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"It's Our Fault" and NPR Has the Graph To Prove It
I only listen to NPR morning news while I make coffee and am away from
my Sirius Left radio. It inevitably makes me angry. This morning they
had on a "cute" story from two guys from "This American Life" who
reported on the bank bailout followed by an interview with one of those
ubiquitous "business professors" they get on. And this guy was
actually a banker turned teacher. Teacher of what? How to sell
bullsh*t? The guy blames us for all this mess. And he had a graph to
prove it. That ended the story with no one even vaguely commenting on
the reams of wrong in that story. National Pablum Radio is worse than
right wing radio. It makes just enough sense to get into the public
mind set. It sets the conventional wisdom. This is what the
corporatocracy wants. It's all our fault. That way when we have all
the safety nets yanked from us, we will all look at each other and say, "We had it coming, Chester. We shouldn't a oughta have bought that consarned TV set". Here's the story. Taxpayers are on the Hook cuz it's Their Fault
This is yet another example of the business bias of NPR. Having a banker on to tell us that it's our fault is manipulative. No, Mr. Beim, It's stagnant wages made possible by the attack on unions that shoved people into the open arms of the credit card companies aka banks that's a big part of the problem. Neither did regular working taxpayers borrow money from China and Japan to give the upper one-tenth of one percent tons of America's wealth that never trickled down. Our coporatocracy did that.
Have James Galbraith on to talk about "The Predator State". Don't waste my time with some pseudo scientist whose job is to teach people how to game the system and call it getting a degree in business. Have on John Perkins who wrote "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man". Have him explain how his degree in Business allowed him to use "biased sciences of forecasting, econometrics, and statistics, if you bomb a city and then rebuild it, the data shows a huge spike in economic growth." Have Perkins explain how we get countries to borrow huge sums of money to build structures to only benefit the wealthy. Ask why these countries can no longer grow their own food?
The spike in 1929 that has the bankster so scared was because of wall street speculators and Charles Ponzi and other pre-Madoffs, not the working people who put things on lay away in the 1920s. That NPR promotes this insidious propaganda is more a reason why we are in this mess than that it's the working taxpayer's fault.
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Time for everybody to read Susan Jacoby's "The Age of American Unreason" which is now in paperback. She reminds us that Neil Postman in his 1985 "Amusing Ourselves to Death" warns
For a supposedly public institution funded partially with taxpayer (that's working people type taxpayers not the uber wealthy taxpayers) money to tell us that we are on the hook for this mess because there is a graph to prove we bought too many TVs is criminal. People call and write in and tell them to knock it off.
This is yet another example of the business bias of NPR. Having a banker on to tell us that it's our fault is manipulative. No, Mr. Beim, It's stagnant wages made possible by the attack on unions that shoved people into the open arms of the credit card companies aka banks that's a big part of the problem. Neither did regular working taxpayers borrow money from China and Japan to give the upper one-tenth of one percent tons of America's wealth that never trickled down. Our coporatocracy did that.
Have James Galbraith on to talk about "The Predator State". Don't waste my time with some pseudo scientist whose job is to teach people how to game the system and call it getting a degree in business. Have on John Perkins who wrote "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man". Have him explain how his degree in Business allowed him to use "biased sciences of forecasting, econometrics, and statistics, if you bomb a city and then rebuild it, the data shows a huge spike in economic growth." Have Perkins explain how we get countries to borrow huge sums of money to build structures to only benefit the wealthy. Ask why these countries can no longer grow their own food?
The spike in 1929 that has the bankster so scared was because of wall street speculators and Charles Ponzi and other pre-Madoffs, not the working people who put things on lay away in the 1920s. That NPR promotes this insidious propaganda is more a reason why we are in this mess than that it's the working taxpayer's fault.
.
