Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [65]
7. Obscure the institutionalization of mispriced risk and assets. Bluntly stated, mispricing risk and assets is lying. If I sell you a car which is worth $1,000 (after spray-painting the old battery, filling the engine with heavy oil to mask the knock and hiding the rust beneath a quick coat of cheap paint) for $5,000, I have intentionally "mispriced" the "asset"--in simple moral terms, I have lied to you for my own gain. The sellers of derivatives, mortgage-backed securities, stocks inflated by bogus earnings, etc. have in effect sold high-risk junk as low-risk valuable assets.
The key point is they did so with the collusion of the State agencies tasked with oversight.
With the active collusion of the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve and the alphabet-soup agencies (SEC, FDIC, etc.), highly leveraged and thus highly risky banks are presented as "solvent" when in fact if their assets were priced by the market ("marked to market") they would be revealed as insolvent.
Derivatives which in an unregulated and thus "buyer beware" market might be forced to be marked to market are, with State collusion and facsimile "oversight," sold as "safe" risk management instruments.
8. Present simulacrum oversight as genuine regulation. By referencing the regulatory agencies created after the Great Depression to restrain the excesses of debt and fraud which enabled the Great Crash, the mass media explicitly implies that these same agencies are still authentic forces of oversight. But the reality is they have been reduced via Power Elite capture and co-option to mere facsimiles of regulation riddled with loopholes and incapacitated by gutted staffs and weakened mandates.
9. Confuse the taxonomy of capitalism and ownership. In another derealization of scale, two-thirds of the "tax cut for the middle class" flows to the top 1% of taxpayers. In a similar way, small business which actually faces a free-market competitive environment is purposefully confused with crony capitalism, oligarchy, cartels and monopoly.
Thus "save the family farm" legislation and regulation ends up benefiting corporate agribusiness and the Power Elites' ownership of vast tracts of forest, grazing and farmland.
10. Mask the reality that the political Elite has been effectively "captured" by a "financial Mafia" --a process and structure akin to kleptocracy States controlled by organized-crime syndicates or oligarchies. Regulators attempting to enforce restrictions on the rentier-financial Power Elite (financial Mafia) are effectively neutralized by interference from the political class (elected officials and high-caste technocrats) who are beholden to Power Elite interests for their own wealth and power.
This "capture" is not necessarily the brute-force "ownership" enforced by bribery, threats (of non-support) and mutual profiteering--though these are the money/power pathways--it is also the capture of the State Elites' politics of experience.
That is, elected officials and high-caste State apparatchiks may actually believe the nation will collapse if Power Elite banks and other rentier/debt-serf structures are allowed to fail, i.e. be declared insolvent. Thus the State Elites are so enthralled, seduced, beholden and manipulated that they are blind to the fact that the exact opposite is true: the nation would be freed from the shackles of enslavement by the destruction of the rentier-financial Elites' investment banks and other concentrations of power.
Once again I call your attention to the fundamental power of the politics of experience; enslavement, capture and surrender all become inevitable once the Power Elites' intellectual framework is accepted as "true." Once "belief in the system fades," then a non-Power-Elite frame of reference becomes possible.
The goal of Plutocratic and State propaganda is thus to legitimize the illegitimate.
Consider, for example, complex derivatives. Although these financial instruments are presented