When I was in college years ago, I was part of a campus conservative group called Undergraduates for a Stable America. (USA, get it?) Being wise-guy college boys, we used to liven up our monthly meetings by inviting local John Birch Society members to give talks, show recruiting films, etc.
While we were outwardly polite and respectful to the Birchers, inwardly we were laughing at their absurd theories and claims. (What is tactfully called “the conspiratorial view of history” is really just a euphemism for a paranoid world view.)
Anyone who has spent any time in grass roots politics knows all the myths and folk lore that have arisen over the years in this regard. (What’s surprising is that if you go out far enough on the fringes, left or right, you actually achieve a convergence of paranoia as far as who the bogey-men are!)
All of the last 240 years of Western Civilization has been controlled (supposedly) by a shadowy elite of international financiers.
This conspiracy originated in Bavaria in 1776 (no coincidence!) as a Masonic plot, whose members were known as the “Illuminati.” Nowadays the nerve center of the cabal goes by the name of the Council on Foreign Relations, or the Trilateral Commission, or Bilderbergers.
These plotters arrived at a scheme of world domination that has unfolded exactly as they envisioned, carried out by such unlikely masterminds as the Queen of England and the Rothschild banking family. The whole elaborate web of supposed connections and manipulation is set out in such classic tomes as Gary Allen’s “None Dare Call It Conspiracy” and the John Birch Society Blue Book, by JBS founder Robert Welch.
On those happy occasions where we j.v. William F. Buckleys would stop in at the Yankee Doodle Tap Room before the meetings, one of us would ask a question of the JBS “presenters.” For example, it didn’t seem particularly rude or churlish to inquire why arch-capitalists like the Rockefellers would bankroll the International Communist Movement. Nor did it seem out of line to ask if it wasn’t against the obvious self-interest of banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, to work toward the destruction of the US financial system, both of which were articles of faith of Bircher theology.
The answer would always be; “It’s in the book! Just read the literature we’ve brought or which you can order from our headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts. You’ll see, it all ties together!”
I thought immediately of that kind of conspiracy mentality when I heard former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich speak at the Plaza Branch of the K.C. MO. Public Library in October about his book, “Saving Capitalism.”
The substance of Reich’s remarks deserve their own post, but the reaction of the audience was itself incredibly revealing. I felt like I was back in that lecture hall in college, listening to fools spin out paranoid fantasies of plotting conspirators, except this time it was leftist wing nuts and there were over a thousand of them in one place.
At least 50 or 60 were wearing Oligarchy Response Team t-shirts and waving Sanders for President signs. This cheering section would go wild every time Reich would utter one of the standard left-wing issue talking points; “Reinstate Glass-Steagall!” (Never mind that there were no more than a handful of people in the overflow crowd who could even tell you what the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933 was, let alone how it could have prevented the Great Recession). Another crowd pleaser was his line that the recent Supreme Court decision on campaign finance, Citizen United, was “one of the worst decisions in U.S. history.” Again, no one there could explain what the decision was about or why it was as bad as Dred Scott, upholding slavery, or Plessy v. Ferguson, upholding segregation.
I couldn’t help but think of the old routine about the Borscht Belt comedian whose Catskills resort audience had heard his jokes so many times that he started holding up numbered cards for each joke to get a laugh, without having to take the time to tell them again.
To show you how slavishly brain dead Reich’s audience was, he got the biggest applause in response to the following: “Why should big corporations be able to use bankruptcy to get out of labor contracts and yet you as an individual can’t take bankruptcy to wipe out your student loan debt or home mortgage?” That would really make it easy to get a college or home loan, once the law was changed, as Reich implies it should be.
The questions from the audience were priceless. One, in particular, from a former Kansas City Star reporter, was a masterpiece: “Do you know anything about the National Security Agency gathering personal data on Americans and then turning it over to big corporations to use to increase their market share?”
