Arthur Silber lectures us to no avail about Reality and it's Unpopularity

September 23, 2008

Studies in Conformity, Generating Consensus, and Why You Are Not Adults

The superficiality and triviality of our public debates reveal themselves in many ways. I've discussed the mechanisms involved in numerous essays. The response to the current economic crisis, including the response to the "solutions" proposed, presents one of those mechanisms in stark, unforgiving terms.

Insofar as the economic crisis is concerned, I will remind you of the relevant context in exceedingly brief terms. In my rude post the other day, I emphasized that the fundamental flaw in all the "solutions" offered is that those solutions are offered to "fix" a problem that cannot be fixed. To understand this basic point, you require only three sentences from Mike Whitney's analysis. Here they are:

This cycle [in the market] will persist until the bad debts are accounted for and written off or until the exhausted dollar-system collapses altogether.

And:

In truth, there is no fix for a deleveraging market any more than there is a fix for gravity. The belief that massive debts and insolvency can be erased by increasing liquidity just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of economics.

This is the truth that almost no one will accept.

Denial of the truth envelops our culture like a suffocating fog. People desperately need to understand the consequences of denial of this kind. It is profoundly damaging, and it kills. I have written at length abour our national narcissism, and how that narcissism allows us to deny the immense crime the U.S. government has committed in Iraq. You would think the fact that our government has murdered well in excess of one million innocent people would be front page news every day. Of course, you would be wrong. You might prefer to believe that, since the murder continues as I write this, as it will continue tomorrow and for years to come, there might be one or two decent and humane individuals in Washington who are working ceaselessly to make the slaughter stop. And you might like to think that many Americans would be outraged that our military continues to occupy a nation that we have entirely destroyed, and that Americans would demand that the destruction and death cease immediately.

About all of that, you are terribly, grievously wrong. Most Americans can't be bothered about any of that. Most Americans simply do not care.

The denial extends far beyond the deaths of innocents, although that alone is unbearable to contemplate. Except for stories offered now and then, our media and most Americans similarly cannot be bothered with the lifelong damage caused to American soldiers. Sometimes, that denial leads those soldiers to kill themselves. Most Americans don't care. We don't want to hear about pain of this kind. It upsets us and makes us uncomfortable. I have indicated why you should be prepared to feel upset and uncomfortable about such matters -- see "Let the Victims Speak" -- and why that should be a minimal requirement for a semi-humane society. In a better world, this would not be a difficult test to pass. We fail it miserably.

These are among the reasons for my admonition at the conclusion of an essay I wrote a year and a half ago: "The Elites Who Rule Us." That article discussed in detail why most people are unable to grasp the reality of our ruling class, the makeup of our ruling elite, and the ways in which the ruling class exercises its control. At the end of that lengthy analysis, I wrote:

I suppose I could briefly summarize the argument in the following manner: Grow up. Be adults about this. And for God's sake, be serious.

With very rare exceptions, my plea fell and continues to fall on ears made deaf by choice, on minds that absolutely refuse to consider matters that cause them distress beyond a fleeting moment of slight discomfort. Americans agonize over who will win a ridiculous television show contest, yet they refuse to consider the ways in which they permit the bodies of innocent human beings to be ripped apart every day, just as they refuse to reach out to those whose souls have been damaged beyond repair. Yet I will continue to make my plea, for until we become adults, we will remain mired in the patterns of thought and the immense destructiveness that threaten to rip our world apart once and for all.

The fact that most Americans refuse to grow up and be adults has many results. One of them is critically relevant here: most Americans will not accept that actions have consequences, and that those consequences are sometimes irrevocable. Your prayers will not restore over a million slaughtered Iraqis to life. Your wishes will not instantaneously erase the horrifying memories that make an American soldier unable to sleep, incapable of holding a job, and that make him a stranger to his own family. There are times when our actions lead to results that cannot be undone.

For the moment, I will continue to adopt terms that are commonly used about this phenomenon, although I will refashion them for my own purposes and make them accurate. People often accuse adults who act in the manner I have described as "children." Please note that this is profoundly wrong. It certainly does not describe healthy children. If children are treated with genuine respect and compassion, if they are regarded as full human beings in their own right, they will treat themselves and others with respect and compassion. Almost no parents treat their children in this manner, a subject I have discussed in great detail in my Alice Miller essays, and one I will discuss still further in my new tribalism series.

