Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith has just published a long diatribe called The Empire Continues to Strike Back: Team Obama Propaganda Campaign Reaches Fever Pitch. Apparently, a renewed propaganda assault is in progress aimed at convincing us that Obama's policies are working, that it's time to start feeling OK about things again. Our Imperial leaders are using accommodating mainstream media stooges to accomplish their goal. Here's Yves—
I’ve seldom seen so much rubbish written by people who ought to know better in a single day. Many able people have heaped the scorn and incredulity on three articles, one a piece on Rahm Emanuel slotted to run in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, another an artfully packed laudatory piece on Timothy Geithner by John Cassidy in the New Yorker and a more even handed looking one (I stress “looking”) in the Atlantic.Ed Harrison has skillfully shredded parsed the Geithner pieces . Simon Johnson thrashed the New Yorker story...
Banking expert Chris Whalen was so disturbed by the numerous distortions in the New Yorker piece that he had already fired off a long letter to the editor by the time I pinged him...
In a Declining Empire, the existence of semi-official propaganda organs like the Atlantic is entirely predictable. I think that I've read exactly two articles in the Atlantic that were interesting to me over the last decade. If you look closely at the cover above, the featured articles argue that Obama is right on the economy, he is right about Afghanistan, and the rest. Again, what is important here is the complete predictability of this kind of crap. Check this out, from Daniel Indiviglio's Why Nobody Likes Obama's Economic Policies—
Daniel Indiviglio is a blogger and staff editor. Prior to joining The Atlantic, he wrote for Forbes. He also worked as an investment banker and a consultant... He resides in the Washington, D.C., metro area.
First, let's think about the stock market ... it's done wonderfully during Obama's reign...
So you've got this kind of odd situation where the most of the economic progress that the Obama administration has made would satisfy the wrong side of the aisle, so it's providing him with very little political capital to work with. I'm pretty sure this wasn't on purpose. It was unavoidable.
The reality is the stock market and GDP growth lead economic recovery, while unemployment lags. In order to have any recovery at all, the President had to stabilize the financial industry. In other words, he had to make Wall Street healthy before the broader economy could recover. After all, it was banking that made the economy sick to begin with.
The most legitimate criticism to be made here is that Obama could have placed financial regulation higher up in his list of priorities, say above health care. But I don't know that there are many liberals willing to concede that point: health care reform is pretty important to them...
This is preposterous Imperial bullshit. Arguments are framed in terms of our dysfunctional—I should say non-functioning—political system, in terms of who is pleased on which side of "the aisle" in Congress. It's all "inside baseball" stuff from Inside The Beltway. And then there are Daniel's hard-hitting points, like the stock market leads the recovery. Only a former investment banker who used to write for Forbes could write this garbage without overwhelming feelings of guilt, shame and embarrassment.
And what about GDP leading the recovery? Well, as everybody except Daniel knows, GDP was up 5.9% (annual rate) in the 4th quarter of 2009, but it was a decrease in the rate of decrease in inventory liquidation (the 2nd derivative of this function) that accounted for 3.88% of it.
But look what I'm doing! I am already making the mistake that Yves Smith does, arguing with someone who not only knows nothing, but who views the world strictly in primate power terms—Who's zooming who? Which monkeys are on top? Which monkeys are taking it up the ass?—and thus is not particularly interested in knowing anything, especially about you. Daniel Indivilgio could care less about the hoi polloi living in insignificant places he can't even find on a map or forgot about long ago, places like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (where I reside) or Des Moines, Iowa or Temecula, California. I mean, c'mon! What do people even discuss in such places? These so-called "States" are so déclassé.
Anyway, here's my point: it's all well & good to get way bent out of shape, as Yves Smith does, when confronted with spurious, bogus, untrue, counterfeit, phony, artificial, incorrect, erroneous, lying, deceitful, and just plain wrong statements about how things are going in the Empire, but it doesn't matter one bit to ass kissers like the New Yorker's John Cassidy. If you want to know exactly why Obama administration statements, and supporting "arguments" from pliant media, are spurious, bogus, untrue ..., then read her long, detailed article. There's some use in going through this exercise. I'm not criticizing Yves Smith here—her new book ECONned is on my bedside reading table.
Yves does make an interesting point about what she calls the Theory of Positive Thinking—
Geithner’s not-much-of-a-plan exemplified the second tool in the Obama campaign to sell doing as little as possible to the financiers: the Theory of Positive Thinking...
[This] notion has a proud tradition in America and was much in evidence in the run-up to the crisis. It promises that the economy will be fine as long as everyone thinks happy thoughts about it...Remember that the US has an entire cable channel devoted to the Theory of Positive Thinking, namely CNBC, and a goodly portion of the financial media falls into CNBC-style cheerleading with more than occasional abandon...
Moreover, the Theory of Positive Thinking has been used, upon occasion, to suggest that conditions will only deteriorate if the public examines the financial services industry critically. It isn’t hard to see whose interests benefit from that posture...
Officially sanctioned "positive thinking" has one overriding purpose: it exists to maintain the status quo. In so far as this directly benefits powerful players on the Imperial stage, who get to keep their exalted positions, it is imperative to maintain a happy stance toward the great potential of our present circumstances, and to extol the even greater benefits we will all experience in the future.
Happy self-serving rationalizations are fraudulent, they are a hoax, as they have always been in past Empires lesser or greater, as they have always been throughout human history. What does Ecclesiastes 1:9 say?
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
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