Has done wonders hasn't it.

what is the most effective propaganda weapon for the Right to neutralize the Left, and make sure its message is never even considered?

Left = elitists who despise ordinary people

chablis and brie

venting on the public square is self-indulgent and self-defeating

the key part is self-defeating

We have to develop a calm and caring voice, and we will have no voice with the public. No significant voice.

On top of that, the scorn is not deserved. Most people work hard, and come home to kids and personal chaos. Not much time for a lot else.

The signals of the housing market were that prices would go up and up. Buy now, or get left behind. Forever. Buy with no downpayment, sell in a could years, make money, then you have your toehold. Based upon limited information, and no perceptible options, it seemed a little scary, but reasonable. Hell, if it didn't work, you went broke -- the whole world didn't fall into depression.

Like that on a lot of issues. Not too many people here seem to have much appreciation for day to day challenges, and the short horizons that most decisions are made upon.

Want the big picture? Want to build a consensus for a different, overall approach?

You say you do. Well, then, change starts with you. Change your attitude. Change your tone.

And, by the way, say the analysis in a way people can recognize.

I'm cynical that the US public is ever going to get this, for several reasons, some their own doing and some due to manipulation.

Two reasons that the public continues to be susceptible to manipulation is lack of aptitude and lack of education. Policy is complex and requires both smarts and study to grok. The educational system is not organized to deliver what it takes to be a competent citizen in a complex world, and a great many people lack the brain power to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to understand economics, for instance, which are needed to understand what is going on and assess policy. In fact, a weakness of contemporary government is that the people involved in it are incapable of running it because it is so complex and they are so simple-minded and can easily be controlled behind the curtain where things actually are decided. Being savvy and well-financed enough to win an election proves nothing about one's ability to govern. In fact, about all it proves now is that one has the ability to raise funds more successfully than others, which is admittedly an advantage, considering the way governing by legal bribery is done these days.

Therefore, most people depend on their leaders and elected representative to do this for them. Big mistake. With bribery of elected officials legal through campaign finance and lobbying, elected officials are often compromised very quickly. A good friend of my father was a senator in the first term of Ike. He was a wealthy person, well liked, a Republican in a Republican state, and reelection was a shoe in. However, he chose not to run again, to the surprise of most people. He told my father that the reason he didn't run again was that Washington was so corrupt (his word as reported to me), he couldn't spend another four years there. That's was in the Eisenhower years. I don't imagine things have improved since then.

Add to that the corporate ownership and consolidation of the media, and you have a recipe for neofascism, and that's what we've got, although almost no one can see it, and those that can and have been issuing warnings for some time, like Noam Chomsky, are marginalized if not demonized.

as well as you run your mouth, we'd have not got in this mess and would have been prosperous and at peace.

http://mauberly.blogspot.com/

In the history of philosophy, there is a continuing debate over the notion of rule by the wise and rule by the people (the vast majority of whom are not wise). The former was proposed first proposed by Plato, and the latter by his student Aristotle.

It is interesting that Plato proposed the rule of the wise, because Plato, like his teacher Socrates, was an Athenian, one of the few places in the world where the polis was governed by direct democracy, with citizens meeting to debate issues and vote on them, as in the New England town meeting. While Plato gave many reasons for preferring the rule of the wise over the rule of the people, he was probably most influenced by the fact that the people had voted to condemn Socrates, whom the Delphic oracle had pronounced the wisest person among the Greeks, to death for impiety toward the gods and corrupting the youth with his teaching. Accordingly, Plato regarded the rule of the people to be subject to becoming the rule of the rabble.

For such reasons the American founding fathers were reluctant to institute direct democracy, but chose instead a republican form of government through elected representatives of the people. The fathers recognized that the majority of the elected representatives would most likely be selected from the elite. In their minds, the elite, being better educated, people of the world, and property holders, would bring prudence to political life, and work in the best interests of society, since that would benefit everyone including the elite.

Over time, however, things developed in directions that the father probably did not anticipate. America became a country in which the majority respected not wisdom but the lowest common denominator. Things also developed along regional lines, as well as along class lines — lines that could be exploited politically by wedge issues.

