Sorry, If You Get Your Politics From Jon Stewart It Doesn't Count!

It seems within weeks of the Boston Globe proclaiming there absolutely was no "deflategate" they've since asserted Comedy Central guy Jon Stewart "shaped the cultural attitudes of a generation".  Which leads to the question: Was it for better or worse?

We already know, for example, that according to author Mark Bauerlein (The Dumbest Generation), the under-30 crowd are foregoing knowledge-based maturity to wallow in a self-confected, solipsistic, social media mirror world of their own egos and selves. The fallout includes their not even meeting basic standards of knowledge for employment, far less earning a degree that actually means anything. (A survey and test several years ago found even a majority of Harvard grads flunked a basic test on American History.)

The entire mental superstructure was revealed in the words of one girl quoted (p. 137-38) when asked by a journalist if she wasn’t worried that she was denied a more in depth  picture of the world by  confining attention to Facebook. Her illuminating retort:

“I’m not trying to get a broader picture, I’m trying to get what I want”.

But this may also account for why the same demographic (a good majority of them anyway) gravitates to Stewart's show as a kind of ersatz medium by which to pick up political insight. After all, he's delivered terrific zingers at the likes of the Fox News morons, including Bill O'Reilly as well as the goobers in Congress.

But zingers, or as one critic put it, "shits and giggles",  doesn't make the cut for serious, in depth political news or reporting. I maintain, as I have for many years, that if you don't read newspapers you can't get a handle on the political news. (TV news doesn't cut it either). Even more important, if you don't read widely outside the mainstream media, you will be in no position to master deep politics which now undergirds our political system. Is Jon Stewart going to  bring you into deep politics? Hell no, because he barely touches the normative form.

Bloomberg columnist Clive Crook perhaps put it in plainest terms when he noted "the generation in question relies on a comedy show for its news and engages with politics mainly through jokes"

Adding, that "perhaps I am missing something but that seems less than ideal."

In fact, it not only seems so but is. It proclaims we're incepting a generation of know-nothing goof balls who don't even vote consistently (as in the critical mid-terms) and need the excitement of a personality to grab them. I call them political dilettantes and woefully uneducated on this nation's most pressing issues. Jokes then, don't cut it.

Yes, I also like to watch Bill Maher's Real Time and get some laughs, but I don't believe it's a substitute for reading newspapers and more importantly parsing the PR and distinguishing it from substantive news within them. The latter is enabled by also reading books, on deep politics (including Naomi Klein's 'Shock Doctrine') as well as Howard Zinn's "A People' History of the United States')

It is this reading which amps up one's vocabulary to the point of ably mastering more difficult books, sources and which then confers deeper political and historical insights. By contrast, how can the Jon Stewart followers assimilate a factual basis when the language to describe much of what is happening in the world’s most critical domains exceeds the language difficulty level to which they’re accustomed?

Just take what is happening in the world of global finance right now, with events in Greece - regarding repaying  its debt -  that could affect all of Europe and even the U.S.  (Say if Greece leaves the E.U.) Do the Tweeters and such even know why oil prices recently fell and why they are climbing now? Do they know what's behind the events in Ukraine? How many of the Twitter-Facebook generation are aware of any of this? How many even think it’s relevant to their lives?

As for 'The Daily Show', as Crook points out:

"The problem was the program's fans began to take it seriously, and academics with nothing better to do began to take it seriously, and worst of all the show began to take itself seriously".

Which is to say it became a parody of itself and at that point no longer relevant. (Maybe why Stewart decided it was time to depart, along with wanting to spend more time with family. In other words, he realized that family time superseded the value of the content time on  'The Daily Show')

The trouble is that while political comedy can be entertaining it provides no ballast. Just as no sane person would consume the juicy looking steak depicted in the corner of a cardboard menu in place of the genuine article, so also no sane person should consume comedy and theatrics believing it's the real deal, It isn't.

But perhaps the problem is too many brains have now been so gutted by PR and fake news that the owners can no longer discern what is a serious issue and what isn't.  Hence, the insipid spectacle of millions of  people engaging in a stupid "debate" about the color of a dress sent via Tumblr.  "It was black and blue! No dammit, it was white and gold!"

