How to Avoid a PhD (Penalty for Hardworking Dummies): Debunking the Meritocracy Myth

By TAMARA I. HAMMOND and Margie Burns

This book is the result of decades-long academic research and 25 years of emergence in the

myth of the American dream. In reality, a small minority of ultra-rich corporations have complete

control over the government and mercilessly exploit the majority of Americans. The author

debunks the illusion of meritocracy, heavily promo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Telepub LLC
• Release date: Dec 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781962130516

Book preview

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How to Avoid a PhD (Penalty for Hardworking Dummies):

Debunking the Meritocracy Myth

Editors: Margie Burns and Kathryn Johnson

Book cover designer: Georgia Nikolova

This is an updated, redesigned, revised, and enhanced version of the 2022 edition.

Copyright © 2023 by TAMARA I. HAMMOND

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by the copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator. at the address below.

ISBN for Paperback: 978-1-962130-49-3

ISBN for Hardback: 978-1-962130-50-9

ISBN for Ebook: 978-1-962130-51-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024901633

Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, places are products of the author’s imagination.

Printing Edition of 2023.

TelePub LLC.

Long Beach, California

USA

For my talented and reliable American husband Ernie, who kept his promises to me, and to whom I dedicate this book with love and appreciation

Acknowledgements

Many special thanks to my grandson Triston for his spiritual wisdom, love, and help during my work, and for brightening my life.

Many profound thanks to my daughter Tammy for her enlightening information, and to her husband, Peter, for his hard work.

My warmest thanks to my supportive sister Mimi for her unconditional help.

Many genuine thanks to my American friends and family, who inspired me to write this book, and who will always have my love and gratitude.

Many heartfelt thanks to my Bulgarian friends and family, whose support and encouragement are essential in my expatriate life.

Many sincere thanks to my friends around the world for their care, communications, and networking.

Many whole-hearted thanks to my book-cover designer, Georgia, for her digital flair, aesthetics, and imagination.

I am deeply grateful to my first designer, Ivie, for her creativity and reciprocity.

I am in debt to family friend Kevin for his generous support for the project.

I am grateful to William A. for taking the time to endorse my work.

I am thankful to Silvy and Georgie for their involvement and help.

I am indefinitely grateful to my generous friend for her anonymous contribution.

Many thanks to my current and future readers from the bottom of my heart.

Introduction

This book is a continuation or rather a rebuttal of my 2011 book titled How to Obtain a PhD, about hard-working dummies chasing the American Dream. In this subsequent book with the same acronym for PhD ( Penalty for Hard-working Dummies ), I argue that naïve thinkers and intellectuals, including the author of this book, fall victims to the educational system and propaganda in America. I was heavily brainwashed by a sophisticated industry called Public Relations founded by Edward Bernays in the 1920s and even more effective today. In the first book I was able to see through and decipher some important aspects of the propaganda. For example, financial predatory lending, the food and drug fraudulent industry, and the two-party system that works for the same elites were obvious to me from the beginning. Paradoxically, however, as I delved into my academic studies, I was swayed away from my critical perspective. Upon emersion in higher education both as a student and as an instructor, deliberate promotion of corporate agenda, gradually felt natural and acceptable in the complete absence of opposite views.

In my case, after fifteen years in academia and a Doctorate degree, I finally broke free from the neoliberal ideology that held me hostage for quite some time Fortunately, thanks to dissident figures such as Eugene Debs, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and independent journalists Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, Whitney Webb, and Caitlin Johnstone, among others, I reexamined and challenged the propaganda imposed on everyone by equally mercenary academia and mass media. In addition, whistleblowers and heroes who risk their freedom and comfortable lives to reveal the truth about our government’s unconstitutional spying on its citizens and carrying out illegal military actions lifted the veil of secrecy and shed a light on the grim reality of corporate tyranny.