Jumping quickly to the conclusion, wisdom became devalued, and ordinariness was valued over being extraordinary. Now, dumb is good, or at least the appearance of dumb, and smart (wise, educated) is bad in the minds of many of the electorate. To great extent, wisdom has been replace by celebrity American-style. Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sarah Palin have become the new Socrates.

The problem with Sarah Palin is not so much that she is too inexperienced to be POTUS; rather, she is not smart enough to be president. And John McCain isn't smart enough either. Barrack Obama and Joe Biden at least may be. But there are a number of others in the US who are, but aren't running.

There are many wise people in America who could be serving in political office, but the political process does not encourage this as it now stands. We are reminded that President Washington rejected out of hand the notion that he should be king. Can we say the same now? I wonder what President George W. Bush's answer would be.

Presently, it is more a matter of luck that someone extraordinary in wisdom and statesmanship is elected to high office, and it is occurring less often than at the inception of this nation. Until the process is changed, America will be fortunate if their leaders are wise, but that is likely to be the exception to the rule.

The task is to figure out how to get the system oriented toward electing representatives and leaders who are wise in the holistic, comprehensive sense of the term, instead of electing "suits" who are the sock puppets of those manipulating for selfish advantage from behind the curtain, pulling the strings with campaign finance and lobbying that amount to legal bribes, and campaign tactics that get substituted for actual governing.

Until that happens, America deserves what is gets. If America wakes up, the tools are there to fix this, and there are wise people skilled in statesmanship available to serve if given the opportunity.

'there are wise people skilled in statesmanship'

Sounds like a bunch of bullshit Plato to me. Aristophanes is my main man-he thought your guys were a joke.

http://mauberly.blogspot.com/

In spite of what you, or I, or anyone else here or elsewhere thinks about it, this dialectic initiated millennia ago by Plato and Aristotle continues to dominate Western thinking, and it continues to underlie politics even when unnoticed — and it will likely continue do so for some time to come, as liberal democracy forges forward in its ongoing struggle to reconcile wisdom in governance with the sovereignty of the people.

Aristophanes pointed out the inherent humor of it all. Stewart and Colbert, Letterman and Leno are his successors, reminding us that human beings make fools of themselves when they take themselves too seriously.

To bring it down from the abstract, in my view General Wesley Clark is an example of a wise man skilled in statesmanship (although unfortunately not sufficiently adept in politics as it is currently practiced, or not appealing enough to enough people). I am sorry he isn't on the ticket, and if Obama is elected, I hope he will play a prominent role in an Obama administration. Admiral Fallon also comes to mind, although he has shown no inclination toward politics to date. Both these men have the vision, values, smarts, and experience to make significant contributions at a high level.

I mention two military leaders because it will be important to have a wise military leader positioned in high office or at least serving in a key position in the administration to be able to rein in military spending, so that these funds can be more productively employed, especially in an economy under duress in a Democratic administration.

word count was roughly 1900. You're at 2160 and still going strong. You need to be president. You could outdo Castro. God bless you.

http://mauberly.blogspot.com/

God bless you.

if your head aches too much, read Krugman("In these times, I need a bit of silliness to get through the day.")'s blog for a while and then come back and tackle a Stirling post again:-)
- mole

_{"The mythical John McCain is an affable, straight-talking, moderately conservative war hero who is an expert on foreign policy" - Bob Herbert}

And there just aren't many polite ways to say "Hey dummy pull your head out of your ass."

I think Stirling is being very restrained, my own opinion is closer to Dean Wormer in Animal House -- "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life son."

The Cluetrain is coming down the tracks, we can either get on board or get run down.

America is now considered by much of the rest of the world, and a good many here in the US as well, as the chief problem the world faces today. There are many reasons for this — the outrageous political climate, anti-war sentiment, the economic crisis that is perceived to have originated here, and so forth, including manifest stupidity being equated with manifest destiny. But there are also deeper reasons involving ideology and policy, and we have looking at many of them here at The Agonist for some time in some depth.

If you think things are getting shrill lately, you clearly weren't around during Vietnam. I was. As a matter of act, I was a naval operations officer serving in the western Pacific when the conflict was heating up in the (bogus) Gulf of Tonkin incidents. At first, I bought into the policy and line. But by the time I got out, I was thoroughly anti-war, and like John Kerry, I became active in the anti-war movement when I was in grad school.

