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Bush-Cheney-Paulson are up to no (or very little) good here

by JR Mooneyham, Unknown News       Dec. 14, 2008
Re Helen & Harry's comment on whether the economic crisis is real:

A report by Celent, a well-respected financial research and consulting firm, concludes that the financial crisis in the US has been broadly overstated by the Bush-Cheney administration, unless the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department have other information that doesn't show up in the public data. The guy who ran the study says, "I don't think they're fabricating stuff but what I think they are doing is taking the situation of a handful of institutions and generalizing that to the market as a whole, incorrectly." I'd never heard of Celent, but Business Week's entry on the company suggests that they're credible. And of course, we have heard of the Bush-Cheney administration, which has an eight-year track record of wildly exaggerating relatively minor problems and minimizing or flat-out denying serious problems.  [ Reuters News Agency ]
I sure wouldn't be surprised if Bush-Cheney did that -- as they and the Republicans in general did that in spades with 9-11-01, managing to terrify Americans into giving them carte blanche in a way I found unbelievable. I mean, we'd seen large buildings being demolished like that oodles of times before -- sometimes even on America's funniest home videos! And yet when a bearded guy does it with a plane, we shit all over ourselves. And neither the plane thing -- or toppling the twin towers -- were even new ideas. They tried to cut down the towers like chopping down trees -- with a car bomb in the basement around 1993 -- and failed. It was all over the news for months. And using a jumbo jet to attack buildings in Washington had been described in excruciating detail by Tom Clancy in a spy novel way before 9-11-01 (I read it before 9-11-01). So I was amazed by how panicked everybody acted after the event. I mean, 9-11 was certainly impressive and unusual -- but nowhere close to armageddon. Heck: the prospect of descent into a real economic depression ought to scare everybody much worse than that!

The US government has been interfering in markets to cover the asses of the rich and powerful all along. I've got references on this predating this latest crisis.

Naomi Klein has written up some excellent material on the powerful manipulating and exploiting the rest of us with various crises. It's called The Shock Doctrine.

Yes: economists will tell you, you can actually spur large changes in the economy via changes in perceptions alone. Which is a very scary thing, as it means the economy is always going to be a more fragile thing than most people think.

After reading the piece through (and considering everything else at my immediate disposal), my best take is this:

Yes, as usual, Bush-Cheney-Paulson are up to no (or very little) good here. And also as usual, citizen/taxpayers are being kept in the dark about a great many things in all this. And yes, B-C-P are actually stupid enough to jawbone the economy into even worse shape than it actually is, merely in order to get what they want.

BUT ... along with Krugman and lots of others, I've personally been expecting a pretty awful recession of some kind for many different reasons, for years now. I mean, I just saw too much bad stuff happening to bring it on. I've personally witnessed many of the same events cause recessions in the past, such as Reagan's insane military spending ramp-up even as he simultaneously cut taxes (Bush did the same). If you look back and compare past decades with the most recent one, you see plenty of signs pointing to a painful slow-down in the present.

Yes, I wish we could wring more transparency and accountability out of Bush-Cheney-Paulson -- but minimizing such stuff has been their hallmark all along. And making sure a succeeding Democratic administration has as little wiggle room as possible to improve anything has even been trumpeted as a major Republican long term strategy by some, for many years now.

The I Ching says that one extreme can lead to its opposite. So hopefully B-C-P have so screwed things up that Obama might now have a better chance to improve things than he ever could have had otherwise. Like the opening the Republicans gave Roosevelt with the Great Depression.

But the economics can be tricky. Especially when you have players in powerful positions doing all they can to sabotage you every step of the way.

© by the author.

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