Libertarians practicing Klein's "Shock Doctrine"

Want to know how much we can trust the Wall Street Banks who are screaming that new regulations will hurt their profits?? Here's what they did after Republican Senator Phil Gramm got the bill passed to eliminate the Glass-Steagall Act and remove most regulations from American banking.

During a little-noticed hearing this week in Sacramento, Calif., a firm hired by Wall Street to analyze mortgages given to borrowers with poor credit, which were then packaged and sold to investors during the boom years, revealed that as much as 28 percent of those loans failed to meet basic underwriting standards -- and Wall Street knew all along.

Worse, when the firm flagged those loans for potential issues, Wall Street banks ignored its recommendation nearly half the time and likely purchased those loans anyway -- selling them to unwitting investors who were never told that the biggest home loan due diligence firm in the country had found potential defects in these mortgages.

[Source Shanien Nasiripour, Business Reporter at the Huffington Post]

The free market politicians like Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul claim that the solution to the current Great Recession is to remove the regulations from businesses - including Wall Street banks. But the current Great recession is the direct result of Wall Street Bank chicanery which was permitted by the SEC, the Federal Reserve under the Libertarian Alan Greenspan and the free market proponents who passed the bills requiring deregulation.

Current Libertarian politicians are funded in large part by the billionaire Libertarian Koch brothers Charles and David. They send a lot of their money to the tea baggers like Sharron Angle (Nevada) and Jim Miller (Alaska) who won the nomination in Alaska because of a last minute sudden contribution of $600,000 of tea party money. The money is often distributed by the libertarian politician Dick Armey through his organization Freedom Works.

The current attacks on American government by the libertarian movement are an effort to concentrate power in America within a few very wealthy families. The Koch brothers are spending a great deal of money this election cycle to obtain that control. The most obvious example of this is the insurgent tea party movements, a supposed grass-roots movement carefully left leaderless so that the money provided by the libertarian billionaires can influence the movement and the media which credulously reports on their antics.

FOX News, owned by the billionaire Rupert Murdoch (the beneficiary of another inherited fortune), is part this effort. Ask who funded the many busses that were used to ship tea party individuals to Glenn Beck's Washington Monument August 28th rally.

There really is a lot going on in this election. The big pressure is the unemployment rate which remains stubbornly just below 10%. It is the direct result of earlier Libertarian free market policies that let Wall Street run wild and sell financial garbage, causing first the housing bubble and then the Great Recession. But now voters feel only the pain of the recession and don't see the government helping them. That it's the banks and private industry that caused the problem and who are not helping seems to escape the attention of the voters, probably because the voters can't vote on wealthy libertarians or on the Wall Street banks.

The result is that the Libertarians who have created the current economic and political mess are attempting to practice what Naomi Klein called Shock Doctrine. Make things bad for everyone and when they are at their worst, some group attempts to take control of the government and change the rules of the economy to favor themselves.

Will it work this election?

A month from now we'll have a better idea.

America is blind to reality - that's the reason why the recent decade has been so bad

SusanG reviews two extremely revealing books. The stories are frightening.

First is Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon by A.J. Rossmiller. Rosmiller was an analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency. He describes being sent to Iraq where he develops intelligence on the bad guys and hands it off to the troops who go out to pick them up. When the identified bad guys aren't there, the troops pick up anyone in the area. Those innocent individuals were then sent to abu Ghraib on the assumption that the Intelligence people and MPs at the prison would sort out the innocents from the bad guys. But at the prison, the assumption was that everyone who was sent to then was automatically guilty. The best intelligence he would send to the consumers would be kicked back by his supervisors as too pessimistic. They were looking for happy talk that agreed with their bias, not real Intelligence. Rossmiller finally quit and has now written this expose.

The second book is So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits, and the President Failed on Iraq by Greg Mitchell. Mitchell is the editor of the publishing industry's magazine, Editor & Publisher. He describes an American media that, like Rossmiller's DIA, has been going along to get along and publishing happy talk news when the truth is too harsh and negative to face. The result is an ignorant American public which gets angry when someone tries to tell them something different from what they believe. The Editors then cater to the ignorant Yahoos instead of informing them (ensuring their continued ignorance), while also rejecting all criticism of their work as coming from ignorant Yahoos. The book is a collection of six years of Gregg's columns with introductions that describe the actual situation at the time the rotten news he castigates was published.

Since 9/11 America has been flying blind. Our military forces in Iraq are afraid to look at the reality they are operating in, probably because their political masters have carefully promoted only those military officers who tell them what they want to hear. those compliant officers have institutionalized rejection of harsh truths that do not confirm the leader's beliefs. Here at home the Media has performed a similar form of self-blinding to meet the desires of the Republican Party who depends on public ignorance if they are to remain power.

The conservative Republicans cannot remain in power unless the American public is frightened and ignorant, and with control over the White House and Congress they have been able to ensure that those conditions existed. But it appears that the Republicans have swallowed their own blinding Kool-aide. A government that fakes its Intelligence cannot operate effectively in reality, which explains the Katrina disaster and the almost total failure of Republican governance. With FOX News, the Washington Times, and a totally encompassing set of propaganda outlets masquerading as News outlets they have been able to fool the American public for the last six years, but it is beginning to unravel.

