You CAN Handle The Truth!

Your leaders do you justice

Most people are wildly myopic (and thereby savage):

"Look at them rocks down there at the bottom of this cliff, Elroy. Ain't them kewl?"

"Sure is, Elmer. Sher would like to see 'em up close and personal like."

"Me too. But you knows what them nose-it-all sez: you can't not no go jumpin' off no thousand foot cliff lessen it kill ya."

"Soun's like bullshit to me! We don't need no outsiders tellin' us what's what!"

"Some folks just gotta go 'round tellin' others whats to do and hows to think, stikkin' their uppity noses in other peeple’s bidness!"

"I jess don't get them folks, Elmer. An' I ain't gonna stand for it no more!"

"Me's neither!"

Then Elmer and Elroy jump off the cliff, mocking in their victory.

"Hey Elroy, you dead?"

"Not me! How 'bout you, Elmer?"

"I be good too!"

"Them lyin' bastards! I knew it!"

And those were their last words before hitting the rocks and losing their battle with "nonexistent" objective reality. Always good to thin the herd though.

This isn't reality because we already determined it can't happen

I love Ed Wallace, an ex-car dealer, ex-rock-n-roller cum journalist. He is someone who fact checks and is highly meticulous in the facts he presents. Later, if he finds out he was wrong, he owns up to it, because getting it right is what it's all about to him (though we'll have to see if he goes all the way down the line with that!). His interpretation of said facts I don't always agree with but it is kind of funny watching him struggle along the path to truth. And in his Sunday column he discovered a bitter pill of reality: people are full of shit!

He titled the column Incapable of Rational Thought and it gave me the most satisfying laugh I've had in a long time. It states in part:


Take the British Petroleum oil gusher at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. The Office of Minerals Management Services is responsible for overseeing items like offshore drilling. And yes, we now know that the OMMS authored a document covering just such a disaster back in May of 2000, which correctly predicted that it would be almost impossible to control because of the well's great depth.

Here is one prophecy from that report: "Spills in deep water may be larger, due to the high production rates associated with deep water wells and the length of time it could take to stop the source of pollution."

And yet we did nothing to prepare for this disaster -- other than correctly forecast it.

It is also true that, as early as 2003, numerous highly respected economists were warning that the American consumer's personal debt load was rising too quickly. Others correctly warned that the nation's housing market was in bubble territory and likely to cause serious damage to the financial system when it popped.

Nobody listened.

Brooksley Born, head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission from August 1996 to June 1999, wanted to regulate derivatives. She correctly foresaw the incredible damage those insurance contracts could do to the financial system and tried to prevent it. Yet Born was told to sit down and shut up by Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers; and to top that off, then-Senator Phil Gramm slammed her position repeatedly during Congressional Hearings on the matter.

The question we should be asking is this: Why were those few people who got the crises right -- in time to defuse them -- ruined and consigned to obscurity? More important, why are those who were completely blind to the crises that were coming our way still in a position of power or influence? In a nutshell, "Why is Larry Summers back in the Obama Administration calling the shots in Washington, and the vast majority of Americans don't know that Brooksley Born could have saved the financial system 13 years ago if anyone had just listened to her?"

Why has deep-water oil drilling been fantastically successful, with one major exception -- which Washington forecast would come one day, but didn't force any company to come up with a workable and realistic plan for reacting to such a disaster?

Why was Ben Stein on TV every week, even while the financial system was starting to melt down, wrong on every last position he took, and yet he's still gainfully employed as a pundit? Or Ben Bernanke, who -- even after Bear Sterns collapsed -- maintained that the financial problem would be contained and our future was bright?

Who Ordered This Mess?

...Yes, it is us. We are the problem, because we hear what we want to hear.

We didn't want to hear about derivatives problems in the late nineties, because the economy was doing too well. We never thought about oil disasters in the Gulf of Mexico, because we wanted the oil and the jobs so badly and needed gas prices to come down. We didn't want to hear about a housing bubble, because so many people owned homes and our own home equity was building so quickly. We didn't want to talk about Wall Street's questionable practices because our personal portfolios were doing fine. And we keep reciting the mantra of "less government regulation" -- even as we see all around us the damage that such financial laissez-faire has caused.

We have delivered to ourselves the government we have demanded. We must be incapable of rational thought, because we reject those who try to convince us otherwise.

Good children believe what they are told!

Yup, the world is littered with Elmers and Elroys, pied pipers of happy illusion. And it continues on, of course. We don't want to hear our wars are evil, that our children are killed and marred in vain and that we destroy in vain. We don't want to hear our system of greed robs us and our children of any possible life or future. We don't want to hear there's any other path to life than the one we're on. Change just sounds so painful.

But change is coming whether we like it or not. No one likes putting gas in the tank - until it runs dry! Facing facts only makes life less painful. We can keep our eyes closed and keep conning ourselves as to what reality is but we will find that fate more horrific than possibly imagined. We are not on a sustainable path. We can face it, change directions and live. Now you tell me, isn't that a truth we want?

Probably his most pure song