the ignorance is simply astonishing.

A good start would be if nobody without an advanced degree in finance or economics and 10 years experience working in the field were allowed to talk about it. That won't happen, so the next best thing is for the rest of us to ignore all economic blogs and free newsletters-- there should be an assumption that anyone who knows what the fuck they're talking about would be paid for it, even though not everyone who is paid for it knows what they're talking about..

I'm not sure that leaving the critical field of finance and economics entirely to those who have a vested interest in the status quo is such a great idea.

And there are plenty of people who have the credentials you refer to in your post who are indeed intentionally lying. There are people who will kill you for $5, why should any rational person think that someone wouldn't lie when the stakes are quite literally astronomically higher than that?

How is the average layman supposed to sort fact from fiction when someone like Romney lies as automatically and easily as they breathe?

The educated elite professionals have certainly done a bang up job of destroying the American economy for the average person, I for one wouldn't trust them as an aggregate group to organize a pick up baseball game.

Bye bye arctic ice shelf.

I'm being snarky here but we simply have gotten to a point where there is such a vast amount of knowledge out there nobody could really be expected to understand more than tiny bits of it.

Some of us here remember the days when the NY Times, Life magazine, and three TV networks did a pretty good job of analyzing and filtering the news and giving us the basics, while 12 years of school gave us the ability to read and watch it intelligently. Plenty of stuff of all political stripes out there, and the weirdness wasn't checked, just not so obvious so it didn't seem mainstream. Expertise was valued, and Walt Disney was giving us real science lessons. Paid liars and hacks were always out there, but easier to identify and often publicly shamed.

Not so today, though. Expertise is suspect, not valued, there is no Cronkite to look to for guidance, and we are bombarded from all sides with competing "facts." Conspiracy has become mainstream and trust is so quaint and naive. Schools dropped critical thinking and "Civics" along with sentence diagramming with parents and politicians telling teachers what and how to teach.

And we have Sununu telling us factcheckers are ruining things! Propaganda has become far more sophisticated than what Goebbels and Stalin were doing.

This isn't freedom of speech-- it's anarchy. It makes Orwell's "Newspeak" seem quaint and naive.

Last edited Sun Sep 2, 2012, 04:30 PM - Edit history (1)

we can develop a basic sense of critical thinking and a realistic view of the evidentiary value of sides.

In the mega thread encouraging everyone to be outraged over a lie (I would surely call it a lie if Romney said it) the most usual form of argument is, "are you saying Bernie Sanders doesn't understand this issue?"

That is an outsider's reliance on an elite... an anti-authoritarians appeal to authority. And generally I would have thought that Bernie Sanders saying something merited a presumption (a rebut-able presumption, of course) of veracity.

Unfortunately Bernie Sanders is being intentionally deceptive. That is different from being wrong.

So in the future I can never give anything Bernie Sanders says a presumptive color of veracity. That does not mean that I will not continue to generally agree with him about many things, but I will always be aware that he might be lying for political effect.

And the same goes for the global warming delusionalists. Climate change is real and serious but that does not mean it is a religion where virtue is revealed by who can make the most ridiculous claims. There was a thing a few weeks ago about how Greenland had lost it's ice pack in the space of a few days.

That was obviously false. And the diagram used to illustrate the point did not support the bogus interpretation of it.

Like the FED thing, one had only to think, "If this was true what would I have seen in the real world?" If the Greenland ice pack had melted in a few days the worlds oceans would have risen more than twenty feet. And we all would have heard about that!

Similarly, if the Fed had given $16 trillion tax dollars to banks we would have seen the effects of it from every direction.

The most irresponsible thinkers are, ironically, the most reliant on elites. They just have different elites. They have irresponsible elites.

A lot of people surely believed Akin on reproductive science because his view was extreme in seeming support of "life" and thus, to them, he was obviously credible. Same for Ron Paul. And it goes for a few people on the left also.

And it is tragic. The reactive personality-cult anti-critical intellectual style of some folks with whom I would like to agree is a LW echo chamber, and no more worthwhile than the RW echo chamber.

I wish and hope and aspire for our side to be rigorously truthful and reliably correct, and to not spit out dishonest agit-prop.

And sometimes I do not get that wish.

Obama for instance has been intentionally deceptive on the drug war, he has said things that I know to be untrue and it's my belief that he said those things knowing them to be untrue.

So we less-than-elites are left with no one who we can trust to give us the unvarnished truth, which leaves us rather in the situation of the erstwhile Kremlinologists, having to sort through a great many small pieces of information, each of which may be true or untrue, and try to suss out which ones might be actually true and which ones are disinformation or outright misinformation and then build our overall gestalt on a foundation planted in quicksand.

You are one of the posters here from whom I have learned the most, I appreciate your efforts to bring facts and well thought out explanations of things that I'm not always interested enough in to chase down the truth myself.

I agree with what you say in this post in a lot of ways, indeed I have an OP up bemoaning the herd-like gullibility of DUers in falling for what is fairly obvious snark.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1240137023

'advanced degree in finance or economics and 10 years experience working in the field', so caveat emptor:

SeekingAlpha.com
ZeroHedge.com
NakedCapitalism.com

Occupy Los Angeles expended immense amounts of time and energy on its various actions to 'end the Fed.' I remember having this feeling that very few OLA occupiers understood the principle of 'common stock' ownership and thus the anger and fear directed at the TBTF banks was directed at hydra-headed supernatural monsters and not at the 1% share- and bondholders who owned and controlled the assets of these banks. Some of this anti-bank\anti-Fed sentiment even carried the faint whiff of older anti-semitism on the wind, typified by rants and screeds against the 'Rothschilds' and so on.

