Group Think

David Brooks conservative columnist for the NY Times said the financial disaster on Wall Street was caused by a “social contagion” and “group think”.

The Bush regime said the same thing when no WMD were found in Iraq, that the CIA got the intelligence wrong because they were victims of “group think”.

In the case of the CIA getting Iraq’s WMD wrong it wasn’t group think that was the problem, it was group intimidation, the administration wanted them to say Iraq had WMD, so that’s what they said. As Upton Sinclair said it’s hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

What type of sick excuse is this group think? Whatever happened to “rugged American individualism”? And what is this social contagion? It is outrageous that such things can be blamed. But of course it is an easy answer, easy to say and easy to digest. They’re dodging the bullet, just blame it on group think.

Human nature is the same today as it was when the Constitution was written. The founders understood that individuals would seek power. We no longer understand that the colossal failures on Wall Street and in Iraq are the results of individuals seeking money and power, and is not the error of group think.

John MacArthur editor of Harper’s said “In America it doesn’t matter anymore what is right or wrong. The public is conditioned to believe everything: no matter if it is emotional stories or lies on weapons of mass destruction”. Don’t be conditioned! It is group greed of the corporate crooks and their cohorts, poisoned politicians who are to blame for the trillions stolen from the tax payer to bail out Wall Street along with the thousands of lives stolen to bail out Iraq. Neither of these are the result of “group think”, it‘s more like group delusion.

Election 2008 Prediction

Prediction for the presidential election-Obama will win the popular vote but McCain will become the president. And I say this because the corporate sponsored politicians create a story line and then this story is repeated over and over in the echo chamber of the media. This is how we wind up with the story line that ACORN is promoting voter fraud. Notice that the closer we get to the election the louder McCain chirps about voter fraud.

Vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is telling us that we are angry over voter fraud. They’re setting the seeds of discontent in our minds so that if Obama wins the Republican candidates along with their media conspirators will cry voter fraud and will try to have all the democratic ballots cast for Obama thrown out, therefore reducing the number of votes for Obama leaving McCain with the most votes to become the next president.

Doesn’t candidate McCain know that as a result of the “voting irregularities” of the 2000 presidential election the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was passed? How many millions have they spent on this act? And how is it that a community group like ACORN is now all of a sudden able to perpetrate this massive voter fraud in at least 13 states thus far?

If they can do this and get away with it, does this mean that the Help America Vote Act was a waste of time and money? Or is this so called massive voter fraud just another example of the failed policies of George Bush? And why didn’t McCain bring more attention to this issue when the act to correct "voting irregularities" was passed rather than now with just three weeks before the election? Because it isn’t the issue that he and the others say it is that’s why.

The Line Has Been Drawn

There is no middle ground anymore. We no longer have to think, we have the TV to tell us what to think and tell us we have to pick a side, now we are either for or against.

The founders had to find the middle ground. The federalists had to champion for the ratification of the Constitution with cogent arguments and an appeal to reason. One of their arguments for a federal government was the many states could help the one state better than one state could help themselves in times of disaster or an attack.

However those reasoned thoughts no longer apply today. Rather than be the united states with all citizens united under the umbrella of federal laws, we are a fragmented society. The line has been drawn by media politicians who have succumbed to polling and lack the courage of having any convictions other than to stay in power.

Since politics and elections have been corrupted by TV, hysteria has taken the place of reason. With the mass marketing of issues that divide, we end up electing TV personalities, or voting against a politician. We aren’t offered the chance to elect the best individual to represent us in the legislative bodies.

Subsequently the ruling class of the rich capitalists along with their puppet politicians control the ability to shape public opinion with the television.

Images are riveting and contain the power to drive change. Precisely why our federal government prevented pictures of states ravaged by Hurricane Ike in the 2008 hurricane season from being broadcast.

Must be the lesson they learned from Hurricane Katrina when the whole country saw it’s citizens abandoned by the federal government who did the exact opposite of what the federal government was founded to do.

Many people were saying the failures in Hurricane Katrina were due to the locals which is an example of the television’s power to shape public opinion, and not for the better either. They only shape it to the betterment of themselves and to retain power of the media’s favorite politician.

Crash Heard 'Round the World'

We were once a country famous for being started with “the shot heard ‘round the world”, now we’re a country whose financial crash is felt ‘round the world'.

