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Psychopaths Caused the Financial Crisis … And They Will Do It Again and Again Unless They Are Removed From Power
Bloomberg notes:
The “corporate psychopaths” at the helm of our financial institutions are to blame [for the financial crisis].
Clive R. Boddy, most recently a professor at the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, says psychopaths are the 1 percent of “people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry” lack a “conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings, sympathy or empathy for other people.”
As a result, Boddy argues in a recent issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, such people are “extraordinarily cold, much more calculating and ruthless towards others than most people are and therefore a menace to the companies they work for and to society.”
How do people with such obvious personality flaws make it to the top of seemingly successful corporations? Boddy says psychopaths take advantage of the “relative chaotic nature of the modern corporation,” including “rapid change, constant renewal” and high turnover of “key personnel.” Such circumstances allow them to ascend through a combination of “charm” and “charisma,” which makes “their behaviour invisible” and “makes them appear normal and even to be ideal leaders.”
***
Until the last third of the 20th century, he writes, companies were mostly stable and slow to change. Lifetime employment was a reasonable expectation and people rose through the ranks.
This stable environment meant corporate psychopaths “would be noticeable and identifiable as undesirable managers because of their selfish egotistical personalities and other ethical defects.”
For Wall Street — a rapidly changing and highly dynamic corporate environment if there ever was one, especially when the firms transformed themselves from private partnerships into public companies with quarterly reporting requirements — the trouble started when these charmers made their way to corner offices of important financial institutions.
Then, according to Boddy’s “Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis,” these men were “able to influence the moral climate of the whole organization” to wield “considerable power.”
They “largely caused the crisis” because their “single- minded pursuit of their own self-enrichment and self- aggrandizement to the exclusion of all other considerations has led to an abandonment of the old-fashioned concept of noblesse oblige, equality, fairness, or of any real notion of corporate social responsibility.”
***
He says the unnamed “they” seem “to be unaffected” by the corporate collapses they cause. These psychopaths “present themselves as glibly unbothered by the chaos around them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings and investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done. They cheerfully lie about their involvement in events, are very convincing in blaming others for what has happened and have no doubts about their own worth and value. They are happy to walk away from the economic disaster that they have managed to bring about, with huge payoffs and with new roles advising governments how to prevent such economic disasters.”
The Independent reports:
Mr Boddy is not alone. In Jon Ronson’s widely acclaimed book The Psychopath Test, Professor Robert Hare told the author: “I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well. Serial killer psychopaths ruin families. Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”
***
A senior UK investment banker and I [were] discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.
He then makes an astonishing confession: “At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.”
Here was one of the biggest investment banks in the world seeking psychopaths as recruits.
***
A 2,200-page report by Anton Valukas, the Chicago-based lawyer hired by a US court to investigate Lehman’s failure … revealed systemic chicanery within the bank; he described management failures and a destructive, internal culture of reckless risk-taking worthy of any psychopath.
So why wasn’t Mr Fuld spotted and stopped? I’ve concluded it’s the good old question of nature and nurture but with a new interpretation. As I see it, in its search for never-ending growth, the financial services sector has actively sought out monsters with natures like Mr Fuld and nurtured them with bonuses and praise.
***
Take Sir Fred Goodwin of RBS, for example. Before he racked up a corporate loss of £24.1bn, the highest in UK history, he was idolised by the City. In recognition of his work in ruthlessly cutting costs at Clydesdale Bank he got the nickname “Fred the Shred”, and he played that for all it was worth. He was later described as “a corporate Attila”, a title of which any psychopath would be proud.
PSYCHOPATHS HAVE DIFFERENT BRAIN CHEMISTRY FROM THE REST OF US
In October, we observed:
I noted last year:
Vanderbilt researchers have found that the brains of psychopaths have the dopamine abnormality creates a drive for rewards at any cost, and causing them to ignore risks.
