Adam Crowe

In which a 'better' peasant with a newspaper column attempts to convince 'lesser' peasant readers that it's all their fault and their faults are irredeemable. Beware the stockholm-syndromed useful idiot, gleefully shilling for the status quo. - Adam Crowe

'We still can't believe how the political elite thinks it will get away with what is in the works. Everyone knows now. There are a million pages on the Internet, all of them decrying the bureaucracy, the pettiness, the meanness and the humbug of this increasingly intolerant and anti-commercial enterprise. We think the EU will Implode... Charlemagne had the Roman Catholic Church and a vital new religion to help consolidate his reign culturally. What exactly does the current Europe have? A kind of muzzy socialist vision that is attenuating every day?' -- Don't forget the climate change religion. Plenty of well-intentioned people are falling for that particular hoax. - Adam Crowe

"The costs of failing to address global warming would be greater than the impact of the two world wars and the Great Depression, he said." -- We're manufacturing an even greater problem to trump the problems that I and my fellow psychopaths have historically created, he said. - Adam Crowe

Comment: Dan G: "There is more room for happiness and satisfaction in being a believer (’clueless’) than a player (’sociopath’). Life for those who find value in what they are doing and get satisfaction out of it can be happy, fulfilled and peaceful. All they need to do is find their true interest and vocation — their true belief, not a delusion. The life of the player-sociopath is bound to be a constant war; and because it is a competition, satisfaction and success are not under their own self-control. It is contingent on the failure of the other player-sociopaths with whom they need to compete. It is ultimately foolish to make your own hapiness contingent on the payoff of a zero-sum game. -- From the point of view of society as a whole, praising sociopathy is a disaster. A society of believers will always thrive and progress; it will be the Utopia. A society of players will stagnate and self-distruct; it will be a Mad-Max style, pre-Hobbesian Dystopia." -- *nodding* - Adam Crowe

'#The Organization as Psychic Prison: ...it divides people into those who get how the world really works (the sociopaths and the self-aware slacker losers) and those who don’t (the over-performer losers and the clueless in the middle). This is where Gervais has broken new ground, primarily because as an artist, he is interested in the subjective experience of being clueless. ...the ultimate explanation of Michael Scott’s (and David Brent’s) careers: they are put into a position of having to explain their own apparent, unexpected and unexamined success. Remember, they are promoted primarily as passive pawns to either allow the sociopaths to escape the risks of their actions, or to make way for the sociopaths to move up faster. They are presented with an interesting bit of cognitive dissonance: being nominally given greater power, but in reality being safely shunted away from the pathways of power. They must choose to either construct false narratives or decline apparent opportunities.' - Adam Crowe

'...if flippancy is more fun then it’s also more attractive. Much like the coolest kid in middle school, it’s funny and it’s exclusive and it’s confident of being understood by just the right people—maybe even especially when it’s being superior and snarky and speaking at someone else’s expense. It can be so attractive, in fact, that you want to share its assumptions, whatever they are. It’s not addressing those assumptions, or earnestly explaining them to you in some dull droning unfunny voice, but you want to share them even more, because you aspire to be on the right side of the cool person’s joke. You might not even think about those assumptions, or notice yourself adopting them. Which means flippancy and snark can be convincing, substantively convincing, without even making an argument. They convince socially, not rhetorically. Being convinced socially isn’t anything complicated or new, not in the least...' - Adam Crowe

'#2) Lazy activism: Joining a Facebook group is the new going on a march, just substantially less effective. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime did not buckle under the onslaught of green-tinted Twitter avatars. #5) Social media gurus: Knowing how to tweet should not be a career in itself. #9) The bedroom invasion: First it was in the living room, then the bedroom and now - thanks to wi-fi and laptops - the internet is in your bed. #17) Companies wanting us to 'join the conversation': A direct result of the ascendancy of No 5 is the insufferable chattiness of previously faceless corporations. But a social media presence is no alternative to swift, helpful customer service. #42) The gradual erosion of your moral boundaries: Tasteless jokes, obscene images and websites devoted to fetishes you've never even heard of are only ever a few clicks away. Even if you never indulge, their taboo is diluted by ease of availability.' - Adam Crowe

'We have moved far past the Affluent Society and its marketing-aroused wants. Now it‘s real life problems – from traffic to disease – that the economy creates and then sells remedies for. In theoretical terms, environmental problems are a genre of what economists call “externalities”, which are unwanted side effects of consumption otherwise assumed to be benign. Now we are entering the realm of what might be called “internalities”—which is to say, dysfunctions inherent in consumption itself. This is a black hole to the conventional economic mind. Economists don‘t even have a language for it; the reigning vocabulary is encoded with the production imperative. An economy consists of goods and services. There are no bads or disservices—no negative products of any kind. How can economists say consumption is good when the consumers themselves think it is bad?' -- Blame cheap credit. - Adam Crowe

