices low by supporting and extending the life of the federal Office of Price Administration (OPA), which had been established during the war.

But business wanted prices to rise. Represented once again by the NAM, it therefore launched a massive campaign against the OPA by printing millions of leaflets that were stuffed into the shopping bags of housewives. It also published full-page ads that stated cleverly but falsely that price controls themselves were the cause of the goods shortage.

In 1946, the Opinion Research Council, monitoring the results, found that at the beginning of the propaganda campaign 81 percent of the American people favored OPA but that at the end only 26 percent supported a continuation of the OPA. Americans had been manipulated yet again to act against their own best interests.

A discouraged Truman said, "Right after the end of the war, big business in this country set out to destroy the laws that were protecting the consumer against exploitation. This drive was spearheaded by the NAM.'' In the effort to kill the OPA, the NAM spent $3 million, which in those days was a lot of money. As a direct result of this operation, consumer prices rose 15 percent and food prices 28 percent between June and December 1946. The people had again been exploited.

To add insult to injury, these price rises canceled the wage rises that labor had obtained from some of its more successful 1946 strikes; at the same time, real wages dropped from $32.50 per week to $30.00 per week, while yearly corporate profits reached their highest point in history, $12 trillion, 20 percent higher than those of the best war year.

It is interesting that since 1918 the Soviet government brainwashed its people by consistently lying to them, but its techniques were so clumsy that the people knew they were being brainwashed. By contrast, in the United States, corporations became expert manipulators, so most people have swallowed the corporate doctrine whole.

HUMAN RELATIONS - INDUSTRIAL PSYCHOLOGY

The corporations developed another nifty trick to convert their workers from "unionism" to "corporatism." It occurred to them that since most U.S. workers were captive audiences in their factories, if they appealed to them the right way, they could win their hearts and minds. Psychologists might be interested to know that the human relations movement was pioneered by corporate America for an ulterior motive. Human relations, a euphemistic phrase, was also called "employee participation," "employee communication," and "democratic decision making."

During 1945-46, business firms invested huge amounts of money in the study of this psychological discipline, and a plethora of books and literature appeared on the subject. Psychologists and social scientists were recruited to develop new and more effective methods to include workers in a science called "interpersonal communication," which was really used to induce workers to support their corporate bosses. By 1950, management had become obsessed with employee "communication." Fortune magazine noted, "There is hardly a business speech in which the word is not used."

These techniques of worker manipulation proved to be a successful tool for bypassing union power in the factories, and worker loyalty swung to management. In 1959, Peter Drucker, who represented American Management Consultants, said of human relations policies, "Most of us in management have instituted them as a means of busting the unions. That has been the main theme of these programs. They are based on the belief that if you have good employee relations, the union will wither on the vine.''

The literature on human relations continued to grow. During the decade of the fifties, there were four times as many studies of small human relations groups published in social science journals as in all previous publication history. Surprisingly, few sociological studies document the impact of this movement.

THE REAGAN ERA

For fifteen years after Joseph McCarthy died, the American public was once again placid and under control. Most people worked hard for their friendly corporation-it was like one big family where loyalty reigned supreme. But then came Vietnam and the civil rights movement, flower power, Woodstock, and Watergate, and the nation once again lost respect for corporate control. We must remember that 20 percent of the 250 million people in 1985 owned 44 percent of the money in the United States and that vast disparities between the very rich, on the one hand, and the middle class and the poor, on the other, must be maintained at all costs. How else could the Mellons, the Rockefellers, and the others have become so hugely rich without this brilliant control of a so-called democracy?

In 1975, the Advertising Council therefore launched another "economic education" campaign on the U.S. public. Two years later, Fortune described the council's continuing campaign as "a study in gigantism." By 1978, according to a congressional inquiry, U.S. business was spending $ 1 billion a year of tax deductible money for "education," to convince people that big government was bad for them. (The truth is that government regulation is bad for corporations. It is amazing how corporate advertising can turn truth on its head.) The campaign was once again successful, and public support for the proposition that government is bad rose from 42 percent in 1975 to 60 percent in 1980. On the coattails of this vastly expensive propaganda exercise was elected the doyen and figurehead of right-wing corporate America-Ronald Reagan. What an incredibly successful campaign! I remember it well. In 1975, the concept of big government was not a topic of discussion; by 1979, TV reporters would ask me, "But isn't big government bad?" I had no idea from where this concept had come. Now I know!

TREETOPS PROPAGANDA AND THINK TANKS

Brainwashing entered a more sophisticated phase in the 1970s. Until then, the propaganda offensives had been "grass roots," but now the corporations decided to establish a series of "think tanks" staffed by brilliant, erudite people who produced editorials, TV news pieces, and legislative material that was easy to understand, well conceived and written, and very acceptable to both the media and Congress. The material has always been provided in a timely fashion to guide legislation on a particular issue. This sophisticated, high-level manipulation is called "treetops" propaganda. Instead of being directed toward the man in the street, it is focused on influential decision makers in Congress and in the media-newspaper editors, columnists, and television. Its immediate purpose is to set the terms of debate and to determine the questions and agenda that dominate public discussion.

Here are a few instances of the terms of debate:

* In the wealthiest country on earth, should unemployment be maintained at 6 percent or at 10 percent? Not, should unemployment at any level be unacceptable? (Unemployment is good for business because it weakens unions' negotiating power by providing a pool of unemployed workers.)

* Should private doctors have more control over the medical system so that doctors make more money and only the rich get good treatment?