As PhysOrg writes:
Abnormalities in how the nucleus accumbens, highlighted here, processes dopamine have been found in individuals with psychopathic traits and may be linked to violent, criminal behavior. Credit: Gregory R.Samanez-Larkin and Joshua W. Buckholtz
The brains of psychopaths appear to be wired to keep seeking a reward at any cost, new research from Vanderbilt University finds. The research uncovers the role of the brain’s reward system in psychopathy and opens a new area of study for understanding what drives these individuals.
“This study underscores the importance of neurological research as it relates to behavior,” Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said. “The findings may help us find new ways to intervene before a personality trait becomes antisocial behavior.”
The results were published March 14, 2010, in Nature Neuroscience.
“Psychopaths are often thought of as cold-blooded criminals who take what they want without thinking about consequences,” Joshua Buckholtz, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology and lead author of the new study, said. “We found that a hyper-reactive dopamine reward system may be the foundation for some of the most problematic behaviors associated with psychopathy, such as violent crime, recidivism and substance abuse.”
Previous research on psychopathy has focused on what these individuals lack—fear, empathy and interpersonal skills. The new research, however, examines what they have in abundance—impulsivity, heightened attraction to rewards and risk taking. Importantly, it is these latter traits that are most closely linked with the violent and criminal aspects of psychopathy.
“There has been a long tradition of research on psychopathy that has focused on the lack of sensitivity to punishment and a lack of fear, but those traits are not particularly good predictors of violence or criminal behavior,” David Zald, associate professor of psychology and of psychiatry and co-author of the study, said. “Our data is suggesting that something might be happening on the other side of things. These individuals appear to have such a strong draw to reward—to the carrot—that it overwhelms the sense of risk or concern about the stick.”
To examine the relationship between dopamine and psychopathy, the researchers used positron emission tomography, or PET, imaging of the brain to measure dopamine release, in concert with a functional magnetic imaging, or fMRI, probe of the brain’s reward system.
“The really striking thing is with these two very different techniques we saw a very similar pattern—both were heightened in individuals with psychopathic traits,” Zald said.
Study volunteers were given a personality test to determine their level of psychopathic traits. These traits exist on a spectrum, with violent criminals falling at the extreme end of the spectrum. However, a normally functioning person can also have the traits, which include manipulativeness, egocentricity, aggression and risk taking.
In the first portion of the experiment, the researchers gave the volunteers a dose of amphetamine, or speed, and then scanned their brains using PET to view dopamine release in response to the stimulant. Substance abuse has been shown in the past to be associated with alterations in dopamine responses. Psychopathy is strongly associated with substance abuse.
“Our hypothesis was that psychopathic traits are also linked to dysfunction in dopamine reward circuitry,” Buckholtz said. “Consistent with what we thought, we found people with high levels of psychopathic traits had almost four times the amount of dopamine released in response to amphetamine.”
In the second portion of the experiment, the research subjects were told they would receive a monetary reward for completing a simple task. Their brains were scanned with fMRI while they were performing the task. The researchers found in those individuals with elevated psychopathic traits the dopamine reward area of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, was much more active while they were anticipating the monetary reward than in the other volunteers.
“It may be that because of these exaggerated dopamine responses, once they focus on the chance to get a reward, psychopaths are unable to alter their attention until they get what they’re after,” Buckholtz said. Added Zald, “It’s not just that they don’t appreciate the potential threat, but that the anticipation or motivation for reward overwhelms those concerns.”
Has anyone tested the heads of the too big to fails for this dopamine abnormality?
What are the odds that they have it? And if they have it, what are the odds that they will voluntarily start acting responsibly, especially given the broken incentive system?
Experts also tell us that many politicians also share traits with serial killers. Specifically, the Los Angeles Times noted in 2009:
Using his law enforcement experience and data drawn from the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit, Jim Kouri has collected a series of personality traits common to a couple of professions.
Kouri, who’s a vice president of the National Assn. of Chiefs of Police, has assembled traits such as superficial charm, an exaggerated sense of self-worth, glibness, lying, lack of remorse and manipulation of others.
These traits, Kouri points out in his analysis, are common to psychopathic serial killers.