Time for everybody to read Susan Jacoby's "The Age of American Unreason" which is now in paperback. She reminds us that Neil Postman in his 1985 "Amusing Ourselves to Death" warns
"...we do not measure a culture by its ourput of undisguised trivialites, but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations."Also read Sheldon Wolin's "Democracy Inc: Managed Democracy and Inverted Totalitarianism and John Perkins "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" (And if you haven't read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine", shame on you). Mythmaking is ever present and appears in seemingly simple stories. Perkins says
"we bought the myth that economic growth benefts all humankind and those people who excel at stoking the fires of economic growth should be exalted and rewarded, while those born on the fringes are available for exploitation."But as Perkins points out, guys like him used pseudo science with fancy graphs to rig the system. Some knowingly do it and others just buy the idea that everybody else is doing it, so they just have no choice other than go along to get along.
For a supposedly public institution funded partially with taxpayer (that's working people type taxpayers not the uber wealthy taxpayers) money to tell us that we are on the hook for this mess because there is a graph to prove we bought too many TVs is criminal. People call and write in and tell them to knock it off.
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In the past few years, NPR and PBS have used whatever laurels they collected over the decades as lefty-liberal, alternative, truth-to-power barricadistas to shill a "soft-right" program of neoconservative foreign-policy churlishishness, and an almost libertarian layout of economic immobility. "Yes, dammit, we're anti-racists and we obsessively decry the monstrous past of this monstrous country, but, hey, where the scrilla is concerned, we got it - let's keep it". I've always held that the measure of any true progressive is the progress of his accounts tally.
February 27, 2009 1:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not going to apologize for NPR or the glib charts, but I think Broughton makes a good point here:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/kris_broughton/2009/02/no-magic-bullet-theory-can-exp.php
I do agree that there has been a decline in wages and a transfer of wealth that has accelerated the process, and that blaming those that are hurting for not realizing that they were lifestyling into a trap is the easy way out for those that profited from said transfer of wealth.
February 27, 2009 1:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Broughton's point is the one that is being pushed by the people who want to keep the status quo aka Empire. We are all responsible. We are all to blame. We all did it. Mankind is basically bad and our demons must be tamed. It's the "Murder on the Orient Express Theory". And it stops the conversation. It stops it because the top of the pyramid don't really think they are part of the "we". They are the elect and they have been exalted by being given the most power and money. They want those of us below them on the pyramid to take the heat and, as the bankers in the NPR interview say, pay the bills.
See I really wonder if the same people pushing the "we are all to blame" meme would be willing then to embrace the "we are all in this together" philosophy? Can WE move away from the past 5000 years of empire building and a hierarchy system to a more community building fraternal or lateral system? The latter still exists amongst ancient tribes in South America. Can we treat them as equals as opposed to looking our noses down on them and only exploiting them?
If we really do turn away from the fundie doctrine of greed, the latest repackaging of feudalism called Friedman/Rubinomics, then the solutions become clear. (courtesy of David Korten)
1. We provide everybody with a healthy, dignified, and fulfilling life.
2. Bring human consumption into balance with Earth's natural systems.
3. support an equitable and socially efficient allocation of resources.
4. Honor sound, rule-based market principles.
5. One person, one vote citizen sovereignty
6. nurture relationships within strong, caring communities.
So no more man made islands in the shape of palm trees. No more lawns in the middle of the desert. No more belief in survival of the fittest or manifest destiny. From stock markets to farmer's markets.
February 27, 2009 3:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
We are all responsible, actually irresponsible, but we don't have to let the conversation stop there. Some are clearly more at fault, some have clearly profited at the expense of others. Even though we have been irresponsible, we can take responsibility, seek redress, and fix what has gone wrong.
February 27, 2009 3:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
I like it. Some have done nothing wrong but try to work hard and pay their bills, and some have been irresponsible and some are downright crooks. Let's get to work by first frog marching the crooks.
February 27, 2009 3:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
But what I really mean is something pretty important and I'd like feedback. By saying that it's everybody's fault or that it comes down to "personal responsibility" and "individualism", it internalizes the guilt. That paralyzes us. We just get nowhere. We are spinning our wheels in the rut and pointing fingers and getting nowhere.
Guilt. It's so Freud. We need a good dose of Jung instead. But that's another diary.
February 28, 2009 10:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Rock on DKC/Feral Cat! You got the fire!
