Hill & Knowlton: How To Dress Up A Really Ugly Pig

New York's Hill & Knowlton Mad Men Making Over Mind Boggling Image Problems While Avoiding Accountability

by Winsip Custer, CPW News Service


    In the Garden of Eden, the serpent had a problem.  How do you get the first humans to accept slavery.  Answer:  Paint the apple red!
    Fascinated by the role that public relations and advertising has had in recreating images, film director Matthew Weiner fashioned the wildly popular television series Mad Men into a nostalgic trip through the 50's, 60's and 70's Madison Avenue advertising and PR agencies as protagonist Donald Draper rose from obscurity to become a leading make-over artist who in season four, The Suitcase, said "Is this a substance much like bullshit?"  In season one Draper had given us a clue as to his motivations learned as a soldier....."I blow up bridges."   On Madison Avenue Don Draper struggled, sometimes well, sometimes poorly, with the ethical issues his profession did and did not address.
   The Mad Men series ended before the 1988 Young & Rubicam Co.'s Willie Horton attack ad showed the power of pointing beyond a candidates' flaws to another's thus deflecting the spotlight in order to redirect it toward a Presidential candates' better features much as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton did in 2016 with a variety of lip glossings and lighting adjustments.  "If you have to be in a beauty contest choose who you stand next to and point to their wrinkles," said Sylvia Ramsay author of Beauty is Only Skin Deep, But Ugly Goes All The Way To The Bone.
   While Young & Rubican who employed George Herbert Walker Bush's nephew received the race card approval from the Bush campaign, there was on the horizon another ugly pig polisher....Hill & Knowlton.   When the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI also known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals, the chief money laundering bank for the Iran-Contra Boland Amendment bashers needed a PR make-over they turned to Hill & Knowlton.  When the Church of Scientology was under the gun for it's abuse of its parishioners the e-emeter Dianetics devotees who followed the U.S. Navy intelligence insider and founder, L. Ron Hubbard, turned to Hill & Knowlton.
    There was no suitcase of bullshit that Hill & Knowlton could not, it seems, turn into a movable feast.  Take the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal, a story that had CBS's 60 Minutes' Dan Rather and Mary Mapes proclaiming that they broke in 2004 a year after Amnesty International had exposed the clear violations of the Geneva Conventions at Baghdad under authority of Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense while Rather co-owned the Las Vegas, New Mexico exotic game ranch, Tecolate Ranch, with Rumsfeld.  At the same time Rumsfeld owned the Mount Misery Plantation where Civil War Abolitionist and orator, Frederick Douglass, had been "renditiontioned" before being sent back to the South from the North to slavery.
    "You can't forget that a big ugly pig in our U.S. history, our Civil War, was actually a race to the opium poppies of the Golden Crescent," said historian Lowell P. Wigglesworth, "and not as we have been brainwashed into believing was a Civil War fought over freedom from slavery.  I have covered all of this in my writings....from the place that Jeff Davis, Franklin Pierce and Caleb Cushing had in molding public opinion under the guise of a 600,000 body count Civil War fought over ending slavery or protecting states rights.  Good people fought and died over that belief just as they did over the yellow cake induced war in Iraq when fifteen of the nineteen 911 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia as a growing number of scientists world-wide now hold the U.S. government's Official 911 Report in complete contempt," said Wigglesworth noting the support of their position from Bush economist and Texas A&M professor, Dr. Morgan Reynolds and former Under-Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for Ronald Reagan, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts.  They have pointed to the outstanding work of pilots, scientists, engineers and architects who have called the Official 911 Report written by Rice University's Philip Zelikow and managed most recently by CBS's 60-Minutes with the coverage of the Saudi royal's place in backing the alleged plot, but with no real effect on reopening a real investigation.   That was, perhaps, the biggest make-over of an ugly pig in world history, and not even Hill & Knowlton have the brainwashing ability nor lipstick to cover that fat pig of bamboozle," said Wigglesworth.
    Mad Men ends with Draper in total meltdown...emotionally, psychologically, spiritually.  We are led to believe that he is dropping out of the rat race and the big fat pig lip-polishing profession.  In the end he sits cross-legged at California commune overlooking the Pacific Ocean, perhaps not far from Fort Bragg just north of San Francisco near where it's namesake, Confederate General Braxton Bragg....business partner before and after the Civil War of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman....had worked with George Bragg securing the San Francisco terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad for the Union.  Perhaps Draper was near the Point Cabrillo Light House where in 1950 was discovered the wreckage of opium cutter Frolic built in the Gardiner Ship Yard in Baltimore for the New England Brahman Heard family....a shipyard that had employed the services of Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, AKA Frederick Douglass, before he was invited to speak at Boston's Faneuil Hall as had been Jefferson Davis at Caleb Cushing invitation....a fine example of building consent for war....which Donald Trump would have us drop Andrew Jackson into the ring to stop the coming slaughter.  It was not Hill & Knowlton that was hired back then to rewrite history, but it was clearly rewritten by a tent full of P.T. Barnums.
    Mad Men's Don Draper's legacy is resurrected in the end when his face lights up and his thoughts turn to Coca-Cola and the iconic ad song "I'd love to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony."  That was just before Coca-Cola was documented by investigative reporter Peter Brewton  in his 1972 book The Mafia, CIA and George Bush to have been providing with the help of Houstonians' Walter Mischer and Coca-Cola's CEO, Charles W. Duncan, aide in funding the Contra death squads in Central America.  Teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony is NOT the agenda of the U.S. military complex in its push toward worldwide hegemony, not of the pig painters who polish up a really ugly bamboozle.
    Today, Hill & Knowlton's CEO is from Waco, Texas, home to the brutal government handling of the Branch Davidian Affair from a city that Brewton says domiciled the Iran-Contra's leading missile mule, Farhad Azima, who was transshipping weapons through his Waco-based Buffalo Airlines... the weapons used in the Iran-Contra weapons and drugs for hostages deal that almost cost Reagan and Bush an impeachment.  Waco would find the arrival of Kenneth Starr as the President of Baylor University coming there from Pepperdine and from the White Water investigation before that with no reference to his relationship to AIG founder Cornelius Vander Starr....to become the attorney, too, for the renegade U.S. mercenaries, Blackwater, and its founder Erik Prince whose sister is now in charge of U.S. education, in Blackwater's attack against its own employees killed chasing yellow cake and phony wars in Fallujah, Iraq.