To celebrate my liberation from manufactured consent in corporate controlled media and academia, I decided to share my newly acquired enlightenment with everyone eager to know the truth. More importantly, I wish I had been an autodidact instead of investing more than a dozen years in the ridiculously expensive institutionalized boot camp called higher education. I argue that the goal of the academic business model is to capture future employees through enormous debt and to condition them to work around the clock in low-paying, precarious jobs for decades to pay back their student loans. A massive investment in formal education precludes the quest for learning the truth while simultaneously delaying unbiased research for years. As an autodidact, I could have stumbled upon the truth significantly sooner if I had not wasted time digesting the mandatory deceptive ideology, designed to maintain the status quo.

This astonishing delay in my discovery illustrates how powerful the industry of propaganda is, strengthened by the network of mass media, academia, and think-tanks working for the real owners of Americans – large corporations driven by profit. The exploitation of most Americans by a handful of super rich multi-billionaires is both facilitated and obscured by mass media, because their few owners control the official narrative. Through sophisticated mechanisms of propaganda that constantly disseminate the illusion of freedom, democracy, and meritocracy, the myth is perpetuated ed nauseum. More outrageously, the media sell to the public absurd ideas such as endless wars, individual responsibility for institutional failures, and social injustice presented as meritocracy. At the same time, the incessant propaganda conditions the public to accept the denial of basic human rights such as healthcare, living wages and higher education as undeserved luxuries. More importantly, a persisting system driven by greed prioritizes profit above human health and existence, leads to the devastation of life on earth, and cannot be sustained.

With the recent pandemic and the subsequent wars, international consensus of multiple governments on the violation of human rights is alarming but predictable; like the United States federal branches, they work for the global financial, tech, military, and pharmaceutical corporations. Although the pandemic exacerbated economic instability in the Western world, accelerating in recent decades, it was not the cause of this crisis, only the catalyst. The pandemic was indeed used for enriching the billionaire class globally. Similarly, as corporation-run institutions, most countries mimicked the economic pattern of widening the gap between the rich and the poor while benefiting a tiny minority at the top. More importantly, the pandemic was used to implement authoritarian measures such as lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and heavy travel restrictions. Synchronized propaganda disseminated through every major media outlet in the world is designed to inflict fear and division in global populations, to control them.

Inevitably, by means of counter information still available online, people are waking up to the sobering increase of centralized digital control of the population. The independent media both inform people about the crimes committed by greed and negligence and organize their resistance against their enslavement in digital neo-feudalism. The most striking yet less known example of concentration of power is Black Rock, the largest asset management company in the world, handling over $10T of wealth.¹ Since the current world circulation of funds is $40T, Black Rock controls one quarter of the global financial capital.² More disturbingly, Black Rock and its largest shareholder, Vanguard, are the top owners of four of the five media corporations controlling more than 90 percent of the US media: Comcast, AT&T, Disney, and News Corporation.³ In reacting to the Covid crisis with an unprecedented concentration of power and wealth, the current global order looks increasingly like a technocratic tyranny. The term for the imposed social transformation, used by the World Economic Forum, transhumanism, sounds neutral and does not explicitly convey the absolute power wielded by the rulers.

Identical tactics of fearmongering and abuse of power were used in the subsequent 2022 NATO/US war with Russia, in which Ukraine was turned into a laboratory-testing experiment for the dystopian digital pattern of control by the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. Based on the accumulated debt of $200B, Ukraine could become the first country owned privately by a corporation – more specifically, by Black Rock, whose impending contracts for the country’s restoration are already advertised amid the war.⁴ As designed by PR founder Bernays a century ago, real power is exerted subtly by men and institutions largely unknown to the public. However, the growing opposition to the future digital serfdom is led by dissident journalists, scholars, and podcast creators, and other counterculture icons. Most notably, investigative journalist Whitney Webb focused her research on the early development of such social order back to its origin in the 1950s, when the term transhumanism was coined by the eugenicist Julian Huxley.⁵

