Factory Farms and Swine Flu

Posted on April 30, 2009 by Lila

I’ve been listening unmoved to all the hysteria about swine flu, feeling skeptical about some of the reporting. There was, after all, a 1976 swine-flu epidemic that never was, according to a piece by Patrick de Justo in Salon.

There’s no clear evidence of how this thing was triggered or how bad it is, but already the government is stocking up from the drug companies. You’ve got to wonder if all the alarmism isn’t just a distraction from the financial shenanigans in DC. And if it will just provide another excuse to clamp down on the population.To wit., the Massachusetts Senate passed a bill on April 28 that would let the public health commissioner “close or evacuate buildings, enter private property for investigations, and quarantine individuals” during an emergency, as well as impose fines of up to$1000 for not complying with public health orders. [Credit to Rady Ananda for providing the link].

Someone, somewhere is making a few bucks off those vaccines – you can be sure of that.

The New Scientist doubts that this is a genetically-engineered virus that was accidentally (or, as some cynics write, purposefully) let loose in the population. Swine-flu might still be man-made, it concedes, but the culprits are more likely to be factory-farms:

(New Scientist):

“Animal vaccines might seem like the answer, but vaccines that do not provide 100% protection can actually make things worse. When there is widespread vaccination, viruses can spread without any visible disease. Ineffective vaccines also create strong selective pressure driving the evolution of new strains that can dodge the immune attack provoked by the vaccine.

Already, attention is turning to the big pig farms in Mexico, and the role they may have played in creating this new strain of swine flu.

The fact is that we still know so little about flu, and what makes it capable of spreading from human to human, means that deliberately engineering a virus of this kind would be a huge challenge. Yes, it’s possible that this virus was created by a mistake at a research laboratory or a vaccine factory.

But by far the most plausible explanation is that this monster is the long-predicted product of our farming system....”

_________________________

Update: Here’s Ron Paul, as usual right on the money, cautioning against the scare-mongering and pointing out that last time around 25 people died of the vaccine, while only 1 person died from the flu itself. And 500 people also developed Guillane Barre syndrome, a serious neurological disorder.

Update: From The Independent, UK:

“Q What defence do we have against swine flu?

A Better than we did against the last pandemics in 1957 and 1968. We have a stockpile of anti-viral drugs – Tamiflu and Relenza – which we did not have then. We also have a pandemic plan, drawn up by the Government since avian flu became a threat in 2003, which sets out what is to be done – from distributing the drugs and setting up helplines to closing schools and banning public events.

Q Has the pandemic plan ever been tested?

A Yes, in one of the biggest emergency planning exercises since the end of the Cold War that took place in 2007. It involved hundreds of health officials across the country.

Q Are there enough anti-viral drugs?

A Not according to the Tories. The Government says it has over 30 million courses of the drugs, enough for half the population. The Tories say this is not enough if family members of an infected person are to be treated prophylactically. In that case, enough drugs to cover three-quarters of the population will be necessary, they say….”

My Comment:

That’s a lot of drugs. And a lot of money for the drug manufacturers. Food for thought…

NY Times Wises Up to Banking Cartel (Update)

Posted on April 27, 2009 by Lila

Finally. The New York Times is on the case.

(About a decade too late. But we’ll take an awakening whenever it comes and wherever, as we’ve said before).

At The Times, criticism of Tim Geithner’s insider status:

“A revolving door has long connected Wall Street and the New York Fed. Mr. Geithner’s predecessors, E. Gerald Corrigan and William J. McDonough, wound up as investment-bank executives. The current president, William C. Dudley, came from Goldman Sachs.

Mr. Geithner followed a different route. An expert in international finance, he served under both Clinton-era Treasury secretaries, Mr. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers. He impressed them with his handling of foreign financial crises in the late 1990s before landing a top job at the International Monetary Fund.

When the New York Fed was looking for a new president, both former secretaries were advisers to the bank’s search committee and supported Mr. Geithner’s candidacy. Mr. Rubin’s seal of approval carried particular weight because he was by then a senior official at Citigroup.”

