CONSPIRACY IN WASHINGTON : REPUBLICAN PAPER SHREDDERS RUN OVERTIME ?

[Morpheal]

CONSPIRACY IN WASHINGTON : REPUBLICAN PAPER SHREDDERS RUN OVERTIME ?

Of course there were insufficient indications, and no reason to take any preventative action on this issue,
during 8 years of Republican administration. (See my article on that, as to failure of responsibility.)

An eight year walk along the tracks, down the tunnel of American (capitalist free enterprise) love,
and suddenly at the end of it the speeding freight train smacks right into the oval office.

Sure, we all "believe" that scenario is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Possible explanations ?

My article avoids going into conjectural theorizing about why. That's an investigative role. Facts
need to be found out as to why and how, as well as to decide who is really responsible for the mess.

However, here we can play with ideas a bit more and consider what "might be" without knowing those facts.

a). Might be that economic intelligence just simply was not up to it. It wasn't able to see through the
board room walls, and into the CEOs and controller's offices. Neither was it able to see into the audits that
are routinely performed. No, couldn't see what was going on and thus no analysis as to what would happen.

How believable is that ? Eight years of blind faith and false analysis on the economic frontier ?
And you know they call the CIA "the company" don't you ? So that applies to foreign economics also.
Blind as bats, we all are. Can't use that xray vision. Superman must have swallowed kryptonite. Sure.
Let's leave all that credulity for the comic books.

b). Might be that the executive branch of government was told by intelligence, and ignored it. They
simply didn't believe the intelligence and decided policy accordingly. Faith is better than facts when you
are the president of the world's most powerful economy and want to push your system of economics over
on the entire world community, isn't it ? Have faith in American (capitalist) love. Never mind how dark the
tunnel is. Never mind that the ground is vibrating and there is a deafening noise and a blinding light headed
right at us at an incredible rate of speed. Never mind. It's like belief in Jesus. Believe in the economy and you
will get through the tunnel unharmed. Well, even a die hard fundamentalist revivalist Baptist preacher would
not be THAT naive. Far from it. Even he knows calling on Jesus will not save the economy. That's more that
other guy's work. Enough of that. We just can't believe in the executive branch anymore, and much less their
ideas about the economy.

c). Might be there is a conspiracy between intelligence and the oval office. Hush, hush, let's not tell anyone
how bad it really is and how bad it is going to be. Motives ? Well, that would be up to criminal investigation
to find out. We really don't want to step across that police line. We can only wonder if the yellow "do not cross
police line" tape has been placed all the way around the Treasury and the White House as of yet. Any minute ?
That too would be a bit much to believe, but it is a bit more credible as purely speculative theory. Maybe
because Americans love conspiracy theories best of all and it would make a good movie afterwards, if anyone
is left to make it, assuming there is a recovery.

d). Might be that there is a conspircy to empty the government coffers as much as possible, to as many
corporate and fiscal beneficiaries of Republican welfare, as is possible as late in the administration's game
plan as possible. In the last day if they can pull it off. A month or two is pretty good timing. Why ? Well that
would be to fiscally cripple up the next administration and render them the victim while the beneficiaries
and the departing administration have the last laugh. Again, if that scenario were the truth, we should see
the police tape around the Treasury, the Oval Office, and a lot of financial and corporate head offices
at any minute. After all we want to know who this mafia is that is emptying the United States treasury at
the sudden and rapid rate that is actually taking place. We might contemplate some sort of fiscal vampirism
and that the money vampires can't help it. They rise from their crypts every so often, like zombies crying
for brains to eat, needing to devour large amounts of currency from the mint. Their real envy is to get into
Fort Knox and eat up the gold reserve there, but that might get them a stake through their vampiric hearts
and back into the grave unfed. So they restrain their appetite a little, hoping for more currency.

Any other possible scenarios ?

I am sure we could come up with some other stories that would make great conspiracy debates that would
last into the next century, and provide fodder for a dozen or more box office hit films somewhere down
the long road to economic hell. Maybe that is the stimulus plan. That is big business. The conspiracy business.

On the other hand, it is serious, and all of the joking and conspiracy theorizing aside, someone has done
something awefully and completely wrong, while in power, and in control over the largest, most powerful,
most persuasive, and most arm twisting, economic system and economy on Earth. Something so wrong
that the lid is coming completely off and we need to see yellow police tape around certain landmark legislative
locations in Washington. Before the outgoing Republicans shred everything the way the KGB tried to do
when they left Moscow.

Robert Morpheal

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. I love a good conspiracy theory, but here's my thoughts.

Most of this stuff is due to emergent phenomenon that weren't really planned by anybody, its the end result of bad policies. Its natural to prescribe human motivations to complex processes like these, and that's what we've done since we first blamed deities for the weather all the way to modern times. However we can see the very human thinking errors when we look closely at this stuff, things that a "good conspiracy" would probably have kept concealed. For example, I saw these celebratory news stories that some unmanned NASA-esque super expensive drone had hit an Al Qaeda campsite, complete with pictures of the drone. The expenditure difference between this vastly complex craft and this operation with AK-47s and sleeping bags hit me as the reason we are losing the war on terror in the long term, but it was chalked up in the papers as a victory.

What I see, and what this is an example of, is an apparently pervasive lack of holistic thinking: What is the total cost of a policy in the big picture? That's what not getting asked. Short term considerations are wiping out long term ones.

Per your OP, I see this across the board in the way intelligence is handled. I'm just a caregiver, but even I could see intelligence professionals talking about peak oil and this coming crash almost a decade ago. Hell, listen to the trailers for Syriana, Clooney knew it. Yet why in the name of God weren't we pushing GM to stop making the Humvees??? Its like these people have the curse of Cassandra, they see things, but in the end they don't effect policy in meaningful ways.

And I'm telling you the reason is simply short term thinking. GM hired some head shrinker ad guru who said that they should make big vehicles because they project dominance. And in the short term, he was right. In the long term they resulted in draining billions from our economy to send to Saudi to power them, and now GM is screwed because all their research went into this. Short term non-holistic thinking strikes again. If you want to see it at work in the trading world, look at the story of credit default swaps. They were there because they WERE "making money" in the short term, or rather hiding a lack of growth in their sectors. Again its short sited non-holistic thinking.