It’s all there, the whole enchilada: fear and loathing of the national security state/military industrial complex; hatred of corporate oligarchs; and irritation at intrusive marketing techniques, e.g. internet pop-ups, telemarketing, and spam email. For the paranoid mind, it really does all fit together like a seamless web. Everything they don’t like causes everything else they don’t like.
This principle has broader application than just an off-the-wall question from an unemployed journalist. The Star’s own Keith Chrostowski wrote a lengthy article last year claiming that income inequality today will cause catastrophic climate change in the near future. The Washington Post, on the other hand, citing a UCal Berkeley study, suggests that climate change will itself lead to income inequality. By the same token, some (Thomas Piketty, French economist) blame income inequality for terrorism, while others (Martin O’Malley, Bernie Sanders) blame climate change.
To quote Hillary Clinton; “What difference does it make at this point?” Either income inequality causes climate change, or climate change causes income inequality. Irregardless (as we say in Olathe), since they both cause terrorism, IT ALL TIES TOGETHER! (This is also a handy way to change the subject from the real issue, the complete inability of the Obama administration to contain, let alone defeat, Radical Islam.)
Personally, I’m strongly opposed to weak office coffee, people who recline their seats on airplanes, and Millennials who use the word “like” at least 20 times in every conversation.
Clearly, each of these phenomena is related, each feeds off each other. IT ALL TIES TOGETHER! (Those at the Robert Reich event might consider a Groupon rate at Western Missouri Mental Health. I understand they’ve got an excellent program for paranoid schizophrenics. Harley, they’ve got a concierge-level suite reserved for you but space is limited. Call now!)
For real fun, have Robert Reich and Charles Krauthammer appear together.
Mark Levin went after Krauthammer the other day for attacking Ted Cruise.
“…Ronald Reagan ran for president of the United States three times and Krauthammer didn’t support him once. Excuse me, ran for president twice, but ran in the Republican primary three times. Ran in the Republican primary three times. I guess technically the last time is four times, but competitively three times. He was elected twice. He was a great conservative, a statesman. And somehow, Krauthammer, who wasn’t a child, was writing speeches or something for Walter Mondale.
Again, I don’t have a problem with the fact that people change. That isn’t even my point, but to take a shot at Cruz because — Oh, the Canadian Ted Cruz, as they were giggling the other day. And not only that, they’re not the font of all wisdom about the conservative movement. They missed the most important aspect of the conservative movement in modern history — it was right in front of them and they missed it, which is exactly why they are missing Ted Cruz. They miss it. ”
Conservatives take the gloves right the fu*k off when they go at it. Check out Bill O’Reilly and George Will.
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=bill+oreilly+and+george+will+fight&view=detail&&mid=621376985DEE64B0C9EE621376985DEE64B0C9EE
Thanks Chuck, Krauthammer is a very interesting character who does not really fit neatly into any set category. Whenever the Star carries his editorials he consistently trashes Obama so I know you and he are very much on the same page there. He is an extremely intelligent guy, trained as a doctor, who did start out politically on the left side of the aisle before moving over to the dark side during the Reagan years. 🙂 While many regard him as the quintessential conservative pundit, his strong scientific training has put him on the wrong side of stem cell research, abortion, and evolution from the perspective of other conservatives. He is enough of a pragmatist to realize that Ted Cruz has zero chance of winning the general election if he does win the nomination. Whoever the GOP nominee is will have to appeal to the independent voters in the middle of the spectrum to have a reasonable shot of winning and to my blue tinted perspective, that group includes only Rubio, Bush, Christie, and Kasich.
You are right about O’Reilly confronting other republicans. I enjoy watching him and Ann Coulter go at it when she appears on his show.
Ann Coulter kicks his tail.
The truth us, George Will won this exchange hands down in my opinion.
G. Will wrote a follow up column and again (As did Sutherland here when he destroyed “north…”) destroyed Bill O.
If your position is weak, or there is a paucity of facts supporting your argument, you should review, study harder, or admit your deficiencies. Bill has his ego and Rep tied up in the book (Killing Ronnie) and has no choice. He is all in, but his position is untenable.
Hence, the ad hominem attacks and the decibel level.