When people say adults behave and think like children, what they more properly mean is that they behave and think like children who are profoundly damaged -- children who are already made emotionally numb by the typical kind of emotional abuse to which most children are subjected many times a day, children who have been forced to deny their own pain simply to survive, and who are therefore unable to grasp the pain of others. Most adults were once such children; one of the ways the damage reveals itself when they become adults is the denial described above and in many of my articles.

Many children believe that "wishing will make it so," just as they believe that there are no consequences for their actions that cannot be undone. But again, children who believe this are those children who are already damaged. Healthy children do not think in this manner. But most of us were greatly damaged as children, and most of us deny what ought to be unavoidable truths because we learned to do this in our earliest years of life.

Read the three sentences at the beginning about the irrevocable economic consequences now playing out again. These are not difficult ideas. Yet most Americans -- and our entire governing class and almost all commentators and bloggers -- refuse to grasp them. It is as if these ideas are written in a dead language. Certainly, the language is dead to them, for they have made themselves incapable of understanding it. To recognize a truth of this kind threatens the mechanism of denial that lies at the very center of their sense of themselves, at the very center of their identity. So the truth cannot be acknowledged.

To return to the economic crisis in particular, I first repeat the single most important point: the consequences we are now seeing are irrevocable and unavoidable. The bad debts must be accounted for and written off. A problem of massive bad debts and insolvency is not a problem of liquidity. This truth means one thing in terms of the "solutions" proposed: a massive bailout of insolvent financial institutions which includes keeping the bad debts in the system still longer is precisely the wrong action to take. It will not solve the problem, for this problem cannot be solved. But it will accomplish one goal: it will postpone the problem to another day, and it will make the problem worse, and it will cause still greater damage.

Do you know of a single government program that has not exceeded its original estimated cost? It is ridiculous to believe that this proposal will cost $700 billion. When all is said and done, as you will see only a few commentators acknowledge, this program will cost well in excess of one trillion dollars. On top of the national debt that already exists, what do you think this will do to the American economy for decades to come? One of the arguments in my post the other day can be expressed another way. Note how the debate has shifted: we are not debating whether this bailout should occur. We are debating in precisely what manner the bailout should occur. In other words: the only debate that should be occurring has already been consigned to history.

Here are some additional details that confirm the accuracy of arguments I have previously made. Note these passages from the Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration and the Democratic Congress inched closer to agreement on a $700 billion plan to rescue troubled financial firms, with the Treasury making most of the concessions amid an increasing backlash from a range of economists and lawmakers.

The administration agreed to allow tougher oversight over the cleanup and provide fresh assistance to homeowners facing foreclosure, two Democratic priorities. In addition, negotiators neared agreement on allowing the government to take equity stakes in certain companies that participate in the rescue.

...

One broad area of agreement involves congressional oversight. Rep. Frank said the Treasury agreed to an independent board to monitor the bailout and report on its progress to Congress and the public. The board wouldn't have authority to veto Treasury investment decisions, and the bailout's launch wouldn't be delayed while a board was being put in place.

Compare this to what I wrote the other day:

At this point, does anyone believe "strings" or "oversight" are worth a goddamned thing? Let me remind you of something that no Democrats and none of their defenders wants to be reminded of: the Iraq catastrophe. The Democrats have had the biggest "oversight" mechanism in the world -- or to be precise, in the Constitution -- since early 2007. The Democrats could have cut off all funding for this criminal war and occupation. They will not do it.

They could have impeached Bush, Cheney and several more of the leading criminals. They will not do it.

Add in the pattern the Democrats followed in the FISA debacle, with regard to the Military Commissions Act, and on a host of other questions, and you see what the Democratic opposition is worth. In a word: nothing.

Add in this: everyone, including every Democrat, now agrees that this is a "crisis" requiring action yesterday. Paulson, the Treasury Department, and the other players will have to be able to act immediately, and to act on a massive scale. And they'll get all that -- but with some "oversight." How long will it be until the "oversight" catches up to what these criminals have done, if it ever does? After the fact, will the oversight mechanisms be able to reverse the actions of Paulson and others? What will be the additional costs of having to reverse some/most of those actions after the fact, if it can even be done?

