Corporate Economists Tell Lies for a Living

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

For a downloadable MP3 copy of this commentary, visit the Black Agenda Radio archive page here.

"Lying is an essential element of their job description,
which is to make corporate rule appear both benign and inevitable."

The National Bureau of Economic Research has announced that,
by its calculations, the United States has been in a recession for almost a
year, beginning in December of 2007. This stands in stark contrast to the
pronouncements from the most widely quoted corporate economists and the Bush
administration, who hesitated to call the unfolding collapse a "recession"
until it could not be denied, making themselves look either incompetent or
dishonest. In fact, they are both.

The economists most cited in corporate media are shills and
boosters for capitalism in general, and Wall Street in particular. They
function as highly paid mercenaries for finance capital, and are legitimized by
a corporate media that all but abolished labor reporting decades ago. The
corporate worldview is transmitted to the public at-large without refutation
from Left economists.

As a result, the corporate mouthpieces who call themselves
economists are unchallenged as they spread disinformation and wishful thinking,
rather than fact-based analysis.

The root of the problem is deeper than the corporate
economists' personal dishonesty, venality, and greed - traits they share with
their bosses on Wall Street. Lying is an essential element of their job
description, which is to make corporate rule appear both benign and inevitable.
Their "prime imperative" is to maintain confidence in "the markets" among
existing and potential stockholders, the better to fleece them, and to
transform the global economy into a conman's paradise. Confidence is
everything, when you're running a confidence game. These corrupt corporate
economists' core function is to disseminate market propaganda packaged as
objective truth, lest the finance capital money-sucking machine grind to a halt
- which has now come to pass.

"Confidence is
everything, when you're running a confidence game."

Even as the impending meltdown of finance capital's Ponzi
schemes and trillions in fictitious money became obvious to any objective
observer, most corporate economists continued to maintain, like George Bush,
that the economy's "fundamentals" were sound. To say differently would be to
betray their corporate masters and the "prime imperative" to keep the bubbles
afloat.

And even now, with the planetary economy in free fall,
corporate economists continue to insist that the crisis in public confidence is
irrational. The alternative would be to confess that finance capital has soiled
everyone's nest, and that corporate economists had colluded with corporate
criminals to inflate bubbles that were unsustainable and inevitably lethal to the
entire system.

When the market meltdown hit and the Lords of Capital
demanded they be allowed to drain the national wealth and future, economists
that had always railed against government intervention reversed themselves,
overnight. Their purposed became to indoctrinate the public on why life itself
depended on transferring trillions of the people's dollars to the perpetrators
of monstrous crimes.

Corporate economists are co-conspirators in the ongoing
larceny. They devise economic theories to facilitate their Wall Street masters'
crimes. Don't believe a word they say. For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted
at [email protected].

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