No people in a serious, politically stable nation would do such a thing - waste their time on such trivial idiocy. But perhaps this is the point most of us have devolved to. Consumers only capable of raising a hue and cry over the color of a dress, but not over our political fabric (or physical infrastructure) and how both are coming apart.

In the end, I suspect false attention to trivial bullshit will only amplify so long as people remain uneducated and unread. (And merely possessing a college degree doesn't ensure this!) More willing to waste time in spurious social media realms with assorted 'likes' and posting images of their kitties boxing doggies than reading and learning about the world they inhabit. As Mark Bauerlein notes (p. 138):

“For education to happen, people must encounter worthwhile things outside their sphere of interest and brainpower. Knowledge grows, skills improve, tastes refine and conscience ripens only if the experiences bear a degree of unfamiliarity.”

What that means, as he further observes, is one must move through and beyond the initial knee-jerk reaction: “I don’t get it! That’s not for me, not my cup of tea!”  Because the intellectual effort in making it your ‘cup of tea’ will then be intellectually rewarding.

In the same way moving beyond the infantile "familiar" world of political jokiness requires a mature temperament, but the required intellectual effort in moving to real politics and deep politics means one can finally emerge as a citizen, as opposed to a consumer.

At that stage, there is a significant intellectual reward, which also serves the interests of one's nation in the best way possible. As Thomas Jefferson put it in his 'Notes on Virginia':

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. AND TO RENDER THEM SAFE, THEIR MINDS MUST BE IMPROVED."

Jefferson understood that a citizen "depository" of false beliefs and misinformation would ultimately destroy the Republic on account of the regression of citizens' minds,  not improvement. He understood that citizens to attain this improvement needed to read widely and in a focused fashion and not believe anything without supporting evidence. He might also have added, they ought not substitute frivolous comedic fare for actual knowledge of history, governance and related matters.

Exposing More of Larry Schweikart's Lies About Liberals

"I fear that if you're an educated conservative, and you've had the misfortune of reading this book, you've already pulled a good deal amount of hair out of your head like I have........Forget that Schweikart is an abominable writer and harms the conservative movement by making it look like buffoonery. IN FACT.......you know what? .....Just forget this book ever came out"  - Reviewer on Amazon.com

"Schweikart discredits lies that he himself invented and attributed to liberals to make himself appear the hero. It is like the exterminator who releases mice into your house then charges you to get rid of them. "   Reviewer on Amazon.com

We now examine a few more of the ridiculous lies Larry Schweikart attributes to liberals in his book, '48 Liberal Lies About American History' .   

Lie #12: The Founders Envisioned a "Wall of Separation" Between Church and State, Keeping Religious Influence Out of Government

Well, Larry might be excused here, since most fundamentalist-leaning, right wing  radicals don't seem to be aware of Thomas Jefferson's (1802) letter to Danbury Baptists:

“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State."

It thereby became an unspoken, unwritten principle that has been practiced on many judicial levels since. And it pretty well embraced Jefferson's (and Madison's) vision of keeping religious influence out of government. The most famous ruling validating it? The 1962 case brought by Madalyn Murray O'Hair which has kept prayer out of the public schools - as it should be.

Lie #18: Senator Joseph McCarthy Concocted the "Red Scare," and There Was Nothing to Fear from Communist Subversives

Most of us, especially from Wisconsin, know the murky history of Joe McCarthy - but evidently this bozo doesn't. We know, for example, that he fomented hysteria about the "Red scare" that reached into almost every U.S. Dept. and agency and at one time bloviated in a Senate hearing about an astounding number of "communists" at  State  and in the military that ran "into the thousands".. He eventually discredited himself by his overreach and unsupported exaggerations, though he ruined hundreds of lives with his insane demagoguery. You can read more here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy

One more interesting fact: It was during the 'Red scare' hysteria of the early 50s  that the Children's Crusade 'Know your Commies' cards came out, e.g.