Given the record amassed by this administration -- and given the record amassed by the most pathetic Democratic Congress ever imagined in this or any other world -- "oversight" and "safeguards" aren't worth shit.

You may view this as expressed in an unspeakably rude manner. The fact remains that it is accurate in every detail.

The same fundamental problem will be found in Dodd's proposal. Indeed, the problem is announced at the very beginning: "TITLE I - Authorizing the Treasury Department to Buy Mortgage-Related Assets." Why is Dodd proposing to authorize anyone to buy mortgage-related assets? That is exactly what must not be done, especially in a massive amount and with taxpayers' money.

Dodd's plan is no better with regard to "oversight"; see Section 4 (among other provisions: "The Emergency Oversight Board shall meet 2 weeks after the first exercise of the purchase authority of the Secretary under this Act and monthly thereafter." Yeah, that should do it.). In addition to the fact that the centerpiece of Dodd's proposal is the one action that should not be taken and that will do nothing to "solve" an insoluble problem, is its gross immorality: presenting the bill to American taxpayers who had nothing to do with creating this crisis. And yet, even Paul Krugman claims that Dodd's proposal is "a big improvement over Paulson's plan." Note the language:

The key feature, I believe, is the equity participation: if Treasury buys assets, it gets warrants that can be converted into equity if the price of the purchased assets falls. This both guarantees against a pure bailout of the financial firms, and opens the door to a real infusion of capital, if that becomes necessary — and I think it will.

So it's not "a pure bailout" -- but it's still a bailout, paid for with money extorted from American taxpayers.

In other words, Krugman insists that we solve a problem that cannot be solved -- but that we do it more "efficiently" and "competently." This is precisely the argument that Democrats, liberals and progressives always make -- even with regard to momentous war crimes like the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In still other words: they concede the basic terms of the argument, and argue only over the specific implementation. And then they pretend to wonder why they keep losing the argument. Here's a clue: they keep losing the argument because they never engage it. If Krugman and the many others like him have their way, the immorality and the futility will continue, in economic policy, in foreign policy and in every other area -- but the immorality and futility will be carried out more "efficiently."

It's downright inspiring, that's what it is.

Take a look at a description of the famous Asch experiment in social conformity. Another simple test, as simple as recognizing that certain consequences are unavoidable should be. Yet many people got it wrong. You know perfectly well why they got it wrong:

To Asch's surprise, 37 of the 50 subjects conformed to the majority at least once, and 14 of them conformed on more than 6 of the 12 trials. When faced with a unanimous wrong answer by the other group members, the mean subject conformed on 4 of the 12 trials. Asch was disturbed by these results: "The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct."

Why did the subjects conform so readily? When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought "peculiar." A few of them said that they really did believe the group's answers were correct.

Asch conducted a revised version of his experiment to find out whether the subjects truly did not believe their incorrect answers. When they were permitted to write down their answers after hearing the answers of others, their level of conformity declined to about one third what it had been in the original experiment.

Apparently, people conform for two main reasons: because they want to be liked by the group and because they believe the group is better informed than they are.

The pathetic truth is that most people fear genuine independence more than they fear death itself. So desperate are they for "acceptance" and so fearful of being thought "peculiar," they will deny the evidence of their own eyes and mindlessly repeat the lies and ignorance of others. When it comes to a subject like economics or foreign policy, they think: "Oh, that's so hard! I can't understand that. I'll just listen to what the 'experts' say. They know best."

If events of the last seven years have demonstrated nothing else at all, they should have made absolutely clear that "experts" are often the very last people you should look to for guidance. The experts are precisely those people most likely to repeat "conventional wisdom," that is, the views accepted by the ruling class -- because, by virtue of the fact that they are regarded as experts, they are part of the ruling class.

And now we see it all again. The bailout will be made. You, your children, your grandchildren and their children will pay for it for endless decades to come -- all because there is no brave child to say the emperor is naked. There is certainly no courageous adult like Robert La Follette. We argue over details, but the only argument that matters was concluded before it was begun.

