Friday, August 3, 2012

Peterson Institute Trying to Co-opt Financial Reform?

commentary by Roger Erickson

This could be right out of Ed Bernays' playbook. Agree with some attempts to fight myths, then divert & pervert them ... in this case to Peterson's fixation on balanced budgets. I smell an obsessive-compulsive-disorder mania. OCDM. Do they have a missile with that warhead?

Big Banks Fall Back On Three Myths - By Simon Johnson

Johnson admits that the banking lobby uses 3 myths in their propaganda.

Myth 1: that all opponents are misguided "populists,"

Myth 2: that every “cost-benefit analysis” would show that the Dodd-Frank financial reforms are not worth pursuing

Myth 3: that every form of financial reform will hurt our growth prospects

All true, but that's just the set up.  Then Mr. Johnson's essay makes an unpredictable U-turn, and heads directly south.  (Do they use Bernays propaganda books in undergrad economics courses?)

"Fortunately, Dennis Kelleher and his colleagues at Better Markets are fighting hard against this myth. In a report released this week, Kelleher, Stephen Hall, and Katelynn Bradley point out that the industry never wants to take into account the real costs of the crisis – millions of jobs lost, growth derailed, lives disrupted, and massive damage to our public finances.
We had a frank discussion of this report at the Peterson Institute ... "


I'll bet they did! And that a little light went off in their one track minds, and they sensed an opportunity.

Talk about perverting & propagandizing the work of Dennis Kelleher and the Better Markets Foundation! Yet few will notice.  We need a warning bot to instantly call policy BS wherever it appears.

"Danger, Will Rogers!  Danger, Will Rogers!"

"Distributed breakdown in logic has allowed unstable forms of DeficitTerrorism to loiter too close to irrational ideology, thereby forming a critical mass of ignorance & stupidity & fraud that is STILL - despite all efforts of the 99% - generating a cascading chain reaction of suicidal mistakes within our very Congress."

Have you ever tried something as simple as trying to play a game of chess with criminally insane, sociopathic, hopelessly ideological Control Frauds? The Control Frauds will amaze you with their ability to cheat - and can arrange to win against even against an entire group of chess grandmasters! 

No matter how superior the group skills, every one of the grandmaster moves will make the fatal mistake of constraining itself to brilliantly extending an existing, logical framework. In response to every single one of these adaptive moves, however, the Control Frauds will simply attempt to derail reality by declaring the equivalent of "my chess pig can fly" while attempting to ignore any and all interdependencies not guaranteeing their local, tactical success. Then they declare - again - that they're winning, of course ... and that you're a populist, that their cost-benefit analysis shows they're right, and that it would be too expensive to deal with reality. It's hauntingly familiar, and strangely addictive, since familiar bits of logic are randomly strewn about with just enough frequency to have a powerful effect on the weak minded.

And we've let these people within 10 miles of policy?  Their outlook requires no allegiance or reference to scalable reality whatsoever.  Hence, they will always win .... if you let them.   They don't even require any coherent strategy, policy or goal since long term planning has no relevance to them. Their entire thought process displays the range of a gold spoon, which they want permanently in their own tea cup.

It's as though the Peterson Institute is operating from a rambling manifesto written in jail by Irwin Schiff, renamed "Mein Brain Krampf."

"The only person sure of himself is the man who wishes to leave things as they are, and he dreams of an impossibility." - George M. Wrong

Would it be wrong to permanently embed someone like George in the Peterson Institute?  Can someone tell them that there's no sane point in arbitrarily balancing a fiat budget, and that there hasn't been since 1933?  The Peterson Institute is worse than impossible, they actually want to go back in time.

I suspect it's hopeless.  One logical approach would be to politely ignore them, and take on the expense of warning all students not to talk to the sick men and their addictive rhetoric.  On the other hand, it might be cheaper to actually build a string of asylums to house them all, complete with personal gold spoons.  We could slip it in as a tenure program in a new, better purposed Ivy League Economics system of really high education, where they could smoke their stuff to their heart's content.

7 comments:

Tom Hickey said...

you're a populist, that their cost-benefit analysis shows they're right, and that it would be too expensive to deal with reality.

The ultimate result of the efficiency principle, aka Social Darwinism, is eliminationism, letting the lower classes just die off in the struggle in which the criterion is survival of the "fittest."

Roger Erickson said...

"letting the lower classes die off"

Yet that's very simplistic thinking that was surpassed decades ago in bio/ecology modeling, and over a billion years ago in social species.

Simplest statement: We generate options by generating diversity, and then secure those advantages by scavenging all existing diversity and dragging it along with us to the next context.

That's how social species run circles around non-social species. They self-scavenge their own diversity resources, so that they enter each new, unpredictable context with more to draw upon & self-select from.

The Social Darwinists got less than half of what Wallace & Darwin wrote about.

Roger Erickson said...

the more I read from the Peterson Institute, the more they remind me of the Lyndon LaRouche organization, only more suave
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche

Unforgiven said...

Repost of my comment at Warren's board, Tom and Roger, you might be able to use this for data visualizations:

Totally OT, but I was at an open house for Tableau Software last night and thought some of you folks might want to take a look. If you have a use for data visualization, biz intelligence, graphing, etc., these guys make some really easy to use software. There’s a free version, with the downside being that the data that you used will be visible to all:

http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/

So if you’re tired of trying to do this sort of thing with Excel and the like, give it a spin.

Tom Hickey said...

The Social Darwinists got less than half of what Wallace & Darwin wrote about.

I doubt that they even read them or any else meaningful about this. They just picked up on a haf-baked idea that suited their purposes and ran with it. This is their modus operandi.

Septeus7 said...

Quote: "The ultimate result of the efficiency principle, aka Social Darwinism, is eliminationism, letting the lower classes just die off in the struggle in which the criterion is survival of the "fittest."

Yup, the worship of the pseudo efficiency of the "market" is inherently violent to those without the politic power claim that which necessary for them to survive as the phony system of propertied right is define as to exclude the "inefficient."

Violence is the basis for all libertarian volunteerism i.e. I have the right to engage in the violence of deliberate privation because like the murder Cain they truly believe they aren't their brother's keeper.


Quote: "The more I read from the Peterson Institute, the more they remind me of the Lyndon LaRouche organization, only more suave
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche"

How so? I was part of the organization for awhile and it couldn't be further ideologically from Pete Peterson. The Peterson Institute is made of opportunistic hacks and the LaRouche's folk's are just about the least opportunistic activist imaginable with a habit of allienating just about everyone. Hell, even the Black Block anarchists who are considered less offensive than LaRouchies.

They aren't as sauve because they enjoy insulting every billionaire and foundation on the planet and sauve needs a budget.

I personally believe that LaRouche changed his movement from a socialist movement to his weird version of the American School Economics after his debate with Abba Lerner who he shamelessly ripped off after claiming he "won the debate."

The result is that movement is bastard love child of Abba Lerner, Friedrich List, and Rosa Luxemburg glued together by LaRouche's insane ego and the personality cult around it.

I hate to be somewhat conspiratorial about but I based on LaRouche's old connection to the CIA that he purposely makes the right policy solutions look fringe by launching the most offensive and absurd street activism possible.

The movement might actually do some good after LaRouche dies and some of the smarter folks can start forming broader alliances rather than trying to offend whoever doesn't fall in line with the personality cult.

I still consider myself American School but with the MMT modification on operations and if it wasn't for Larouche I wouldn't have heard about Abba Lerner and MMT.

Letsgetitdone said...

Roger, this one was terrific. I laughed a lot!