Lie #21: Columbus Was Responsible for Killing Millions of Indians

 Blatant exaggeration and red herring. Columbus himself did not "kill millions of Indians" and no liberal of any sense ever said he did. This is another case of what one reviewer described as Schweikart's tactic of inventing the lies himself than attributing them to liberals - analogous to the exterminator who releases mice in your home then charges you to remove them.  Those who want the lowdown on the effects of the arrival of the Europeans, including Columbus, on native Americans,  can consult James Loewen's excellent and quality book, 'Lies My Teacher Told Me'.

The key aspect to note? The Europeans brought smallpox with them to the New World, as well as other diseases (e.g. measles) which devastated native populations. But, as Loewen also notes, there was indeed a genocide waged but not over one limited period (i.e. Columbus' arrival) but over hundreds of years. (Culminating in the "Indian Wars" fought in the American West, punctuated by many massacres - such as at Sand Creek in Colorado.)

Lie #27: Richard Nixon Sent Burglars into the Watergate Office Complex

Schweikart can maybe be pardoned for this howler, because he wrote his screed before all the Nixon tapes were released (including new ones only recently). But even then he might have been able to obtain the deathbed account of E. Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate burglars,  who 'fessed up that  he'd been sent to the Watergate complex by....who else? Nixon!   Bottom line: 'Tricky Dick' basically hung himself by keeping a tape system originally installed by JFK, and using it to the point every nefarious word or plan was faithfully recorded.  By the time of the Watergate investigation in 1973 his 'goose' was basically cooked. (Though his supporters to this day hate to admit it.)

Lie #28: Neither Ronald Reagan's Election nor the "Contract with America" Proved the Triumph of Conservative Ideas

No liberal of any sense ever  "denied" (or proclaimed as a 'lie')  that Reagan's two terms "proved" the triumph of conservative ideas, because one can't deny what never existed in the first place. . What we have said is that too many millions got suckered by Reagan's "aw shucks"  demeanor into buying into conservatism more than they otherwise might. Much of this mental hijacking was superbly described by neuroscientist Robert Ornstein in his 'New World, New Mind'.

Ornstein noted how this "old Mind" (the regressive mind)  of a nation or people can be ramped up collectively and reinforced if its leaders also display and act on their own 'old Mind' predjudices, beliefs, etc. For example( p. 172):

"..the old mind has never been so much in evidence in American politics as in the second half of the Reagan administration"

Ornstein observed that Reagan's 'avuncular' persona and smile (which essentially disengaged too many  Americans' critical thinking centers) made it much easier for them to buy into the "morning in America" pap and swill he was busy feeding them. Never mind the half million tossed into the streets from mental hospitals, or the conversion of the U.S. to the world's foremost debtor and so on.

The populace' old Mind was its own worst enemy in perceiving the very real damage Reaganites were perpetrating (which has more recently been emulated by the Bushies as well as  Bushie leftovers- i.e. neocons, in Obama's State Dept.. ) Orstein points to the (then) 'Star Wars' program as yet another example of 'old Mind' workings (p. 169):

"The Star Wars program represents the continuation of a mind blindness to trends that have long made military thinking one of the clearest examples of old mind functioning. The rigid, unimaginative training of those who choose military careers apparently reinforces the brain's natural tendency to focus on the immediate and the near term and especially, to count on the environment to remain unchanged. So obvious is this effect that the comment that 'generals are always preparing to fight the previous war' has become a text book commonplace. "

The takeaway was that despite the face these assorted conservo  clowns have put on (e.g. Gee Dumbya) Americans bought into them in enough numbers to put them into power (or keep them there)  where they wrecked the economy even before Obama arrived! Sadly, those like Reagan, Bush Jr. et al have exploited Americans' dumb "faith in the future" i.e. that Repukes will do things better, despite the fact their very core plans (preserving massive tax cuts for the wealthiest) will do the opposite!

