THE `ECONOMIC BEHAVIORISTS'
Clean Out the Nest of Psywar Vipers
Around Nero Obama
by John Hoefle
[PDF version of this article]
Most people don't know where their opinions come from. That statement may sound absurd to some, but it is true. Much of what is generally considered personal opinion is actually the result of decades of brainwashing delivered through our educational system, our entertainment and news media, the ever-present advertising, and more recently, the Internet.
In this feature, we will show how a small group of behavioral economists is shaping policy in the Obama Administration, and we will show how that group of behaviorists is merely the latest incarnation of a long-standing British Empire campaign to destroy the United States, and to undo the American Revolution. We will trace the activities of this group to the Tavistock Institute and the London School of Economics, and beyond that to Jeremy Bentham and the Venetian Paolo Sarpi.
Though couched in pseudo-scientific terms, and presented as New Age self-help and personal empowerment measures, the policies these behaviorists are pushing are designed to dehumanize the population, to turn us into even more of a herd of frightened sheep than we are already. Now that the financial bubble has popped, they say, it is time for a new paradigm, one which will prepare us for the coming collapse of living standards, and of population levels. These policies will be presented as positive—stopping "global warming," learning to live simpler lives, doing with less as a way of saving the planet. Underneath this feel-good pop psychology is pure fascism.
The Obama De-Generation
These policies are particularly aimed at the children and grandchildren of the Baby Boomers, the generations which have rejected the "reality" of the Boomers in favor of creating one of their own. These youth have seen what a mess their parents and grandparents made of the world and want no part of it, but they have no real sense of identity around which to properly diagnose and remedy the disaster they are inheriting. As a result, they've largely opted out, indifferent to the world in which they live, preferring to escape into entertainments, amusements, and narcissism.
Obama, as is becoming more clear in the wake of his disastrous trip to Europe, shares this indifference. Lyndon LaRouche identified Obama's problem as a "Nero Complex" (see below) in which his narcissistic fixation dominates his personality. He is too committed to his own glory to worry about others, or the fate of the nation.
This indifference to reality, and his desire to see himself as a Messiah of change, plays right into the hands of the behaviorists, who themselves are indifferent to the plight of humanity, and are determined to destroy the United States by turning its people into gutless sheep, unable to resist the planned global dictatorship. To them, Obama is the empty vessel into which they can pour their theories, while to Obama, they are levers he can pull to remake the country in his image. It is a marriage made in Hell.
In the wake of the disastrous Bush-Cheney Administration, people were filled with hope that Obama would be different, that he would return the nation to the proper course. Instead, we have been betrayed. The Obama Administration has continued the Bush-Cheney drive for war, de-emphasizing Iraq in favor of Afghanistan; he has continued the transition of the U.S. into a British-style police-surveillance state, and he has continued that gigantic swindle known as the bank bailout. With regard to the policy of confrontation with Russia, qualified sources have told EIR that the option of dropping the provocative deployment of anti-missile missiles on its periphery, was seriously on the table in private discussions between Obama and top Russian leders, as well as in Obama's deliberations with his national security team. But from his statements in Prague on April 4, it appeared that he had changed his mind.
At the G20 meeting in London on April 2, Obama betrayed the very principles upon which this nation was founded, by conceding to a British scheme to turn the International Monetary Fund into a global financial dictatorship, able to issue its own currency and impose orders on nations, including the U.S. In exchange for being fêted as the "I'm not Bush" world hero, he sold the nation down the river.
Part of this can be laid directly at the feet of Larry Summers, the director of the National Economic Council and Obama's chief economic advisor. Summers makes sure that the trillions of dollars of taxpayer money keeps flowing into the banks, bailing them out, while sticking the nation with a ruinous bill. In the terms of the Benthamite psychologists, Summers delivers pleasure for the parasites, while inflicting the pain on the people.
Preparing the people for the pain is where the "behaviorial economists" come in.