Critically, the last two artificially created crises awakened society, and since 2020, in a shift in public opinion, trust in the media and the government have fallen sharply. According to a Gallup Poll from October 2022, two thirds of Americans believe that their own news sources present facts that favor one side of an issue, and only seven percent have a great deal of confidence in the media.⁶ The change is driven by the independent media that took the responsibility of breaking the silence on important issues, leading to movements for peace, social justice, and to class action lawsuits against coalitions of governments and big business for their crimes against humanity. Massive waves of protests, strikes, and demonstrations around the world resemble the civil movements in the 1960s that brought significant progressive changes in multiple countries, especially in the U.S. Therefore, my hope is that new positive changes are possible. I strongly encourage people to study the facts and take a stand against current policies of exploitation, violation of human rights, and mandates for control over our minds and bodies. More importantly, I believe in and promote the optimistic message that it is not too late for actions, although action will require massive coordination and solidarity among conscious people globally.

Sadly, as history teaches us, most genuine movements get co-opted by special interests, and perhaps unwittingly, are neutralized by the very powers they fight. The environmental, anti-war, anti-racist, and equality movements are not immune to being co-opted by massive corporations that work covertly against their ideas. By the time this book is published, many movements and independent media outlets could be corrupted or banned. The predominant bad actors here are the corporations whose financial interests lead to gross inequality and possibly to the extinction of the culture that produces them. Their accomplices, mass media and academia, willingly deceive and manipulate the public to preserve their privileges and social status. Although a drop in the ocean, every dissenting voice is important, because the solution lies within populations using the power of numbers to force governments to stop the transition to global technocratic dictatorship.

Like many authors who had succumbed to the propaganda and wasted many years before they could see the light, I credit my awakening partly to digital independent media outlets, too many to be listed here. Nevertheless, I will mention a few journalists besides the ones already named, such as Alan Macleod, Richard Medhurst, Aaron Glantz, Ben Norton, Clayton and Natalie Morrison, and filmmakers Oliver Stone, Peter Joseph, Abby Martin, and Eleanor Goldfield. Moreover, I am grateful to whistleblowers such as former intelligence analyst Eduard Snowden, currently in exile abroad, and Julian Assange, incarcerated for the past four years for revealing governments’ corruption, mass surveillance, and illegal wars. Since the propaganda machine constantly calls for censorship in social networks, disseminating the truth often is left to comedians such as Jimmy Dore, Russell Brand, Joe Rogan, Sabrina Salvati (Sabby Sabs), Lee Camp, Graham Elwood, Katie Halper, and so on, who are proud descendants of counterculture icons Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin.

Finally, I would like to explain some of the terms I use repeatedly throughout the book. Transhumanism is currently defined by Wikipedia as a Philosophical and intellectual movement, which advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity and cognition. According to Wikipedia, Transhumanism is often compared, especially in the media, to the Nazi project to improve the race in eugenic sense. Although denied by current determined supporters, the eugenic premise is evident in the professional titles of its founder Huxley, a famous eugenicist, evolutionary biologist, and internationalist. Huxley was President of the British Eugenics Society, and the first Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), a fact that explains the current global push for transhumanism by international organizations such as the UN, WEF, and the World Health Organization (WHO). In the last three years since the pandemic shutdown of 2020, these organizations have globally implemented anti-democratic measures mandating experimental vaccines, destroying economies through lockdowns, and practicing severe censorship in mass media and digital social networks.

In my use, the term fourth estate represents established or mainstream media, and the independent new media or the fifth estate and are used interchangeably to signify alternative media. The term fourth estate was coined by Edmund Burke in 1787 as a symbol of the fourth branch of power, the press, whose main function is to hold accountable the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of power.⁷ The fifth estate is defined by scholar Arthur Hayes as the critics of the press and emerges because of the failure of the fourth estate to play its proper role of challenging power.⁸

The first, second and third estates of power are supposed to be independent from the fourth estate in democratic societies. Increasingly, however, the three main branches integrate with the mainstream media, which now belong to the ruling class by virtue of their wealth and privileges. Because these undemocratic phenomena and their consequences remain unreported by the press, I analyze the dynamics of power and corruption in Western societies and more specifically, in the United States. As Matt Taibbi describes the invisible role of propaganda coupled with censorship in the inculcation of Americans, It is a subtle, idiosyncratic process that you can stare at for a lifetime and nonetheless not see.⁹ I know I did not see it for nearly fifteen years. Therefore, I hope that my work will contribute to the uneasy process of illuminating the informational eclipse that keeps the public oblivious to its own ignorance.

