The Idiots Who Rule America: Our "elites don''t have the capacity to fix our financial mess"

[Better Believe It]

October 20, 2008
The Idiots Who Rule America
By Chris Hedges

Christopher Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, where he was a reporter for fifteen years. Hedges was part of The New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. In 2002, he received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.

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Our oligarchic class is incompetent at governing, managing the economy, coping with natural disasters, educating our young, handling foreign affairs, providing basic services like health care and safeguarding individual rights. That it is still in power, and will remain in power after this election, is a testament to our inability to separate illusion from reality. We still believe in “the experts.” They still believe in themselves. They are clustered like flies swarming around John McCain and Barack Obama. It is only when these elites are exposed as incompetent parasites and dethroned that we will have any hope of restoring social, economic and political order.

Our elites—the ones in Congress, the ones on Wall Street and the ones being produced at prestigious universities and business schools—do not have the capacity to fix our financial mess. Indeed, they will make it worse. They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of the common good. They are stunted, timid and uncreative bureaucrats who are trained to carry out systems management. They see only piecemeal solutions which will satisfy the corporate structure. They are about numbers, profits and personal advancement. They are as able to deny gravely ill people medical coverage to increase company profits as they are able to use taxpayer dollars to peddle costly weapons systems to blood-soaked dictatorships. The human consequences never figure into their balance sheets. The democratic system, they think, is a secondary product of the free market. And they slavishly serve the market.

We may elect representatives to Congress to end the war in Iraq, but the war goes on. We may plead with these representatives to halt Bush’s illegal wiretapping but the telecommunications lobbyists make sure it remains in place. We may beg them not to pass the bailout but 850 billion taxpayer dollars are funneled upward to the elites on Wall Street. We may want single-payer, not-for-profit health care but it is not even discussed as a possibility in presidential debates. We, as individuals in this system, are irrelevant.

The working class, which has desperately borrowed money to stay afloat as real wages have dropped, now face years, maybe decades, of stagnant or declining incomes without access to new credit. The national treasury meanwhile is being drained on behalf of speculative commercial interests. The government—the only institution citizens have that is big enough and powerful enough to protect their rights—is becoming weaker, more anemic and less able to help the mass of Americans who are embarking on a period of deprivation and suffering unseen in this country since the 1930s. Consumption, the profligate engine of the U.S. economy, is withering. September retail sales across the U.S. fell 1.2 percent. The decline was almost double the 0.7 percent drop analysts expected from consumers, whose spending represents two-thirds of U.S. economic activity. There were 160,000 jobs lost last month and three-quarters of a million jobs lost this year. The reverberations of the economic meltdown are only beginning.

Please read the entire article at:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081020_the_idiots_who_rule_america/

[sam sarrha]

1. the ReThuglicans operate Exclusively on "CONVICTION" they believe a man's wealth is proof gOD favors

him/corporation. so being favored by god anything they do is supported by god, they cant lose ..unless a Liberal messes up god's will.. explains their hateful contempt for liberals.

http://doggo.tripod.com/doggchrisdomin.html
"snip...How comforting the Calvinistic idea of a “justified sinner” is when one is utilizing Machiavellian techniques to gain political control of a state. It’s more than comforting; it is a required doctrine for “Christians” who believe they must use evil to bring about good. It justifies lying, murder, fraud and all other criminal acts without the fuss of having to deal with guilt feelings or to feel remorse for the lives lost through executions, military actions, or assassinations.

Leo Strauss was born in 1899 and died in 1973. ... He is most famous for resuscitating Machiavelli and introducing his principles as the guiding philosophy of the neo-conservative movement. ... More than any other man, Strauss breathed upon conservatism, inspiring it to rise from its atrophied condition and its natural dislike of change and to embrace an unbounded new political ideology that rides on the back of a revolutionary steed, hailing even radical change; hence the name Neo-Conservatives.

Significantly, Dominionism is a form of Social Darwinism.<48> It inherently includes the religious belief that wealth-power is a sign of God’s election. That is, out of the masses of people and the multitude of nations, wealth, in and of itself, is thought to indicate God’s approval on men and nations whereas poverty and sickness reflect God’s disapproval.

(It was not until I read this article that I realized that this is a fundamental tenet of Dominionists.

Worldly wealth and power are signs of God's favor -- to attempt to limit or decrease one's wealth and power is to disrespect God.

On the contrary, God's elect on Earth are called upon to increase their wealth and power.

It is not sufficient for a man to be a millionaire, or for a country to have sovereignty within its borders -- a man must strive to increase his wealth as much as possible, and a Dominionist government's behavior toward its neighbors must be "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity".

Furthermore, any attempt to decrease a person's or a country's wealth and power -- to take from the rich to give to the poor, to reduce military spending and power -- is a direct attack on God.)