More at “Geithner, Member and Overseer of Finance Club,” Joe Becker and Gretchen Morgenson.

My Comment:

Here at The Mind-Body Politic, your diligent commentator makes it a point to cite people, even if they don’t reciprocate, so we will note appreciatively that Ms. Morgenson did the leg work that outed Goldman Sachs for its presence at the AIG bail-out (September 30, 2008). She deserves every credit for it.**

But that said, it still remains true that mainstream journalists today are moved less by the need to keep the public informed at the critical time than to bolster their reputations. That is really too bad and it’s why, increasingly, so many people disdain the press. Imagine doctors who watched the patient bleed and didn’t share information about his condition so they could “break” the case for themselves? What sort of professional ethic would that be?

Blogging and writing down intuitions as they occur is the only way of putting valuable information out into the public realm as fast as possible, so as many people can push back from as many angles as possible. That’s the only way to keep up the pressure on public officials. I could not ethically hold back on my insights, just to avoid having other people take them without acknowledgment. You’d think better positioned journalists would act with equal public spirit, especially as they – unlike bloggers – are paid rather well to do so.

Writing critically about Tim Geithner in 2009, after the milk’s been spilled, and when it’s public knowledge is one thing. Much better for the Times to have written about Geithner a few years ago, when it counted.

This is precisely why the reputation of the mainstream media among people who follow such things is a little below that of a loan officer at Fannie Mae.

Update:

Apparently, this piece provoked reaction elsewhere in the blogosphere, with Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism claiming that the piece is too kind to Geithner and Paul Kedrosky finding no smoking gun in all of it. Over at Portfolio.com, Ryan Avent sees it as evidence of Geithner being much less of an establishment figure, much less timid, than people think.

My own sense is that Geithner is more of a scape-goat, a convenient prop to beat up on. It’s the figures behind him, Rubin, Summers, Volker, (and a few others whom I’ll post on later), who are the important players.

As a further aside:

Note this sidebar from The Times (September 28, 2008):

The Reckoning: A Spreading Virus: Articles in the series are exploring the causes of the financial crisis

In the last two years, NRR , The New York Times , and a few other places, have repeatedly used the word “reckoning” for the financial crisis, as well as a a few other terms. They sound strangely reminiscent of my co-author’s very popular newsletter, The Daily Reckoning – well known to DC and NY financial circles. I’ve seen arguments from said missive (as well as from “Mobs”) lifted wholesale….

No one owns words or phrases or ideas. Or leads. There is no monopoly on them. And all writers are only too happy to have people read them, no matter what.

But political journalism is not simply any journalism. It plays a vital part in the creation and preservation of public memory. And that memory, that record, is essential to monitoring the state – which is the role of the fourth estate. Journalistic ethics, which cannot be enforced in the courts alone, demands a degree of personal integrity to function as it should in creating and preserving that record.

With notable exceptions, this integrity is not much in supply any longer.

So, while stoning the banking cartel for its sins, let’s keep a few chunky pebbles for the media cartel.

Footnote:

**[I wrote a piece on AIG and Goldman Sachs the week before Morgenson’s piece. My piece was widely disseminated in the blogosphere (and to members of Congress, I learn from readers) and since Morgenson had never written critically about Goldman’s insider ties with AIG before, I have more than a suspicion she took the lead from that piece — “Lipstick On An AIG” (Counterpunch, September 18-19, 2008)].

PS. I wrote both Morgenson and Jim Pinkerton (who mentioned Morgenson’s story on TV the following weekend), requesting correct attribution. There was no reply.

To the reader who writes to me that such imitation is a form of flattery, I wish….

It has nothing to do with flattery. It’s an attempt to co-opt language. It’s a way of muddying the waters. It’s revisionism. And its goal is to steer your mind the way that opinion-makers (who only voice choices within a carefully vetted spectrum) would have it go. Don’t be misled by the apparent opposition between the left and the corporate class. Communists and capitalists have always colluded when necessary. Certain kinds of capitalists (corporatists) love the state and they love communism — for you.