But let's go on:

Lie #30: George W. Bush Was Selected, Not Elected, in 2000, and Votes Were Stolen on His Behalf

This is the truth. The theft of the 2000 election was described in detail, including the publication of actual documents from Florida Secretary of State Kathleen Harris showing how Choicepoint was hired to put more than 53,000 black voters in Duval County on felons' lists (they weren't but they were put there, because Harris knew most black voters were democrats). The entire background and evidence is available - for those who want it  - in Chapter One of Greg Palast's 'The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.'

The unlawful elimination of all those black voters allowed Bush to take the 27 electoral votes of Florida, though he lost the popular vote by over a half million. Hence, the evidence is there that Harris, Jeb Bush et al, stole the election on his behalf.  The  Fla. recounts to try to show Gore actually won were doomed from the start because they didn't include all counties. In any case, the voter rolls would still have been short those 153,000 banned black voters.

Still, the  abrupt stoppage of the vote recount by the Supreme Court effectively halted the process and amounted to a "selection" of Bush Jr., as Vince Bugliosi pointed out in his book, The Betrayal Of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined Our Constitution and Chose Our President .

The truth is a bitch.

Lie #37: Global Warming Is a Fact, and It's a Man-made, American-Driven Problem

Actually, all the evidence shows that this is the case.  Anthropogenic warming  is certainly as much a fact as just about anything in science can be expected to be, and the evidence is all around us from collapsing ice sheets and glaciers, to the instability of the polar vortex, to increasing intense storms and heat waves to acidification of the oceans. As for being "American -driven", it largely is. It is also a fact that we are offloading many of the worst carbon-laden fuels and also coal, and tar sands oil to China. Hence, much of their CO2 output is actually derived from what WE have dumped on them!

Lie #47: The Reagan Tax Cuts Caused Massive Deficits and the National Debt

Again, this is true, though portrayed by Schweikart as "a liberal lie."  The fact is that before the Reagan era America was still largely a creditor nation, more capital inflows than outflows, holding more debt from other nations than debt owed to them. Reagan changed the dynamic by going on a $2,1 TRILLION spending spree, mainly for military hardware and toys as well as allowing ridiculous cost overruns for common materials (e.g. $75 hammers $3,000 each toilets).  In the wake, and coupled with Reagan's tax cuts, the country went from mainly creditor to debtor and the situation has remained the same since - as tax cutting has become a fetish with the Reepos.

Final Lie: History Textbooks Used in Schools Are Unbiased and Not Politically Correct

Again, this is true, though portrayed by Schweikart as a liberal lie. The problem is not, however, so much "political correctness" as the refusal to look at all the blemishes, fractures and conflicts of our history. In other words, our history books are overly sanitized, a point noted by James Loewen. Do any of the current history texts examine the duplicity of the Warren Commission in its findings on the JFK assassination? Of course not. Do any of them examine the My Lai massacre committed by American troops in Vietnam? No. Do any of them really examine the betrayal of native Americans in assorted treaties (concerning their land) and the many massacres ...such as at Sand Creek here in Colorado, or at Wounded Knee?  What about the nation's track of growing inequality? Is there any examination of the historical factors that have led to this? What about the origin of Army Security and spy programs and how they were mounted against unions, workers? I could go on and on, as Loewen does - which is why he refers to 'Lies My Teacher Told Me' - the title of his book.

But then teachers are constrained by their tepid history curricula and textbooks. If those are avoidant of the underbelly of American history, the history teacher will be averse to exploring it too. (One reason why any real American history teacher also needs Howard Zinn's text : "A People's History of the United States" as an accompaniment.

Our kids get bored senseless by history because it's taught as settled events and assorted dates to be memorized, as opposed to a sequence of conflicts, many of which are ongoing. The aim ought to be not to whitewash our history but to show it with all its boils, pustules and follies as well as internecine, unsettled conflicts and divisive issues.

We do our students a disservice by teaching them the nation's history is immaculate and getting them to buy that we are the "exceptional people of the world". We aren't!  We are no different from all other nations, and the delusional belief we are "special" merely feeds our hubris.