And so, still one more time, I repeat my plea:

Grow up. Be adults about this. And for God's sake, be serious.

posted by Arthur Silber at 11:38 AM

Arthur Silber: The Vampire, Struck by Sunlight

That quote from Arthur Silber in my previous post inspires me to post the whole thing. Is this a bit indulgent? Perhaps a bit redundant? I don't think so....




Arthur Silber:

September 15, 2008

Simplicity and directness would appear to be advisable, as we are all buried in a torrent of irrelevancies, self-justifications, explanations which explain nothing and serve only to confuse everyone (which is precisely their aim), and an unending stream of lies and half-truths. Perhaps it would be easier to think of it in the following terms, for vampire stories are very popular. The economy of the United States is disintegrating in the same way a vampire does when exposed to sunlight, and for the same reason. Having sucked the blood out of all the living creatures unfortunate enough to be nearby, the vampire becomes intoxicated with what he perceives as his own power. Heedless of the warnings screamed at him from the few sane voices that remain, the vampire frolics and gambols long past the appointed time for his return to the soil of reality, so drunk is he on the glory of his being. The sun has been slowly rising for quite a while. Anyone who is looking can see it. Anyone who knows the relevant facts is fully aware of what will happen when the sun's rays strike the vampire. But almost no one is looking at the sun, and anyone who states the relevant facts is ignored. Finally and now inevitably, the sun strikes the vampire. Within minutes, the vampire no longer exists. This is not a surprise. This is what happens -- this is the only thing that happens -- in these circumstances, given the nature and characteristics of the sun and the vampire. Here are a few simple principles to keep in mind. Given the propaganda spewed by the ruling class, all of which is eagerly gulped down by most Americans, I should rephrase that: here are a few simple principles to understand, perhaps for the first time. One: You can't get something from nothing. Didn't your parents teach you this when you were four or five? Did you forget it? Or perhaps you never actually believed it. After all, most people want to believe they will win the big lottery. Fools, that's what they are. If the description applies to you, put that shoe on, sister or brother.

Mike Whitney:

The funny thing about capitalism is that you need capital to play. When the bank-vault is full of nothing but worthless mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and overvalued junk bonds; the whole thing goes belly-up fast. That appears to be the case with Lehman Bros, the century-old Wall Street warhorse that has joined the long procession of underwater banking establishments now hurtling towards the cliff. Lehman had a great go of it during the boom times when all it took to make oodles of money was a predictable flood of low interest credit from the Fed and a compliant ratings agency that would stamp every crappy securitized pool of mortgages with a big Triple A before hawking it to some gullible investor in Shanghai or Heidelberg.

Lehman travails are not much different from anyone else in the banking fraternity. The problem is that the entire system is under-capitalized and over-leveraged. When Bear Stearns went down last year, it was levered at a ratio of 26 to 1. When Hedgie Carlyle Capital blew up, it was levered at 32 to 1. And when Fannie and Freddie were finally taken over by the US Treasury; the two behemoths were levered at 80 to 1, which is to say that they had a one dollar capital cushion for every $80 they had loaned out.

A major part (perhaps the major part) of the U.S. economy has treated debts as assets for a long time. The best and brightest made it appear sophisticated and smart: they took debts and securitized them, chopped them up, repackaged them, recombined them, splintered them some more, repackaged and sold those, and on and on it went. This process doesn't turn nothing into something: it spreads the nothing among more and more institutions and makes the entire system increasingly vulnerable. Everyone pretends that the nothing is backed by something, but it isn't. To be more precise, as in the case of Fannie and Freddie, for example, there is $1 of something for every $80 of nothing. In fact, there's much more nothing, when you add in the repackaging, recombining, splintering, selling and reselling. That's a lot of nothing, and almost no something. This is how con games work. Your parents probably explained this to you, many years ago. You forgot, or you didn't believe it. Believe it now. Two: You, the "ordinary" American, are the one who finally pays for all of this. You are the ultimate sucker. My only criticism of Whitney's latest article is that he buries the most critical sentence in the middle of a longer explanation:

Keep in mind, the biggest source of American power is its access to cheap capital via the US taxpayer.

