THE IRON TRIANGLE

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The Iron triangle consist of the policy-making relationship among the congressional committees, the bureaucracy, and interest groups. An iron triangle is pork-barrel policies that benefit a small segment of the population. Pork barrel is the appropriation of government spending for localized projects secured solely or primarily to bring money to a representative's district. 

Appropriation from Latin appropriare, "to make one's own" is the act of setting apart something for its application to a particular usage, to the exclusion of all other uses.  

A bureaucracy is a body of non-elective government officials and/or an administrative policy-making group. Historically, bureaucracy referred to government administration managed by departments staffed with nonelected officials. In modern parlance, bureaucracy refers to the administrative system governing any large institution.

The concept of an iron triangle is that bureaucratic agencies, as political entities, seek to create and consolidate their own power base. An agency's power is determined by its constituency, not by its consumers. 

Constituents are politically active members sharing a common interest or goal, consumers are the expected recipients of goods or services provided by a governmental bureaucracy and are often identified in an agency's written goals or mission statement.

Private or special interest groups, on the other hand, possess considerable power as they tend to be well-organized, have plenty of resources, are easily mobilized, and are extremely active in political affairs, through voting, campaign contributions, and lobbying, as well as proposing legislation themselves.

Bureaucratic power is exercised in the Congress, and particularly in congressional committees and subcommittees. By aligning itself with selected constituencies, an agency may be able to affect policy outcomes directly in these committees and subcommittees. This is where an iron triangle may manifest itself. Bureaucratic dysfunction may seem real but not necessarily so and may be caused by alliances formed between the agency and its constituency. 

The official goals of an agency may appear to be prevented or ignored altogether at the expense of the citizens it is designed  to serve...

The Military–Industrial–Congressional Complex, comprises the policy and monetary relationships which exist between legislators, national armed forces, and the arms industry that supports them. These relationships include political contributions, political approval for military spending, lobbying to support bureaucracies, and oversight of the industry. It is a type of iron triangle. The term is most often used in reference to the system behind the military of the United States, where it gained popularity after its use in the farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961, though the term is applicable to any country with a similarly developed infrastructure. 

http://youtu.be/Jib1B2cyWpE
Dwight D. Eisenhower (October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was the 34th President of the United States from 1953 until 1961. He was a five-star general in the United States Army during World War II and served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe; he had responsibility for planning and supervising the invasion of North Africa in Operation Torch in 1942–43 and the successful invasion of France and Germany in 1944–45 from the Western Front. In 1951, he became the first supreme commander of NATO.

The term is sometimes used more broadly to include the entire network of contracts and flows of money and resources among individuals as well as corporations and institutions of the defense contractors, The Pentagon, the Congress and executive branch. A parallel system is that of the military–industrial–media complex, along with the more distant politico-media complex and prison–industrial complex. The first modern military–industrial complexes arose in Britain, France and Germany in the 1880s and 1890s as part of the increasing need to defend their empires. 

 Daniel Guérin, in his 1936 book Fascism and Big Business, about the fascist government support to heavy industry. It can be defined as, "an informal and changing coalition of groups with vested psychological, moral, and material interests in the continuous development and maintenance of high levels of weaponry, in preservation of colonial markets and in military-strategic conceptions of internal affairs." 

Franz Leopold Neumann's book Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism in 1942, a study of how Nazism came into a position of power in a democratic state.

Total world spending on military expenses in 2008 was about $1.50 trillion US dollars. 50% of this total, roughly $700 billion US dollars, was spent by the United States. The privatization of the production and invention of military technology also leads to a complicated relationship with significant research and development of many technologies.

 The military budget of the United States for the 2009 fiscal year was about $500 billion. Adding emergency discretionary spending and supplemental spending brings the sum to $700 billion. This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget. 

Overall the United States government is spending about $1 trillion annually on defense-related purposes.The defense industry tends to contribute heavily to incumbent members of Congress. In a 2012 news story, Salon reported, "Despite a decline in global arms sales in 2010 due to recessionary pressures, the U.S. increased its market share, accounting for a whopping 53 percent of the trade that year. Last year saw the U.S. on pace to deliver more than $46 billion in foreign arms sales.

 The politico-media complex (PMC) is a name given to the close interaction between media networks and the relationships between a state's political and ruling class. The media industries dependency on corporations and political special interest groups and agencies such as CIA, FBI, and Law Enforcement. The term PMC is often used to name the secret or illegal relationships between governments or individual politicians and the media industry in an attempt to manipulate rather than inform the people. There is recent evidence to suggest that newer media portals as opposed to those outlets of 'traditional' mainstream media are turning, more readily, to using the PMC framework in critical analysis and interpretation of media behavior.

 The mass media are diversified media technologies that are intended to reach a large audience by mass communication. The technologies through which this communication takes place varies to distribute their information. There are conglomerate organizations that control these technologies, such as television stations and publishing companies.

 Mainstream media (MSM) are the largest distribution channels, which therefore represent what the majority of media consumers are likely to encounter. The term also represents the media influence of thought and action.

 Large news conglomerates, including newspapers and broadcast media, which underwent successive mergers in the U.S. and elsewhere at an increasing rate beginning in the 1990s, are often referenced by the term. 

This concentration of media ownership has raised concerns of a homogenization of viewpoints presented to news consumers. Consequently, the term mainstream mediahas been widely used in conversation and the blogosphere, often in oppositional, pejorative, or dismissive senses, in discussion of the mass media and media bias.

 According to philosopher Noam Chomsky, media organizations such as CBS and The New York Times set the tone for other smaller news organizations by creating conversations that cascade down to smaller news organizations lacking the resources to do individual research and coverage, the primary method of which is through the Associated Press, from which many member or subscribing organizations get their news. This results in a recycling effect ,wherein organic thought is left to the mainstream that choose the conversation and smaller organizations recite absent of a variance in perspective.

 Agenda-Setting Theory describes the ability of the news media to influence the importance of topics on the public agenda. If a news item is covered frequently and prominently the audience will regard the issue as more important. Agenda-setting theory was formally developed by Dr. Max McCombs and Dr. Donald Shaw in a study on the 
1968 presidential election. In the 1968 "Chapel Hill study," McCombs and Shaw demonstrated a strong correlation  between what 100 residents of Chapel Hill, North Carolina thought was the most important election issue and what the local and national news media reported was the most important issue. 

By comparing the salience of issues in news content with the public's perceptions of the most important election issue, McCombs and Shaw were able to determine the degree to which the media determines public opinion. Since the 1968 study, published in a 1972 edition of Public Opinion Quarterly, more than 400 studies have been published on the agenda-setting function of the mass media, and the theory continues to be regarded as relevant.

In public relations, spin is a form of propaganda, achieved through providing an interpretation of an event or campaign to persuade public opinion in favor or against a certain organization or public figure. While traditional public relations may also rely on creative presentation of the facts, "spin" often implies disingenuous, deceptive and highly manipulative tactics.

Edward Bernays has been called the "Father of Spin". As Larry Tye describes in his book The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and The Birth of Public Relations, Bernays was able to help tobacco and alcohol companies use techniques to make certain behaviors more socially acceptable in the 20th-century United States. 

 

Edward Edward Louis Bernays (November 22, 1891 − March 9, 1995) was an Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". He combined the ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud. 
He felt this manipulation was necessary in society, which he regarded as irrational and dangerous as a result of the "herd instinct" that Trotter had described