We aren't at the same point yet, or anywhere near it, even though in many ways the situation is a lot worse, despite the fact that far fewer Americans are getting killed and casualties are being suppressed. Nevertheless, the destruction is actually greater and the effects on the world much more serious than Vietnam in many ways.

It really surprises me that Americans aren't more publicly exercised about this. Or maybe I'm not surprised since there is no draft. So far the situation hasn't really impacted most people's live very dramatically, as it is starting to do now.

US policy is of a piece. It all fits together, even though most may not see how this works in practice. People like Stirling are showing how the puppet strings are pulled financially, and no wonder they are pissed and come across as strident. For example, economic policy and military policy are joined at the hip, or should I say, at the sources of energy (oil) — as they have been in the Great Game since WWI.

The fact is that people who understand what's happening are appalled because the US is using rhetoric about American ideals to mask nationalistic and imperialistic objectives and behavior that belie these ideals and often betray them. There's truth in the bumper stickers that read, "If you aren't appalled, you aren't paying attention."

Right now, I read how individuals are concerned about their own finances. Maybe that's what it takes to wake people up and get them to investigate why this is happening (the Big Picture), and what to do about it through progressive reforms and global vision.

Forget that this is a patriotic duty as a citizen of the US and member of the human family. Just do it to save your ass, because otherwise you can kiss it goodbye.

American's do not pro-actively work to understand anything beyond what they passively absorb from the media. The media is about segmented marketing. Whether it',s your favorite sitcom or the news Americans are seeing segmented marketing that bases itself on careful gathering of statistics and feedback. The media is not always about deception but rather organizing perception. No amount of cajoling and helpfulness is going to change that.

Americans either don't know how or don't make the time to learn to move beyond the message presented to them. We Americans spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing sports which is no more than a form of entertainment even as the world burns around us. George Bush attended the Olympics. Why? Because he likes bicycle racing or was it to direct attention at China's show and away from the problems?

Are there angry voices yelling at Americans? Yes I hear them on the Agonist and elsewhere. Will angry voices do any good? Probably not but neither does sounding helpful. What we need to do is create a direction for American culture that leads away from the consumer culture which devours our minds and exploits our free time keeping us from an understanding of our responsibilities. The education system here in America is gutted and does not generally produce citizens capable of meeting the civic responsibilities required by Democracy. So we find ourselves living in an oligarchy thinly veiled by Democracy. More and more the veil lifts to reveal the truth that we are not a healthy Democracy but a society standing at the abyss.

If you think about gun control, right to life or choice, renewable energy, or worried about the teaching of science in schools you missed the truth that these things are nothing more than market segmentation and the reality is that the control of our society has moved out of the People's hands into those who subjugate us. Welcome to the new world order.

"You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!" - Joseph Heller

are bad and worse

but the differences are often very important. see 1930s

The world is chaotic, and all of our knowledge is fragmentary and quickly out of date. This applies to experts as well as working folk.

Working people, and many educated people, do not want to be consumed with politics, or world economics. On the whole, this is a good thing.

The trick is to make the system safe enough to ignore.

The system is not that safe at the moment. Indeed, some activity by gadflies is constantly needed.

The difficulty is to identify certain pressure points, and to try to guide the torrent of public emotion (plentiful in a crisis) toward support for better policies. This is not a one-man or one-woman job. A forum like Agonist can be a way for a community to exchange ideas, and perhaps help, in some small way, to identify ways forward.

If this forum is not about community, not about helping, then it is only about preening.

That's ok. Just not my thing. At least, not completely.

a community and about understanding what is happening around us, whether we disagree or not. I'm sure you didn't mean Stirling was preening just because he differs in style and opinion than you?

Your primary input here appears to be castigating folks for not speaking clearly enough to effect political change. Thats just fine.

But serious analysis must go on somewhere so that people can start to make real choices based on reason, not just intuition. Sometimes that analysis is is complex and difficult to express clearly. Sometimes a complex dialogue must take place before simply stated answers become apparent.