February 27, 2009 2:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am just laughing about graphs on the radio.
Driving your car to work and listening to the radio and they wish to 'show' you graphs. What's next, go through Hustler magazine?
Good post. You can see a lot people here are really not happy with NPR
February 27, 2009 3:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's is so funny. I didn't even think about the absurdity of trying to describe some "twin peaks" graph on the radio. Your "Hustler" comment now has me thinking about people talking about peaks being boobs.
February 27, 2009 3:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
The only good graph is a graph on radio was my though.
February 27, 2009 4:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
One morning back in the 80's on my way to a class at Grad School I had on a NYC radio station on in the car and they were doing just that but with Penthouse and some other rags as opposed to Hustler. It was my appalling introduction to Howard Stern. I found a new station after that.
February 27, 2009 5:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Has everybody read this article on "Wired" "The Formula That Killed Wall Street" http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant
And a great article by James Leiber in the Village Voice about the bucket shops in AIG London that did the system in. http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-01-28/news/what-cooked-the-world-s-economy/
The first article shows how self deluded we can all be as we look for easy wealth with the right formula that keeps us sure we can beat the casino.
The second article is yet another very simple and clear call for rules and regulations. Bucket shops were made illegal and they should have stayed that way. Safe banking institutions should be separate from gambling institutions aka investment banks.
No we are not all to blame for this. But the weasels have been given far too much deference. And not only deference, but a free pass. Why haven't we see any frog marching?
My point is that the media and the corporations, international bankers and government lackeys keep hammering us with the personal responsibility (code for screw the working people) meme. And I mean hammering. Don't fall for this flim flam from our so called "news".
February 27, 2009 3:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree, thanks cat, for telling it like it is.
February 27, 2009 7:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
The chart shows 'non-corporate debt' for the '29 crash, which line fades out in 1976, below it a line called 'household debt' starts in 1955, so the two lines are not measuring the same debt. I assume the 'household debt' which only goes back to 1955 wouldn't have included stocks bought on margin by speculators in 1929, ergo the use of 'non-corporate' instead of 'household' for 1929.
The only similarity might be all the bad debt went through up on Wall Street with a lot of brokers and banks skimming off their take of it, whether 'non-corporate' or 'household'.
Debt to GDP ratio will also go up when the GDP goes down.
February 27, 2009 11:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
In a nutshell, in the 1920's Wall Street made a lot of money pumping up stocks with loans that went bad, in recent years they made money pumping up housing prices with loans that are going bad.
It was the folks who dished out the money who inflated the bubble that KO'd the system.
If the ex-banker guy on NPR was so smart why didn't he and his banking buddies see this coming years ago?
February 27, 2009 11:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you for clarifying the banker's graph, or more appropriately, graft. Lot of wiggle room by calling it "non-corporate" debt.
A chart that the banker turned professor should look at is the top marginal tax rates. In the 1920's they were 20%. That left a lot of funny money around in those days to "play the market". John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Great Crash 1929" is a great little book on the ins and outs of the crash. There was a great deal of "get rich quick" schemes focused on land in Florida. The proverbial "Have I got some swampland for you"was made famous by Charles Ponzi's subdivision near Jacksonville.
Yes, some Americans can become easily self deluded by get rich quick schemes, casinos, lotteries, but it takes the big boys to crash the system.
February 28, 2009 10:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
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Oh brother . . .
The ol' it's everybody's fault... eh?
Geez ... I hate to do this but, as I said about the Bushies in my very first blog post here back on Independence Day 2005, I also say about these corporate banking and lending shills and all the media enablers . . .
Here ... What Do I Really Think . . .
There. I feel better now ...
~OGD~
February 28, 2009 3:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
I listen to NPR, as well as This American Life. I remember the latter's piece on the earlier happenings in this crisis, and it accurately reported on the loan-issuing mania. I know the "It's everybody's fault" meme is out there, and here, too. As in:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/kris_broughton/2009/02/no-magic-bullet-theory-can-exp.php
Complain to NPR if you think they're biased, they will notice.
February 28, 2009 8:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
By saying it's everyone's fault, they are in essence saying it is no ones fault.
