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Are Our Leaders Really Incompetent ... Or Just Pretending?
- Afghanistan
- Central Banks
- Corruption
- Creditors
- default
- Department of Justice
- FBI
- Federal Reserve
- Fractional Reserve Banking
- Germany
- goldman sachs
- Goldman Sachs
- Great Depression
- Henry Kissinger
- Iraq
- Kool-Aid
- Meltdown
- Middle East
- Neocons
- New York Times
- Reality
- Saudi Arabia
- Simon Johnson
- Testimony
- Unemployment
- Wall Street Journal
- White House
People want to assume that when someone in power messes up - especially someone who appears incompetent - it was just a mistake.
For example, folks can't believe that an incompetent president could carry out scoundrelly deeds.
But as I wrote 5 years ago:
As noted social historian and author Michael Parenti writes:
"Generally, US foreign policy is remarkably consistent and cohesive, a deadly success, given the interests it represents. Those who see it as repeatedly befuddled are themselves revealing their own befuddlement.
Sometimes the policymakers themselves seize upon incompetence as a cover. [For
example, when the Iran-Contra affair was discovered, President Reagan
pleaded incompetence.] His admission of incompetence was eagerly
embraced by various analysts and pundits who prefer to see their leaders
as suffering from innocent ignorance rather than deliberate deception.
Subsequent testimony by his subordinates, however, revealed that
Reagan was not as dumb as he was pretending to be, and that he had
played an active and deciding role in the entire Iran-contra affair.***
No
less a political personage than Henry Kissinger repeatedly pretended
to innocent ignorance and incompetence when confronted with the dirty
role he and his cohorts played . . . ."This strategy
of "playing dumb" and acting incompetent has, in fact, long been
employed by leaders on both the left and the right. Many liberals and
old fashioned conservatives have been suckered by this dumb and dumber
act.***
Let's take a look at the actual history of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld for insight into whether they are incompetent leaders.
After
Bush lost his bid for congress because he was perceived as an
over-educated, "spoiled rich kid from back East", he cultivated a
bumbling, "good old boy" image, and then started winning his political
elections. That's right: Bush actually cultivated a bumbling, misspeaking mannerism.Moreover, President
Bush proposed painting a U.S. surveillance plane in the colors of the
United Nations in hopes of drawing fire from Iraqi military, as a
way to justify war against Iraq. Is this the kind of proposal that
someone who is incompetent would make, or is it the kind of thing a
conscious deceiver would suggest?Rumsfeld and Cheney are also long-time experts at using deception to
justify their military and political goals. They were, in fact, the
folks who intentionally hyped the Soviet threat during the Cold War so that the defense contractors would make a killing and the U.S. would have a suitably scary "bad guy" to rally against (see this article). These guys, like other neocons, are students of Machiavelli.Remember how the TV character Detective Columbo pretended he was bumbling and dumb, so that people would underestimate him? Or remember the TV show Matlock, where Andy Griffith pretended to be a slow-witted country lawyer in order to put people off their guard?
I would argue that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have also used this same trick: playing dumb.
Prominent
liberal figures and 0ld-fashioned conservatives have tried to warn
others of the ploy. For example, liberal guru George Lakoff wrote an
article in 2006 called "Bush Is Not Incompetent" which demonstrates that the Bush administration has been incredibly successful
in implementing its agenda (the article is well worth reading for its
evidence that Bush is not incompetent; however, I believe Lakoff
confuses neoconservatism with true conservatism).Similarly, in an article entitled "Bush Didn’t Bungle Iraq, You Fools",
veteran investigative reporter Greg Palast says that the
administration got exactly what it wanted from the Iraqi war. And
popular liberal writer William Pitt says "the 'incompetence' thing is nonsense . . . Can anyone still think this was all by accident?".
Pitt recognizes that the White House, rather than being incompetent,
has gotten exactly what they wanted all along -- to invade Iraq, get a
foothold in the Middle East and to get control of the oil.Indeed, the neocons have openly advocated civil war and instability in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries as a long-range strategic plan.
I noted last year:
Countries need to lie about their enemies in order to demonize them sufficiently so that the people will support the war.
That is why intelligence "failures" - such as the following - are so common:
- The
U.S. Navy's own historians now say that the sinking of the USS Maine
-- the justification for America's entry into the Spanish-American War
-- was probably caused by an internal explosion of coal, rather than an attack by the Spanish.
- It is also now well-accepted that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident which led to the Vietnam war was a fiction (confirmed here).