They know they’re always going to get the perks and privileges of the ruling class, while equality for everyone else makes for a pliable, governable body politic…

Bernanke and Paulson Pressured BOA-Merrill Merger

Posted on April 27, 2009 by Lila

More evidence of behind-the-scenes string-pulling in the banking crisis:

NEW YORK (Reuters) –

Bank of America Corp CEO Kenneth Lewis testified under oath that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pressured him to keep quiet about losses at Merrill Lynch & Co, which the bank was buying, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Testifying before New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in February, Lewis said “it wasn’t up to me” to reveal Merrill’s fourth-quarter losses as they were becoming apparent in December, the newspaper said, citing a deposition transcript.

Shareholders of Merrill and Bank of America voted to approve the merger on December 5, and the transaction closed on January 1. Bank of America subsequently reported that Merrill lost $15.84 billion in the fourth quarter.

At Bank of America’s April 29 annual meeting, shareholders will vote on whether to force Lewis to step down as chairman of the largest U.S. bank or leave its board, because of Merrill and a falling share price…”

IMF: G-20 Fiscal Stimulus On Target

Posted on April 26, 2009 by Lila

In the news:

The IMF says the G-20 fiscal stimulus will reach its 2% target.

Bloomberg reports on the figures spent so far:

“The G-20 countries will spend $820 billion on stimulus measures in 2009, up from a March estimate of $780 billion, and will spend $660 billion in 2010, the fund estimated.

The IMF also revised its forecast for budget deficits in G- 20 countries as a result of fiscal expansion. Today’s report calculates that budget deficits in the G-20 this year will increase by 5.5 percentage points of gross domestic product relative to 2007 and 5.4 percent in 2010. In March, the fund forecast a 4.7 percentage-point rise this year and a 5.1 percentage-point jump next year.

Strauss-Kahn said yesterday that governments should start to discuss “exit strategies” from the emergency spending once the crisis passes.

The fund’s estimate for financial-sector support also increased today to 32.1 percent of GDP, up more than 3 percentage points from the March estimate….”

My Comment (check back for more):

Domininique Strauss-Kahn, a member of the Socialist party and a former finance and economy minister in Lionel Jospin‘s “Plural Left” government became the new managing director of the International Monetary Fund on September 2007, replacing Spain’s Rodrigo de Rato.

Interesting things to note about Strauss-Kahn:

He’s part of the European Council on Foreign Relations, launched in October 2007 (i.e. just after DSK became IMF chief), which in an expression of pan-Europeanism in world affairs. Rubbing shoulders with DSK, according to Source Watch are such notable globalists as George Soros (Chairman of the Open Institute), Stephen Wall (Chairman of the influential PR firm Hill & Knowlton, advisor to Tony Blair), and Timothy Garton Ash (whose influential book, The Magic Lantern, cheered on the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe). Note: Hill & Knowlton was the outfit that concocted the story about Iraqi soldiers killing babies that became a provocation for the 1991 Gulf War.
Strauss-Kahn has been linked to the financial scandal around ELF Aquitaine, a state-owned oil giant through which former President Francois Mitterand allegedly channeled money to Germany’s Christian Democrats. Strauss-Kahn’s wrong-doing was apparently less serious than some of the fraud and corruption with which other French government officials and company heads were charged (including money-laundering, influence peddling, falsification of documents, and bribery)
Money from the ELF oil company, as well as from the Taiwan frigates scandal, passed through “unpublished accounts” at Clearstream Banking, the clearing division of Deutsche Bourse, based in Luxembourg. The ELF affair and the Taiwan frigates scandal were the two major financial scandals that hit France in the 1990s. And in both, Clearstream was a platform for money-laundering and tax evasion.

Mankiw’s Negative Fed Rate Proposal

Posted on April 23, 2009 by Lila

This excerpt from a column on April 18 by Greg Mankiw (“It May be Time for the Fed to Go Negative,” New York Times) has been raising howls in the blogosphere:

“At one of my recent Harvard seminars, a graduate student proposed a clever scheme to [make holding money less attractive].