I do draw the line. Those financial wizards looking down their noses at the rest of us, and that were in positions to know better and didn't say so, have the most responsibility. Not because of mere ethics, but because that is why WE paid THEM. It was their JOB.
Can I get a refund? I could use the $5K in fees I paid the bank to vet me and approve my loan right now.
February 28, 2009 10:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
A essay here yesterday pointed to the William Black piece about how much fraud was involved in this whole housing bubble and bust. Pay attention to most everything coming out of the U of Missouri's economists. They and others were shoved to the side for the last 30 years and were considered "heterodox". (See Chris Hayes piece "Hip Heterodoxy"). Black's piece is hugely important.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/the-two-documents-everyon_b_169813.html
The FBI warned of the huge fraud. Elliot Spitzer and the other Attorneys Generals of all 50 states tried to rein in the fraud on the state level but were repelled by the Bush administration. Spitzer spilled the beans in an op ed and several weeks later, his trysts were uncovered.
Having said all this, there are individual things all of us can do to not go insane or become hopelessly depressed. This crisis gives us unique opportunities for taking this nightmare and returning the real American dream. We can
downsize without depleting our lives. Read more books. Plant food gardens. Volunteer to give a talk on something you care about at the local school or church. Become a student and a teacher. Too often lately, we've become a bunch of lecturers. That's what burned me about the bullsh*t banker. He needs to do more learnin' not more preachin'.
Protest free trade that exploits people like us around the world. Don't buy from companies that use sweatshops. Drive less. Imagine a whole new line of luxury buses that are hybrids. You get on the bus and it is outfitted with computers. Cool.
For those of us who blog and can write decently, it behooves us to spread the word. Bill Moyers said that we should "shout it from our keyboards and from the cafes". I try to write a letter to the editor with as many facts as I can put into it, to get "the truth" out there.
This is a a battle, folks. The status quo controls all of the TV and radio news, the Fat Cat News. But we have the internet. So don't isolate yourself. Talk to one person per day and pass on a fact. Become a Painite Pamphleteer!
February 28, 2009 10:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
DKC -
First, I like your reading list!
The mutation of PBS is an old wound for me which is reopened on a regular basis. The Republican's successful attack and takeover of PBS was - and still is - evident. The argument was that it wasn't "fair" for a public supported media to "compete" against private media (like Clear Channel and others). So they choked off funding forcing them to seek corporate funding. Then Bush stacked the board with ditto heads to either kill or radically transform PBS. The changes began with the funding shift, but have certainly continued.
In short, PBS, the last bastion of relatively balanced information, tipped into the corporate media spin machine.
Personally, I have renamed the various media. The "mainstream" media is the "corporate" media as that is whose interests and perspectives they represent. The "alternative" media is the "people's" media, which are those individuals and organizations who attempt to present reality in a context that takes "data" and produces "information." One of the primary strategies of the corporate media is to decontextualize and bombard. Frequently, all the data is ultimately presented (or available) but it is presented piecemeal, spun, and NEVER related to the other pieces.
There is a different bias problem here and that is most of the U.S. public's faith in the corporate media. They see it as "fair" informative, and covering "what's important." The "alternative" media is "biased" and has an "agenda." For many of those who don't get caught within the above myth, there is the meme that the media (corporate) is "liberal" and therefore not credible. The default for too many people is to avoid the news at all cost. All this leaves us with a large block of the population who is either misinformed or uninformed, and therefore very easily manipulated.
One first step I recommend for folks to open their eyes to the myth of the media is one longstanding warrior for truth - Project Censored. Here's the wikipedia entry, but it has been fighting for media democracy since 1976. What amazes folks when they start reading the investigative reports on critical events that never made it to the corporate media is, "Why didn't we hear about that?" It fundamentally shakes people's belief in the stuff that passes as "information." (No, I am not affiliated with Project Censored).
February 28, 2009 5:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your thoughts are much appreciated. I like the explanation that they present everything piecemeal and then they spin it in a big mixer and out comes the mush.
March 1, 2009 4:18 PM | Reply | Permalink