What actually are your views about some of the complex discussions that folks like Stirling have been good enough to share with us so that we can engage in a dialogue that will bring us to a sophisticated understanding of the issues?

This is, all in all, a pretty bright community of folks seriously interested in the serious issues of our times. Why don't you join in these discussions instead of engaging in the particularly distressing anti-intellectualism that derides serious discussion as preening.

Stirling writes:

"But that's their view: fix the paper, and then go back to borrow and squander. Far from critiquing the "failed policies" of Bush, so far, they are promsing merely a repetition of them, run by different people. That may help in the short term, because Bush's ability to execute on even his own plans is feeble. The only thing he's ever been good at is stealing elections, or engaging in a leveraged buy out of them. However, the basic premise, that we can go back to land flipping and burger flipping internally, while making our money by blowing up Baghdad one block at a time, is fundamentally flawed.

This means, absent a sudden and completely unexpected attack of sanity, in a few years, we will be back here, only worse.

The American people have decided to ride this bucket all the way down. There will be a bounce off this ledge, but not one that people should have any faith in, because the leadership, like the public, is in a simplistic mode of demanding that we go back to doing all the wrong things, and solemnly pass laws that someone else will pay for it."

There seems to be kernals of insight in there; at least, some stuff that I probably agree with, and think is important. But the prose is purple, and too vague.

If I didn't think that Stirling had some insight to offer, I would not bother to comment. It is frustrating to me that he clouds his message with the extraneous venom.

Second, is this highly sophistocated technical analysis? Hard to tell. It is not clear writing.

I have always come here to try to mine insights from others with technical expertise. I have none.

But I am better at understanding than the average audience. If I cannot tell exactly what is being explained, then it is a pretty good bet that 99 percent of the public cannot tell either.

Stirling needs to do better. If your point is that Stirling knows things that I do not, then I freely concede that point. If your point is that Stirling need not try to communicate with people like me, then I concede that point as well. But I think we would all be poorer.

I knew very little technically about economics -- pretty much what I could remember from Econ 101 in college (like the law of supply and demand), and a short stint trading stocks short term on margin thirty or more years ago. However, it became obvious to me that if I was to understand the current political situation, I had to not only brush up but get into some more technical knowledge, too.

My modus operandi has always been to learn from people who are able to identify and express key fundamentals clearly, precisely, and succinctly, cutting through the confusing mountain of data, expert opinion and sheer BS to get to the heart of the matter.

That lead me here for one place, and Stirling is one of the rare people who has clear insight and deep knowledge across a range of interrelated fields, like some others who post here. When one finds someone like this the challenge is to acquire what is necessary for at least a basic understanding. This requires not only some homework, but also asking questions. There are a lot of folks here willing to help out if asked.

No one here or anywhere else for that matter who is an expert on everything. We all learn from each other. That's what a learning environment is about and the blogosphere is such a learning environment.

All one has to do is learn how to take advantage of it. This is a small enough community to be manageable, and it presents a fantastic opportunity for learning if one jumps in.

Another way to learn is to attempt to state something oneself and post it for others' feedback. If one gets something right, there is not necessarily any response. But if one gets something wrong, then there is generally correction forthcoming. This is very valuable as a learning tool.

I would also add that people who know their way around a field well often don't know what is being put simply for those not so well acquainted. Only by the questions that get asked can they tell this, and usually they are willing to break it down if they have the time. But experts usually don't have a lot of time for this kind of thing since they have another life. Therefore, one has to be willing to do one's own homework. Searching the net for terms that one doesn't fully understand is important in this regard. A lot of so-called expertise is simply understanding the vocabulary and methodology (grammar) of a field.

I'm just curious what his qualifications are, beyond vocabulary.

Actually I don't know and don't care. He is consistently brilliant, consistently makes me look at things in new ways, and generally has been right in predicting things.

Those seem qualifications enough for me.

EOM

"You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!" - Joseph Heller

SN, according to Wikipedia at least, is American. (And a young 'un, born in 1967).

eom

_{"The mythical John McCain is an affable, straight-talking, moderately conservative war hero who is an expert on foreign policy" - Bob Herbert}

However, the result will be that we will smash our currency DOWN to their level, or whatever level that is beyond their ability to depress...

