During most of the Obama administration, Digby has made a habit of pointing out just how thin-skinned our Elites seem to be, desiring desperately to be loved, and mouthing off at all the wrong times. For "the best and the brightest", such behaviour certainly seemed unusual, given how they just nearly destroyed the world economy. If I were them I would have taken an extended stay in my remotest vacation home, emerging only to cut ribbons at soup kitchens and orphanages.
So what's up? Are they just that stupid? Or is there something more driving their behaviour? I've always thought that the insecurity was a form of "thou doth protest too much". That they feel guilty, and know that people should be furious with them, so they put on false bravado.
Yesterday, Digby posted something that seems to have confirmed that:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.ca/...
Jump to the body for more analysis of this.
But first, there's the confidence fairy. This idea that investors lack the confidence to invest because of worries that our future debt will destroy us all. By making bold moves to limit our deficit, and reduce our future debt, they will be re-assured. There were never any indicators that this was true, and no amount of bold moves seem to have been enough, especially in Europe.
But what if the confidence fairy is real, and she is what keeps the Elites up at night?
What if investors aren't investing not because of any future worries about the debt, but because of an immediate worry that the system has been gamed by a bunch of cheaters? After all, plenty of people were made very rich crashing the economy, and none of them have been punished, so why wouldn't they do it again?
So that brings us back to Digby's link, out of which I want to pull one thing:
Zuckerman isn't even saying that the Confidence Fairy needs to be shown that we are serious about our debt so she will unleash her market power for the good of everyone. He's pretty much admitting that she's a vengeful Goddess who is punishing the lazy parasites for their piggish ways. She promises a dystopian hellscape in the future even for the deserving few unless we ensure that these parasites will continue to suffer now and in the future.
(Emphasis added).
So here it is. The Elites recognize that someone needs to pay in order for most of us to trust the financial system again, and they want to make sure it's anyone but them. It's not about any financial outcomes, it's a desire to see someone suffer, in order to deter others from gaming the system. To paraphrase something Atrios has said many times, why would we take our money to bank that got just got robbed, where half of the current staff helped the thieves carry the money out the door?
The confidence fairy was never about the bond markets, or deficits, it was about convincing everyone that it was the poor and the middle-class who destroyed the economy, with their food stamps and their health care. But it didn't work. At this point, we know who is responsible. The public knows it was the greed of the financial industry and the 1%, recklessly leveraging everything in sight so they could skim ever-greater amounts off the top.
They now know we see them for what they really. It has always been a long shot that they could convince us to blame their crimes on ourselves, but they had the money and the media, so they might have gotten away with it. But Occupy and Mitt Romney put an end to that idea, and now they are panicking. I might even go so far as to say the the attacks on and denigration of Mitt Romney and the 1% has been a big part of the increase in consumer confidence.
But, making an argument for stupid:
From http://digbysblog.blogspot.ca/...
British Prime Minister David Cameron's new chief whip, Andrew Mitchell, yelled at police because they wouldn't let him pedal his bike out of Downing Street, The Sun reports.
Said Mitchell: "Best you learn your fucking place. You don't run this fucking government. You're fucking plebs."
An eyewitness said Mitchell also branded them "morons".