When FDR famously said that we need only fear “fear itself,” he was only partly right. The greater danger in modern American politics turns out to be political cowardice. For while we are all susceptible to fear, it is the coward, the person who is unreasonably and excessively afraid who poses the greatest danger in challenging times.

Barak Obama is a coward. His cowardice is evident in the clear record of fearful inaction that is now too long and consistent to explain away as 11-dimensional chess moves:

1. Obama’s cowardly deference to the anti-gay bigots (More DADT)

2. Obama’s cowardly capitulation to the Military-Industrial-Complex (“There is no peace dividend”)

3. Obama’s cowardly subservience to Goldman Sachs and the rest of the gangster financial industry (Trillions in future taxpayer liability to pay astronomical Wall Street salaries and bonuses)

4. Obama’s cowardly protection of the coverage-denying medical insurance industry. (The “public option” will emerge as a mangled and inadequate program so feeble that it will continue the dominance of the insurance companies and provide only token relief to the underinsured.)

But Obama’s greatest and most pernicious act of cowardice is his abject failure to restore belief in the competence and authority of government. Ronald Reagan’s infamous acts of civic vandalism (“Government is the problem”) will not be undone by Barak Obama, because Obama is too cowardly to challenge the ideological legacy of the Gipper. Vast new government-directed employment programs are the only hope for reversing the steady growth of joblessness in America. Only vigorous Federal programs aimed at energy independence and rebuilding national transportation infrastructure can put millions of American’s back to work. But Barak Obama is afraid to do what FDR did: make the US Government a primary engine for the revitalization of America.

Obama is a coward, and America will pay a heavy price for his failure to confront our great economic problems with the necessary courage.

Never has so much accurate and impartial information been so thoroughly ignored by the general public as in the current econmic downturn. There are numerous sites on the Internet that have been accurately predicting the steady decline of the world economy while government cheerleaders and corrupt “journalists” have been encouraging the public to smoke green shoots. As a public service, I will post a few links that are the equivalent of the “red pill” in the Matrix.

The Automatic Earth

Zero Hedge

James Howard Kunstler

Naked Capitalism

Stirling Newberry at Firedog Lake

Jesse’s Cafe Americain

Calculated Risk

If you have the least interest in understanding the magnitude and direction of the economic turmoil around us, you owe it to yourself to swallow the Red Pill and visit these sites. Otherwise, you will be trapped in a Matrix dream characterized by this ridiculous headline from today’s New York Times business section:

“June Sales at Ford Fall Less Than G.M. or Chrysler”

By contrast, here is a quote from Cafe Americain that shows the attitude of the Red Pill blogs:

We are on the record in the opinion that the Obama economic team is ineffective, backward-thinking, compromised, and possibly corrupt. They are serving the corporate banks and not the people. They should be replaced starting with Larry Summers who is a Greenspan and Rubin crony and the core of failure on the team. Tim Geithner should follow to find better employment for his talents, possibly as a salesman of men’s suits.

Trying to make sense of the gloomy and chaotic world political scene requires evaluating the likely outcome of the massive conflict between the entrenched forces of organized irresponsibility and the growing forces of an emergent global networked intelligence. To my mind, the best metaphor for what appears to be happening is the electronic warfare phenomenon of “burn through.”

In electronic warfare, radar is a primary sensing system for determining target location and movement. To deny the adversary this information, electronic jamming is used to interfere with accurate radar returns. However, as the power of the search radar increases relative to the jammer, the false signal created by the jammer is overwhelmed and accurate radar information is obtained.

Consider Iran. Ten years ago, the authoritarian regime could easily have suppressed reporting from the streets showing massive protests. But the advent of ubiquitous image-gathering cell phones and wireless Internet access have made censorship in Iran nearly impossible. The power of the Internet has “burned through” the jamming of a sovereign state’s propaganda apparatus.

In America, a similar phenomenon is occurring with regard to reporting of economic conditions. Dozens of independent bloggers are posting grim statistics and analysis indicating that economic conditions are bad and worsening, while the corrupt commercial press and our Wall Street-owned government keeps talking about the end of the recession and “green shoots.” Again, the Internet is burning through the propaganda jamming.

This trend will continue until propaganda and disinformation tactics are thoroughly discredited and a new paradigm for institutional leadership is established. Honesty will become not only the best policy, but the only available option. The force driving history now is the steady, irresistible assault of the collectively gathered truth on the ancient tactics of deceit that have been the basis of concentrated power since the first political lie was told.

Many years ago, in the mid 90s, I was peripherally involved with the analysis of the two startup satellite radio companies, XM and Sirius. It was apparent to me then that the advent of mobile Internet access would kill these companies. The superior versatility, unlimited programming choices, and precision advertising capability of the mobile Internet platform would do to satellite radio what talkies did to silent films.

The only question in 1994 what when (not if) Internet audio programming could be streamed to cars and hand-held devices. It might be argued that this competitive uncertainty was so great as to provide ample justification for the lavish investments required to orbit radio broadcasting satellites and the corresponding programming and marketing infrastructure, but was this really so?

