Is this, in the end, how our Governments are treating us?
Yves Smith runs the incredibly successful Blog, Naked Capitalism. Frankly, I have no idea where she finds the time to put together her Posts, many of which are constructed on the back of in-depth research.
On Friday, 16th October there was a Post which has huge implications. It is all about Access Journalism. It needs to be read. Here’s an extract.
Let us start with the cheerleading in the media over Wall Street, and in particular, Goldman earnings. Matt Taibbi, in “Good News on Wall Street Means… What Exactly?,” tells us why this is so distorted:
It’s literally amazing to me that our press corps hasn’t yet managed to draw a distinction between good news on Wall Street for companies like Goldman, and good news in reality.
I watched carefully the reporting of the Dow breaking 10,000 the other day and not anywhere did I see a major news organization include a paragraph of the “On the other hand, so fucking what?” sort, one that might point out that unemployment is still at a staggering high, foreclosures are racing along at a terrifying clip, and real people are struggling more than ever. In fact the dichotomy between the economic health of ordinary people and the traditional “market indicators” is not merely a non-story, it is a sort of taboo — unmentionable in major news coverage.
The press has been on a downslope for at least a decade, as a result of strained budgets and vastly more effective government and business spin control (and it was already pretty good at that, see the BBC series, The Century of the Self, via Google video, for a real eye-opener). I met a reporter who had been overseas for six years, opening an important foreign office for the Wall Street Journal. He was stunned when he came back in 1999 to see how much reporting had changed in his absence. He said it was impossible to get to the bottom of most stories in a normal news cycle because companies had become very sophisticated in controlling their message and access.
As I said, please read the Post in full. Oh, and I see Baseline Scenario picked up on this as well.
By Paul Handover
Learning from Dogs 
In 1902, Lenin published “What is to be done?”, a book in which he set up his blueprint towards his sort of revolution. He was later on able to make it work, with the indispensable help (I claim) of imperial Germany (this assertion with make howl old style “Marxist-Leninists”).
At the times most of the intellectuals in Europe agreed that some revolution needed to be done. Even presidents of the USA such as the Roosevelts not only agreed, but implemented, revolutions (Teddy against Rockefeller and other monopolists; Franklin Delano against his “banksters”).
Interestingly, nowadays intellectuals to not seem to agree about what is going on.
So let me say it in a few words: some non elected individuals, the big bankers, were endowed, by the state and the supine nature of the People, with powers only the state had in the last few millennia of civilization.
Those private, unelected individuals, direct most of the capital towards the casino of “derivatives”, a casino in the sky that produces, at most, and very inefficiently, bonuses, for the bankers and their accomplices.
In particular, employees, employers and industry, and also the People in general, and even public goods and commons (such as hospitals and communications means; roads, railways, etc.) get starved of capital.
Lenin and other revolutionaries complained about the exploitations of workers by employers. At this point, what we have is exploitation of everybody, even employers, by a small number of individuals who ought to have only one right, that of disappearing.
To make them disappear, one has to look at the global theory of derivatives. I truth, there is no such a thing. Why? Because it would easily show that the derivative market ought to be mostly OUTLAWED. Derivatives can be useful, but mostly only in the way they were initially set-up, to insurance commercial operators. Left unregulated, the concept of derivatives would end up sucking up most of the world’s imaginable capital, and even much more than that: the global derivative market is about twenty times world’s GDP. It’s sheer insanity.
Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
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