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1 Kit Rees, Black Rock Assets Seen Topping $15T in Five Years Time, Bloomberg, April 17, 2023.

2 Aaron Vaughan, Black Rock is the Biggest Company You Never Heard Of, Innovation & Tech Today, July, 2023.

3 Ibid. The fifth corporation is Viacom.

4 Caitlin A. Johnstone, Black Rock Logo to be Added to the Ukrainian Flag, MRonline, Jan. 4, 2023.

5 Julian Huxley, Transhumanism, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 8, No 1, (January 1968): 73-76.

First published in 1957 Harper and Brothers, New York under the title New Bottles for New Wines.

6 Megan Brenan, Americans’ Trust in Media remains Near record Low, Gallup News, Oct. 18, 2022.

7 Julianne Schultz, Reviving the Fourth Estate, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U Press, 1998, 49.

8 Arthur S. Hayes, Press Critics Are the Fifth Estate, Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2008, 2.

9 Matt Taibbi, Hate, Inc: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another, New York, London: OR Books, 2021, 11.

Chapter One

The Failure of Mainstream Media to Counter-Balance the Three Estates of Power: A Short History of the Corruption of the Fourth Estate

Nearly every war that has been started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies

~Julian Assange, 2011

Although the monopolization of the mass media started in the early 1970s, the Communication Act of 1994 was an important milestone in the destruction of free media. The Act eliminated the cap on nationwide station ownership and limitations on cross media ownership, which caused massive media consolidation and a handful of corporations’ domination of the newspapers, airwaves, TV, and the Internet. It allowed cross ownership for unlimited number of news outlets. As a result, the number of media owners has been reduced from several hundreds to five corporations. ¹⁰ The goal is very clear: the fewer the owners, the easier it is to control the narrative and eliminate competition. Ben H. Bagdikian, famous for obtaining and delivering the Pentagon papers during his tenure at The Washington Post, explains the process in his book The New Media Monopoly: A Completely Revised and Updated Edition with Seven New Chapters (2004). ¹¹ Bagdikian reveals that there were fifty dominant media companies when the book was first published in 1983. ¹² By contrast, by the seventh edition of the book in 2004, all media outlets, from newspapers to magazines to book publishers, motion picture studios, and radio and television stations in the United States were owned by five corporations: Time Warner, the Walt Disney Company, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Viacom, and Bertelsmann. ¹³ In 2021, after several new mergers and buyoffs, the owners of the media are still five: Disney, News Corporation, Comcast (joined by GM), AT&T, and Viacom. According to Bagdikian, This [ownership] gives each of the five corporations and their leaders more communication power than was exercised by any despot or dictatorship in history. ¹⁴ As a consequence, these entities set the tone for the public discourse and decide what is acceptable and what is unacceptable for public opinion and what is considered important. While the companies Bagdikian names the big five compete in a limited fashion, they all share assets when it is mutually beneficial, thereby making them business partners. Bagdikian further explains the danger of the media monopoly in their unanimous promotion of the status quo:

Modern corruption is more subtle. Today, or in recent times, advertisers have successfully demanded that the following ideas appear in programs around their ads: All businessmen are good or, if not, are always condemned by other businessmen. All wars are humane. The status quo is wonderful. Also wonderful are grocery stores, bakeries, rug companies, restaurants, and laundries. Religionists, especially clergy, are perfect. The American way of life is beyond criticism.¹⁵