Unlike earlier eras of technological progress, the microelectronic revolution has been a forecaster’s dream. Because of Moore’s law, which describes the exponential increase of microcircuit density, it has been possible to predict the price/performance and the feature/performance characteristics of future consumer electronic devices with considerable precision. Moore’s Law was well understood at the time that the radio satellites were launched.

In retrospect, it is difficult to avoid concluding that the backers of satellite radio, their contractors, and their consultants fully understood the high probability that mobile Internet technology would wipe out their business model. Why did they proceed? I believe that the ventures were funded because of what C. Wright Mills calls “organized irresponsibility.” The people behind the schemes had front-loaded rewards, in the form of commissions, contracts, bonuses, and IPO proceeds that provided ample inducements to launch a doomed venture. Many of these players privately reasoned that they would make a lot of money – no matter what happened to satellite radio.

Does this pattern sound familiar? It is the same thing that happened in the financial sector and resulted in the near-meltdown of the world economy. People deliberately made deals that they knew were tainted or ill-fated because their short-term gains would outweigh any long-term losses – especially if the losses would be borne by others.

The bad news is that almost any industry in America over the last 20 years shows evidence of organized irresponsibility misdirecting investments with ruinous results: automobiles, aerospace, telecommunications, banking – you name it. Our business culture has contracted a disease of predatory bad-faith dealing, and until it is cured we will continue on the road to national ruin.

What if Clarence Thomas were President? This prospect would horrify most “liberals,” but would the policies coming out of the White House be very different from the “change we can believe in?” A Thomas presidency would favor corporations over working people; promote government secrecy over transparency; protect torturers from prosecution; and continue endless war, thereby enriching and aggrandizing the Military-Industrial Complex.

Obama is better looking than Clarence Thomas, and he has better political instincts than Condi Rice, but he is an example of the Plutocrat Party (Democratic wing) expanding the proven tactic of the minority shield. Installation of a minority candidate into a high office immunizes that leader from most liberal criticism and clears the way for a plutocratic agenda.

Look at what Obama is DOING, not at what he PROMISED:

He is breaking the laws against torture by immunizing confessed torturers.

He is jacking up already obscene “defense” spending.

He is blocking single-payer national health care.

He is continuing the occupation of Iraq and expanding the war in Afghanistan.

He is maintaining Bush-era secrecy claims over White House information (even visitor logs).

He is refusing to allow equal rights for gays.

He is providing unlimited taxpayer funding to corrupt Wall Street firms.

This is not a man of the people; this is a man owned by the CORPORATIONS – this is the equivalent of Clarence Thomas in the White House.

The Obama presidency is turning into an extended metaphorical demonstration of a sports technique called the “head fake.” A basketball or football player will move his head briefly in a direction opposite to where he intends to go so as to fool his adversary into making the wrong moves. A sports head fake only works for a fraction of a second, because the real direction of motion must be revealed.

Obama has mastered the art of the political head fake to the degree that his fakes last for months. During his campaign, he faked an anti-war move, an anti-torture move, and an anti-corporate corruption move. In office, he has cranked up the Afghanistan war, provided blanket immunity for CIA torturers, and fed hundreds of billions of public funds into crooked financial corporations.

When Obama is criticized for not carrying out his campaign promises, his defenders insist that the head fakes are the reality and the actual policies of the administration should be ignored. It is this stubborn insistence that the fantasy Obama is real that shows the power of Obama’s fakery.

Americans should be demonstrating in the streets against a president who shields torturers, feeds a perpetual war machine, and engineers massive transfers of wealth from taxpayers to rogue corporations. Instead, they are fooled by one head fake after another. We are being faked out of our democracy and our prosperity by the slickest front man the American plutocracy has ever produced: Barak (Head Fake) Obama.

Faced with a slide into public economic madness, I have taken up the analysis of collective irrationality as a form of therapy. Herewith I offer a convenient summary of the new and improved Orwellian methods America’s Ministry of Truth applies to economic statistics under the Obama Administration:

1. Cherry picking. If you have three negative numbers on employment and one slightly positive one, you tout the positive one and ignore the negatives.

2. Making data out of noise. Since the self-deluded citizenry doesn’t apply the concept of statistical margin of error, any positive fractional improvement, like a .3% improvement in consumer confidence or unemployment numbers can be represented as a “turnaround” or an occasion for celebration.

3. Quiet negative “revisions.” Almost every month, the government employment statistics are revised in a manner that makes them less positive. This is not a coincidence.

4. Promotion of amnesia. Important and highly-touted programs, like PPIP, are made to “disappear” from public consciousness when they fail.

5. Moving goalposts. Can’t control an exploding deficit? Just set your goal to reduce it by “half” at a date that constantly moves into the future. Don’t want to mark bad assets to market? Mark them to whatever “model” makes them look good.

6. Magic hats. Need to come up with a few hundred thousand jobs every month to take the sting off depression-level job losses? Just cook up an unverifiable jobs generator, like the BLS “birth/death” model that hallucinates jobs out of invisible new businesses. Hey presto! Unemployment is down again.