Imagine that the Fed were to announce that, a year from today, it would pick a digit from zero to 9 out of a hat. All currency with a serial number ending in that digit would no longer be legal tender. Suddenly, the expected return to holding currency would become negative 10 percent.

That move would free the Fed to cut interest rates below zero. People would be delighted to lend money at negative 3 percent, since losing 3 percent is better than losing 10.

Of course, some people might decide that at those rates, they would rather spend the money — for example, by buying a new car. But because expanding aggregate demand is precisely the goal of the interest rate cut, such an incentive isn’t a flaw — it’s a benefit….”

My Comment

I didn’t see this until today because I haven’t followed the economics blogosphere very closely recently. Post-TARP, it’s been awash with all sorts of schemes and proposals built on very flimsy foundations.

The numero uno objection to all of them is the notion that the economy is something that can be manipulated like a board game. It’s not.

Objection two is also obvious and also foundational. Any grand scheme based on taking illegally from someone what they’ve earned honestly (and I think it’s safe to say at least a few people here and there have earned their livings honestly) is morally wrong. What’s morally wrong on an individual level cannot be morally right on a grand scale, even if we allow for all sorts of prudential calculations, reservations about “the public good” and so on.

Objection three is that a crisis caused by excessive borrowing and spending is not plausibly solved by more spending and borrowing.

Objection four is that degrees in economics do not give you an understanding of how proposals might actually work in the real world. That takes common sense and some experience of how human beings actually function and build businesses.

Objection five is that theories are only very nebulous and hazy road maps with no correspondence to the actual terrain underneath. A theory which has never been tried before, let alone produced the results touted, is a very flimsy guide to follow.

Mish Shedlock takes on Mankiw here in more detail but quite unnecessarily, since the proposal is on its face absurd and impracticable.

You can see, however, that on this, the New York Times (ostensibly more left-ish) and the Washington Post (ostensibly more centrist) are both singing from the same page.

In my previous blog post, “Bernays and Citizen Parrot” I cited a Wash Po article, “When You’re Flush But Acting Flat Broke,” by Michael Rosenwald (April 16) that referenced the work of Robert Cialdini, a scholar of marketing. The Post piece was slanted to getting the consumer to go out and spend.

So, keep that in your mind. The two things the establishment wants right now are:

(1) Increased consumer spending

(2) Nationalization of banks

More spending means what? Putting your money (one of the few forms of control you exert over your circumstances) into someone else’s pocket. (I’m not opposed to this if you’ve got plenty saved, are getting a good deal and need what it is you’re buying, but that’s not the kind of savvy spending the powers that be are looking for).

Nationalization means what? Allowing the government to control the people in charge of lending you money…who are also the people holding your savings….who are also the people mainly responsible for getting us into this mess.

Forget all the deep explanations, economics theories, and punditry.

Just focus on those two things. Do they make sense to you right now, right here?

No? I thought not…..

Black Swans and Nationalization: More On Media Memes

Posted on April 22, 2009 by Lila

(This is the second half of the earlier post on Taleb cut and reposted here so as to be more readable)

As I wrote in my earlier post, I agree with everything in Taleb’s list of “black swan proofing” the economy, except two points:

As I see it,

(1) This financial crisis had NOTHING to do with Black Swans (and Taleb himself says so elsewhere, so this piece confuses me).

(2) Nationalization (which he seems to be supporting here…and it may be he has a different understanding of what is involved) is not the the right response, in my opinion.

A Black Swan refers to an unpredictable event. The financial crisis was predicted repeatedly, was completely foreseeable, and was indeed foreseen by Austrian theorists in writings throughout this century.

The financial industry spin doctors (I’m not including Taleb in this group – but I think his writing may be put to that use) have been working overtime to associate this mess with the notion of “black swans,” hence the centrality given to accounts of the blow-up by industry insiders, who have acted as if it were something unforeseeable (Greenspan and others – I’ll find the links).

Why?

