Peterson Institute Trying to Co-opt Financial Reform?

commentary by Roger Erickson

This could be right out of Ed Bernays' playbook. Agree with some attempts to fight myths, then divert & pervert them ... in this case to Peterson's fixation on balanced budgets. I smell an obsessive-compulsive-disorder mania. OCDM. Do they have a missile with that warhead?

Big Banks Fall Back On Three Myths - By Simon Johnson

Johnson admits that the banking lobby uses 3 myths in their propaganda.

Myth 1: that all opponents are misguided "populists,"

Myth 2: that every “cost-benefit analysis” would show that the Dodd-Frank financial reforms are not worth pursuing

Myth 3: that every form of financial reform will hurt our growth prospects

All true, but that's just the set up.  Then Mr. Johnson's essay makes an unpredictable U-turn, and heads directly south.  (Do they use Bernays propaganda books in undergrad economics courses?)

"Fortunately, Dennis Kelleher and his colleagues at Better Markets are fighting hard against this myth. In a report released this week, Kelleher, Stephen Hall, and Katelynn Bradley point out that the industry never wants to take into account the real costs of the crisis – millions of jobs lost, growth derailed, lives disrupted, and massive damage to our public finances.
We had a frank discussion of this report at the Peterson Institute ... "

I'll bet they did! And that a little light went off in their one track minds, and they sensed an opportunity.

Talk about perverting & propagandizing the work of Dennis Kelleher and the Better Markets Foundation! Yet few will notice.  We need a warning bot to instantly call policy BS wherever it appears.

"Danger, Will Rogers!  Danger, Will Rogers!"

"Distributed breakdown in logic has allowed unstable forms of DeficitTerrorism to loiter too close to irrational ideology, thereby forming a critical mass of ignorance & stupidity & fraud that is STILL - despite all efforts of the 99% - generating a cascading chain reaction of suicidal mistakes within our very Congress."

Have you ever tried something as simple as trying to play a game of chess with criminally insane, sociopathic, hopelessly ideological Control Frauds? The Control Frauds will amaze you with their ability to cheat - and can arrange to win against even against an entire group of chess grandmasters! 

No matter how superior the group skills, every one of the grandmaster moves will make the fatal mistake of constraining itself to brilliantly extending an existing, logical framework. In response to every single one of these adaptive moves, however, the Control Frauds will simply attempt to derail reality by declaring the equivalent of "my chess pig can fly" while attempting to ignore any and all interdependencies not guaranteeing their local, tactical success. Then they declare - again - that they're winning, of course ... and that you're a populist, that their cost-benefit analysis shows they're right, and that it would be too expensive to deal with reality. It's hauntingly familiar, and strangely addictive, since familiar bits of logic are randomly strewn about with just enough frequency to have a powerful effect on the weak minded.

And we've let these people within 10 miles of policy?  Their outlook requires no allegiance or reference to scalable reality whatsoever.  Hence, they will always win .... if you let them.   They don't even require any coherent strategy, policy or goal since long term planning has no relevance to them. Their entire thought process displays the range of a gold spoon, which they want permanently in their own tea cup.

It's as though the Peterson Institute is operating from a rambling manifesto written in jail by Irwin Schiff, renamed "Mein Brain Krampf."

"The only person sure of himself is the man who wishes to leave things as they are, and he dreams of an impossibility." - George M. Wrong

Would it be wrong to permanently embed someone like George in the Peterson Institute?  Can someone tell them that there's no sane point in arbitrarily balancing a fiat budget, and that there hasn't been since 1933?  The Peterson Institute is worse than impossible, they actually want to go back in time.

I suspect it's hopeless.  One logical approach would be to politely ignore them, and take on the expense of warning all students not to talk to the sick men and their addictive rhetoric.  On the other hand, it might be cheaper to actually build a string of asylums to house them all, complete with personal gold spoons.  We could slip it in as a tenure program in a new, better purposed Ivy League Economics system of really high education, where they could smoke their stuff to their heart's content.