But — and here’s the part that may spark some controversy and defensive discussion — these traits are also common to American politicians. (Maybe you already suspected.)
Yup. Violent homicide aside, our elected officials often show many of the exact same character traits as criminal nut-jobs, who run from police but not for office.
Kouri notes that these criminals are psychologically capable of committing their dirty deeds free of any concern for social, moral or legal consequences and with absolutely no remorse.
“This allows them to do what they want, whenever they want,” he wrote. “Ironically, these same traits exist in men and women who are drawn to high-profile and powerful positions in society including political officeholders.”
***
”While many political leaders will deny the assessment regarding their similarities with serial killers and other career criminals, it is part of a psychopathic profile that may be used in assessing the behaviors of many officials and lawmakers at all levels of government.”
***
Studies also show that the wealthy are less empathic than those with more modest wealth, and so:
The idea of nobless oblige or trickle-down economics, certain versions of it, is bull,” Keltner added. “Our data say you cannot rely on the wealthy to give back. The ‘thousand points of light’—this rise of compassion in the wealthy to fix all the problems of society—is improbable, psychologically.”
Those in the upper-class tend to hoard resources and be less generous than they could be.
Given that many in Congress and top government posts are multi-millionaires, the study might help explain why politicians seem only to work to make themselves wealthier and to help their wealthy buddies.
We will remain disempowered if we assume that the super-elites are “like us”. Unless we learn to spot “wolves in sheep’s clothing”, we will continue to fall prey to their scams.
UNLESS WE REMOVE THE PSYCHOPATHS FROM POWER, THEY WILL CAUSE MORE AND MORE DESTRUCTION
The inmates are still running the asylum.
Anyone who knows Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein or the other Wall Street “leaders” can tell you that they haven’t changed a bit since 2008. They are not repentent for their role in the financial crisis. They don’t feel bad that the taxpayers have had to bail them out again and again … and that they have used that money to enrich themselves and stick it to the little guy.
As the Independent notes:
Mr Ronson reports: “Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted Hare’s contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out.”
But, far from being rooted out, they are still in place and often in positions of even greater power.
As Mr Boddy warns: “The very same corporate psychopaths, who probably caused the crisis by their self-seeking greed and avarice, are now advising governments on how to get out of the crisis. Further, if the corporate psychopaths theory of the global financial crisis is correct, then we are now far from the end of the crisis. Indeed, it is only the end of the beginning.”
I’ve been saying the same thing since 2008:
Ralph Waldo Emerson said:
“Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.”
Its like a thief who has been arrested 5 times for burglary. Even though he says all the right things to the judge at sentencing, the judge is still going to throw the book at him.
If the thief is appointed to head a government commission on corruption, do you think people will have confidence in the commission or its proposed actions?
***
[Those in power] may be saying nice things about fixing the economy, shoring up the financial system and helping American citizens, but people don’t believe them anymore. They’ve been proven liars one too many times.
***
The only thing that can restore confidence in the economy and the financial system is to replace the whole lot of them (tar and feather them) with honest leaders who will do what’s best for the people.
Forget the “toxic debt” that the talking heads keep referring to. The only way to restore confidence is to get rid of the “toxic leaders” who caused the mess.
I noted in October:
The main demand of the Egyptian protesters was that Hosni Mubarak and his cronies leave power.
Why should the demands of the American protesters be held to a higher standard?
As former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson notes, the American finance industry has effectively captured our government in a “quiet coup”, a state of affairs that is at the center of many emerging-market crises, and that recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform.
***
The U.S. has become a kleptocracy, an oligarchy, a banana republic, a socialist or fascist state … which acts without the consent of the governed. There is a malignant symbiotic relationship between the governmental leaders and their cronies, which makes a handful rich at the public trough (in the same way that the Mubarak family raked in between U.S. $40 and $70 billion dollars through bribes and cronyism).
Remember, Mubarak pretended that he was going to offer concessions or negotiate several times. But the protesters would have none of it. They demanded Mubarak leave.