What upsets me most about all this shoddy behavior is that it is tolerated and encouraged after it has been repeatedly and thoroughly documented by journalists, economists, academics, and bloggers. Any informed citizen knows about the deceptions of our Ministry of Truth, and any curious citizen could learn about them in 30 minutes of Google searching. For the serious investor, $175 a year is the cost of unfalsified economic data from www.shadowstats.com. But the public much prefers the MOT product: cheerful lies.

Let us be very clear about this. Handsome, intelligent, and earnest President Barak Obama presides over an administration that knowingly prepares and distributes false information about the US economy in order to provide political and financial advantages to the people who put him in power. A nation of liars has placed the most attractive and persuasive available liar in charge of its government.

A funny thing happened on the way to the “change we can believe in.” We seem to have lost our reasoning faculties. In two important matters concerning the Obama administration, the operation of logic has broken down and it has been replaced by a strange Alice-In-Wonderland kind of unreality. These matters concern missing White House emails and missing pictures of torture and abuse of captives.

1. The Bush administration “lost” a considerable number of emails that might implicate high officials in crimes or impeachable offenses. Curiously, the Obama administration is not interested in finding out how these items went missing, nor is it interested in providing the public with any assurance that such an unfortunate event would not recur. Indeed, the legal position of the Obama administration is that the White House office of administration, which manages the email system, should not be subject to FOIA requests. A President truly committed to “transparency” would have aggressively investigated the missing email scandal and implemented strong measures to prevent it from happening again.

It defies reason to assert that the reliability and accountability of White House email systems is unimportant, yet that is the implicit message of an Obama administration that is eager to disappear the entire missing email controversy. It may be argued that holding Bush regime torturers accountable would be politically divisive, but how could it be controversial to investigate the “loss” of thousands of sensitive White House emails? Yet the press has dropped the missing email story and it seems to have vanished from public awareness. Let me put it plainly: the Bush administration brazenly tampered with official records of emails and the Obama administration has expressed no interest in investigating this activity or preventing a recurrence. Obama smiles and we are supposed to ignore the facts.

2. The Bush administration compiled a large number, possibly several thousand, images of prisoner abuse occuring in multiple locations. Yet the recent controversy over the release of a specific set of 44 photographs demanded in an ACLU FOIA lawsuit has completely muddled the issue of how many such photographs exist and the responsibility of the US Government to release them. Childish quibbling over what is or is not depicted in the small set of officially requested pictures is obscuring what is shown in the much larger set of closely held images.

What kind of investigative genius does it require for the press to demand to know how many torture photographs exist? How hard is it to question White House spokesmen on the distinction between what is depicted in the photographs in the ACLU request and what is in the much larger body of secret photographs? Can there be any explanation, other than the arrogance of Presidential power, for why the White House has refused to even describe the scope and content of these incriminating photographs? Again, Obama smiles and we are supposed to ignore the facts.

We are seeing a consistent and deliberate pattern of disinformation coming from the Obama White House. This activity is now so grossly misleading that it requires the willing suspension of the public’s reasoning faculties. Unfortunately, the public is quite willing to oblige. How much longer can Obama’s smile conceal the truth? How much longer will reason be displaced by hero worship?

Like some great inflatable amusement park monster, Obama and his fellow Democratic Party Machiavellians decided to pump up the deflating Al Qaeda bogeyman to prove their “toughness” on national security – and to keep the arms merchants happy. But the problem with reinvigorating bogeymen is that they frighten people.

The campaign promise of closing Guantanamo has now collided with the rediscovered super-evil, world-threatening, cosmically colossal threat of AL QAEDA! This great terrorist organization, which has been incapable of putting so much as one sniper with a rifle and a box of bullets in the United states, is now becoming a self-created political obstacle for the Obama administration.

We are waging two ruinously expensive “wars” against the Al Qaeda bogeyman, and now the main issue Republicans are using to undermine Obama is his “weakness” in dealing with the terrorist threat he has revived. The irony is extraordinary, but the results are very bad for America. We will continue to piss away our dwindling resources chasing the Al Qaeda bogeyman, and Obama has given the Republicans a permanent claim to superior devotion to protecting us.

Al Qaeda is a weak enemy that can easily be contained for a fraction of our “war on terror” expenditures. But Obama can’t tell these simple truths. He is now the victim of his own bogeyman.

In view of the stunning policy reversals Obama has made in the last few weeks, we must conclude that something significant has happened to change the political positions held by Barak Obama. I believe that there are four possible explanations:

1. Obama has carefully reconsidered his positions and decided to turn away from a lifetime commitment to populist and liberal beliefs to embrace the governing philosophy of the Bush administration.

2. Obama has been persuaded that he must continue Bush administration policies to raise political capital for reforms he wishes to pass in Congress (e.g., national health care).

3. Obama has been coerced by blackmail or some similar mechanism into continuing Bush/Cheney policies.

4. Obama was always a “Manchurian candidate” of the plutocracy, and he deliberately misrepresented his positions during the campaign.

I am leaning toward #4. What do you think?