Why the ‘Ivy League’ Universities Really Comprise the Corrupt League – In Politics, Econ, Business

The Gaussian Copula Formula (top) used by economists to justify credit default swaps, and the Pareto distribution - used to justify the allocation of most wealth to the richest. These are two illustrations of the bunkum taught at 'elite' universities to subvert economics in our nation and the world at large.











It was actually a comment from a nitwit poster on a Guardian (UK) forum that caught my eye. It was in response to a previous poster’s eloquent contribution and a citation of Prof. Stephen Cohen of NYU.  The response comment read, taking on the source of the citation:

“From a 2^nd rate prof at a 3^rd rate university”

Really? Are there ‘third rate’ universities? In fact, not so much these days and hence the inexplicable  yen for so many t0 blow hundreds of thousands of bucks to  compile massive debt just to get into an Ivy league school for the sake of name cachet.  Or tens of thousands more merely to make futile efforts via applications, to enter the magic, golden doors.  The fact is, it makes very little difference which university you attend (assuming it isn’t a ‘for profit’ or online version). It is more the cachet and reputation of the specific department.  From the May 2011 issue of MONEY magazine: "Don't assume an Ivy League education is better than one from a public or state university."

However, as Chris Hedges observes in his remarkable book, ‘The Empire of Illusion’ it is the “Ivies” – the likes of Harvard, Yale, Princeton and others,  that are the source of a continuing flow of zombot, unthinking elites poisoning our nation and the world. To be clear,  this lot are being disgorged in specific academic areas, namely business, politics and economics. Their toxic views are infiltrating the memosphere and reinforcing the hegemony of the elites and their stranglehold on the country – including the ongoing inequality.

Thankfully, their scientific and math contributions remain relatively uncontaminated – unless they’re in the areas which receive corporate grants to support oil shale and natural gas fracking, or GMO foods. In astrophysics, for example, they’re generally fine.

Hedges’ takedown chapter is III: The Illusion of Wisdom and he comes out swinging for the fences with his opening paragraph (p.89):

“The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredding of Constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the door of institutions that produce and sustain our educated elites. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Toronto and the Paris Institute of Political Studies, along with most elite schools, do only a mediocre job of teaching students to question and think. They focus, through the filter of standardized tests, AP classes, enrichment activities, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools, entrance exams and blind deference to authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. “

Adding:

“Response for the collapse of the global economy runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and academic halls in Cambridge, New Haven, Toronto and Paris to the financial and power centers of the world.”

 

This is a breathtaking accusation but Hedges can fully back it up with his examples and citations. Nor is this simply a matter of “sour grapes from a loser” since Hedges did in fact lecture at Princeton for years. But what he shows is that the tolerance for divergent thinking in these assorted elite faculties and enclaves is almost non-existent. Hence,  the examples he provides shed light on the extent to which all the above named schools “disdain honest inquiry – which is by its very nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent and often subversive.”

They therefore would have little tolerance for a remarkable political thinker like Neoliberal gadfly Henry Giroux,  who for many years was Waterbury Chair Professor at Penn State. But on account of his work and resolute critical voice (one of “the most vocal critics of the corporate state and destruction of American education”) he was driven to the margins of academia in the United States. The Neoliberal sock puppets and their assorted lackeys simply couldn’t abide his independent research and critical thought and so drove him to Canada where he now teaches at McMaster University. (Certainly not a ‘3^rd rate school’ if it has the likes of Giroux!)

But Giroux is only one of  many examples of the minds marginalized because of their outspokenness.  Hedges also cites those such as Noam Chomsky (linguistics prof from MIT),  consumer advocate Ralph Nader, the late historian Howard Zinn and others who are shut out once they critique the system keeping us all down, as serfs in the alleged ‘land of liberty’.

How do these wretched intellectual pretenders get away with this evisceration of faculty and critical thought? Well, by an entrenched and well-rehearsed, embedded template that sifts all yearly intakes to find the individuals that will be the most easily molded - the most confident carriers of the elite virus and zombie ideas. (Mainly, as Hedges also notes, little dweezils that follow their profs all around -  groveling-   while also grafting for 4.0 in all their subjects.)