Saving face could be one reason. But considering the level of corruption and malfeasance that we’ve seen so far, it’s more likely that the angle is being worked as a diversion from the obvious fact that the whole business seems at least partly engineered.

Equally important: by emphasizing the “unknown risk” angle, the industry also makes more control, regulation and centralization the natural option.

Do you see that?

Taleb is right about risk and Black Swans otherwise.

He’s a very smart guy and he certainly warned a lot about unknown risks and the foolishness of conventional wisdom.But he didn’t give the kind of detailed specific step-by-step account that Austrian economists, journalists, and theorists have done, not just in the last two years but for decades, predicting what would happen once the country went off the gold standard.

My own suspicions about Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do with risk or financial models. They arose from the clear and widespread evidence of fraud oozing in every direction from Goldman Sachs and the rest of the banking cartel, with Fannie and Freddie at the center. It didn’t need rocket science to see that. Just common sense and the ability to see through jive talk. “Don’t dazzle me with bull shit,” as an acquaintance of mine used to say, making up for any lack of metaphoric aptness with dead-on accuracy about human nature.

I’m not knocking Taleb whom I greatly admire. I’m knocking what’s being pushed through his writing.

As I said in an earlier blog post, the whole establishment is for nationalization. The same fellows who drove the bus that just wrecked itself.

Why listen to them?

Stick your fingers into your ears – NO NATIONALIZATION

This is not about ideology. It’s about transparency.

Nationalization in a small, incorrupt, transparent state of Vermonters is one thing.

Nationalization in the American empire, circa 2009, is another. It’s cover for a power grab. The reason it’s being pushed so hurriedly is because something is unraveling and a few too many people are catching on.

Don’t take my word for it.

Ask yourself why one of the savviest investors, Warren Buffett, thinks that the banking industry is on the verge of tremendous profitability.

Buffett has a stake in the banks, of course. But is what he’s saying entirely about chatting up his investment?

Ask yourself why Nouriel Rubini first advocated nationalization as though it were diametrically opposed to the position (private-public partnership) held by Larry Summers and Tim Geithner.

Ask why he didn’t let the public know he was in business with Summers .

Ask why it is that since that business connection was revealed, Roubini has now started saying that “nationalization” can proceed even with “private-public partnership”?

[Note: Roubini’s warning about the economic crash, made in September, 2006 to the IMF doesn’t seem to be available on the IMF site and any links I found on the web didn’t work. The closest I got to the actual speech was a reference at the IMF website in September 2007 to the 2006 speech.

Here’s an extended bio of Rubini at the IMF site that mentions the 2006 speech, but again there are no links.

Rubini’s own site has a link to his September 2007 speech which warns of a hard landing but no 2006 link.

On wiki, as well, there are no links to any 2006 predictions although there is a NY Times interview with Roubini from Sept. 2006 about the housing bubble, where he anticipates a housing bubble burst, with prices down 5-10% in a year in New York and perhaps 20-30% nationally. Honestly, in September 2006, everyone was saying that. Yours truly is on record calling the peak of the housing bubble in July 2005, as you can check from this website. And was much more detailed about it too. And I’m not an economist in the heart of the global financial order like Roubini.

Bottom line, except for this 2006 piece, which is very narrow in scope, limited to the housing bubble and quite modest in its predictions, there really is no other prediction of apocalypse I could find from2006 that would qualify Roubini for the title Dr. Doom, a title that more appropriately belongs to the Asia-based fund manager and commodities guru, Marc Faber, who is an Austrian and who was far more prescient and detailed in his warnings. Again, you have to wonder if the “Doom” moniker wasn’t intentionally applied to Roubini to coopt the libertarian Faber’s argument into the statist Roubini’s policy prescriptions.

Roubini’s cv also rings some alarm bells for me. His thesis adviser was Jeffrey Sachs and Roubini still admires him the most of all his colleagues; he’s worked closely with Larry Summers; he’s been on Clinton’s advisory team at Treasury; he was involved in the Asian crisis; he’s worked in a number of positions at the IMF (which is being pushed as the new global central bank). Now he’s been brought in as “Dr. Doom” (effectively co-opting bearish commentary on the market) and he’s pushing nationalizatio,n like every other establishment figure.

