Lies we tell ourselves
by Tom Sullivan
America has lost faith with itself.
Grazing on the Net this morning, one story after another pops up where a common thread is the lies we tell ourselves and the ugly truths about ourselves we struggle to hide.
According to conservative dogma, which denounces any regulation of the sacred pursuit of profit, the financial crisis of 2008 — brought on by runaway financial institutions — shouldn’t have been possible. But Republicans chose not to rethink their views even slightly. They invented an imaginary history in which the government was somehow responsible for the irresponsibility of private lenders, while fighting any and all policies that might limit the damage.
Matt Taibbi (on securities fraud at Chase and collusion between the company and the Justice Department to cover it up):
When [Alayne] Fleischmann and her team reviewed random samples of the loans, they found that around 40 percent of them were based on overstated incomes – an astronomically high defect rate for any pool of mortgages; Chase’s normal tolerance for error was five percent. One mortgage in particular that sticks out in Fleischmann’s mind involved a manicurist who claimed to have an annual income of $117,000. Fleischmann figured that even working seven days a week, this woman would have needed to work 488 days a year to make that much. “And that’s with no overhead,” Fleischmann says. “It wasn’t possible.”
But when she and others raised objections to the toxic loans, something odd started happening. The number-crunchers who had been complaining about the loans suddenly began changing their reports. The process she describes is strikingly similar to the way police obtain false confessions: The interrogator verbally abuses the target until he starts producing the desired answers. “What happened,” Fleischmann says, “is the head diligence manager started yelling at his team, berating them, making them do reports over and over, keeping them late at night.” Then the loans started clearing …
“That’s the thing I’m worried about,” she says. “That they make the whole thing disappear. If they do that, the truth will never come out.”
The Guardian, wondering if a Republican-controlled Senate will even release its long-delayed torture report:
Torture is so endemic to the prosecutions undertaken by the US military commissions that the military designed and built a special courtroom just to limit any outside access to unredacted testimony given at the commission: court and legal observers are relegated to “censorship chambers” attached to the courtroom, where they can only view the proceedings behind soundproof glass with a 40-second audio delay.
And just to make certain that no one will hear if the defendants or their lawyers mention torture outright, the military judge and commission’s security officer have a button to unilaterally cut that audio feed when they believe discussion might veer into dangerous territory. When the government can silence the truth about its own crimes in a single click, it’s the very negation of justice.
Frank Schaeffer on the midterm elections:
The Republican Party base is white evangelicals. So it’s no wonder that GOP lies about the country, the economy and the president worked. The folks who base their lives on religious mythology have spent lifetimes being trained to believe lies. On Tuesday they won. Lies won.
I opened an April op-ed on the propagation of the “voter fraud” fiction with this quote from retiring Wisconsin State Senator Dale Schultz, the sole Senate Republican to oppose early voting limits:
“It’s just sad when a political party has so lost faith in its ideas that it’s pouring all of its energy into election mechanics. I am not willing to defend them anymore.”
It’s getting sadder when I’m quoting the Bible in a blog post two days in a row.
God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:
That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
2 Thessalonians 2:11-12, KJV
Where’s Samuel L. Jackson when we really need him, my brothers, to save us from the tyranny of evil men?