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General News    H1'ed 3/5/11  

March Madness and Class War

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Danny Schechter
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That just about throws all the "bad guys" they could come up with into one big barrel of ducks to shoot at. Never mind, that this "revelation" is totally vague and undocumented.

On the left, artists explore apocalyptic themes, not a serious activist response. One new exhibit is called "The Days of this Society" are numbered.

"Inspired by a famous statement by French thinker Guy Debord, proclaiming that THE DAYS OF THIS SOCIETY ARE NUMBERED, this exhibition plays with the notion that at the beginning of the XXI century one is experiencing a period of fin de sià ¨cle, in which the state of affairs is questioned and a collective anxiety is emerging, a situation caused by the feeling of political, economic, and cultural crisis that is permeating the Western world and is creating a social entropy."

Perhaps there is something in the water or the political ether that precludes any agreement on facts, much less a consensus on what to do about them.

Resolve on punishing mortgage fraudsters has gotten caught up in arcane debate over obtuse contractual language. Even as "pervasive fraud" was documented by the FBI,   noone, least of all the regulators, can agree, on who is responsible and what the fines and penalties should be.

It's clearer now than ever that denial is not just a river in Egypt. Reports the New York Times, "as the negotiations grind on, there are signs that the banks have still not come to grips with the problems plaguing the foreclosure process."

The newspaper of record does not look at the record to note that big banks may have no interest in coming "to grips" with charges that they defrauded their customers.

All of this "debate" functions like a fog machine to insure that the public doesn't know what is happening, and to insure that the class at the top is not treated like the class at the bottom as Naked Capitalism.com's Yves Smith observes:

"It is one thing to point out a sorry reality, that the rich and powerful often get away with abuses while ordinary citizens seldom do. It's quite another to present it as inevitable.

It would be far more productive to isolate what are the key failings in our legal, prosecutorial, and regulatory regime are and demand changes. The fact that financial fraud cases are often difficult does not mean they are unwinnable."

Winnable or not, there seems to be rational calculation--even a carefully constructed strategy-- behind the increasingly irrational political debate.

Perhaps it's a form of a calculated lack of "intelligent design" that belongs right up there with classic political strategies in which invented realities and message points become believable they more they are repeated.

George Bush once contrasted a fact-based political order with his preferred faith-based one. That's why all the exposes of his WMD claims in Iraq rolled off his back and never stuck.

The madness this month is like a chicken that has come home to roost, reminding us again that the only time we can only tell when a politician is lying is when his or her lips start moving.

News Dissector and blogger Danny Schechter directed Plunder The Crime of Our Time, a film assessing the financial crisis as a crime story. (Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com) Comments to Email address removed

 

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News Dissector Danny Schechter is blogger in chief at Mediachannel.Org He is the author of PLUNDER: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books) available at Amazon.com. See Newsdisssector.org/store.htm.
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