The same government despots (Bernanke and the rest of the knuckleheads at the Fed, Geithner, and various other Goldman alums and proteges of Robert Rubin) and the same Wall Street manipulators (Blankfein, Dimon, etc.) are still on their thrones causing mischief. Nothing will change while these guys are still in charge.
Why can’t Americans – like the Egyptians – demand that the bums be thrown out?
While America’s protesters don’t need to give any list of official demands (see this, this and this), breaking up the unholy alliance which is destroying our country and removing vampires from both government and Wall Street who are most responsible for blocking reform is a perfectly good demand all by itself. As Gordon Duff – senior editor at Veterans Today – says, it’s “time for regime change” in the U.S.
Postscript: The fact – as discussed above – that top leaders may have psychopathic characteristics may be helpful in assessing questions such as:
- Whether rogue government personnel would ever carry out hanky panky to justify their policy objectives
- Whether our leaders could really cover up something as awful as cancer from nuclear accidents to promote their polices
- Why our leaders want to emulate China by gutting the Internet
- Whether government workers could actually label as suspected terrorists anyone who simply questions war, protests anything, asks questions about pollution or about Wall Street shenanigans, supports Ron Paul, is a libertarian, holds gold, stocks up on more than 7 days of food, or investigates factory farming
»
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These people answer to Civil Penalites!
You and I answer to a Criminal Court.
OBEY! THE OWNERS!!
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Climb all the way up that pyramid and gouge the all seeing eye. The stories you cited blame the pit bulls for doing what they're told. Their handlers are the psychos.
....describes Barry, Adolf, Joe, and Benito to a "T."
Frankly, after the first paragraph, but one grizzled, bearded visage presented himself in my mind:
The "Honorable" Jon Corzine.
Politicians share same traits as serial killers
I know, a liberal rag, LA times and painting a broad brush
"These traits, Kouri points out in his analysis, are common to psychopathic serial killers.
But -- and here's the part that may spark some controversy and defensive discussion -- these traits are also common to American politicians. (Maybe you already suspected.)"
ha ha, yeah, maybe
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/06/politicians-and-serial-killers.html
They aren't even near the level to cause joe 6-pack off the couch. The coliseums are full on weekends and couches occupied. Junk food continues to flow….the obese make poor rioters. The lunatics are safe for the time being.
Notice that the cameras avoid showing empty seats?
The "Franklin American Mortgage Music City Bowl"? Really?
I think we're getting bored and restless with the whole "Bread and Circus" thing.
Excellent read!
Events That Could Affect Gold and Silver Prices in 2012george you are so fabulous and wonderful i could cry.....
yes yes yes the banksters are psychopaths and are much more of a danger than toxic debt.....obama is a psychopath ( read about his support of abortion ) whose lies about his place of birth are legendary... www.obamacrimes.com
that disgusting book who moved my cheese was the magnum opus of the psychopaths....it was to condition people to accept the psychopathic way of life....
the b-schools and culture teach this kind of win at any price....i was appalled at the affirmation of criminal and/or unethical behavior advocated by students at kennesaw state university especially those in the business program....the professor asked students about the use of dishonesty in achieving a certain end where almost all accepted or approved of such tactics....and they didn't give one fuck about whether it was right or wrong or whether anyone was hurt....
same behavior is noted by those who want 0% interest for their fucking home loans but who don't give a rats ass that some old widow is going to freeze to death in the cold because her fixed income can no longer pay the heat with 0% interest....
i pray that god hasten the return of yahushua so that we may see the peaceable kingdom and we learn war no more....
Worse than that. Some have described him as a malignant narcissist. Those kind of guys put people in gas chambers. By the millions....