We won't have a choice. If stagflation happens while this crisis unfolds, we will be in deeeeeeep shit. It's absolutely mandatory that we fix our current account and foreign trade deficit. The industries that benefited the warped economics--finance and housing, are collapsing now, and their power to cooperate with the wishes of the foreign export industries is diminished. Thus, I think we will see the start of a trade war soon, if not a settlement.

This Ponzi scheme depends on expansion of debt, and lenders are balking unless rates rise to take into consideration both inflation expectations and repriced risk.

The only option the government has then to keep this game going is to give money away. But remember, "It's your money."

The solution to all problems is to attack them at their common source. Ad hoc solutions are only palliative and other problems just pop up elsewhere.

The underlying problem that America faces is success. This has resulted in the overarching policy that the US will defend its economic and military superiority against all challengers forever. The purpose of this policy is to preserve US status as the world's sole superpower, and to protect and project that power. Projection of power is for expanding influence (control). The purpose of expansion of US influence is to control the world's wealth and capture as much as possible for the US elite who control the US government, a plutocratic oligarchy, and to reward their their cronies and clients.

To this end, the US must maintain the world's largest military, which requires the world's premier economy. Hence, the policy of preserving economic and military superiority. The trade off is that the US population must forgo the social benefits enjoyed by virtually all developed nations and many developing nations, like universal health care. Moreover, it is the objective of the elite to divert national wealth now dedicated to social programs such as SS and Medicare by privatizing them, i.e., putting those funds into the economy so that they can be profitized.

So the solution to all probems that the US faces involves ending this policy and the economic neoliberalism, neo-imperialsim and neocolonialism on which it is based.

How, specifically, this weekend?

Announce an end to the military spending that underlies and sustains this policy of global domination and call a global conference to create a global commonwealth of nations. The world doesn't need "free trade," it needs to erase the fictitious lines called national borders and start treating humanity as a family instead of as field for exploitation of the weak by the strong.

In the late 1940's (post-WWII) Bucky Fuller conducted a study — as I recall reported in Nine Chains To the Moon — of the earth's resources and technology and concluded that there was enough available through doing more with less (design science) for the world to be a utopia for all. Then he examined the current distribution and found that 90% was being committed to military purposes.

I suspect that something like the same equation exists today. That's how to solve virtually all the problems, and yes, humanity should start this weekend. The president of the US as the leader of the superpower that effectively controls the world economically and militarily should announce the commencement of this project sooner rather than later.

Gardels: Now that the U.S. authorities are at last on the right track, what are the key components of resolving the crisis?

Soros: The outlines are clear. There are five major elements.
-- First, the government needs to recapitalize the banking system by buying equity stakes in banks.
-- Second, interbank lending needs to be restarted with guarantees and bringing LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) in line with Fed funds. This is in the works. It is going to happen.
-- Third, we must reform the mortgage system in the U.S., minimizing foreclosures and renegotiating loans so that mortgages are not worth more than houses. Stemming foreclosures will cushion the fall of housing prices.
-- Fourth, Europe has to fix a weakness of the Euro by creating a safety net for its banks. While initially resisting this, they have now found religion and done it at their meeting in Paris on Sunday.
-- Fifth, the IMF must deal with the vulnerability of countries at the periphery of the global financial system by providing a financial safety net. This is also in the works. The Japanese have already offered $200 billion for this purpose.
These five steps will start the healing process. If we implement these measures effectively, we will have passed through the worst of the financial crisis.

article

They been raidn' the coast they have and now there aint no booty left to plunder. The folks who live on the coast, well, they been pretty much robbed clean ya see? There's no more plunder, so what is the governor supposed to do? Put Captain "Plunder" Paulson his self, the famous pirate leader, in charge! That's right mate's because who else is going to find more plunder than Captain Plunder himself? Heh, heh, heh! He has a nose for plunder he does. The Captain always has a plan. The governor used be the Captain's mate see. They used to sail together and those were good times they were; plenty of booty to go round. So now they control the taxes see and then watch the good times roll ...

"You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!" - Joseph Heller