Thanks for the fair criticism of my elitist take on Trump supporters. I was actually attempting to carry out the admonition to the narrator,Nick Carraway,by his father in the first line of The Great Gatsby;
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,just remember that all the people in the world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
My scorn was reserved instead for the Moveon.org groupies in the Reich event audience, who clearly came from more affluent backgrounds than the toiling masses they purport to champion. I thought this was obvious but apparently it was a distinction that eluded Ms. Laura Black and
others.
You’re still walking on water with me DS.
🙂
Dear Stomper: I want to give you a trigger warning since I know you regard the comments section of kcconfidential as a “safe space”. I particularly don’t want to be accused of an act of “cultural appropriation”! But here goes! ……………What do you think of the schlonging controversy?
Thanks Dwight, I appreciate the consideration since you know I am both a Jew as well as a Democrat that favors Hillary. That said, I don’t think Trump concerns himself with being politically correct and meant only to make the point that in the head to head competition between Obama and Hillary in 2008, Obama kicked her a$$. In hindsight, maybe that choice of words by The Donald was not the “safest” word to use, but again, being safe is not a concern of his. Once he made the statement and used the word, Hillary and her spokespeople (like any smart politician would) quickly jumped and tried to take advantage and paint the statement as a sexist barb and an attack on women as a group. She is trying to solidify the bloc of women voters for herself and Trump handed her an easy lay-up. Not uncommon for partisans to try to take a statement from the opposition much further than it was intended and paint the opponent in an uncomfortable/irrational position. Sort of like what you did with this piece. Saying that all those in the Reich audience have serious mental health issues was a bit over the top. It’s also naive in my humble opinion to think that any president, or any other nation’s leader can control radical Islamists (there, I said the phrase radical Islamists). American presidents can’t even control their own governments or national behavior, how can they be expected to control events or individuals outside their borders? While I rarely agree with your political opinions, I do respect them but I think you have a tendency to paint with too broad of a brush on many occasions. I’m sure we are all guilty of that from time to time.
And yes, I am also naive to think that the comments section here at KCC should be a safe place but we should still try. You do get a number of personal insults here when you comment and that is unfortunate.
Thanks for the question.
I personally love how all the libs manage to parlay a short stint as a government bureaucrat into a personal fortune and outlandish speaking fees from our country’s fascist universities.
A cursory look at the top names on the speakers circuit includes Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, James Baker, Dick Cheney, John Sununu, David Gergen, and even Laura Bush. It shouldn’t come as any surprise to the most casual observer of politics that parlaying a short stint in government into a personal fortune is standard operating procedure on both sides of the aisle. Capitalism in the raw.
Agree. What I had in mind were the notoriously obscene fees paid bu universities to primarily leftist politicians and bureaucrats.
I was worth every penny.
Now, I am running, without any competition in a field flooded with scofflaws and scandals, the most corrupt, treasonous, inefficient and outrageously criminal “Charity” in “payola” history.
By the way Chuck, I noticed that your alma mater, UMKC and the fighting Kangaroos, sponsored a $65,000 jubilee for what we can all agree, was a speech unlike any other in Missouri since Fulton.
Perhaps, Dwight, you were part of the cabal that was obtaining signatures to pass a set of 10 laws in front of the KU student union. Maybe three percent of the students recognized the laws as the Bill of Rights. The rest, joyfully signed or explained why passage of those laws would be impossible. As you well know, running for election brings out the crazies on both sides, from a Montana State Senator with a bust of Karl Marx in her foyer, to a member of the Montana militia in the next Senate District. Although the fringe made you laugh, they scared the devil out of me, as these were the souls we elected. At one point, I came across a politically active soul who had three children from different men. None of her children had social security numbers, as she claimed the the social security card, by its self, would allow the government to track you wherever you went. After showing me pictures of Russian military equipment being shipped on US railroad lines, so Russians could take away our guns, she asked if she could campaign for me. I asked, since I was running in a college district, if she could leave her gun at home, and she said no. I think my response was please don’t.
Nice article.