As far as I can tell most people are avoiding the most obvious reality of not only the past year, but the past decade. Capitalism is now an anachronism. It is dead. I am not a Marxist, socialist or any other ‘ist’, simply an objective observer who understands from what I see what’s working and what’s not. The elites understand that capitalism as practiced historically in this nation is inapplicable now. In case you haven’t noticed – this isn’t capitalism at work anymore. It’s something, but certainly NOT capitalism, not even neo-capitalism. They made it this way. That’s why they are engaging in the most egregious schemes to accumulate what wealth still remains. Jon Corzine anyone? They control not only the means of looting our wealth, but the media necessary to redirect our attention to other seemingly important ‘issues’. They are sociopaths with lots of power. They are cunning instead of wise, ruthless instead of practical and contemptuous (of those of us us who still possess a semblance of morality and human virtues) instead of discerning. They consider the art of human relations as warfare, strategically and tactically. It is as simple as that. All and I mean ALL of their convoluted ‘explanations’ concerning daily life, world events, global finance are simply created to keep us confused and vaguely hopeful that the capitalist system still works. Most of the decent people intimately involved in the finance system now understand that the tipping point has been passed and that if you’re NOT engaged in illegal and furtive activities to ‘Get Some’ then you will most certainly be left in the dust. The system does not work anymore for the larger majority of US. Corzine is simply the teeniest tip of the iceberg. A simple question – where can a trusting person put their money, assets, wealth anymore? There are answers, but they involve radical diversions from what have been traditionally safe options for almost all Americans. These answers involve the human virtues of trust, compassion, yeah, LOVE, accommodation (as in stepping up to create alternatives to the world that these madmen have created for us), fortitude, honesty, respect for life, all life. They want it all and will do ANYTHING to get it. Now they are preparing to kill Iranians and there is more than a good chance that nuclear weapons will be involved. These radical authoritarians are, indeed, insane and the defining danger of their madness is that they ultimately hold our lives in their hands. Want to affect it? I do and I know I will have to seriously, very seriously change my life and accept the truth that if I want sanity to return to earth then I will have to be prepared to make some sacrifices. BIG SACRIFICES. I hate having to involve myself in this kind of truth, reality, whatever, write about it, discuss it. It sounds kind of hopeless, but a day(s) of reckoning is(are) approaching and the maniacs soldier on into the jaws of certain destruction, a destruction which will involve ALL of us. This will become a pivotal year, a make or break time which will either lead to an ongoing darkness or the first shreds of light. Good fortune in the new year!
"The inmates are still running the asylum."
LOL
Another empty post from ZH's paranoid imbecile. So enlightening, like anybody with a fucking pulse doesn't already know that the big boys at the big banks all eat shit.
How about another conspiracy article, GW?
Shit, it's been a couple of weeks since you've written on how 9/11 was an inside job.
Or how about some more shrewd insight into why the admitted dicksucker Bradley Manning is a true patriot for stealing and publishing classified military files ?
You no nothing of the Military's to Tiered Communication System.
1. is for Soap Opera Bullshit.. like the Soap Opera Bullshit Bradley Manning was supposed to have shared.
2. the second is for operational information.
this is Building 7 info http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mxFRigYD3s , this http://www.ae911truth.org/ is the 2,000 Building Professionals who have risked thier Business Licenses / Reputations / Livelihoods.. now if you would like to disclose your expertise? maybe I can decide on whether or not your Professional Opinion should be taken seriously.
So far you have proven that you know little to nothing about the Military and the fact that you are not well researched on the facts that you openly discuss leads me to believe that you are a fucking idiot.
How about you read a book or two and then come back and try to disucss the fact contained therein?
Maybe you will be of some use to your fellow human beings.
Becuase as of NOW! you attack on George.. that lacks any serious credibility is boring, I am sorry that you are not more interesting.
You idiot asshole.
A 9/11 inside takedown would have required the cooperation of a minimum of several hundred people, maybe over a thousand, with NO dissents. All it would have taken is for a single individual who was invited to participate, to have instead responded, "No thanks, I'd prefer not to help murder three thousand innocent fellow citizens."--but instead go to the authorities and expose the plot. They would all have gone to prison for conspiracy to commit murder.
How can you people be so goddamn thick as to not get the total impossibility of an inside job?
Just a single person who participated, say, who is on his death bed several years later, to have a guilty conscience and spill the beans to the media.
There was a popular CNN reporter, Barbara Olson, who was on television each week. She was married to then-Solicitor
General of the U.S. Ted Olson. She was on the plane that hit the Pentagon.