- And two lies were used to justify the 1991 Gulf War: the statement that Iraqis murdered Kuwaiti babies and the statement that a quarter of a million Iraqi troops were massed on the border with Saudi Arabia (see also this article)(technically, the statement about Kuwaiti babies did not come from the U.S. government, but from a public relations firm hired by the government).
Oops.
Obama's Economic Incompetence
Obama - like Bush before him - also appears to
be totally incompetent with regard to the economy. He hasn't been
able to rein in the giant banks or significantly lower unemployment.
Obama is following disproven models, and has appointed economists who
either helped cause the crisis in the first place, or who have drunk the
kool-aid of failed economic theory.
But Obama has actually been serving "his constituency": Goldman Sachs and the other Wall Street giants which funded his campaign.
And as I pointed out
last year, top economists running the Fed and advising Obama don't miss
the dangers to the economy due to negligence, but because they are rewarded for doing so:
Most economists don't exercise any independent thinking because economists are trained to ignore reality:
As
I have repeatedly noted, mainstream economists and financial
advisors have been using faulty and unrealistic models for years. See
this, this, this, this, this and this.
And I have pointed out numerous times that economists and advisors have a financial incentive to use faulty models. For example, I pointed out last month:
The decision to use faulty models was an economic and political choice, because it benefited the economists and those who hired them.
For
example, the elites get wealthy during booms and they get wealthy
during busts. Therefore, the boom-and-bust cycle benefits them
enormously, as they can trade both ways.Specifically, as Simon Johnson, William K. Black and others point out,
the big boys make bucketloads of money during the booms using
fraudulent schemes and knowing that many borrowers will default. Then,
during the bust, they know the government will bail them out, and they will be able to buy up competitors for cheap and consolidate power. They may also bet against the same products they are selling during the boom (more here), knowing that they'll make a killing when it busts.But economists have pretended there is no such thing as a bubble. Indeed, BIS slammed the Fed and other central banks for blowing bubbles and then using "gimmicks and palliatives" afterwards.
It
is not like economists weren't warning about booms and busts.
Nobel prize winner Hayek and others were, but were ignored because
it was "inconvenient" to discuss this "impolite" issue.Likewise, the entire Federal Reserve model is faulty, benefiting the banks themselves but not the public.
However, as Huffington Post notes:
The
Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants,
visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly
dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central
bank has become a career liability for members of the profession,
an investigation by the Huffington Post has found.
This
dominance helps explain how, even after the Fed failed to foresee
the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, the
central bank has largely escaped criticism from academic
economists. In the Fed's thrall, the economists missed it, too.
"The
Fed has a lock on the economics world," says Joshua Rosner, a
Wall Street analyst who correctly called the meltdown. "There is
no room for other views, which I guess is why economists got it so
wrong."The
problems of a massive debt overhang were also thoroughly
documented by Minsky, but mainstream economists pretended that debt
doesn't matter.And - even now - mainstream economists are STILL willfully ignoring things like massive leverage, hoping that the economy can be pumped back up to super-leveraged house-of-cards levels.
As the Wall Street Journal article notes:
As they did in the two revolutions in economic thought of the past century, economists are rediscovering relevant work.
