[Peace-discuss] Fw: Guest Commentary Submission

[E. Wayne Johnson]

the N.G. probably thinks its a little white lie
or maybe they want to just let sleeping dogmata lie.

There are so many Big Lies somnambulating lately
that its hard to consider which one is the really
big lollapaloozic one that should be called "The Big Lie".

This seems more like a cloaking distraction.
A mac may cover freddies fannie.

mony a mickle maks a muckle.

I think that the really admirably large lies should have people killing
and dying and reshaping geography, etc.,
in the defense of their pseudovirtue.

Now I am wondering if the big lies should be rated by
their popularity (numbers of those deceived),
some hedonic or sadistic scale measure of deceit or cleverness
(obviously subjective), or some other index
of satisfaction, dissatisfaction, perplexity, surprise
schadenfreude. It really gets complicated because
clearly there seems to be similar masochistic enjoyment gained
from being lied to as there is from promulgating and disseminating lies.

The most sadistic thing to do seems to be telling the truth (in love)
to those who dwell on a doily of tergiversations.




On 12/25/2011 8:35 AM, Stuart Levy wrote:
> David, this is such an excellent piece!
>
> Shame on the N-G for not publishing it already.
>
> Would you be inclined to try to get it posted elsewhere - on 
> commondreams, maybe, or truthout?
>
> On 12/24/11 9:19 AM, David Green wrote:
>> This is what I submitted to the N-G a month ago, as yet unpublished. 
>> They're very committed to the Big Lie, but I'm glad to see Nocera on 
>> the case. Ritholtz was the first to apply the phrase. Wallison is the 
>> primary advocate, but it was also the publication of the 
>> Morgenson-Rosner book six months ago that fueled broader publicity. 
>> Nocera doesn't mention that, probably due to the usual NYT 
>> "collegiality."
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/opinion/nocera-the-big-lie.html?hp
>>
>>     ----- Forwarded Message -----
>>     *From:* David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com>
>>     *To:* John Beck <jbeck at news-gazette.com>
>>     *Sent:* Saturday, November 26, 2011 4:16 PM
>>     *Subject:* Guest Commentary Submission
>>
>>     *The Big Lie of Wall Street and the 1%: Fannie and Freddie are
>>     Responsible for the Economic Crisis*
>>     David Green
>>     The mantra of the neoliberal era of the past three decades is
>>     that government fails, while the free market succeeds. When
>>     events and facts shatter this dogma even more obviously than
>>     usual—as in 2008—reality must be not only denied, but replaced
>>     with a boldly fabricated scenario.
>>     Such is the case regarding the assertion that the practices of
>>     government-supported mortgage securitization agencies Fannie Mae
>>     and Freddie Mac—rather than mortgage lenders and Wall Street
>>     bankers—were responsible for the practices that resulted in the
>>     housing bubble, the financial meltdown, the bailout of the 1%,
>>     and the outrage of the 99%. An attentive reader of this newspaper
>>     could not have failed to notice this trend in columns,
>>     editorials, and letters. This trend reflects a conscious
>>     propaganda campaign.
>>     Barry Ritholtz recently summarized in “The Big Lie Goes Viral” on
>>     the Washington Post’s website: “Wall Street’s Big Lie is that
>>     banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash. It
>>     was not irresponsible lending or derivative or excess leverage or
>>     misguided compensation packages, but rather long-standing housing
>>     policies that were at fault. Indeed, the arguments these folks
>>     make fail to withstand even casual scrutiny. But that has not
>>     stopped people who should know better from repeating them.”
>>     The Big Lie serves not only to obscure the gross culpability of
>>     Wall Street, but the genuine culpability of (corporate-driven)
>>     government. Economists like Dean Baker, who debunks the Big Lie
>>     on his blog, never fail to emphasize the flaws in Fannie and
>>     Freddie—as “government supported enterprises” operating in a
>>     for-profit context—that led to their collapse. More important,
>>     the Big Lie distracts us from the deregulatory financial policies
>>     of administrations of both parties, the willful negligence of the
>>     Federal Reserve in failing to prevent speculative bubbles, and
>>     the revolving door between Wall Street and the White House.
>>     Blogger Glenn Greenwald writes: “People like (Robert) Rubin and
>>     (Lawrence) Summers shuffle back and forth from the public to the
>>     private sector and back again, repeatedly switching places with
>>     their GOP counterparts in this endless public/private sector
>>     looting.”
>>     The Big Liars not only assert Wall Street’s innocence, but
>>     exploit the privileges of the 1% to manipulate government
>>     policies—deregulatory and/or interventionist—to enhance their
>>     profits. Recent revelations regarding Newt Gingrich’s lucrative
>>     services to Freddie Mac provide a timely example of such
>>     corruption, and the “free market” hypocrisy that goes with it.
>>     A balanced assessment of Fannie and Freddie can be found online
>>     in the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (FCIC) of the National
>>     Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in
>>     the United States: “These government-sponsored enterprises had a
>>     deeply flawed business model as publicly traded corporations with
>>     the implicit backing of and subsidies from the federal government
>>     and with a public mission. … We conclude that these two entities
>>     contributed to the crisis, but were not a primary cause.
>>     Importantly, GSE (government supported enterprise) mortgage
>>     securities essentially maintained their value throughout the
>>     crisis and did not contribute to the significant financial firm
>>     losses that were central to the financial crisis.”
>>     The lone Commission dissenter from this report, Peter Wallison of
>>     the American Enterprise Institute, with research support from AEI
>>     economist Edward Pinto, has been a major proponent of the Big
>>     Lie. David Min of the Center for American Progress has responded:
>>     “Did Fannie and Freddie buy high-risk mortgage-backed securities?
>>     Yes. But they did not buy enough of them to be blamed for the
>>     mortgage crisis. Highly respected analysts who have looked at
>>     these data in much greater detail than Wallison, Pinto, or
>>     myself, including the nonpartisan Government Accountability
>>     Office, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, the
>>     Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission majority, the Federal Housing
>>     Finance Agency, and virtually all academics, have all rejected
>>     the Wallison/Pinto argument that federal affordable housing
>>     policies were responsible for the proliferation of actual
>>     high-risk mortgages over the past decade.”
>>     Finally, promoters of the Big Lie have relied on the
>>     much-discussed book “Reckless Endangerment” by Gretchen Morgenson
>>     and Joshua Rosner. I would refer readers to a thorough critique
>>     by Jeff Madrick and Frank Partnoy at the New York Review of Books
>>     website. They write that the authors’ “bold claim is not
>>     substantiated by persuasive analysis or by any hard evidence in
>>     the book. The GSEs did generate large losses, but their bad
>>     investments in housing loans followed rather than led the crisis;
>>     most of those investments involved purchases or guarantees made
>>     well after the subprime and housing bubbles had been expanded by
>>     private loans and were almost about to burst.”
>>     The Big Liars have big guns in their arsenal. They control
>>     wealth, power, the mainstream media, and much of academia—all
>>     without threatening the use of pepper spray. But it’s up to the
>>     99% to decide whether the burning sensation of lies is more
>>     intolerable than that of chemical agents.
>>     David Green (davidgreen50 at gmail.com
>>     <mailto:davidgreen50 at gmail.com>) lives in Urbana, and contributes
>>     to News from Neptune on UPTV.
>>
>>
>>
>>
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