You're absolutely right, Carol, and there is your answer, Sandy.

The corporate-controlled mass media in the USA are in the business of moulding public opinion all the time. They do so by slanted and misleading coverage which creates a general impression in the minds of millions of Americans that any kind of "socialism" is dangerous and evil, and keeps them misinformed and ignorant of what is really happening to them and all around them.

It's very much like the society George Orwell envisioned in "1984", only it's being done through a vigorous capitalist marketing mode rather than a dour form of quasi-Stalinism. People can far more easily be snared through mass marketing by targeting their greed, their selfishness, and their self-indulgence.

Consumer marketing and the glitzy modern "news" shows are a far more effective means of brainwashing a people than having red flags hung all over the place, big military parades, and long lines waiting at a few stores for a miserably poor selection of goods. ;-)

That's why one corrupt system (Soviet Communism) eventually fell to another equally corrupt system (western mass marketing by increasingly enormous corporate entities in a few wealthy hands).

It's clever. You snare people through their own desires for convenience, shallow entertainment, sexual titillation, addictions, and lots of cheap consumer goods (made in China), and you feed them an endless diet of absolutely unreal views on their own society and the world.

You convince the monkey in the cage that there is no cage by giving him lots of food and lots of toys and plenty of distractions. You tell the monkey that OTHER monkeys in other places around the world are worse off than he is! (It's a lie, but he'll believe it, because he's PROUD to be an American monkey living in the "greatest country on Earth".) He wants to believe it.

You appeal to his patriotism and zenophobia and the self-doubts that lurk under his facade of proud certainty about his country being "the best in the world".

He is already eager to believe that no one else in the world could possibly have as good a health care system as the USA....so he will just get angry if he is presented with strong evidence of superior health care in Canada or the UK. He'll deny it. He'll change the channel and find some other program that tells him what he wants to hear, and that's all he'll listen to.

That's how the Nazis did it too. That's how they bamboozled millions of Germans into fighting most of the world. They just fed them a daily diet of super-patriotism, fear, and disinformation. That's how ANY such lying system does it. By a constant flow of disinformation through the mass media.

It works. The majority of people are fooled by such a propaganda program...until things get REALLY bad (as they did for the Germans from about mid-1944). Things have not yet gotten REALLY bad in the USA. Somewhat bad for a fairly large number of people, yes...REALLY bad for a minority of people...but not REALLY bad for just about everyone.

That is what it would take to wake the monkey up to the fact that he's been had, and THEN he'd see the bars and he'd realize he's living in a cage.

By then it would probably be too late. It certainly was for the Germans.

People who object to the above analogy because the USA at present is not equivalent to Nazi Germany will be missing my point entirely. I'm not saying it's equivalent to Nazi Germany. The analogy is not meant to be taken in literal all or nothing terms. It is an analogy of a certain harmful direction that any society can move in through a flow of false propaganada, that's all, and these things happen by degrees. They happen a bit at a time. And they don't necessarily happen exactly the same way as they did in some other historical case, because every situation is unique to its own time and circumstances.