It
is only "rediscovered" because it was out of favor, and it was
only out of favor because it was seen as unnecessarily crimping
profits by, for example, arguing for more moderation during boom
times.The powers-that-be do not like economists
who say "Boys, if you don't slow down, that bubble is going to
get too big and pop right in your face". They don't want to
hear that they can't make endless money using crazy levels of
leverage and 30-to-1 levels of fractional reserve banking, and credit
derivatives. And of course, they don't want to hear that the Federal Reserve is a big part of the problem.Indeed, the Journal and the economists it quotes seem to be in no hurry whatsoever to change things:
The
quest is bringing financial economists -- long viewed by some as a
curiosity mostly relevant to Wall Street -- together with
macroeconomists. Some believe a viable solution will emerge within a
couple of years; others say it could take decades.Saturday, PhD economist Michael Hudson made the same point:
I
think that the question that needs to be asked is how the
discipline was untracked and trivialized from its classical
flowering? How did it become marginalized and trivialized, taking
for granted the social structures and dynamics that should be the
substance and focal point of its analysis?...To
answer this question, my book describes the "intellectual
engineering" that has turned the economics discipline into a public
relations exercise for the rentier classes criticized by the
classical economists: landlords, bankers and monopolists. It was
largely to counter criticisms of their unearned income and wealth,
after all, that the post-classical reaction aimed to limit the
conceptual "toolbox" of economists to become so unrealistic,
narrow-minded and self-serving to the status quo. It has ended up as
an intellectual ploy to distract attention away from the financial
and property dynamics that are polarizing our world between
debtors and creditors, property owners and renters, while steering
politics from democracy to oligarchy...[As one
Nobel prize winning economist stated,] "In pointing out the
consequences of a set of abstract assumptions, one need not be
committed unduly as to the relation between reality and these
assumptions."This
attitude did not deter him from drawing policy conclusions affecting
the material world in which real people live. These conclusions
are diametrically opposed to the empirically successful
protectionism by which Britain, the United States and Germany rose
to industrial supremacy.Typical of this now
widespread attitude is the textbook Microeconomics by William
Vickery, winner of the 1997 Nobel Economics Prize:
"Economic
theory proper, indeed, is nothing more than a system of logical
relations between certain sets of assumptions and the conclusions
derived from them... The validity of a theory proper does not
depend on the correspondence or lack of it between the assumptions
of the theory or its conclusions and observations in the real
world. A theory as an internally consistent system is valid if the
conclusions follow logically from its premises, and the fact that
neither the premises nor the conclusions correspond to reality
may show that the theory is not very useful, but does not
invalidate it. In any pure theory, all propositions are essentially
tautological, in the sense that the results are implicit in the
assumptions made."Such
disdain for empirical verification is not found in the physical
sciences. Its popularity in the social sciences is sponsored by
vested interests. There is always self-interest behind
methodological madness. That is because success requires heavy
subsidies from special interests, who benefit from an erroneous,
misleading or deceptive economic logic. Why promote unrealistic
abstractions, after all, if not to distract attention from reforms
aimed at creating rules that oblige people actually to earn their
income rather than simply extracting it from the rest of the
economy?
***
Not
only have our government "leaders" in the Fed, Treasury, Congress and
White House ignored the real world, they have taunted it - like
monkeys who pull the tail of the lion and then are surprised when the
lion attacks:
They have:
- Covered up all of the fraud which led to the crisis
- Rewarded looting by the big banks
- Given trillions in bailout or other emergency funds to private companies, but then refusing to disclose to either the media, the American people or even Congress where the money went
- Let banks buy the government lock, stock and barrel (and see this and this)
- Blown bubble after bubble
- Plundered the treasury to effect "a massive redistribution of wealth to the bank shareholders and their top executives"
- Allowed high-frequency trading to completely warp the markets
These aren't the only areas where the "incompetence" card was played.
Cenk Uygur pointed out:
The New York Times reported ... that we sent in 36 U.S. Special Forces troops to get Osama bin Laden when we knew
he was in Tora Bora. By contrast, we sent nearly 150,000 soldiers to
get Saddam Hussein. In case you're keeping count at home, we got
Saddam and we didn't get Osama. What does that tell you about this
administration’s priorities? This goes beyond incompetence. If you send only 36 soldiers to get somebody in the middle of Afghanistan, it means you don’t want to get him...Osama
had about 1,500-2,000 well-armed, well-trained men in the region. 36
guys to get 2,000? Why would we let ourselves be outgunned like
that?...There is an inescapable fact – if you put this little effort into capturing someone, it means you don’t want to capture him.
***
If
people inside the administration actually held back from capturing
Osama bin Laden when we had him cornered, it borders on treason.
And
former Federal Prosecutor, Office of Special Investigations, U.S.
Department of Justice under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan;
former U.S. Army Intelligence officer, and currently a widely-sought
media commentator on terrorism and intelligence services (John Loftus) says:
The
information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11
was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or
FBI to assert a defense of incompetence.
Postscript:
If you still don't believe a bumbler like Bush could have really been a
rascal, remember that Colin Powell's Chief of Staff Lawrence
Wilkerson said:
The vice president and the secretary of defense created a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" that hijacked U.S. foreign policy.
(Just like they've hijacked foreign policy in the U.S. for nearly 40 years.)
Similarly, if “We are in a cabal... five or six players ... own the regulatory apparatus. everybody is afraid to regulate them"
you think Obama is incompetent in fixing the economy and reining in
Wall Street, remember that Harold Bradley - who oversees almost $2
billion in assets as chief investment officer at the Kauffman Foundation
- said:
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JamesBond a Plant Troll 2 Weeker...
