Understanding Deception and Misdirection

I think it's important to understand the art of deception. Indeed, many of the problems we're facing right now as a people are the result of various interests lying about their activities, their goals, "the science" and the such. And the problem, as I'm increasingly seeing, is that the people who are meant to watch these interests are either negligent or complicit, and our political system now works to misdirect you to keep you from seeing the real issues you should be caring about. To see what I'm talking about, let's talk about what happened with Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).

For those who don't know, Silicon Valley Bank recently failed. It was the third or fourth largest bank failure in US history and its failure threatened to cause a series of cascading failures which would destroy millions of jobs and bankrupt tens of millions of people. Good times.

As a people, we should be outraged because of the following:

(1) Why was a bank allowed to become so large that it endangered the American banking system? This was supposed to have been fixed by the Democrats in 2008 when they "fixed" the issue of too-big-to-fail under Obama. How could a bank become too big to fail in light of that? And why are there still so many that have become so big? Why have they not been broken up?

(2) The Fed knew there was a problem months ago, so why did it not act before this became a potential doomday disaster? Indeed, the Fed even sent the bank a warning letter almost a year ago, but never did anything more.

(3) Why did the Fed and Treasury at first agree to cover all bank deposits in the US only to have Janet Yellen turn around and say that only those banks whose failure endangered the US banking system would be saved? In other words, she agreed to protect only the too big to fail banks, while abandoning the smaller banks. This resulted, as it obviously would, in a massive drain of funds from small banks which were then deposited in the too big banks, making the system even more dangerous.

(4) One of the reasons SVB got so big was that to get the best rates, you had to agree not to use other banks. That made its failure even more dangerous. That also happens to be a violation of anti-trust law and yet the Justice Department did nothing about it. Why not?

(5) Why was the bank board staffed with people who knew nothing about banking? That's negligence... but it protects insiders and famous people.

(6) Why was the bank allowed to hand out massive bonuses knowing it was essentially broke? Why were they allowed to make a massive amount of loans to insiders? That violates the very essence of good governance and is a fraud on depositors, creditors and shareholders.

These are the questions we should be focused on and demanding answer for as these are the reasons this became a crisis: Why did the government let a bank get so big that it endangered the system? Why did the Fed fail as a regulator? Why, when called upon to act, did the Treasury Department take steps that protected the big connected banks while thrusting a dagger into smaller banks? Why have the board and executives not been held to account?

Yet, no one is talking about breaking up banks or changing the incestuous relationship between the regulators and the regulated. Only Elizabeth Warren is talking about changing the law to let the government claw back bonuses and salary from executive (do you know how much it kills me to praise her?). So what is everyone talking about?

Well, the main stream media has ignored the issue of the failure of too big to fail. Instead, they have tried to shift the blame to Trump. So rather than report on the failure of too big to fail or dig into how the regulators failed or how the boards/executives functions, they tossed red meat into the ring and gave the left their villain to absorb all the blame and simultaneously distracted the right by getting them to defend Trump. This was a distraction. It was misdirection. What about Elizabeth Warren? They morphed her comments into a discussion of whether or not she'll run for President again.

It gets worse.

Progressive talking heads are doing what they always do. Too-big-to-fail was their thing and it failed, so they are shifting blame. They have chosen Trump as their scapegoat, claiming that he weakened key components of the regulations, even though those had nothing to with any of the issues in 1-6 above. Thus, they are blinding leftists to what is important here and leading them down the Trump rabbit-hole.

The right is no better. Talk radio found out that some pointless VP at SVB is a lesbian and was working on lesbian appreciation month and off they went to the deep end once more. You couldn't find a less significant criticism if you tried and yet talk radio has been pounding this home, along with the equally stupid idea that the bank made loans to woke causes. None of that was the issue here. Of course, you also had chest pounding that bailing out the banks was "socialism," proving that these talkers neither understand how to handle a crisis or what socialism really is. So after weeks of table pounding, their followers remained utterly ignorant and blissfully outraged.

Do you see the problem here? A group of insiders misbehaves in ways that endanger the whole country but escape any consequences because left, right and center would rather obsess about their pet peeves than understand what really happened. And let me tell you, this is happening on issue after issue after issue. The Romans talked of distracting the public with bread and circuses, well, our circus is called politics and our ringmasters are making a whole lot of bread keeping the clowns fighting.

When you see issues like this, ask yourself, is the guy on the radio or television actually talking about what really went wrong and is he offering a solution that can fix it, or is he just jerking me off with talking points.