The world’s economy depends on Americans paying their mortgages, and when we don’t pay our mortgages the world’s finances collapse. How did this happen? And where are our leaders?

When we ask our leaders how this happened, they tell us now is not the time to point fingers or ask questions, we need to just fix the problem and fast. George Bush the president tells us to “have faith” the market will come back, but have patience, it’ll take time.

Just like we’re supposed to have faith that “good” will triumph over evil in this “global war on terror”, now we should have faith that the free market capitalism will right itself if we wait long enough.

Just as America has been looked upon as a beacon of light for self governance, Wall Street has been looked up to as the example of free market capitalism. How does this self governing free market capitalism look to the rest of the world right about now?

The free market is fine as long as the fat cats are winning but when the bottom falls out because they have no “capital” they expect the feds and the tax payer to bail them out.

Companies like AIG have divisions that are making money and many of these non bank sub prime lenders and Wall Street firms have offices in the Cayman islands to avoid paying taxes. Take over the divisions making money and close the offices in the Cayman islands to recoup some of the money that was stolen. Since we the tax payer have to bail out these capitalistic crooks then we have the right to do these things.

But of course with the leaders we have today who lack the intestinal fortitude to do the right thing, these ideas will never be put on the table. Eventually the middle class will just run out of money to bail out the greedy bankers. You can bet those at the top of this housing pyramid scheme saw this coming and cashed in their stocks, hiding their money. They’ll be in the Cayman Islands while we’re living in our cars.

A lot of us had nothing to do with the stock market, or living beyond our means like we were told at the beginning of this “credit crisis”, was the problem. As it has been throughout human history it’s the innocent victims who’ll be paying the price for a market that went out of control with human greed and human failures.

With an empire at the helm it doesn’t bode well that the federal government is nationalizing our “free market capitalistic system” especially since America has become a country that rewards the rich and punishes the poor.

After the 1787 Constitutional Convention a woman asked Ben Franklin what they had given them and he replied “A Republic if you can keep it”. Why did he say that, did he know that we could loose it? We’ve seen the fall of communism, are we now seeing the fall of the American free market society?

Economic Infection

Alexis DeToqueville wrote in his classic “Democracy in America” that “there is a general distaste for accepting any man’s word as proof of anything”.

Not so today. When asked why he voted for the first bail out bill, Congressman Paul Kanjorski said “the worst problem that we have is probably a lack of faith and trust by constituents out there to take our word for it that there is a problem”.

“Democracy in America” was written centuries ago, fast forward and here’s a modern day politician telling us to turn back on our heritage and just take them at their word when it comes to handing over a trillion dollars in tax payer money to Wall Street crooks.

Kanjorski said “I've been watching this disaster, if you will, unfold for probably two years now, and particularly since last August -- not this immediate past August, but the August before that, when the subprime mortgage problem was created. And then we saw the deterioration that occurred in October when the auction market started to fail. And then we saw the infection spread throughout the financial system.”

The mistake everyone makes is that the subprime mortgage problem was created in the past few years, it wasn’t, it’s been brewing for decades ever since the Savings and Loan bail outs of the 80’s.

Our current economic problems were created while our government stood mutely on the sidelines watching and collecting payoffs while thousands of subprime players including firms on Wall Street, investment bankers, hedge funds, non bank subprime lenders, mortgage brokers and realtors together created the housing bubble that has just burst. This seven hundred billion is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the trillions and trillions Americans owe on their homes and will not fix the problems.

There is an infection spreading, it’s called the “malaria of power” and it’s not limited to the financial system, it has spread to the people running our government and financial system.

Henry Adams said “the effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends in killing the victim’s sympathies, a diseased appetite, like a passion for drink or perverted tastes; one can scarcely use expressions too strong to describe the violence of egotism it stimulates”.

For over thirty years egotistical politicians have told us to take their word for it, that politics don’t matter, the only things that matter are our stocks and portfolios. We should just shut up, invest our retirement and homes in crooked stocks, sit back, watch our diversified portfolios grow and let the free market prevail.

This is precisely why we’re on the brink of bankruptcy today. The greedy bankers sucked all the money out of our homes into their pockets. And they’re not satisfied with our homes, now they’re going for the US Treasury.