GW hit the nail on the head. People are living in total delusion about their politicians. Anyone who can manipulate their way to the top cannot be that moronic. A favorite gag of mine is to ask a main stream financial advisor whether he believes that Bernake is incompetent or lying to us. The FA usually stunbles to give an answer, as I reply, "well, Bernanke has been wrong 99% of the time since he has been FED chairman, so is he incompetent or is he lying to everyone?"
I then proceed to remind them that Bernanke has a Phd and attended Harvard University then went on to become head of Goldman Sachs. Any rational pesron will realize that level of success would be impossible for a individual that was as incompetent as Bernanke has been. So the only answer left is that.....
Ding-Ding-Ding!!! You got it Johnny! He is lying to everyone.
To watch their faces as they try to somehow rationalize this revelation into their little world is truly a priceless moment. I recommend that everyone try this occasionally.
I agree with your comments except Bernanke was never the head of GS as far as I know.
And he went to MIT and was a professor at Princeton.
No wonder they look at you like you're mad.
he got his phd from mit but was harvard undergrad. no formal work for goldman but boy he has sure carried their water for no direct compensation. cf. his "the great moderation" in 2004 claiming the volatility of the business cycle had lessened. again willful ignorance or arrant duplicity? like msm careerist journalists, tptb employ those who will never ask the uncomfortable questions.
. . . and another junk for an ass-hat who can't address a flaw in the argument at issue and resorts to ad hominem attacks instead. Criticise the idea, not the man. . . if you can.
A refresher course in critical thinking might be in order.
Government apologists are eager to label anyone "taking a cynical stance toward politics, mistrusting authority, endorsing democratic practices, ... and displaying an inquisitive, imaginative outlook" as worthy of a Stalinist trip to the insane asylum.
I guess that means the Founding Fathers and most of our presidents were not only terrorists, but they were also crazy?
It should be obvious that the opinions of mental health professionals are only as sound as their knowledge. For example, a mental health professional in 1640 would likely have labeled Galileo crazy for saying that the Earth orbits around the Sun.
More importantly, a German psychologist who heard from a patient in 1933 - when Hitler started consolidating power in Germany - that Hitler was a dangerous fascist who would launch a world war, try to take over the world and kill millions would likely be labeled as delusional.
Indeed, the psychologist for the wife of the United States Attorney General under Richard Nixon labeled her claims of a conspiracy by White House officials as delusional (she was later proven right when the facts of Watergate were revealed).
Just as with any field, the opinions of mental health professional are only as good as their knowledge.
Personally, I think that having an incompetant [or neutered] figurehead benefits those right behind the curtain. Bush [W] was the perfect distraction to enable Rumsfeld and Cheney to basically run amok w/their agenda and deflect the heat they would've gotten had they been in the POTUS seat.
My vote is that W was actually incompetant, Obama is complicit/neutered, and Cheney and his cohorts were/are f'n world-class evil geniuses.
Cheney was the real president and Bush was allowed to act like he was. Cheney is one evil fuck, no doubt about it. A Master of War, like Mr. Bob said. Saw him today babling on TV and he looked half dead, but still a menace to the human race. Not soon enough will he pass into the dark void.
It seems they learned this trick from Poppy under Reagan. Sure, Reagan wasn't the most aware bulb in the ceiling. Poppy was able to run amok, Iran-Contra, political assassinations and on and on.
With W, he could easily feign stupidity, what being from Texas and all, while still allowing his boys to roll behind the scenes, forwarding their agenda like no one has before in the history of the world. Notice, same names as under Poppy: Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice.
Obama, same deal. Only he has been brainwashed into believing that he is lucky to be there, because he was basically brought up by CIA and NWO-types to be president of the United States. His entre life has been spent as a figurehead and I am sure he has become comfortable with that position. Meanwhile, his underlings...
Well, you get the picture.
an incompetent figurehead leader is a good way to fake out the public. obama is incompetent, notwithstanding his skill as a campaign orator. (i never listen to him any more, for the record.) gwb was incompetent (very). clinton was competent but compromised. bush senior was exceptional in many ways, and i don't say that admiringly. reagan was incompetent. i'm referring to the competence to guide and dominate the executive branch of the federal government.
It's easy to say that bush was incompetent. But you can only judge someone's competency based on the goals they were trying to achieve. If you look at Bush/Cheney through the eyes of most Americans, where we want liberty and the pursuit of happiness, they look incompetent. If you look at them through the eyes of Bilderberg or CFR, they are extremely competent. It's a matter of goals. At election time, they promise us the goals we want, once elected they do their own goals.
