Politicians, businesses, and other powerful sources keep doing bad things but try to fool people by saying glib platitudes. Do NOT believe at face value what they say. Look at what they ACTUALLY DO.
For four years the U.S. was ruled by someone who said he would “Make America Great.” His actual policies did the opposite.
Politicians and businesses keep saying things that the people want to hear, but their actual policies violate the public’s interests.
Platitudes and hypocrisies have been around for a very long time. Jesus kept denouncing people who kept trying to impress people with their religiosity, by pointing out that they were violating the core values of their faith. He said not to believe their pious platitudes and said, “By their fruits you will know them.”
This is true nowadays when official sources say glib platitudes but whose actual policies violate them.
For many years the Port of Olympia (owned by the public, financed largely by taxpayers, but managed to serve private business interests in ways that actually hurt the environment) has been trying to fool the voters while actually hurting the public interest. A friend of mine recently noticed that on the Port’s website there’s a single page where some form of the word sustainable occurs seven times, even though many of the Port’s actual activities are NOT sustainable.
For most of the U.S.’s history we had a Department of War, but that sounded bad, so in 1947 it was changed to the Department of Defense. During most of the U.S.’s history we had very few wars, but since 1947 we have had many — but the government kept trying to fool us by saying that those wars were necessary for our “defense.”
Businesses keep using public relations campaigns in attempts to fool us into thinking that they are helping us, even while they are hurting us. Oil companies spend huge amounts of money to fool us into thinking they are “green,” when actually they keep hurting the environment and the climate.
Many more examples exist.