“In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons […] who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”
— Edward Bernays
Tom di Lorenzo at Lew Rockwell blog has this:
“Following Alan Greenspan’s pathetic “don’t blame me” speeches and books, various Fed branches have parroted his view that the Greenspan Depression we are in was caused by thrifty Orientals whose savings drove down interest rates. So imagine my surprise upon receiving a hard copy of a Dallas Fed publicaton entitled “Taming the Credit Cycle by Limiting High-Risk Lending” and reading that “The present troubles emerged to a large extent from the growing use of hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages . . .” Huh? What happened to The New Yellow Peril?
There is no mention at all — not one word — of the role of Fed monetary policy in creating the housing bubble. The culprits, say these self-serving excuse makers (the author is Jeffrey W. Gunther), are “lightly regulated institutions” that are in need of the Fed’s “disciplining force.”
My Conment
Mr. di Lorenzo can relax – this new tack does nothing to exonerate Greenspan. Look at this USA Today piece from early 2004, when housing was already showing bubbl-y tendencies:
“He [Greenspan] said a Fed study suggested many homeowners could have saved tens of thousands of dollars in the last decade if they had ARMs. Those savings would not have been realized, however, had interest rates shot up.
“American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage,” Greenspan said.”
Read through the whole piece and it’s clear that American house buyers actually “preferred the stability” of the traditional fixed rate mortgages. In other words, it was only a concerted PR effort by Greenspan & Co. that changed people’s tastes in this.
Let that put an end to any moralizing of this issue. Yes – rampant consumerism and debt binging exacerbated the problem. But the problem wasn’t caused by some moral defect in American consumers. It was caused by policies deliberately pushed by the federal government in the hope that the consumer would succumb. The chairman of the Federal Reserve thus acted no differently from any confidence man or grifter who spots a mark (a naive, uninformed person easy to manipulate), then sets about winning the mark’s confidence before baiting the trap….
You can see the chairman’s own words to the national association of credit unions on February 23, 2004. (Skip down to the last 2-3 paragraphs to catch the gist)
And now, just like any con man, the Fed chairman too blames his victims.
They had it coming to them...
From an AP report this morning:
WASHINGTON – The White House is turning to the Internet to hit back at a Web posting that claims to show President Barack Obama explaining how his health care reform plans eventually would eliminate private insurance.
The three-minute White House video features Linda Douglass, a former network television correspondent and now White House Office of Health Reform communications director, sitting in front of a computer screen showing the Drudge Report Web site. That site carries a series of video clips from another blogger who strings together selected Obama statements on health care to make it appear he wants to eliminate the private health insurance business.
In the video Douglass says the site is “taking sentences and phrases out of context, and they’re cobbling them together to leave a very false impression.“
My Comment
And of course, the government and its minions would never take anything “out of context,” or “leave
a false impression..”
Oh nooooooo.
Drudge must have hit pretty close to get this level of presidential attention…
As for your jaded blogger at this humble site, I am as wary of the word “private” as I am of the word
“public.” Private is just the other face of public, most times. Gates, Buffet, Trump, Welch – they’ve all proved that their companies aren’t “private” enterprise – they all profit from insider ties, knowledge, subsidies, and pay-offs.
The “private-public” divide, like the “left-right” divide, is an elaborate bit of window-dressing intended to camouflage a much more real divide: “honest-dishonest.”
Update: I notice that Barack Obama has now joined Michelle Obama on Vanity Fair’s “best-dressed list.” Look, I agree Mrs O. has a distinctive and interesting fashion voice, but her husband?
Now the president is a runway model too?
Could this have something to do with creating positive spin in the wake of the recently resuscitated “birther” controversy?
“Birther” is the disparaging term applied to anyone who questions whether President Obama was born within the US, or believes he was born in Kenya, or apparently even brings up the subject – as the recent attacks on conservative broadcaster Lou Dobbs suggest. To clarify, I have no idea what positions Lou Dobbs takes or doesn’t take. And to further clarify, my personal opinion is that naturalized citizens should be as free to become president as natives. Of course, that isn’t the position of the constitution, but that’s another issue.
Surely, questioning the president on a constitutional point would seem to be the essence of what free speech protects. Instead, the establishment puts a derogatory label on it that makes it off-limits and a kind of racist “hate” or “fringe” speech, like the speech of holocaust revisionists (‘denialists’), 9-11 theorists (‘truthers’), critics of Israel or Zionism (‘anti-semites’), and critics of the US (‘anti-Americans’)
[how come if you criticize China, you’re not an anti-sinite?]
Please. Talk about feeding a fire…
Fire is a useful tool but a dangerous god. Feed it with too much fuel, and it burns in every direction. It consumes everything in its path.
He who glows in the fire of public adulation today burns in it tomorrow.