2011/09/23

Read Fernandez

Richard Fernandez ranges widely, though most often with a security policy emphasis, and expresses deep analysis simply. Anyway, read this. All of it.
...The market is writing down the value of the world economy. Right across the board. It is making a judgement on what they think the future is worth. By recent numbers, not much. Not just because policymakers have gotten it wrong about the “root cause” of terrorism, or the Euro; but also about “Too Big To Fail”, population policy, multiculturalism, a crippling environmentalism and Global Warming, to name a few. The financial, national security and educational systems of the world are in utter collapse because they are stuffed with lies, which even when they are shown to be obviously false suck up trillions of dollars in their pursuit . And nothing will turn the global elites from continuing their ruinous path until they have spent the last nickle and dime they can lay their hands on. Certainly not the media. As Osborne and Weaver wrote:
One urgent lesson concerns the BBC. The corporation’s twisted coverage of the European Union is a serious problem, because the economic collapse of the eurozone means that a new treaty may be needed very soon — plunging the EU right back into the heart of our national politics.

The problem is that the BBC’s record is dreadful. It simply cannot be trusted not to become part of a partisan propaganda operation.
Neither the BBC nor any of the similar organizations which have jointly created our fantasy world will return to honesty. Not until it annihilates itself into bankruptcy along with all the other causes it touted and supported. The bad news is that by then most of us will have sunk beneath the waves.
Neither can the mainstream US media be trusted. The relentlessly State-worshipful reporters and editorialists who write for local and national newspapers and broadcast media have not, by and large, accepted responsibility for the one-sided criticism of the Bush presidency and the sanctification of the Obama candidacy, which shifted control of Congress in 2007 and the White House in 2009. This is not a purely partisan point. If Guantanamo detention, warrantless wiretapping, and budget deficits mattered under President Bush, why do they not not matter under President Obama? If climate science mattered enough to appear in the Vice Presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden in 2008, why does it not matter now? Why did it never matter enough to merit a thorough public discussion with all relevant areas of expertise represented? When journalists and politicians use issues as partisan weapons, news consumers discount news. Public attention is a scarce resource which reporters and politicians squander with their partisan cheerleading.