Hubris. Plain and simple.

I think you accurately pegged it in your opening paragraphs. Spend enough time feeling no limits to your power and something like the Internet and blogging and a public who is all of a sudden paying attention will sail right over your head, if your multitude of "able" assistant even bother to mention it to you.

Do you ever get the feeling that all those folks at the highest levels are simply doing their best to deny reality as long as they can?

Lady Huff is waxing about whether or not Jon Stewart would have done a better job with dicky c than John King of CNN. It made me giggle.

CarolG, in her news center, noted that AIG thought maybe they would get away with throwing out some news about bonuses on Friday, because who reads the newspapers on Saturday (straight quote from West Wing). Ha!! Those days are gone.

Send out some news on Sunday at 1 AM, boom. Greenwald, or Lady Huff, or Joan Walsh, or Josh will pick it up and at 1:30AM somebody is blogging about it.

This is good post. Looking at some positive aspects of the information age.

If X notes that in 2003 w said blah blah blah. Well hit the NYT or Newsweek and hit one of their search engines (At least I think that is what I am doing when I google, in the posters google as it were) and you can find out if that is what was said or not in less than an hour. Sometimes half an hour.

Go ahead evil ones. Try to hide. We shall seek you out and show you for what you really are!!!

Sunlight is indeed the best disinfectant.

Excellent post TheraP!

Anyone who has been around power and powerful people both in politics and the private sector, who is an honest observer, can tell you that the answer to your question about whether these people think nobody will check them or call their bluff is that is exactly what they think. With the acquisition of even a little bit of power most human beings are wont to change how they view themselves and others. Like anyone else who breaks the rules they think they won't get caught, but in these cases they also think their power protects them even if someone starts nosing around. They often feel invulnerable.

It is the rare human being who is able to maintain their sense of sameness as opposed to superiority once they have acquired some power. Most people believe they will not be effected by the power they wield. This is because they just don't really understand the toxic quality of power and are unable to see how it has changed them. As in Joe Walsh's song "Everybody's so different. I haven't changed! Life's been good to me so long."

Some are able to check the negative psychological attributes that accrue with the acquisition of power, but most are unaware of the transformation and deny it happens at all until they find themselves in a position that brings them down to earth. Sometimes it takes quite a fall to do that. Look at John Edwards. Look at Bill Clinton. Look at Madoff. Look at Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Ted Haggard. Look at Nixon, the Enron gang, etc... Power presents opportunity but also great risk if not handled and approached properly.

Power ingrains an arrogance of a special sort. The ability to resist is greater when the effects of power are less, so that the higher up one goes in either politics or business the less able one is to effectively resist seeing one's self as possessing superior abilities, etc... and from a sense of entitlement to whatever the perquisites of the position might be and so on. Power, in any arena, corrupts those who wield it.

Whether it is someone elected to a town council position, school board on up the political ladder or in business as one accumalates power and position, the typical human begins to believe things about themselves that may or may not be the case or begins to acquire certain distorted beliefs about themselves that cause them to think they are entitled and even invincible. These distortions are shaped by their sense of enhanced power as a human being because they can influence the behavior of others and make decisions, etc... Often, they begin to perceive themselves as possessing superior intellect, judgment insights, etc... They become fascinated with their power and believe that the power is something that comes not from their position, but from themselves. They believe it belongs to them and they will do anything to keep and/or enhance it. They often come to believe it is an attribute they themselves possess and control no matter how small or large. The attention and deference they receive only because they are in power intoxicates them, distorts their vision of themselves and those around them. The more power they have the more intoxicating it is to them and the more they want and need the feeling they get from it. Few can maintain an undistorted view of the world without focusing on doing so once power has taken hold of them. One of the rare individuals who seems to have been able to keep themselves in tact and remained humble despite the acquisition of great power is Warren Buffet and that's why he is so well respected. His ability to remain "normal" while wielding all that power and wealth is the most remarkable thing about the man.

The distorted vision power causes leads to all manner of abuses great and small. The person who allows power to go to their head can easily believe that it is extremely important for everyone but themselves to follow the rules, but because they are who they are, the rules do not really apply at least not in the same way. They can also easily assume that while they are aware that something they are doing is against the rules or even illegal that they will never get caught because their power insulates them from scrutiny or questioning and so on. Once a politician or businessperson has reached this point there is little but disaster that can stop them. The corrupting influence of power is palpable and if not checked will end up corrupting even the strongest person.

