Relax, I was just throwing back at you one of your own lines about reading the links....

The links I posted here about the history of consumer advocacy and consumer reports, were the ones I was referring to.

As a potential customer your actions are laudable and understandable, but letting others guide the wealth into the hands of the CR "anointed" is troublesome on a large scale as it cuts competition and eventually leads to less diversity in the marketplace.

If CR says BRAND X widget is great and BRAND Y's widget sucks eggs, then all the wealth is redirected to the makers of BRAND X. Brand Y may have some really good points and uses an innovative feature that BRAND X doesn't, but now this attributes will also go unrewarded in the market as almost no one bought one to see for themselves. As a result, BRAND Y will spend what little money they made from folks who don't read CR, and churn out a widget that's closer to BRAND X.

You're smart enough to see where that leads:

One product and a bunch of clones of that product.
Product diversity is defeated.
Competition is undermined as "non-anointed" manufacturers no longer build products for the public but for CR and others who will tell you what's good and what's not good.

Consumer Reports can make or break a product and their history has tended to serve to funnel money out of America - all the while telling Americans that buy buying the foreign products, US manufacturers will soon have to imitate them and everything will be hunky-dory. When, in reality, the money that goes out of the country seldom comes back and the US manufacturers cut wages and jobs as their BRAND Y widget was given the shaft by CR. If they do imitate BRAND X, it will always be just that - an imitation. So whatever was great and unique about BRAND Y will be flushed away over time. (Just look at US car companies to see why product imitation is corporate suicide)

Wages will be lost, plants will close, companies will merge - all because some CR type folks try to redirect the previously random flow of money in the marketplace.

It's not a matter of getting hypnotized by some group, rather its the whole mass-media process that is actually subversive to the "good of the collective"

;-)