'That this particular scam played such a prominent role in the demise of the two firms was supremely ironic. Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class. What really happened to Bear and Lehman is that an economic drought temporarily left the hyenas without any more middle-class victims — and so they started eating each other, using the exact same schemes they had been using for years to fleece the rest of the country. Our economy is so completely fucked, the rich are running out of things to steal.' -- See: http://vimeo.com/3722293 - Adam Crowe

On the irrational response to irrational exuberance: "Only on Wall St do people get excited as the prices go higher and get disgusted as prices go lower. People assume that a low price means there's something gone wrong with the company and they shun it like the plague. But when prices go high, people think there's something going on and must own it. It's not greed that drives markets, it's envy. People buy stocks and get involved in these manias because they fear that their neighbour is getting rich and that they're missing out." - Adam Crowe

Comment: J.Hansford: "The Socialist Global bureaucracy can sniff victory. It’s so close they can taste it. Once they have the framework signed and the money. There is a surreal quality in it. To have finally arrive in a political era in which they have designed the power to tax the very air we breath. It was once the stuff of science fiction novels. We stop this folly quickly. Or we will perish under the tyranny of such perverse people." -- Comment: Peter: "What it amounts to is the poor people in rich countries giving money to the rich people in poor countries." -- SLAVE THE PLANET. - Adam Crowe

'The phrase "two plus two equals five" ("2 + 2 = 5") is a slogan used in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as an example of an obviously false dogma one must believe, similar to other obviously false slogans by the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is contrasted with the phrase "two plus two makes four", the obvious – but politically inexpedient – truth. Orwell's protagonist, Winston Smith, uses the phrase to wonder if the State might declare "two plus two equals five" as a fact; he ponders whether, if everybody believes in it, does that make it true? Smith writes, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." Later in the novel, Smith attempts to use doublethink to teach himself that the statement "2 + 2 = 5" is true, or at least as true as any other answer one could come up with.' -- So many things. - Adam Crowe

'"They are about to impose a communist world government on the world." -- Skimming through the treaty, I came across verification of Monckton’s assessment of the new entity’s purpose: [page 18] 38. The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism...: #World Government (heading added): (a) The government will be [...] responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies. #To Redistribute Wealth (heading added): b) The Convention’s financial mechanism will include a multilateral climate change fund... #With Enforcement Authority (heading added): (e) an international registry for the monitoring, reporting and verification of compliance of emission reduction commitments, and the transfer of technical and financial resources from developed countries to developing countries.' -- If you tolerate this, your children will be next. - Adam Crowe

'[The] “you are in a minority, you are wrong” message DOES dissuade a lot of people. It is remarkably poisonous. And it discourages people from taking concrete action.' -- Comment: craazyman: "The issues of central banking, credit, regulation and capital ratios are so esoteric and so remote that few Americans can really build a world view around them. Not out of lack of intelligence but simply because it’s a completely foreign language. There is nothing in this crisis to grab on to — intellectually and ideologically — for most people. Just a stewing frustrated rage that something isn’t right with the big picture. There’s no center, no point of communal traction that could be sloganeered into a reference point to rally around. And so people acquiesce to a state of affairs that they know is messed up, but they don’t know quite why or what to do about it– other than tune out the morons on TV and try to survive the night in the jungle." - Adam Crowe

'Legislate in haste, repent at leisure. Almost everything we’ve done in response to the credit crunch has served to exacerbate our problems. Quite apart from the generational debt, the nationalisations and the red tape, we have put in place the machinery of global economic government. The rule holds whether we’re talking about the national or the international stage: the further away government is, the more bureaucratic, self-serving and expensive it becomes. Sure enough, every G20 meeting ends up with a call for more regulation, higher taxes (sorry “cracking down on tax-havens”) and extra spending. Result? Britain’s national debt has risen by around £200,000 while you’ve been reading this blog, and America’s only a little less in proportionate terms.' - Adam Crowe

'Say hello to the Mugabeverse. The theory that bailout benefits sans meaningful reform will trickle down and benefit the average Joe (as much than or more than bankers) is the kind of perverse logic only an economist could love. It's is faith-based economics — and it's Barack Obama's biggest mistake. (Consider for a moment that 20+ per cent of hedge funds misrepresent info.) For years, George Bush hunted for phantom WMDs, while terrorist networks flourished under his nose. Now Barack Obama is hunting for a phantom prosperity, while the greatest robbery in the world is happening right under his nose.' -- CHANGE!!! - Adam Crowe

'When Goldman Sachs wins the Nobel Prize in Economics next year, we will become mildly annoyed and then yawn in the best American tradition and go on allowing the Robber Class to steal us blind, hoping that there is another juicy divorce or celebrity death that can distract us from reality. The Robber Class doesn’t frustrate me nearly as much as the Robbed Class. Robbers will be Robbers only as long as we in the Robbed Class let them.' -- Come on, America. - Adam Crowe