Do you stupid cocksuckers think she was in on the plot and decided to sacrifice her marriage and career so she could help kill 3000 innocent Americans? Do you think she is in Rio by the pool sipping a margarita now?
Do you think the Islamic hijackers were in on the conspiracy? If not, why were they flying the planes? If so, was Osama Bin Laden in on it?
There are so many goddamn holes in your insane conspiracy nonsense that it is laughable.
Go fuck yourself.
in spite of the insults, your sparkling rhetoric has me convinced. i'm going to renounce my diploma, since all those deceptive people at ae911truth.org *almost* succeeded in deceiving me. almost, that is, until i read your post above.
thanks for showing me the light. i feel better.
Why did you stop wearing deoderant?
George: http://www.infowars.com/congress-proves-ron-paul-right-on-foreign-policy/
There has been much attention given these days to psychopathology with the usual suspects being pilloried concerning their egregious and high crimes. Is it however correct or even desirable to gratuitously assert automatically and universally that "pathology" in a necessary concomitant of "power"? In this regard Lord Acton's notable maxim is instructive:
Rather than expressing the obvious and endemic corruption which exists in high places as an expression of an individual pathology, it might be more cogent to express the actions of these "great men" who exercise such dominion, control, and influence over the affairs of others as the fulfillment of what C.E.O.Carter calls the Law of Subsumption, namely the focus-point of a larger sphere of influence or cosmic forces which generally exist outside and beyond the purview of ordinary consciousness. In other words, though it might be comforting to some to imagine in a Manichean sense that the innocent and well meaning are exploited by some remote and inaccessible evil, the removal or absence of which will usher in a longed for condition of justice and order in human affairs as a natural outcome of some mythical common will and purpose, the reality as is generally the case is infinitely more subtle and hard of apprehension.
It has been suggested that "From 80 to 90% of the populace of the United States can be hypnotized to varying degrees and at least 5% (10,000,000 of the U.S. population) is so easily hypnotizable that they are in a constant state of exaggerated suggestibility, even when awake and going about their daily routine. They are at the total mercy of all forms of influences and can easily be persuaded to do things and afterwards have no idea they did them." This is the opinion of Dr. Tobias Brocher, Director, Center for Applied Behavioral Sciences, Menninger Foundation, Topeka, Kansas. The implications of this supposition combined with the rapidly advancing sophistication and widespread deployment of CIA mind control techniques visited above have obviously created a climate in which the ability of the citizenry to openly and freely participate in the so called democratic process has been seriously compromised if not entirely destroyed. Indeed the unmistakable patterns of covert manipulation and coercive subliminal suggestion so characteristic of modern advertising and the application of such techniques in political campaigns was evidenced in the 2009 Cannes-Lion International Advertising Awards which bestowed the top two awards to the Obama campaign which in addition set new records for campaign expenditures totaling nearly $1,000,000,000. David Axelrod, later to become a senior adviser to Obama, engineered the cynical advertising campaign, accompanied no doubt by the subliminal currents of mass public mind washing alluded to above. An expert in media manipulation and ad consultant to numerous corporate giants such as AT&T and Commonwealth-Edison, Axelrod has made his specialty the engineering of ad campaigns supposedly generated by grass roots organizations and public interest groups which are actually the creations of the high powered corporate clients he really represents. In Chicago he helped create the so-called Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity (CORE), which actually organized around the demand for higher electricity rates for the monolithic utility giant Com-Ed, which was then discovered to be a company front organization funded by Com-Ed to the tune of 15 million dollars. This kind of cynical charlatanism rose to new levels of political manipulation as Axelrod’s AKP+D Message and Media consultancy managed the Obama campaign, where a candidate representing the interests of Wall Street bankers and financial oligarchs was packaged as a community organizer and, most cynically, an anti-war activist.