I loved William F. Buckley Jr. Just watched “Best of Enemies”. Vidal v the Buck.
🙂
This is also a handy way to change the subject from the real issue, the complete inability of the Obama administration to contain, let alone defeat, Radical Islam.
Now that’s hilarious…
The argument goes like this: “We can’t do anything about X because we have failed as a nation to address Y”. X is whatever problem you don’t have an answer to. Y is whatever your pet cause is, especially if it’s something you can blame your political enemies for.” Address” is a weasel word because it can mean in this context “fail to recognize” or “fail to solve” or even “try to solve”. Thus you can say; “We can’t defeat defeat Isis( X)because we have failed to address job opportunities in the Middle East(Y)”,Obama spokesperson Marie Harff. Another example is, ” We can’t do anything about the lagging economy(X) because we as a nation have failed to address income inequality(Y)”. It’s a classic switcheroo to get the focus off the problem you have no answer for,to one you feel more comfortable with,even though the link between the two is dubious.
A “Tu Quoque” fallacy.
It’s also a classic case of the “argument from authority”,i.e. you stress the rank or position of those you are citing as proof of the irrefutable truth of their positions. I’ m sure my Big Green buddie would agree with all of Ted Cruz’s views once I cited all his sterling academic credentials,which are every bit as prestigious as Reich’s!
You never addressed the substance of the now apparent fact that it would be better if Commercial Banks and Investment Banks were not the same entities. Likely because you would have no argument.
Here is an article from George Will from a couple of years ago.
“Too big to fail”?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-break-up-the-big-banks/2013/02/08/2379498a-714e-11e2-8b8d-e0b59a1b8e2a_story.html
“A mere lawyer”? What do you think Reich is? He’s not an economist by training or at least has no advanced academic degrees in economics.You praise him for being a Summa Cum Laude grad of Dartmouth. Since you claim to know so much about me personally,why didn’t you mention that I was a Magna Cum Laude grad of Princeton? I guess I only got that because of family influence!
You also ignore the fact that I said I would comment on the substance of his remarks in a separate post. This post I just did was about the appeal of conspiracy theories to a mass audience, be they left or right,particularly in response to the mere invocation of phrases or names that are verbal short hand for complex ideas beyond the grasp of the listener. For instance,Glass-Steagall barred commercial banks from underwriting securities. It was investment banks,aided and abetted by government agencies,doing what they’ve always done,selling speculative securities,that triggered the Crash.To the extent commercial banks were at risk,it was because of making bad real estate loans,something they always did,not just a new practice permitted by the repeal of Glass-Steagall.By the way,making the repeal of GS the culprit for ’08 was an argument which originated with convicted felon and lunatic cult leader Lyndon Larouche. Are you really sure this is something you want to embrace?
>“A mere lawyer”? What do you think Reich is?
A lawyer, law professor at two of the top 15 schools in the country and one of the most highly respected cabinet members of the last 20 years.
The fact that you try to associate opposition with Glass-Steagall with being a Larouche supporter just shows how bizarre and out of touch your political opinions are.
>Glass-Steagall barred commercial banks from underwriting securities. It was investment banks,aided and abetted by government agencies,doing what they’ve always done,selling speculative securities,that triggered the Crash.
this is incorrect and intellectually dishonest. After Glass-Steagall there was no difference between an investment bank and a commercial bank. The differences existed only on paper.
I’m sure that in your next piece you will be sure to address the fact that the IBs were selling and even shorting mortgage backed securities at the same time their commercial bank arms were continuing to bundle these as AAA debt when anyone who took a more than 5 second look at what those were knew it to be a farcical rating.
wah hoo wah
Let’s review the actual record. The implosion of Bear,Stearns and Lehman Brothers started the deluge.Neither was a commercial bank that was effected by Glass-Steagall.(The conversion of the investment banks to commercial national banks -e.g Goldman Sachs,Morgan Stanley,et alia,largely occurred after the crash so they could borrow money at the Fed window. This would not have been possible if GS was still in effect.) The ability of commercial banks to make lousy and absurdly leveraged real estate loans was not something they could only do because of Gramm-Bliley,which repealed GS. The conflict of interest you talked about was between the trading arms and the corporate finance arms of traditional investment banks like Goldman.( Noone would want to get into low margin commercial banking from I-banking.You’re confused on this,as on so many other points.)
