Violent suppression of labor organizing is a prominent part of American history. Read, for instance, Rick Perlstein's "Before The Storm" about what happened at the Kohler factory in Sheboygan, more recently than the steel strike we're talking about here.
But looking over the fact that the advertising industry is fundamentally about the exploitation of cognitive biases in order to convince folks to buy things that more often than that they do not need just betrays a certain naïveté of what's going on out there.