IMO, one of the best cures for this quackery is a well-knit social safety net. If people don't have to worry that losing their jobs means losing their homes they will be far less prone to falling victim to the flim-flam artists who seem to proliferate and spawn from these types of financial crises.

although much of it is.

Ignorance and fear, though, are at the root of all this,and things like the economy are so complex that most economists agree they are guessing half the time (but only after few drinks) and know no more truth than physicists do about string theory. The population can't be blamed for not understanding the complexity of it all, but should be looking for someone trustworthy to explain it and watch over it.

One can argue that a fat and happy populace won't vote to give up its lifestyle, but there is no question that it can be moved by threats to that lifestyle. I'd add that people are now spending so much time keeping it together that they don't have much left over to actually learn about even their own issues.

Seeking Alpha is an investment blog with thousands of contributors.

All three reflect poorly on economics.

Brad DeLong is the best.

http://delong.typepad.com/

Reading his nonsense is a good way to never learn truth in economics.

damned good reason that poster was 'banned from kos.')

Our financial education is abysmal...just look at the mortgage debacle. And we learned nothing as evidenced by the student loan debacle.

People don't understand the risk and reward relationship either.

The level of knowledge needed to understand policy is way above the head of the average American.

You have no business lecturing anyone about financial knowledge.

And I think it is the ultimate in deception for anyone to tell the middle class their taxes won't be raised. Everyone needs to pay more.

Your positions on taxation are laughable.

Must suck to see it all slipping away.

Tell that to Peter Orzag. Please don't tell me you think all we need to do is tax the rich and the numbers work out nicely. Show me you've at least examined the numbers.

Citigroup Pimp Orzag?

Privatize the Post Office Orzag?

Yeah, I can see why you like him.

I mean, that's what the innertubes are for.

Then I decided, wait, I don't want to be associated with that.

I have reworked the OP somewhat to reduce the heat and increase the light.

Some people think that the "government" gave trillions of dollars to the banks.

as I am doing now-- you'll learn (if you don't already know) that Geithner is a
huge problem.

More embarrassing secrets revealed about Geithner's penchant for protecting Wall Street, from a July 24 appearance by Neil Barofsky on MSNBC's Morning Joe that left the panel stunned in disbelief. It's a safe assumption that Tim Geithner now regrets threatening Barofsky back in 2010. Here's the truth from Geithner's omnipresent media nemesis:

"American Express alone received more TARP money than struggling U.S. homeowners."

Neil won't stop torching the Treasury Secretary, everywhere it seems. I've got at least 10 Barofsky clips from the past week. Granted, it is a book tour, but praise the Rain Gods, because Geithner is being abused early and often by the ex-SIGTARP. I've written extensively on it before. Turbo miscalculated Barofsky. Big time. Geithner tried to bully the wrong dude. As a general rule, it's probably best not to threaten former Federal prosecutors. Exposing scumbags like Geithner is Acapulco style, Dos Equis drinking, leisure and vacay to Barofsky, who dealt with death threats from Mexican and Colombian drug lords as a normal part of his old gig.

Don't forget that the HAMP bait-and-switch Geithner organized destroyed actual lives:

The most disturbing parts of Barofsky’s book are stories of Americans who were made worse off by Obama’s bailouts. One California business owner who could have sold his house at a loss, but maintained some savings and his credit history, was enticed into a HAMP trial modification that was supposed to cut his payment in half. Instead, thanks to HAMP, he lost his house, his savings, his credit and his business.

Keep this in mind while Obama prattles on about his undying support for the middle class.

individuals. So what?

No private person got a penny from TARP.

HAMP was part of the Obama stimulus deal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Affordable_Modification_Program

Was HAMP flawed? Sure it was. Banks got creative on how to circumvent the letter of the law.

yeah, it's "great" to see the banksters continue to scam the system... just like they
did under the bush administration-- DISconnect: how does this make the Obama
admin better than the bush admin?

it doesn't. they are more or less the same on this issue.

FAIL.

Thanks for looking into this.

Unreal.

The article is reposted manny places and one of the reposts somehow bootstrapped it up to being by Krugman

Fun while it lasted!

For those who like the truth, free of mindless Fed/bankster apologia:

http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/?docid=1467

The extraordinary scope and magnitude of the financial crisis of 2007–09 induced an extraordinary response by the Federal Reserve in the fulfillment of its lender-of-last-resort function. Estimates of the total amount of bailout funding provided by the Fed have ranged from its own lowball claim of $1.2 trillion to Bloomberg’s estimate of $7.7 trillion (just for the biggest banks) to the GAO tally of $16 trillion. But new research conducted as part of a Ford Foundation project directed by Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray finds that the Fed’s commitments—in the form of loans and asset purchases to prop up the global financial system—far exceeded even the highest estimates.

Can I get $45 trillion?

Where everyone understands the utter ridiculousness of the concept called money?

The Fed, the banks, the multi-nationals, more than anyone else, the government . . . . they are just making this up.

The government could wipe out the deficit tomorrow. Really they could. In any of a number of ways. Same thing with funding Medicare.

And none of them would be any more ludicrous than the things that have already been done.

And not just in banking but all these other sectors as well.

But Wall Street luuuvs a monopoly so that's what we got.

www.angrybearblog.com
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/

Zero Hedge and Market Ticker (Denninger) are the worst of the quackadoodles.