The puerile and insouciant ignorance with which a certain vast segment of the American populace accepted these latest electoral manipulations, which have by now become a hallmark of our recent presidential investitures, was remarkable even by the accepted standards of the ridiculous and superfluous charade. The traditional off loading of the significant treacheries and ongoing malfeasance of the previous administration in 2008, what with further wars in the making and engineered economic meltdown in the offing, acquired such a critical importance that a candidate with a requisite and seemingly inverse proportionality had been manufactured to orchestrate the semblance of extraordinary alteration. And so from the farthest reaches of the realm of antithesis, the Hegelian dialecticians dredged up a prefabricated golem: anti-Bush, pre-programmed, packaged and personified as the radical and yes, racial departure from all policies of the previous administrations, while unfailingly and hypocritically committed to the further necessary elaborations of the same. The ingenious exploitation of the hopelessly retrograde black populace, combined with the deeply felt need of white Gen-X hiphoppers to forever expunge white guilt and a gnawing sense of racial inferiority reached a crescendo of futile and misplaced commonality of purpose in the resounding acclamation of the black face marionette dancing on the strings of oligarchic Wall Street puppet masters. The kleptocrats at Goldman Sachs, UBS, J.P.Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Lehman Bros. and Morgan Stanley (Obama’s top six campaign contributors) are proud owners of the best candidate money can buy. It is interesting to note that as early as December, 2007, George Soros and Robert Wolf, the U.S. chief of UBS, were busy mapping out campaign strategy for the Illinois senator which resulted in Wolf assuming the role of de facto campaign finance chairman, raising $500,000 by the following April. The payoff for the plutocrats was in the form an escalating velocity of the ongoing and unprecedented upward transference of wealth initiated in the Bush administration under former Goldman Sachs CEO and Secretary of the Treasury Paulson. This wholesale looting was handed over to the Obama tag team of Larry Summers and Peter Orszag, the masterminds of the economic pillage, asset mining, and transfer of Russian industrial and mineral wealth to congeries of underworld oligarchs which collapsed the Russian economy in 1998 under the aegis of economic hit man Al Gore.
That's why I quit watching TV. Time for a game of solitaire.
--Raymond.
The Greatest form of slavery is Apathy - WaterWings.
Happy New Year WaterWings !
God Bless and God Love You and Yours!
Signed, Christian Constitutionalist
P.S. this is from Chunga, up above.. share with everyone! Again!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pin8fbdGV9Y
Merci! Same to you, fellow ZHer.
I would have read all of that if you had broken it up a little.
and i would have read what you might have said if you had said anything.
relax mr sensitive, it wasnt personal,
I'm crazy for pm's
I just can't believe the Au:Ag ratio. 54:1? That's crazy
"He then makes an astonishing confession: “At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.”"
Well there we have it. The fraud is by design.
I can't think of any group of persons better suited, or engineered, to serve the whims of our wholly profit-motivated, soulless, inhuman beings called the modern American corporation (Supreme Court says so) than some soulless, conscience-less humans.
LinkTV has been running this on the cathode ray tube for a while now. Really gross perversion of capitalism...
THE CORPORATION [1/23] What is a Corporation?
"Free Markets" my ass. It's sickening.
it is just a few bad apples..
LULZ!
Happy New Year Chunga!
God Bless and God Love You and Yours!
Signed, Christian Constitutionalist
Happy New Year JW. Rednecks like us stick together.
On the turning away
From the pale and downtrodden
And the words they say
Which we won't understand
"Don't accept that what's happening
Is just a case of others' suffering
Or you'll find that you're joining in
The turning away"
It's a sin that somehow
Light is changing to shadow
And casting it's shroud
Over all we have known
Unaware how the ranks have grown
Driven on by a heart of stone
We could find that we're all alone
In the dream of the proud
On the wings of the night
As the daytime is stirring
Where the speechless unite
In a silent accord
Using words you will find are strange
And mesmerised as they light the flame
Feel the new wind of change
On the wings of the night
No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away
From the coldness inside
Just a world that we all must share
It's not enough just to stand and stare
Is it only a dream that there'll be
No more turning away
-
PF
VOTE RON PAUL
What better way to celebrate the bicentennial buring down of Washington, D.C. in 1812 by once again, burning the damn thing DOWN...... You can do it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwv61Uu1fdA
The Roof! The Roof!! The Roof is on Fire!!!