If “Secular Humanists are the greatest threat to Christianity the world has ever known,” as theologian Francis Schaeffer claimed, then who are the Humanists? According to Dominionists, humanists are the folks who allow or encourage licentious behavior in America. They are the undisciplined revelers.

Put all the enemies of the Dominionists together, boil them down to liquid and bake them into the one single most highly derided and contaminated individual known to man, and you will have before you an image of the quintessential “liberal” -- one of those folks who wants to give liberally to the poor and needy -- who desires the welfare and happiness of all Americans -- who insists on safety regulations for your protection and who desires the preservation of your values -- those damnable people are the folks that must be reduced to powerlessness -- or worse: extinction. ...snip"

it is very obvious Palin was chosen cause she is a long time Dominionist

[Lyric]

4. I would say then, by their own reasoning, that this massive loss of wealth

is a good indication that God no longer favors them. In fact, it looks like God is favoring Barack Obama by a pretty wide margin.

:hi:

[sam sarrha]

8. no.. it means the godless evil liberals fucked it all up.. that is why they call kill him, they are

in a spiritual end times war with us and feel any means to crush us is legal under the laws of god

[BelgianMadCow]

2. I don't believe the elites are gonna care. No way will they hold the shortest straw.

They have deep pockets and will be there to scoop up what's left, and end up with more still.
yes, they have suffered a big paper loss.

I have read the Shock Doctrine though, it may have impacted me too much, as did "confessions of an economic hitman".

regards
bmc

[JCMach1]

3. Virtually allow of the economists and economic experts are disciples of Friedman!

So, what do we expect...

Maybe a few of those assholes will dust off their dusty copies of Keynes and come up with something newer and better...

[Better Believe It]

9. Nouriel Roubini Is The Best Economist I Have Found

He just lays out the truth about this capitalist crisis in terms understandable to most.
But read what he thinks must still be done. And if his steps are actually implemented by the United States, Europe and Asia (China, India) he still projects a long (2 years or more) and very deep recession with unemployment at around 10%!

A Review of This Week of Macro and Financial Developments and My Latest Project Syndicate Column
Nouriel Roubini | Oct 17, 2008

My latest column for Project Syndicate has been just published and is reposted below. This column was written last week at the peak of the market turmoil and when the G7 had just announced its plan to avoid a systemic financial meltdown. So, how have things changed in a week since this column was written? On the positive side the G7, the EU and other economies have committed to do whatever is necessary (not allowing any systemically important bank to fail, recapitalizing banks with public capital, providing unlimited liquidity to the financial system, providing direct credit to the corporate sector, providing guarantees to most banks’ liabilities, and any other necessary policy action) to prevent a systemic financial meltdown; most of these actions are sensible and follow closely the ones that I suggested were necessary to prevent the meltdown that the financial system neared at the end of last week. Much more needs to be done including further monetary policy easing, a large fiscal stimulus program to boost demand at the time when private aggregate demand (consumption and investment) are sharply falling; and a plan to reduce the mortgage debt burden of millions of distressed households. But at least policy is going in the right direction and the probability of a systemic meltdown – that reached a peak a week ago – is now significantly lower.

But are we close to the end of the tunnel now? Not really ....

http://www.rgemonitor.com/roubini-monitor/254084/a_review_of_this_week_of_macro_and_financial_developments_and_my_latest_project_syndicate_column

[Initech]

5. This is the very definition of insanity, folks.

[Greyhound]

6. K & R.

[Bonhomme Richard]

7. The problem is fixing and make a bundle at the same time.

They just haven't figured it out yet.

[Waiting For Everyman]

10. That first sentence is why they get the big bonuses.

Experts never have done anything right (but there aren't that many experts in Congress anyway). Solutions always come from the people - crisis management doesn't come from those who have never pulled out a crisis before, and why would experts dirty their hands with such an activity, to learn how? What's changing is, the people have found a lever of power - the internet.

Grassroots creativity, here and there, will come up with some solutions to things eventually. What Congress needs to do is fix the level playing field - and right now, that means tilting it toward the non-rich to compensate for past excesses for a while. That isn't so hard to figure out. Will they do it? If they realize that the rich are going down with the ship too if they don't, maybe.

[Better Believe It]

11. Soros, Roubini, Sachs Video On The Economic Breakdown 10/20/08

You can see the video of this discussion at:
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/worldeconomy/

You'll need to view it with RealPlayer.

George Soros, global financier and philanthropist, founder and chairman of the Open Society Institute and the Soros foundations network, and chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC.

Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics and international business at the Stern School of Business, New York University.

Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and special advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Moderated by John Roberts of CNN.

An open and frank conversation on the breakdown of financial markets around the world and if we can save the global economy. Will the Wall Street bailout plan work? What steps need to be taken in Europe and Asia to stem the market’s downward spiral? Are we headed for a global recession? Three of the leading minds in global economics will discuss the options.