Similarly, digital media’s monopoly of five giants, including Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta,¹⁶ controls the entire news dissemination by imposing both direct and subtle censorship. In fact, given that in the Age of Information, people turn to their digital social networks for news, Silicon Valley controls the newsfeed of billions of viewers. Moreover, even the traditional news outlets provided by cable TV are often viewed on YouTube (owned by Google), which allows the channel to promote mainstream news while limiting independent sources through their corporate-friendly algorithms. In this manner, unelected billionaires in Silicon Valley control the flow of news using discretion in deciding what programs get exposure. The algorithms work in a predictable way: they are oriented to maintain the status quo and to bring enormous profits through the unpaid labor of millions of users who create content, but more importantly, through selling their collected data to companies that target them based on their likes and preferences. Since the corporate power of the advertising companies is also concentrated, Silicon Valley really must be concerned about very few mega sponsors: Wall Street, big pharma, the oil industry, and the military-industrial complex.

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky summarize this invisible control in their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media, explaining the five filters of mass media: ownership, advertisement, elite experts, flak, and a common enemy.¹⁷ The first filter, ownership, reached its maximum concentrated monopoly after the 1996 Telecommunication Act. The second filter, advertisement, not only pays for the expenses of the media outlets but it allows them to profit from selling their audiences to the advertisers as products. Because collecting data from users is unconstitutional, media corporations collaborate with the government and sell this information to them as well as to private corporations. Former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 that Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook have been sending private citizens’ data directly to the government since their inception.¹⁸ Because of their cooperation in spying on regular citizens, they were allowed to become the giants they are now. Consequently, anti-trust laws are not enforced on these corporations, and their infringement of citizens’ privacy is not prosecuted by the government.

Even more effectively, using digital media, the government manufactures peoples’ consent for invading countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq where we have maintained military presence since 2001 and 2003, respectively. With the relentless pro-war propaganda in mainstream media and especially through omission, the media is complicit in the unconstitutional, violent policy of breaking international laws. For example, the media’s failure to report the United States bombing of ten countries currently on a daily basis or the importance of approving the bloated military budget increasing every year undermines people’s resistance to war and precludes anti-war demonstrations.¹⁹ Even after deciding to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2021 after 20 years, Congress approved almost unanimously an increased annual budget of $768B – an amount greater than the combined budgets of the next ten countries including China and Russia. Instead of questioning and challenging such a bi-partisan agreement, the media failed to report the controversy of a seeming opposition party’s enthusiasm to give such enormous military power to a president accused of treachery and, therefore, impeached twice. Such controversies, unreported or underreported by the media, prove their loyalty to the ruling class, in direct conflict with the main duty of the fourth estate – to keep the powerful accountable.

The third filter – elite experts is illustrated in the daily news. William Arkin, a military analyst for more than 30 years, explains in his 2021 book The Generals Have No Clothes that we are bombing at least ten countries on any given day in the Middle East and Africa.²⁰ According to Arkin, because of secrecy, the real toll of soldiers and private contractors who died in the global war on terror are tens of thousands more than the official number of 11,000.²¹ Moreover, the cost of so-called war on terror paid by the American people was more than $6.5T by 2020, twice the cost of annual healthcare for all Americans.²² Arkin resigned from NBC in 2019, publicizing his resignation letter, which went viral on the Internet. Arkin made a statement that the result of the so-called war on terror is more terrorists and more violence because these countries are no safer than 18 years ago.²³ Arkin further explains that he feels out of sync with the network and his expertise less valued because he was confronted by the overwhelming presence of generals and politicians with pro-war points of view. Arkin defines them as highly partisan formers who masquerade as analysts who glorified and advocated for wars without being challenged.²⁴

The fourth media filter – flak, causes fear of retaliation for deviation from the mainstream narrative. It is evident in the profound failure of the media to complete its role of balancing the first three estates of executive, judicial, and legislative powers of the government. The punishment for disloyalty in journalism could be very serious – it varies from losing access to power to ad hominem attacks to firing to physical elimination. The most extreme example is Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, who was arrested in 2019 and contained in a high-security prison in Belmarsh, London, for exposing war crimes of the