We dont need no water let that Mother Fucker Burn!!
Burn Mother Fucker!!
BURNNNNNNN!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9zGhYSIAP8&feature=g-all-f&context=G268522dFAAAAAAAACAA
we need to Jail ALL 16 year old boys! they are ALL Terrorists! I know I was!
Egging Cop Cars.. just to be chased! yep!
We even egged a cop car, while hiding in a Tree! and got caught in the tree! LULZ!
and we didnt even go to Jail! we were NOT! considered Terrorists..
we did have to wash ALL the Police Cars..
which we did, no court.. no terrorist tag.. just little kids who honored thier word.. like they were taught too!
Imagine that! today?
attempted murder plus plus plus and prison for little kids who egg a cop car today..
thats sad.
the terrorists (the CIA) won!
Yes We Can! and Should! #WeCantWait
Corporations by their very nature condition people to mistreat each other, constantly demanding that customers get less quality for more money. So it's no surprise that psychopaths would do well there. Just as "Yes Men and Yes Women" also do well in such an environment.
Personally, I think it's time we all start fighting back. All it takes is for people to stop buying the corporations products.
Ughh... and deflect blame from the state, blessed be its name.
What a waste of time and energy.
The only solution is no power structure at all.
The structure IS CORRUPTION. It survives by taking money by force. i.e., by theft.
People have been trying to reform the structure since 6000 BC. It has NEVER worked.
exactly
NOBODY!
i don't get the downtick you got...
c'mon you disagreeable bitchez, if you gotta hit him with a downer for that, 'splain yerself!
I had a psychologist correct me on the point. Her assertions is that psychopaths are easy to spot....and that technicallly, it is the sociopaths that pull this kind of junk.
I still like to call them psychopaths--folks "get" what that is. Sociopath sounds nice, like you can take a shot and get rid of it or something. If you look it up, such things were once called moral insanity.
That fits too, don't it?
Brilliant blog post, GW, and this is why I thought the role Adrian Pasdar played in this was spectacular:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg5YEZ214aQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt7FFeN2K3I
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_(TV_series)
http://cryptogon.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/hope.jpg
Academic psychopaths seem to be the fat of the distribution.
and BTW perpetual turnover/significant change is much more volatile than not.
but of course the herd will not be putting down their lattes, flipping off their 6ft TVs and getting their obese asses off the couch in anyone's lifetime here.
The real failure of the one system that has benefitted mankind the most by leaps and bounds is a failure of spirit.
how can this one and only fantastical, exceptional system be so beneficial if it fails in spirit, you don't see a contradiction there?
Thanks GW, good stuff.
A federal prosecutor was present at the deposition in Miami and would not allow Rothstein to identify the police officers or judges he claims to have bribed.
Rothstein said he spent the money he didn't pay out in the Ponzi scheme on "money laundering, extortion, physical violence, influencing law enforcement, influencing bankers, influencing business owners, a whole myriad of things." He admitted to ties with organized crime and said he paid for prostitutes for the police.
"The police also were sleeping with my escorts," Rothstein said. "Broward sheriff's office, Fort Lauderdale Police Department weren't going to bother me."
http://www.finalternatives.com/node/19146
JW I read some of the transcripts from Rothsteins testamony . That was one busy thief and he hung with the right crowd help him steal : banksters, politicians , judges , cops , media fascist. I only found one of the corporate fascist meda stations with trial coverage the bribes are still in play .
Great material!! So true in my experience. I've dealt with many of these wealthy psychopaths in the Venture Capital community. With few exception the rule among the wealthy is: "The only way to build wealth is with somebody else's money." They never risk their own financial positions. This flies in the face of the "wealthy as job generators" belief but I've seen few exceptions. If you look at the Wall Street CEOs and money managers you will notice that all of their deals are structured so that they walk away intact or even wealthier if their company goes bust. I'd settle for that deal.
Anyone else notice this?