Not, Does every person have a right to free state-of-the-art treatment?

* Is it economically desirable to eliminate CFC gas, should CFCs be reduced to 50 percent production by 1995, or would business lose too much money? Not, Should CFCs be eliminated completely?

* Would auto companies suffer too much if they made fuel-efficient cars? Not, Are fuel-efficient cars a necessity for saving the planet?

These think tanks are involved in "policy research" or "agenda setting" for the corporate benefit. Their goal is not to save the earth or to care for the American people but to enable the rich to get richer and maintain their power. I find it extraordinary that the rich expend so much effort and energy to gain ever more money and power, for these assets do not by themselves lead to happiness.

Although some private think tanks, such as the Conference Board and the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, have existed for several decades, some new, aggressive right-wing tanks producing an incessant flow of market-oriented studies were established in the 1970s. Among them are the Heritage Foundation, the American Economic Institute for Public Policy Research, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Business Roundtable. Funders include such reputable corporations as Reader's Digest, Hertz, Coors, Holiday Inns, Ocean Spray Cranberries, Bechtel, Gulf Oil, Vicks (makers of VapoRub), Amway, Hunt Oil, and the Chicago Tribune Company. (Of course, there are also a number of think tanks that might be described as left-wing, among them the Brookings Institution, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the World Policy Institute, but they exert little influence on the public agenda.)

These think tanks virtually created the new conservative movement of the 1970s and set Reagan's agenda. The Heritage Foundation drew up a comprehensive list of agenda items for his first and second terms of office. The first document was called "Mandate for Leadership-Policy Management in a Conservative Administration." During his eight years in office, Reagan withdrew financial support for the United Nations (until recently the United States still owed several hundred million dollars to the UN in back debts from the Reagan years); undermined the trade unions; mined the National Parks; decreased funds for education, medicine, job training, community development, the poor, the elderly, and the indigent; stacked the Supreme Court with conservatives; built more nuclear weapons to develop "superiority" over the Soviet Union; attempted to create the capacity to fight and "win" a nuclear war; gave tax breaks to the rich and increased the sales tax; and undermined the Civil Rights Commission. But the actual agenda of these corporate-funded think tanks is to (a) decrease government regulation of big business, (b) decrease taxes for corporations and for the rich, (c) destroy the unions, and (d) increase profits.

In 1977, the AEI produced fifty-four studies on right-wing agenda items, twenty-two forums and conferences, fifteen analyses of important legislative proposals, seven journals and newsletters, and ready-made editorials sent to 105 newspapers. Public-affairs programs were carried by three hundred TV stations, and display units were produced for three hundred college libraries.

The Business Roundtable, founded in 1972, comprises 197 chief executive officers from America's largest corporations. In financial terms, the total revenues of these companies represented in 1981 was equal to about half the GNP of the United States, or more than that of any other country in the world. In 1972, Justice Lewis Powell, a Nixon appointee to the Supreme Court, urged business "to buy the top academic reputations in the country to add credibility to corporate studies and give business a stronger voice on the campuses." This happened. In the 1970s, business established chairs of "free enterprise," filled with handpicked candidates, in forty colleges. This is a prostitution of classical education!

The Roundtable maintains a statesmanlike image, but according to Ralph Nader "the dominant purpose leading to the foundation was a desire to combat and reduce union power," and "it proclaims moderation while sabotaging moderate reform." Although the Roundtable specializes in treetops propaganda, it also works closely with the NAM and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in their grass-roots activities. Together, they in 1978 defeated labor law reform, which was established to help reinforce America's declining labor unions, and they worked to oppose important consumer protection bills.

To this end, the Roundtable hired a public relations firm that distributed canned editorials to 1,000 daily papers and 2,800 weeklies, along with cartoons that attacked consumer protection bills. It also utilized a fraudulent poll claiming that 81 percent of all U.S. citizens opposed consumer protection when independent polls showed that one out of every two people favored it. This poll was published in a full-page advertisement in the New York Times. According to Fortune magazine, the defeat of this bill was a signal of victory; in retrospect, it marked a watershed in the history of consumerism (its fate mirrors the defeat of Harry Truman's Office of Price Administration in the 1940s).

So the business of America is business-as demonstrated in the successful campaigns of 1919-21, 1946-50, and 1976-80. To quote Alex Carey, "Complete business hegemony over American society was established. On each occasion similar, if not more sophisticated propaganda and public relations techniques were used."

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EDUCATION

... In Australia, all universities, until recently, were funded by the federal government, and education for all disciplines, including law, medicine, architecture, and science, was totally free. Two years ago, the government introduced a small tertiary tax of $1,000 to $2,000 per year, which I fear may be the beginning of privatization of our university system. This new scheme is strongly supported and encouraged by right-wing think tanks employing the U.S. treetops philosophy and by corporate Australia. But my daughter, who recently graduated from medical school, had almost her entire education paid for by the Australian government.

High schools and primary schools are funded and run by the state governments, and education is free and uniform throughout each state. Like health care, free education is deemed a right of all children and people.

When I lived in Boston, I was surprised to discover that school districts in the state are autonomous and funded by the local population. It follows that, if schools are located in poor communities, the educational standards or facilities will be correspondingly low. In America, private schools are very expensive and available mainly to the middle class and the wealthy, as are many good colleges and universities, except for some excellent state systems like that of California. It is hard to believe that it can cost $20,000 or more to send one child to college for one year. For a family of six, educating four children breaks the budget and often leaves the parents in penury for years. Such a state of affairs is not fair, equitable, or right.

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