The Kooks
We put the term "behavioral economists" in quotes because, though they use that term, they are not really economists at all, but psychological warfare specialists disguising their psywar measures as economic policy. They are all hard-core followers of the British philosophical radicalism of John Locke, Bernard de Mandeville, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-Century creatures who argued that man in nothing more than a beast, irrationally driven by pleasure and pain.
This, of course, is nothing new. The Mandevillian "private vices, public good" rationale, manifested in the more modern "greed is good" outlook, was the creed of the bubble, and remains the creed of the behaviorists. What has changed, is that the bubble has burst, requiring an alteration of the brainwashing programming. Whereas the old-style "neo-classical economics," with its assertion that man acted in his "rational self-interest," was useful in convincing the people that the "markets" knew what they were doing, and that the bubble was good for the nation and good for the people, that era has passed. Now the people are to be told something else: that the bubble was wrong, that we went too far, that we are killing the planet, and that changes, and sacrifices, must be made. We must be "green," we must not only acccept, but desire, a lower standard of living. We are, in effect, being prepared to pay the bill for the bailout, and for the destruction it will produce.
The core of this group of behaviorist kooks is the Behaviorial Economist Roundtable, based at the Russell Sage Foundation in Washington, D.C., and jointly run through Sage and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. These foundations are offshoots of the same treasonous, pro-British networks who supported Hitler and Mussolini, created the fascist American Liberty League, and fought President Franklin Roosevelt at every turn. They were fascist then, and they are fascist now.
Time magazine (April 13), in an explosive article, exposed that President Obama is surrounded by a collection of these behaviorists, who have cultivated a cult-like following through the publication of such nutty pseudo-economic tracts as Freakonomics, Nudge, Predictably Irrational, The Wisdom of Crowds, and Animal Spirits. These economists, including longtime Obama advisors Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler, Dan Ariely, and Daniel Kahneman, have formed a tight clique, surrounding the President, to the exclusion of some of the more well-known, neo-classical economists, originally brought in to the Obama White House, but who have now been cast aside in favor of the new paradigm.
White House Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag is another believer. "His deputy, Jeff Liebman of Harvard, is a noted behavioral economist, as are White House economic advisor Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago, Assistant Treasury Secretary nominee Alan Krueger of Princeton, and several other key aides. Sunstein has been nominated to be Obama's regulatory czar. Even National Economic Council director Larry Summers has done work on behavioral finance. And Harvard economist Sendhil Mullathainan is organizing an outside network of behavioral experts to provide the Administration with policy ideas," Time reported.
The founder of the "behavioral economics" movement is Daniel Kahneman, a French Jew who wound up in the Israeli army, where he teamed up with Amos Tversky, who published paper after paper on the subject, beginning in 1969. Under the guise of attempting to prove that people were irrational, they presented a series of questionnaires in which people were asked to choose between a series of unacceptable options. Here is one example:
"You must deal with a public health epidemic threatening 600 people.
"First question: One course of action would save 200. The other has a one-third chance of saving 600, and a two-thirds chance of saving none. Which would you choose?
"Second question: One course of action will result in 400 deaths; the other has a two-thirds chance of 600 deaths and a one-third chance of no deaths. Which would you choose?"
The real point here lies not in analyzing the answer you select, but in the dehumanizing effect of submitting to such questions in the first place. This is a classic "Reesian choice," named after the late Tavistock brainwasher John Rawlings Rees. The participants are not being graded, they are being attacked.
Longtime Obama friend Cass Sunstein, the co-author of Nudge and the man tapped to become the Administration's regulatory czar, is an animal-rights cultist as well, who advocates human rights for animals. That's really just the flip side of believing that humans are animals—animals who should be enslaved because they are irrational and therefore must be controlled. This is the bestiality and degeneracy of the British Empire, being openly displayed in Nero Obama's government.
In the following reports, we pull back the curtain—or lift the rock, if you prefer—on these creatures, to alert you to who they are and who controls them. We do so not merely to provide information, but to identify a grave threat to our nation's security. This nest of British-trained vipers must be cleaned out, if we are to reclaim our nation.