Read that sentence again. Once more. Again. One more time. You pay for all the depredations of empire: for the endless criminal wars of aggression abroad, and for the feast of the vampires here at home. It's your blood that kept them going all this time -- and it's your blood that will still keep them going. The ruling class rigged the game a century ago. Short of leaving the country or dropping out of the system altogether, you can't go somewhere else. There isn't anywhere else to go. The system is designed by and for the benefit of the ruling class, and for no one else. Now look at that sentence in the context of the longer passage:

When the net foreign purchases of US financial assets begin to slow; the game is over. The Fed will be forced to raise interest rates to attract foreign capital which will put downward pressure on the economy and accelerate the housing crash. Paulson's decision to provide unlimited capital to Fannie and Freddie, will stack more and more debt atop the faltering dollar and US Treasuries. It is the equivalent of lashing the greenback to an anvil and tossing it overboard. Paulson's attempts to stave off a systemic banking crisis ensures that the federal government will undergo an unprecedented funding crisis sometime in the near future. There will be higher taxes for the battered middle class and higher interest rates for businesses and consumers. This will trigger a protracted economic slowdown and weaker growth. Credit will get tighter, banks will default, unemployment will soar and GDP will shrivel. A negative feedback loop will develop from the faltering financial system to the real economy; a vicious circle ending in massive layoffs, weakening demand, falling stock prices, and withering consumer confidence. Welcome to Soup kitchen USA.

Presently, Paulson and New York Fed chief Timothy Geithner are pressing Wall Street banking elites to pony-up enough money to buy up Lehman's devalued real estate assets. The Fed's proposal is similar to Greenspan's rescue of Long-Term Management LP (LTCM) which roiled financial markets in the late 1990s. Paulson has signaled that there be NO government bailout like Bear Stearns when the Fed bought up $29 billion in mortgage-related assets. The Fed is tapped out, having already committed half of its balance sheet -- nearly $500 billion -- in repos through its "auction facilities" which have recently skyrocketed to record highs of $19 billion per week for the last 3 weeks. The crisis is deepening by the day. Similarly, the Treasury has hitched its wagon to Fannie and Freddie which expands the National Debt by another $5.2 trillion and seriously undermines the "full faith and credit" of the US in the process. Keep in mind, the biggest source of American power is its access to cheap capital via the US taxpayer. Paulson has now put that source of revenue at risk by nationalizing the housing industry and burdening the taxpayer with (potentially) astronomical future obligations, even though he knows full-well that the market could drop another 15 to 20 per cent before the end of 2010. Paulson's recklessness has doomed the country to years of struggle

You've been conned, and the con is killing you and everyone you know. Whatcha gonna do about it? Not a damned thing, that's what. Three: As with every other crisis, the ruling class, which created the crisis in the first place, will tell us how to "solve" it. As I wrote in, "Psst -- While You Were Gibbering, the Ruling Class Rigged the Game and Won Everything":

This election campaign will be especially awful for anyone still capable of the most minimal kind of rigorous thought, in significant part because we have the triple- or quadruple-twist of the Obama lies on top of all the lies that are regularly trotted out every four years (and on a lesser scale, every two). We are told about how "important" it is that we vote -- although for many of us (including me, since I live in California), our votes are altogether meaningless on the presidential level, to say nothing of newer voting methods, which make one wonder if all of this is nothing but a charade for idiots -- and we are told of the glories of "participatory democracy" and how splendiferous it is to hear "the people's voice."

These are the idiotically empty cliches and slogans of our civic religion, which serve to drug "the people" into apathy, into granting the ruling class still more power, into taking part in these vacuous exercises in "democracy," and into colluding in a massive coverup of the truth of what has transpired over more than a century and is now set in stone: this is government of the ruling class, by the ruling class, and for the ruling class. Barring severe economic collapse (more than possible), widespread global war (also more than possible), repeated natural catastrophes (similarly more than possible), it shall not perish from the earth -- until it implodes as the result of its own rot and corruption, as have all similar systems in the past. Assuming disasters on a massive scale don't occur, it's probably here for your lifetime at least.

...

This amalgamation of major business interests with state power, this system of oligopoly and governance of, by and for the ruling class, has metastasized beyond imagining since the Progressive era. It has expanded in every direction and subsumed virtually every industry and business in America, large and small. It is this system of "political capitalism" that dictates domestic and foreign policy, including a foreign policy of endless war, preparation for war, and various forms of "cleaning up" after war. You the ordinary citizen, you "the people," figure nowhere in this -- except to provide the necessary labor and, when required, your blood and your life.