As for the zombie ideas forced down the willing throats of these sycophant students, like:  “money is speech”, "corporate personhood", "free markets", "globalization"  and “trickle down economics”, they ought to have died ages ago .  But all are sustained via the publication of specious, pseudo-academic bullshit for which the dumpster would be the only rightful place in a rationally run institution of higher learning.

Hedges details the methods at the outset of the chapter:  

“They organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow answers …it allows students and faculties to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the most pressing  moral, political and cultural questions.”

 

And then later elaborates some more (p. 103):

 

"This is what the Harvard Business School method is about, a didactic system in which the logic employed to solve a specific problem always, in the end, sustains market capitalism. These elites are not capable of asking the broad, universal questions, those staples of an education in the humanities, which challenge the deepest assumptions of a culture and examine the harsh realities of political and economic power. They have forgotten, because they have not been taught, that human nature is a mix of good and evil. They do not have the capacity for critical reflection. They do not understand that for every answer there arises another question- the very basis behind the Socratic method's search for wisdom."

 

One of the ways this occurs is the use of specialized vocabulary.  Thus, the pseudo-intellectuals or “quants” that helped develop the Gaussian Copula formula (see embedded graphic at top) were quite confident that when they applied it to the development of credit default swaps  few would figure them out before it was too late. Indeed choosing the name for this bastardized form of credit derivative ensured that they’d be virtually home free. On account of the arcane lingo used and the complex nature of the underlying formula, few ordinary mortals would have the time, intelligence or temperament to get to the bottom of it all.

These nasty devices were geared to enable commercial banks (the ones that hold your passbook savings) to leverage their assets to preposterous ratios just like investment banks, sometimes as high as 33:1.  In other words, their generation of profits would largely be based on phantom money – since they lacked the reserves to make good if the bets (which is what the credit defaults swaps were) failed. In the meantime, the Gaussian formula itself allowed the credit derivatives to be sliced and diced numerous ways to package them throughout ordinary securities such as collateralized mortgage obligations.  The failure of the credit agencies themselves to recognize this enabled them to be outfoxed by the specialized lingo and the presence of one fraction of ‘AAA’ bonds in each. This  then led directly to the misrepresentation of junk bonds as AAA and the collapse of the credit markets in 2008.

Since then  it’s become ever more evident why elite economics is a failure and can’t even be regarded as a science like Physics, or even in a “pre-scientific phase” as one respondent (Sanjay Bissessur)  to an original  Financial Times letter of mine showed. But economists' failure to even appreciate or use the Gaussian Copula formula correctly shows that they aren't even in the pre-scientific phase. And Bissessur’s pathetic efforts to compare the incident to “early physics” was plainly based on false analogy and disclosed his own lack of critical thinking.

 

In the case of the Gaussian copula, invented by David X. Li  and articulated in his (2000) paper: ‘On Default Correlation: A Copula Function Approach”  it isn't even a true mathematically sound equation analogous to those used in physics or celestial mechanics.. It is more an intellectual Frankenstein monster that never should have seen the light of day any more than a four-headed baby with a pointed tail. For example, Li's misuse of the distribution functions (F_A(1)) and (F_B(1)) would appall any genuine mathematician or physicist. Each is actually based upon significant uncertainties via survival law distributions which can vary enormously. There is no way to normalize any probability based on (T_A, T_B ) so there is no way to equate Pr[T_A, T_B] to anything on the left side. The equal sign is dangerous recklessness masquerading as math. Did elite economists or quants know any of this when they cranked out their credit default swaps? The evidence of failure to predict the 2008 credit crash shows they didn't.

All of which supports Hedges’ condemnation of these mental zombots, i.e. p. 98:

“They cannot grasp that truth is often relative. They base their decisions on established beliefs such as the primacy of an unregulated market or globalization, which are accepted as absolutes.”

 

In other words, they inhabit a self-confected, solipsist world of illusion devoid of critical, empirical testing or critical thought. I mean, Jeez, if any one of these so-called geniuses would have just taken the time to understand WHAT he was doing in applying the Gaussian Copula to credit derivatives he’d likely have seen it was the equivalent of a physicist taking a tiny piece of special relativity and trying to inject it into areas (i.e. thermodynamic systems at room temperature)  that had no relevance because the primary criterion (speeds near c, the speed of light) were not being met. But see, that sort of moral value perception would also have required a moral dimension to their research and its applications, and all the elites lacked it in spades.

