Gareth Porter — The Real Tonkin Gulf Deception Wasn't by Lyndon Johnson [It was McNamara]

For most of the last five decades, it has been assumed that the Tonkin Gulf incident was a deception by Lyndon Johnson to justify war in Vietnam. But the US bombing of North Vietnam on August 4, 1964, in retaliation for an alleged naval attack that never happened, was not a move by LBJ to pave the way for war in Vietnam. 

The real deception on that day was that Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara's misled LBJ by withholding from him the information that the US commander in the Gulf who had initially reported an attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on US warships had now expressed serious doubts about the initial report and was calling for a full investigation by daylight. That withholding of information from LBJ represented a brazen move to usurp the president's constitutional power of decision on the use of military force.

McNamara's deception is documented in the declassified files on the Tonkin Gulf episode in the Lyndon Johnson library, which this writer used to piece together the untold story of the Tonkin Gulf episode in a 2005 book on the US entry into war in Vietnam. It is a key element of a wider story of how the national security state, including both military and civilian officials, tried repeatedly to pressure LBJ to commit the United States to a wider war in Vietnam.…

Truthout
The Real Tonkin Gulf Deception Wasn't by Lyndon JohnsonGareth Porter

Simon Wren-Lewis — The scandal of the austerity deception

The problem for ‘small state people’ like Warner is that “there is never any appetite for it in the good times”. I can only interpret this as meaning that in good times people appear to be quite content with the size of the state they have, and will not elect a government which aims to reduce the size of the state. So why are things different in a crisis? Do people’s preferences over the size of the state relative to GDP really change when we are in recession? Or could it be that in the current crisis people are told that government debt is ‘out of control’, and that a reduction in government spending is necessary to bring the nation’s finances to order. Cuts in government spending are being justified by the need to reduce debt and not because of the virtues of a small state.

Reducing the size of the state temporarily to reduce debt, and reducing it permanently are rather different things. There is apparently no appetite for the latter, so why not push for the former as a way of achieving the latter? As a political ruse it sounds very clever, and it is currently working in the Eurozone, US and UK. But it remains a ruse: a giant deception played on electorates across the globe.

Simon Wren-Lewis piles on. Good on him, even if a bit late in the game. But better late than never. Wren-Lewis is specific. The objective is subversive and the means perverse. Economic ignorance is no excuse. This is a political ploy.

Mainly Macro
The scandal of the austerity deception
Simon Wren-Lewis | Professor of Economics, Oxford University

William K. Black — What If George Akerlof Had Written About Lethal 'Lemons'?

If you have studied economics at the university level in the last 35 years, it is likely you were introduced to the concept of "asymmetrical information" and George Akerlof's famous 1970 article on markets for "lemons" (American slang for an automobile of terrible quality). The Nobel committee that awards the prize in economics singled out that article for special praise in deciding to make him a Nobel Laureate in 2001. The article discusses the implications of asymmetrical information in a number of contexts, but at least two of the contexts involved what criminologists call "control fraud" and a third involves the risk of fraud by borrowers.

Most of the examples Akerlof discussed involved fraud. The frauds he analyzes concern deceit about the quality of goods being sold or the borrowers' ability or willingness to repay a loan.
I have noted in many articles that the clan of economists has a primitive tribal taboo against saying the mystic "f" word out loud or even putting it in print, so Akerlof's article does not contain the word "fraud." His language, however, makes it clear that he is discussing fraud and how it can create what we now call a "Gresham's dynamic" in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the market.

The theme of my article is to alert the reader to other variants of anti-purchaser control fraud in which the deception about the quality of the goods sold (or rented) affects safety, not simply the appropriate price of the bad quality goods. I use as my example the recent deaths of nearly 400, and over 1,000 injured, Bangladeshis when the building they were working in collapsed. I show that the same case is also an example of anti-employee control fraud.

The nature of the survivors' injuries is often horrific.

The Huffington Post
What If George Akerlof Had Written About Lethal 'Lemons'?
William K. Black | Assoc. Professor, Univ. of Missouri, Kansas City; Sr. regulator during S&L debacle

Repeated Loudly and Often Enough, a Self Deception Becomes Accepted Truth?

commentary by Roger Erickson

According to some commodity investment advisors, this is ...

How QE3 – Like QE1 and QE2 – Will Trigger Inflation.

Seems like no 2 people use the same, semantic definition for "inflation," but that word triggers the same fear in most, regardless of which definition is used. Let's call it inflated convergence.

I would bet $50 that there's a correlation between financial trades and the frequency of media mention of anything sounding remotely like "inflation."

Some psychology dept somewhere has likely done a test run with some local media outlets - sprinkling a variety of "be-, ce-, de-, fe-, ge- ... on to ze-flations" into ongoing business section articles. Maybe even "zen-flayshun," for those meditating on how to boycott self flagellation!