This is not a confidence-builder.

To return to my caveat: why set up nationalization and PPP as as an either/or alternative if they can work as complements?

Either/or is the binary switch which propagandists use to turn individuals into mobs. Scare the public and tell them, either you do this…OR you suffer that.

Either/or provokes people into instinctive responses. It makes them scared or angry. It forces them into flight (panic) or fight (anger).

It’s us or them.

We’re seeing all that now. Some very clever people are pushing those two buttons over and over.

This is one of those snakes and ladders games where you move left, and a green snake swallows you and you’re back on square one.

So you move right and a ladder takes you up four rows and then a green snake swallows you and you’re back on square one.

Solution? Stay where you are and let the snakes sort it out for themselves.

Instead of rooting around for fixes for the problem, we should be investigating the chicanery that led to it, and finding out legal ways to undo or challenge the legislation that gave us TARP etc.

Greenwald Calls Out Right-Wing Amnesiacs

Posted on April 21, 2009 by Lila

From Salon, the tireless Glenn Greenwald calls out the amnesiacs on the right for double standards:

“Conservatives have responded to this disclosure as though they’re on the train to FEMA camps. The Right’s leading political philosopher and intellectual historian, Jonah Goldberg, invokes fellow right-wing giant Ronald Reagan and says: “Here we go Again,” protesting that “this seems so nakedly ideological.” Michelle Malkin, who spent the last eight years cheering on every domestic surveillance and police state program she could find, announces that it’s “Confirmed: The Obama DHS hit job on conservatives is real!” Lead-War-on-Terror-cheerleader Glenn Reynolds warns that DHS – as a result of this report (but not, apparently, anything that happened over the last eight years) – now considers the Constitution to be a “subversive manifesto.” Super Tough Guy Civilization-Warrior Mark Steyn has already concocted an elaborate, detailed martyr fantasy in which his house is surrounded by Obama-dispatched, bomb-wielding federal agents. Malkin’s Hot Air stomps its feet about all “the smears listed in the new DHS warning about ‘right-wing extremism.'”

Amazing chutzpah. Malkin’s, especially, considering that her magnum opus was a celebration of the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, precisely the kind of violation of liberties she’s exercised about now.

No. Libertarians have to wash their hands off the two-party system entirely and admit that both parties are too compromised by their records to pose as civil libertarians and constitutionalists at this hour. Give the mic to the people whose record holds up, please.

Or to anyone else but these folks.

Mexican Gun Trade Is Multicultural, Not American

Posted on April 20, 2009 by Lila

In the news, Obama’s gun stats are cooked, say libertarians.

“ATF Special Agent William Newell tells Fox News that between 2007 and 2008, around 11,000 guns used in Mexican crimes appeared to come from the United States and were submitted to the ATF for tracing. Of those, only 6,000 could be successfully traced. Of those, only 5,114, according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover, were found to have come from the U.S.

Obama’s “90 percent” number refers, not to the percentage of “guns recovered in Mexico,” as Obama claims, but to the “percent of the traced firearms” according to a BATFE spokeswoman.
But Mexican authorities report that in those two years, a total of 29,000 guns were recovered at crime scenes. That means 68 percent of the guns recovered by Mexican police did not even appear to come from the United States.

That means only 5,114 out of 29,000 guns used in Mexican crimes were found to have come from the United States. That figure would be 17 percent, not the 90 percent repeated by Obama.

Further weakening Obama’s case is the fact firearms manufacturers such as Colt legally shipped some of those United States-originated guns into Mexico for permitted uses, such as by the Mexican military.

Research finds most of the guns used by Mexican criminals come from overseas black markets, Russian crime organizations, South America, Asia, Guatemala and even the Mexican army.

“No reasonable person would think Obama didn’t consult the BATFE to get numbers before coming up with his talking points, and this information has been public for over two weeks. Barack Obama chose to intentionally spread fake information because he hopes to use fear to ram his anti-Second Amendment agenda through the Senate,” said Ferguson.