At least physics has and uses empirical testing before advancing to hard claims  – so the odds are less that physicists will make asses of themselves. Not so with these economic, political elites.   Unlike astronomers,  who can accurately predict the position of Jupiter or Mars in 2050 or the next lunar eclipse or occultation of a star, the economists can't even predict simple stuff in their immediate domain - say like forecasting the U.S. economic growth would be 3.2 % in 2011 when it was only 1.7%

So why do we keep paying attention to these overpaid clowns? Just because they have Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, Stanford or whatever degrees after their names? Well, mainly because the politicos who achieve high office (and have similar backgrounds)  tend to install them in their cabinets so instead of being relegated to some corner office behind the hallowed walls of ivy, they have the ear of Presidents and Prime Ministers. These clowns can then help determine national policy which result is usually to the detriment of the rest of us. (Think of the 'chained CPI' gimmick that Obama once entertained.)

Which elicits the question of whether Obama is caught up in this elitist matrix. It was clear in his recent salon.com piece Thomas Frank believes so, as he writes:

"The Obama team, as the president once announced to a delegation of investment bankers, was “the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” and in retrospect these words seem not only to have been a correct assessment of the situation at the moment but a credo for his entire term in office. For my money, they should be carved in stone over the entrance to his monument: Barack Obama as the one-man rescue squad for an economic order that had aroused the fury of the world. Better: Obama as the awesomely talented doctor who kept the corpse of a dead philosophy lumbering along despite it all.

The Age of the Zombie Consensus, however poetic it sounds, will probably not recommend itself as a catchphrase to the shapers of the Obama legacy. They will probably be looking for a label that is slightly more heroic: the Triumph of Faith over Cynicism, or something like that. Maybe they will borrow a phrase from one of the 2012 campaign books, “The Center Holds,” and describe the Obama presidency as a time when cool, corporate reason prevailed over inflamed public opinion. Barack Obama will be presented as a kind of second FDR: the man who saved the system from itself. That perhaps the system didn’t deserve saving will be left to some less-well-funded museum."

In other words, Frank's take is that Obama has helped to preserve and sustain the defunct market capitalism system taught at the elite schools, as well as the whole corporate hegemonic infrastructure. What does Chris Hedges think? He writes (p. 113):

"Obama is a product of the elitist system. So are his degree-laden cabinet members. They come out of Harvard, Yale, Wellesley and Princeton. Their friends and classmates made huge fortunes on Wall Street . They belong to the same clubs. They speak the same easy language of privilege, comfort and entitlement. The education they have obtained has served to rigidify and perpetuate social stratification."


Not that Obama is any different from Clinton before him and worst of all his immediate predecessor,  Bush Jr.,  who we learned benefited as a "legacy student" at Hah-Vahd. Hedges observes (p. 102) that Harvard sports something called the "Z-list" wherein 25 to 50 well-connected but borderline applicants "are told they can enroll if they defer for a year". Hmmmm.....nice trick if you can get it.  Especially if your pappy happens to be a wealthy SOB that can bestow personal grants on the universiy!

Will this corrupt system ever change to benefit the larger society? Not likely! So long as corporate money, personal wealth and advantage are extolled above principles, honor and moral decency, the myopic, amoral elites will lead their blind, greedy and obsequious students, the blind politicos and the rest of us (who aren't so blind) into oblivion. In this light, Hedges'  words are perhaps most trenchant (p. 103):
.
"A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death."

Will the elites take any notice of this and act to change their ways before the pitchforks really come out? Hardly! They are too smug, self-satisfied and arrogant to take seriously anything an outside critic has to say.

Which more or less resembles the stance of the French elites before the pitchforks - and guillotines - came out (during the French Revolution) , to lop off thousands of elitist heads and send them rolling into large baskets.