The current economic situation, being spun by, among others, our illustrious President as "not a recession and not likely to become one", is another example. This comes from the guy who is so unaware of reality that he does not know that the price of gasoline is approaching $4.00 per gallon. The government does not recognize reality because they have the best experts pumping out happy talk instead of real analysis. I would not be surprised to find out that they have been "cooking" the economic data that the federal government publishes, at least around the edges. That would make the economic reports we all depend on to tell us how the Macro economy is performing little more than the same economic happy talk the financial sales people and the politicians have been feeding us.

Napoleon warned against the General who lost contact with his enemy. Such a general, operating blind, can expect to be defeated. America is in much the same situation right now. Our political leaders are unaware that accurate bad news is completely superior to inaccurate news that confirms what they want to believe, so they manipulate the news - the Intelligence - they are given. They have lost contact with reality.

Those two books SusanG reviewed are efforts to make reality impinge on the rest of us.

Narrative - why it matters

Here is an interesting story of how narrative drives political actions.

Earlier this week on NPR, I heard a man-on-the-street segment about the current election cycle featuring three Southern women, two Texans, one a former New Orleans resident who left after Katrina.

The first woman is an assistant manager in a store somewhere in Texas. She sounded bone-weary about both politics and life. When the interviewer asked what national issues she followed most, she said that she just keeps her head down and tries to keep her family afloat, that all that stuff is beyond her. But when she was asked a bit later about what she’d find attractive about a presidential candidate, she very forcefully turned to the issue of illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants, she said, are what has made it difficult for Americans like herself to access welfare and health care. The interviewer pointed out that illegal immigrants usually don’t make use of welfare or unemployment compensation, but the woman shrugged that off. Her resentments were deeper: she sees people that she’s sure are illegal immigrants driving by in nice cars and they seem far better off than she is. She’s struggling just to keep afloat, she’s had to give up health insurance for her children because it’s unaffordable. Her answer to the mystery of how people around her seem better off is that government has something to do with it but in a deep and enigmatic way, and that she’s looking for the candidate who will admit to it, who will mirror her structure of feeling, long before she’s looking for some highly concretized solution. [Snip]

That woman in Texas is probably not a Democratic voter regardless of whom the candidate is. Her key issue maybe ought to be health care reform, but she’s enmeshed in another kind of narrative, one where racial resentment, among other things, is lurking very powerfully just underneath the surface. But even that is a layer covering the real depths. What I heard listening to her was someone who basically thinks that she’s in a hopeless place because some great engine is churning mysteriously in the depths of history, that life is just bad now.

The real problem as far as that woman is concerned is

that life is changing, that the changes are mysterious, that power lies somewhere far away from where the speaker exists, and that they don’t believe that there’s much to be done about it.

The Liberals have been offering plans and programs that are intended to solve that woman's problems, but they all come down to one thing as far as she knows. She is currently fucked, things aren't getting better, and they won't get any better, and the only thing the Liberals offer is "I'm and expert. Trust Me." and she doesn't, because the experts in the past said the same damned thing, and look how THAT turned out.

The Conservatives offer a narrative that "explains" why her life is so difficult. It's simple. All the illegal immigrants are coming over the border and using up the resources. That's why she can't get any. The narrative is simply, it's understandable, and - Hey! It still won't change anything, but that lady understands what is happening to her, and nothing is going to change anyway. At least she has someone to blame.

I'd say that the same thing that drives this woman to the narrative "It's all about the illegal immigrants." will also drive her to find a leader who promises that if she will join him, things will get better because he understands her and her problems. That would fit right in with the idea that she is looking for someone who can mirror the structure of her feelings.

That structure is found in the narrative she accepts as explanation. As Mark Kleiman pointed out in his post that directed me to this one, The answer as far as that woman is concerned could just as well be that "Witches cause the problems."

She'll ignore the expert who says "Trust me." because that does not mirror her feelings the way the narrative she has accepted does.

Lieberman planned strategy with the Republicans

Sen. Lieberman knows who his friends are - and they aren't Democrats. From CQPolitics.Com:

Lieberman has taken his alliance with GOP leaders up a notch. During the abortive debate on the defense authorization bill, he attended daily tactical sessions to help them plan their strategy for combatting anti-war amendments and their rhetorical points for use against the Democrats. And in a fitting symbolic twist, some of those meetings convened just down the hall from the office of Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who essentially owes his 51-seat majority to Lieberman’s continued caucusing with the Democrats.

Before the Democrats realized they could not break a GOP filibuster and set aside their anti-war crusade last week, the meetings were the main forum for developing the GOP counterpunching strategy. For example, the group — which typically included GOP leaders such as Minority Whip Trent Lott of Mississippi and prominent supporters of the war such as John McCain of Arizona — decided to highlight a Lieberman amendment that would have required the administration to report on Iranian support for attacks against coalition forces in Iraq.

Lieberman presented it as a consensus proposal. “Whether you are for or against the war,” he said on the floor, “I hope we can all find common ground in making this statement.” They almost could: It was adopted, 97-0. But Republicans immediately sought to put Democrats on the defensive. At a news conference with Lieberman and GOP leaders, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham said, “If you believe that everything in Sen. Lieberman’s amendment is true, how could you engage in a strategy that would at the end of the day allow Iran to be successful?”

Joe better enjoy his popularity now. Next election there are 22 Republican Senate seats and only 11 Democratic ones up for election. Odds are that the Democrats will gain an increased margin in the Senate. Joe is a known backstabber. The Democrats are going to have nothing to do with him, and the Republicans aren't likely to trust someone who practices backstabbing as a way of life.

Joe has about 18 more months of popularity. After that he is going to be a very lonely man. Maybe the traitor Bob Novak will still be around to interview him.