'Students of the Watergate school of journalism were taught one lesson: "Just follow the money." It was Deep Throat's one message to the Washington Post reporters from the depths of his underground car park. I have long followed this maxim, especially since first trying to understand the credit crunch last year. What motivated those in charge of Britain's financial policy? Why were they so obsessed with saving bankers and nobody else? The answer must lie in their personal circumstance. Those advising Brown and Darling in Downing Street, such as Lord Myners, Lady Vadera, Lord Turner and John Kingman, were all past or present bankers, or friends of bankers. When they leave public life they are likely to work for a bank.' -- Tony Blair's £2.5m from JP Morgan. NEVAR FORGET. - Adam Crowe

'The British people are living in a fool's paradise and have yet to understand the gravity of the economic crisis, according a former head of the Financial Services Authority. What is disturbing is that the British people seem unwilling to face minimal belt-tightening. Even professors in higher education are balloting to strike, demanding a continuation of boom-time pay raises. "You have the best minds in the country planning to go on strike for 8pc. People are miles away from understanding what is needed." Polling data shows that 48pc of the public are against any spending cuts and only 20pc see the need for retrenchment. Britons appear to assume that the "fantastic growth in public spending" over the last decade has become an entitlement.' -- I see dead people. - Adam Crowe

Millhouse: "The reality is slightly more nuanced." -- Max: "The reality is people are dying because of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Wall St Jihadists!" - Adam Crowe

Max: "The word is fraud; they're hiding losses." -- Millhouse: "I wouldn't be that critical; the banking system is a policy tool." -- Max: "When other countries hear this gobbledegook doublespeak, they say, 'We're gonna dump the dollar...'" -- Millhouse: "THEY CAN'T!" -- ORLY? - Adam Crowe

MEMORY HOLE. DOUBLEQUICKWISE!!! THIS WARN YOU!!! - Adam Crowe

'[The] movement toward abstraction has important advantages for complex societies, because abstractions can be deployed with a much smaller investment of resources than it takes to mobilize the concrete realities that back them up. ...economic abstractions keep functioning only so long as actual goods and services exist to be bought and sold, and it’s only in the pipe dreams of economists that the abstractions guarantee the presence of the goods and services. Vico argued that this trap is a central driving force behind the decline and fall of civilizations; the movement toward abstraction goes so far that the concrete realities are neglected. In the end the realities trickle away unnoticed, until a shock of some kind strikes the tower of abstractions built atop the void the realities once filled, and the whole structure tumbles to the ground. -- An economy of hallucinated wealth depends utterly on the willingness of all participants to pretend that the hallucinations have real value.' - Adam Crowe

Video interview: On the obscenity of transparent doublethink and negative liberty. (Beware the toe-deep economic theorizing.) - Adam Crowe

Short documentary on bankster-ist hyperinflation. - Adam Crowe

“IF you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence.” “O.K.,” I said. “Let’s hear it.” “The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.” He took a sip of his martini, and stared straight at the row of bottles behind the bar, as if the conversation was now over. “But weren’t there smart guys on Wall Street in the first place?” I asked. He looked at me the way a mathematics teacher might look at a child who, despite heroic efforts by the teacher, seemed incapable of learning the most rudimentary principles of long division.' -- Numbers numb - Adam Crowe

'On a real basis (not nominal) the Dow at 10,000 ten years ago is equivalent to 7,537 today! In other words, not only have we had a lost decade for all those who focus on the absolute flatness of the DJIA, but it is also a decade where the US Consumer has lost 25% of purchasing power from the perspective of stocks! You won't hear this fact on the MSM. -- And if you want to be really scared, here is the comparable representation for the DJIA in ounces of gold. It cost about 30 ounces to buy the 10,000 Dow last time. Now it costs less than 10.' -- Hehe. Dollar-tinted glasses. - Adam Crowe

'It’s literally amazing to me that our press corps hasn’t yet managed to draw a distinction between good news on Wall Street for companies like Goldman, and good news in reality. I watched carefully the reporting of the Dow breaking 10,000 the other day and not anywhere did I see a major news organization include a paragraph of the “On the other hand, so fucking what?” sort, one that might point out that unemployment is still at a staggering high, foreclosures are racing along at a terrifying clip, and real people are struggling more than ever. In fact the dichotomy between the economic health of ordinary people and the traditional “market indicators” is not merely a non-story, it is a sort of taboo — unmentionable in major news coverage.' -- We're from the TV and we're here to sell you. - Adam Crowe

'Positive thinking is different, she says, from being cheerful or good-natured -- it's believing that the world is shaped by our wants and desires and that by focusing on the good, the bad ceases to exist. Ehrenreich believes this has permeated our culture and that the refusal to acknowledge that bad things could happen is in some way responsible for the current financial crisis. -- BE: "I look at it with a little bit of sociological detachment. It's a brilliant system of social control. When bad things happen to people you say, "Well, it's really your attitude that has to change." I have traced how positive thinking became the corporate culture in America. It was mandatory to be positive. So you had companies who would literally fire people for being negative, negative in the sense of maybe raising too many questions, maybe expressing a doubt. So we had a culture of complete denial at all levels of the possibility that bad things could happen..."' - Adam Crowe

I ACCIDENTALLY A SUCKERS RALLY. WHEN SHOULD I SELL? - Adam Crowe