During his term in the Senate, Obama earned an “F” rating from Gunowners of America, as well as the National Rifle Association. …”

More here.

Correction: The actual figure seems more like 35% than 19%, according to FactCheck.org.

My Comment

This doesn’t surprise me at all. As some wag wrote, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics….”

The conventional wisdom is that guns don’t deter crimes; that guns cause violence, that only semi-literate goons believe in self-defense, and that second amendment rights are pushed by a lunatic fringe of bible-thumping, arms-stockpiling David Koresh mutants. Well, whatever Koresh was or wasn’t, the remedy for lunacy, child-molestation, fundamentalism or any of his other sins in the eyes of the Feds was not to incinerate him and scores of human beings, including children.

Which is just what Bill Clinton’s AG Janet Reno did at Waco, Texas, 16 years ago, as Anthony Gregory notes in this article. It was one of the most infamous and pointless crack-downs of federal power on the heads of citizens. The usual line is that the Koresh group deserved to be burned to a crisp since they were cultists and child abusers — this from people who would fight to the death for the right of serial killers to endless appeals.

The second amendment of the Bill of Rights wasn’t meant just for state militias. It was meant for individuals.

And the reasoning behind it was impeccable: weakness invites abuse.

Right now, the citizenry has been all but disarmed.

Any wonder it’s being abused by the government?

Bernays On Citizen Parrot

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Lila

Theory:

“Opinion polls are designed to gauge whether the agitprop of the corporate state is having the desired narcotic effect on the general population. The more the average citizen can parrot back what he has been told by his betters, the more democracy, as defined by the elite, can be preserved.”

– Edward Bernays, the father of modern marketing psychology

Practice:

“When You’re Flush But Acting Flat Broke: Social Cues Can Drive a Downturn” Washington Post, April 16, 2009, is an interesting piece by Michael Rosenwald, which quotes Robert Cialdini on how social influence can make a downturn even worse.

Interestingly, we referenced Cialdini’s enormously useful work in “Mobs, Messiahs and Markets” (Bonner & Rajiva, 2007) in Chapter 4, footnote 14. p.88. I happened on the book purely by chance, but now, reading the Post piece, I’d like to read his other work.

Rosenwald’s take in his piece is rather close to mine, with one crucial difference.

I see no reason why people who have money in their pockets should hold off buying when there are so many bargains to be had.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s your patriotic duty to go forth and spend when the economy is hurting. But there’s certainly no reason why doom-saying should prevent people who are far from the edge from continuing with their investments. Panic only makes things worse. And many astute people are no doubt making things much worse because they’re on that end of the trade.

I don’t believe in papering over how serious the economic situation is. But ‘serious’ is not the end of the world, even if such a thing could be.

So I think the Wash Po piece gets the “Mobs” part of the equation right.

But I’m not sure if getting experts to sell optimism is the right advice. That’s where the “Messiahs” part of our book comes in.

Whatever you decide to do should be based on your own study of the matter at hand and should suit your own circumstance, life-style, psychological profile, risk appetite, and responsibilities. Trading gurus, commodity mavens, gold boosters, currency experts, professors, analysts, and talking heads – take all the advice you want and look through as many eyes as you can.

But in the end, choose for yourself.

Ultimately, it’s the only way to build up your own economic and moral well-being.

No one else will do it for you.

Steven Kinsella on Stalking (Update)

Posted on April 15, 2009 by Lila

Great blog post at Mises on stalking as a violation of libertarian ethics.

Meanwhile, just to double check – I had someone email my personal account. I was just told by someone who posted on this blog that it’s been blocked.

Not sure if it’s by some kind of spambot or something else. Or if it’s related to some stalking I’ve experienced.

I mailed myself and my mail wasn’t blocked so someone might just be playing with my head, as the expression goes.

Not a very interesting game.

OK. Apparently, I can get mail.

I just sent a reply. Let’s see if it reaches.

It did.

(Sigh)

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