Here's a quick peek to the inside
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbnpN07J_zg
that is so true. george w. bush was both the worst president in the history of the country and one of the very most effective/influential. that his most heinous excesses have been retained/augmented by his seemingly opposing party, way different successor is further testimony to his epic importance as an historical figure.
PS Geo, I love that your posts now just get serially junked by assholes who won't/can't even come up with any actual reason other than baseless ad hominem attacks.
Citations to authority are the basis for peer-reviewed academic liturature for a reason. Keep up the good work Geo - you are tireless and methodical - and your efforts are greatly appreciated.
Well said both your comments.
Yes
If it's multiple choice, I pick all the above
Pretenders, bitchez! Didn't need to read all that you wrote, and while I'm sure you worked really hard at it, a near total waste of time.
G/W. is guaranteed to be a complete waste of time; and the answer to his question is; yes. They are just as ignorant as you are; It would be nice if you could somehow educate yourself George, so that you had at least some basic idea idea what was going on in the real world surrounding you, but I'm afraid that is impossible, so you'll just have to keep delighting in abysmally ignorant emoting, and "female logic". too bad, but that's the genetic roulette wheel for you.
IQ145
Why don't you enlighten us?
Prithee, what is "female logic," exactly?
Dont take that shit orly.
But what i want to say is that the usa better start getting some competent people in charge because in thwe last 20 years the west - and specifically the usa and europe have been totally caned by the chinese and the muslims.
osama wanted to bankrupt the US and those dumbasses Bush and Cheney et al let him do it.
Time to lift our game.
Its the corporate globalist agenda that did america in.
The politicians were bought off, or promised to, the people never had a chance.
Now here we are. Blame the establishment, not any single republican or democrat.
My good friend and occasional poster on these boards, Oh Regional Indian, pointed something out to me last night that, frankly, has me floored. I think the idea would go a long way to pointing out just what control the globalist agenda has on the United States and, therefore, the rest of the world.
Sarah Palin just bought a house in Scottsdale, Arizona. Big deal, right? Well, Scottsdale is located at the 33rd North parallel. That is a bold signal from the globalists (I'll call them NWO...). Why? The number 33 is a very powerful number in Masonic rite and ritual. The NWO are all Masons.
Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski are two of the main "controllers" of the NWO. Palin has had several meetings with Kissinger and has come to be called his protege.
Palin’s meeting with Kissinger, however, is apt to be of far greater significance than the others. As the New York Times observed in a September 22 report:
It is likely that Mr. Kissinger, a close outside adviser to Mr. McCain’s campaign, will give Ms. Palin a broad overview of international affairs, focusing particularly on Russia, China and the Middle East. Mr. Kissinger, who was national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations, is regularly called on by Mr. McCain for advice on foreign affairs.
Kissinger was also asked to chair the 911 whitewash but the families smelled that coming down the Avenue of the Americas and that idea got nixed. Amazing how the same names come up over and over again, am I right?
Well, needless to say, Kissinger and Palin have been pretty good buds ever since before 2008. So, I guess that answers the question as to why an Alaskan country girl would buy an ugly house in Arizona- along the 33rd parallel.
But that's not the scary part. Remember that numbers and names are like an obsession with these people. Palingenesis is a concept that has a long history. Basically, the word means a rebirth or re-entering.
Here are some of the historical concepts, according to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palingenesis
New world, New World Order.
Are these people incometent? Oh my, I certainly don't think so.
Seriously. Think about it.
No, they are not, if of 11, 22, 33 calibre.
Pal-in-gen-e-sis, trans-migration. Hummm.
After reading your post, I am floored also.
Posse or "trainee"?
Thanks for sharing.
Where is ORI?
"Where is ORI?"
He drowned in the Ganges taking a dirty-bath with the dead cows.
I knew there was a real reason I didn't care for your comments very much, Monsieur Splicer. It would behoove you to learn some respect.
Jus' sayin'.
Willkommen auf der neuen Reich.
The Fourth Reich. To last a Thousand Years.
Es ist wunderbar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P7Zd-x2QXw
That song actually pisses me off. Were it only within my ability to remaster it with historically ironical lyrics (sung with a thick East German accent) "We're all slaves under USSR."
The 9th Rule of Fight Club:
Newbies have to STFU and read their first 26 weeks...
Mr. Five Inches... I mean Mr. Five Weeks...
Thank you for your considered opinion(s).