Lying, stealing and other unethical or immoral behaviors can easily become a daily and routine activity in the life of a very powerful business or political leader. Rarely do the sycophants who surround them tell them that they need to stop or that they are wrong. Typically these are people who, for lack of a better phrase, get a contact high from the power of the person they serve and will do nothing to jeapordize the their acquisition of this second tier of the ultimate drug. More frequently in business than in politics (for obvious reasons) the addition of large amounts of money enhances the seductive and addictive quality of power.

You can look at a very long list of powerful persons whose lies, arrogance, personal indiscretions, and crimes all essentially end up admitting that they were in a position where they felt invincible, capable of pulling off anything and that the rules that apply to everyone else did not apply to them.

Our founding fathers understood how potent and corrupting power is in the political arena and that is why they set up a government with checks and balances so that no person or party could accumulate too much unchecked power. I doubt very much whether they could have envisioned the extraordinary power held by private corporate leaders today given the very different scale and nature of commerce in their time. They likely could not have anticipated the vast concentration of power in the hands of a small number of executives and so saw the greatest threat as absolute governmental power. Nonetheless, certain checks and balances exist in the corporate world, albeit often weak and easily manipulated, so somewhere along the line there has been some inkling about the corrupting influence of power in the business world. FDR and the New Dealers understood well that business power required regulation or it inevitably leads to the sort of disasters we are surrounded by today. Thank God all the safeguards they put in place were not dismantled!

Obviously, all we have to so is look at our recent past and the current financial debacle to see how easy it is for those in power to lie and deceive and view themselves as being beyond any rules or any laws. They can lie to and/or manipulate auditors, accountants, boards of directors and regulatory agencies. They can even lie to and manipulate our government itself at the highlest executive and legislative levels. Many of them in the financial sector obviously haven't been humbled enough to keep from continuing to manipulate the political system in support of maintaining their power and position. The lobbying of the big banks demonstrates they really don't understand that for the public, the aura of power no longer protects these guys. And they do it shamefacedly, with a sense of entitlement unrestrained and without any fear of being effectively scrutinized because it is so very rare that they ever are scrutinized.

The best and most effective check on the powerful now is the voice of the people demanding real, radical and substantive redistribution of power and wealth in our society. We must realize that what Frederick Douglass said was true:

"Power a demand. It never did and it never will."

The "selling" of it being at times more important than the product itself.

Most days, that's the part that angers me the most.

Wow! I really appreciate the candid feedback!!!!

I do tend to be too abstract. I certainly don't want to absolve them of responsibility. I can see why my post would suggest that they can't help it.

Let me modify. I think that they have an AWARENESS that their world-view is like a map. I think that they also hold the knowledge that a map is not reality. So I think that they CHOOSE to blur the distinction between the map and the world--between story-telling as presentation and story-telling as representation.

I think Scott Peck talked about this best. To paraphrase: The map is only a means, not an end. We have to remain open to changing the map. We have to allow that some input cannot be charted anywhere on our current map. We have to be humble enough to accept that our map is, and always will be, a work-in-progress. Which goes back to your original point: the "I'm smarter than you mentality." If we believe the map is a perfect representation of reality, then we think we're infallible.

It is a new paradigm, and you’re quite right that it’s very difficult for the powers-that-be to put things over anymore. But they are learning to play the new game and this case might be one instance of reverse engineering the blogosphere-media feedback loop to their own ends.

In this case, the unfair bonus story is stoked for a while then numbers are released with the conventional wisdom that they will be buried between news cycles. But instead the story is picked up and explodes (with a little help from “anonymous sources”). The story meant to foment populist anger at AIG employees seemed to be too widespread and coordinated.

The bonus story and the little back-stories around it get even more play through the blogosphere-media loop, so much that the bigger story (where the AIG money is going), released at the same time the “blame Dodd” story, is all but ignored.

As Michael Hudson wrote in CP today:

Here’s the problem with all the hoopla over the $135 million in AIG bonuses: This sum is only less than 0.1 per cent – one thousandth – of the $183 BILLION that the U.S. Treasury gave to AIG as a “pass-through” to its counterparties. This sum, over a thousand times the magnitude of the bonuses on which public attention is conveniently being focused by Wall Street promoters, did not stay with AIG. For over six months, the public media and Congressmen have been trying to find out just where this money DID go. Bloomberg brought a lawsuit to find out. Only to be met with a wall of silence.
Until finally, on Sunday night, March 15, the government finally released the details. They were indeed highly embarrassing. The largest recipient turned out to be just what earlier financial reports had rumored: Paulson’s own firm, Goldman Sachs, headed the list.