If you want to lay blame let’s talk about the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.,which allowed all sorts of exotic futures and other derivatives.As with the repeal of GS,however,both these laws were passed by huge bi-partisan majorities in Congress and signed by Bill Clinton,in whose cabinet Reich served, so its a little rich for him to blame the Republicans.By the way, over a dozen times the Bush administration and GOP leaders in Congress tried to rein in Fannie and Freddie,only to be thwarted by Chris Dodd and Barney Frank.(Yes,as in Dodd-Frank!) One man’s affordable housing is another man’s sub-prime mortgage.The two Democratic political hacks who ran these entities into the ground,Frank Raines(Clinton’s OMB director)and Jim Johnson(former Mondale aide) walked away with 100 million dollar golden parachutes.If I was a Dem,especially a Clintonista past and present,a discrete silence on the subject would seem to be in order. Oh,no,we’re going to go out and whip up the the credulous and ignorant,like the Trumpster does. At least his folks have the excuse of a lack of education. What’s your excuse?
“… his folks have the excuse of a lack of education. What’s your excuse?”
I can’t believe you wrote such distorted conclusions, only to accuse others of a lack of education. People like you are impassioned political believers of one ilk or another and will always fill in the blank to make a point. You’re frustrated … I get that part. So what? Grow up.
Laura, while you are correct in your assessment that the “education” barb in the coda to a brilliant and eviscerating answer to Mr.” still north in his heart”, is elitist and unworthy of Mr. Southerland (Still the Gold Standard here at kcc.), that in no way refutes the facts and the response.
While we are all, all of us, diminished in retrospect at our pathetic matriculation at various and sundry commuter colleges (UMKC anyone? ANYONE!?!?) and our flirtation with the “Donald”, I, for one, am a proud Kangaroo and wish I had as much hair as the Trumpster . the Trumpster and I still think that our immigration and foriegn policies are insane and the Fascist Fed is a Jackbooted Brobdingnagian beast that seeks the real time death of all of us “still south in our hearts.”
“You’re a mere lawyer and Reich is a respected economist !” Actually,Reich is a lawyer too and not an economist.
“Well, then he’s a law professor at two of the most prestigious law schools.”No,actually he teaches politics to undergrads and is not a law professor.
“You’re intellectually dishonest for suggesting that speculation by investment banks triggered the crash” Read the piece last year about Bear Stearns’ short position in silvers futures that was the catalyst for its collapse in March of 2008,the first domino to fall. On and on it goes!
I have no problem with bringing back Glass-Steagall. I have distinct memories of a sense of unease when a banker client boasted back in the 80’s of their new discount stock brokerage operation.All these depression era reforms were enacted for a reason,i.e.banks cannot be objective in peddling stocks of their commercial loan customers,after all. I also have no objection to cracking down on credit card companies and the purveyors of pay day loans. That said,none of these abusive practices had anything to do with the 2008-2009 Crash. Just chanting “Bring Back Glass Steagall”or “Overturn Citizens United!”while wearing your”Oligarchy Response Team”t-shirt is not exactly a thoughtful or informed approach to politics,especially if you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Interesting piece Dwight. A couple of the comments here really crossed the line and I’m glad Hearne took them off. People may not agree with your politics ( I certainly don’t) but commenters really do need to keep within the lines of decency. Nothing wrong with alternative views but insults do not advance the goal of finding common ground. We just differ on what we see as the role of government and to trash personalities misses the big picture.
Keep them coming.
Excellent article! I have nephews who believe the USA attacked itself on 9/11, and socialism is the answer to a peaceful America. I have friends who believe the government will truly take away all of their firearms, and we should all stock up with dried/prepared foods and buy gold for the coming of martial law- I despair for this world!