...

[T]his "transformation of the American political narrative" was essentially completed during and immediately following the Progressive era, and then enshrined by the New Deal and World War II. We were fucked a very long time ago. What's tragic is that it is only now that a few more people are beginning to notice -- and even now, it is still only a very few additional people. These are truths that no politician will tell you, and that almost no commentators or bloggers will mention. Lies are what sustain you, lies are what you live on, lies are what you demand, and lies are what you'll get and all you'll get. If you keep this up, the lies without end will kill you, and a lot of other people as well.

Those people who have followed the foreign policy catastrophes of recent years are repeatedly struck by this phenomenon: all the "experts" who are supposedly so knowledgeable in this area -- that is, all the "experts" who led us into the catastrophes and who were grievously, bloodily, murderously wrong about every significant matter -- remain entrenched in the foreign policy establishment. Moreover, they are precisely the people to whom everyone turns for the "solution" to the disasters that engulf us, both now and the disasters likely to come. This is what it means to have a ruling class. As I have said, the ruling class rules. The ruling class exercises a lethal monopoly on the terms of public debate, just as it exercises a lethal monopoly on the uses of state power. What you have seen over the last six months and more, and what you will see in the coming months and years, is the same phenomenon in the realm of economic policy. All of the solons who led us into this abyss of mounting debt, worthless securities, failing financial institutions, economic contraction and collapse, rising taxation, and all the rest, will now instruct us as to how we should "solve" the crisis that they have created. The crisis may be ameliorated to a degree, and the worst of the consequences may be postponed for a while. But whatever "solutions" are implemented, whatever reorganization and reregulation is imposed, it will all be done in accordance with the ruling class's desires and goals. It will all be to protect their own wealth and power to whatever extent is possible, and to expand their wealth and power still more, if that remains at all feasible. And it probably will be feasible: your taxes can increase. They can increase a lot. You still have some blood that can be drained. And/or, if Obama is elected, you can look for his adoration of "voluntary" service to switch seamlessly to mandatory service very quickly, especially if the crisis deepens sufficiently. Almost no one will complain. Almost no one will remember the bloody history of those past regimes, of both left and right, that relied on mandatory national service. The ruling class is the state. The state exists to serve the interests of the ruling class, and only the interests of the ruling class. They may promise you greater unemployment benefits, better health care, and a host of other government benefits -- all benefits also paid for by you, please note (the ruling class does have a sense of humor, after all; vampires are often crudely funny creatures) -- and those promises will cause most Americans to fall for the con still one more time. Whatcha gonna do? Not a goddamned thing. Vote for McCain! Vote for Obama! It doesn't matter. The ruling class wins either way. The ruling class always wins. That's how the system was designed, and that's how it works. For the ruling class, it works very admirably. Whatcha gonna do? Laugh. Laugh a lot. Fuck the bastards.

Chris Floyd explains the irony of finding all that money that could have been used to rebuild the country, just in time to bail out the rich

Chris Floyd: Creative Destruction: The Solid Core Behind the Financial Crisis

Fed’s $85 Billion Loan Rescues Insurer (NY Times)

The bailout [of American International Group]... effectively puts taxpayer money at risk while protecting bad investments made by A.I.G. and other institutions it does business with.

Do you get it now? The rich and powerful spend years making foolish deals in a market they rigged with the connivance of utterly corrupted politicians on both sides the aisle; their fraudulent scheme finally collapses, exposing them to some of the most horrific financial losses in history....and YOU will have to pay for it. For generations. Not only directly, with the tax money straight from your pocket, but even more so in the further degradation of national life: infrastructure, services, programs, amenities that will be starved or abandoned as even more of the government's money is poured out to shield the wastrel elite from suffering the consequences of their own rapacious folly.

And with all the talk of a "new Cold War," who knew that it would be Washington and Wall Street, not the Kremlin, who resurrected socialism in the 21st century, in what the Times called "the most radical intervention in private business in the central bank’s history"? Socialism for the rich only, to be sure. Ole Joe "Bankruptcy Bill" Biden and his bipartisan cohorts in Congress have long made sure that any ordinary citizen -- especially the old, the sick, the poor, the most desperate -- will be squeezed to the last drop to pay off their debts, even if these were incurred through illness or misfortune. But for our boardroom Bolsheviki, the state is always there, to cushion and to coddle.

