Recently President Obama made a speech saying that when we fear what is and might happen to us, we stop thinking and react without knowing the facts. Unfortunately this is a common problem with even elite well educated Americans. In the past, the well propagandized elites also have problems going outside what they read and hear about the so-called facts and conclusions and do not see reality starring them in their faces.
I saw this clearly in the panel discussion today on Meet the Press. Steele got the most face time at the beginning who is the beleaguered chairman of the Republican National Committee whose chief aim is to get money for elections which he has not.
David Brooks, E.J. Dionne, Harold Ford, and Rachel Maddow. Gregory kept Rachel at 20 second soundbites. Brooks chose his own facts to put forth his view. When Rachel corrected him, he made a stupid excuse. Rick Santelli, a Tea bagger, toned down his far right rhetoric.
This week’s New Yorker reported that the Tea party candidates can speak well so they can say outrageous things and make it sound reasonable because most people don’t seem to concentrate on the context but just how it is delivered. That is why we are often conned easily by crooks if we do not think.
The only time Meet the Press is worth watching is when Gregory interviews people in detail for 30 minutes. The other shows are worthless. Zakaria of CNN is better, but always remember that he invites people who have their own elite agenda. It is hard to beat Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow for real important facts and sometimes Dylan Ratigan on MSNBC on financial matters. Chris Matthews is variable who is basically a conservative Democrat who is starting to be delusioned by the Republicans and more often says things that makes my heart warm.
Jim Kawakami, Oct 24, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com
“Inside Job” why there’s been no systematic investigation of the 2008 crash, Roubini answers: “Because then you’d find the culprits.”
Published: October 23, 2010
PRESIDENT Obama, the Rodney Dangerfield of 2010, gets no respect for averting another Great Depression, for saving 3.3 million jobs with stimulus spending, or for salvaging GM and Chrysler from the junkyard.
And none of these good deeds, no matter how substantial, will go unpunished if the projected Democratic bloodbath materializes on Election Day. Some are even going unremembered. For Obama, the ultimate indignity is the Times/CBS News poll in September showing that only 8 percent of Americans know that he gave 95 percent of American taxpayers a tax cut. …
The much acclaimed new documentary about the global economic meltdown, “Inside Job,” has it right. As its narrator, Matt Damon, intones, our country has been robbed by insiders who “destroyed their own companies and plunged the world into crisis” — and then “walked away from the wreckage with their fortunes intact.” These insiders include Dick Fuld and four other executives at Lehman Brothers who “got to keep all the money” (more than $1 billion) after Lehman went bankrupt. …
Asked in “Inside Job” why there’s been no systematic investigation of the 2008 crash, Roubini answers: “Because then you’d find the culprits.” With the aid of the “Manhattan Madam” (and current stunt New York gubernatorial candidate) Kristin Davis, the film also asks why federal prosecutors who were “perfectly happy to use Eliot Spitzer’s personal vices to force him to resign in 2008” have not used rampant sex-and-drug trade on Wall Street as a tool for flipping witnesses to pursue the culprits behind the financial crimes that devastated the nation. …
No matter how much Obama talks about his “tough” new financial regulatory reforms or offers rote condemnations of Wall Street greed, few believe there’s been real change. That’s not just because so many have lost their jobs, their savings and their homes. It’s also because so many know that the loftiest perpetrators of this national devastation got get-out-of-jail-free cards, that too-big-to-fail banks have grown bigger and that the rich are still the only Americans getting richer.
In our new banking scandal, as in those before it, attorneys general in the states, where many pension funds were decimated by Wall Street Ponzi schemes, are pursuing the crimes Washington has not. The largest bill of reparations paid out by Bank of America for Countrywide’s deceptive mortgage practices — $8.4 billion — was to settle a suit by 11 state attorneys general on the warpath. …
When we reward financial engineers infinitely more than actual engineers, we “lure our most talented graduates to the largely unproductive chase” for Wall Street riches, as the economist Robert H. Frank wrote in The Times last weekend. Worse, Frank added, the continued squeeze on the middle class leads to a wholesale decline in the quality of American life — from more bankruptcy filings and divorces to a collapse in public services, whether road repair or education, that taxpayers will no longer support. … http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/opinion/24rich.html?src=me&ref=general
No comments:
Post a Comment