And who knew there was so much money in the federal coffers? Endless, roaring torrents of money available for the ever-expanding operations of the global Terror War (up to $3 trillion for the rape of Iraq alone), and all of this on top of an ever-expanding "regular" military budget that tops half-a-trillion dollars each and every year. And now tens of billions for Bear-Sterns, Fannie Mae, Fannie Mac, A.I.G. and the next fat-cattery to go under. Gosh, you mean all that cash was just lying around under the federal mattress all along?

You mean we could have used some of it for, say, building schools and hospitals, or national health insurance, or rebuilding our globalization-gutted cities, or drug rehab programs, or caring for our elderly, or helping people start businesses, or repairing our rotted infrastructure, or supporting the arts and sciences, or building parks and other "common pleasures, to walk abroad and recreate yourselves"? You mean there has been enough money there all along to help create a more just, equitable, enjoyable and civilized society? Don't that beat all?

[, , ,]

Arthur Silber: the Vampire, Struck by Sunlight
[. . .]
Whatcha gonna do? Not a goddamned thing. Vote for McCain! Vote for Obama! It doesn't matter. The ruling class wins either way. The ruling class always wins. That's how the system was designed, and that's how it works. For the ruling class, it works very admirably.

That last observation by Silber is perhaps the most telling, and frightening of all: despite all the disasters raging around us -- the wars, the atrocities, the tyranny, the economic collapse -- the system is working. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do: serve the rich and powerful, guard and protect them, entrench them in their rule. Just like John McCain says, the system is fundamentally sound.

P.S. And for those who believe that the current conniption somehow presages the collapse of the American empire, please note that the sound system of elite service described above is backed up by the most powerful military machine in the history of the world (including a nuclear arsenal that can obliterate any nation at any time), directed by a militarized state that has never shown the slightest hesitation in using violent force against its own people should they step too far out of line. It's not going to collapse overnight because of a well-cushioned crash on Wall Street or a few botched wars. It still has many miles to go – and much blood yet to spill – before it faces the inevitable axe of history.

You, Too, Can and Should Be an "Intelligence Analyst"

At the end of a long and interesting post, Arthur Silber informs us:

I therefore repeat my major admonition, and give it special emphasis:

NEVER, EVER ARGUE IN TERMS OF INTELLIGENCE AT ALL.

It is always irrelevant to major policy decisions, and such decisions are reached for different reasons altogether. This is true whether the intelligence is correct or not, and it is almost always wrong. On those very rare occasions when intelligence is accurate, it is likely to be disregarded in any case. It will certainly be disregarded if it runs counter to a course to which policymakers are already committed.

The intelligence does not matter. It is primarily used as propaganda, to provide alleged justification to a public that still remains disturbingly gullible and pliable -- and it is used after the fact, to justify decisions that have already been made.

None of these facts and this background are all that difficult to ascertain, if one is committed to finding out the truth. It is a measure of the monolithic, deadly grip that so-called "conventional wisdom" holds on our public discourse that what ought to be regarded as noncontroversial and even obvious truths are transformed into forbidden matters never to be mentioned in "polite" company. And it is entirely remarkable that the intelligence game continues with none of its lethal force spent. As Jim Webb's recent pathetic explanation of his support for the abominable FISA legislation demonstrates, there would appear to be only one value that our politicians refuse to compromise or surrender: their wholehearted, indeed passionate devotion to abject stupidity.

But two can play this game, and the politicians and the "professionals" can be turned into fully deserving losers. As the above indicates, you too can be an "intelligence analyst" -- and you can do it with far more accuracy and insight than those with careers that will be imperiled if they deliver unwelcome news. Make your own judgments based on what is in the public record, as McGovern indicates, and resist the calls to war.

After all, it is members of the public who pay for it all -- and it is members of the public who die for it, too. Let the public decide. It's only just. And perhaps, one day in the future, we finally will have peace.

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Here is another great Silber post from July:

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/07/still-another-call-to-activism-prove-me.html