Wall Street's $16 Million Job Offer to Robert McNamara

In his memoirs, In Retrospect, Democrat Robert McNamara reports (p. 312) that in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War that McNamara helped oversee on behalf of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, he received an offer for a  Wall Street partnership that would have paid $2.5 million in 1967 dollars. In 2010 dollars that translates into $16,322,000.  It seems that the government-bailout street is two way.  Wall Street bails out failed government officials like McNamara and then failed politicians like Barack Obama bail out Wall Street.  Of course, both the incompetent fools who run Wall Street and their equally incompetent friends in Washington could not pay each other a cent, because neither produces anything of value, if the Federal Reserve Bank did not finance their failed ideas.

America's Media, Advocating a Suppressive Ideology, Is Pravda's Cousin

Don't confuse Pravda with Prada.  Pravda was the Soviet Union's newspaper, and its Orwellian name means  truth. Prada, in contrast, is the Prada family's fashion label. It was publicized by David Frankel's The Devil Wears Prada.

The American news media is Pravda's cousin, even while it writes about Prada.  Wall Street influences it as well as the federal government.  It is not that the United States has a Pravda-style state controlled media, it is that Wall Street influences the media, the government and the university system so that American political debate is monotone: "Bailout, bailout, bailout."  Progressivism, the variants of which are Rockefeller Republicanism and the Democratic Party's progressive-liberalism, is a totalitarian ideology that suppresses dissent in a more sophisticated way than the Soviets did. It permits but ignores dissent, suppressing dissenters through carrots such as academic jobs and sticks such as refusal to air dissidents' views.

Last night I was reading Robert McNamara's memoirs that focus on the Vietnam War, In Retrospect.  McNamara paints a picture of government decision making that ought to be of interest to organizational scholars.  He and his cabinet colleagues got strategy in Vietnam wrong because they were unable to think coherently. They reversed their assumptions in 1965 for no explainable reason.  Prior to 1965 they believed, for good reason, that the South Vietnamese had to fight the war.  In 1965 they took over the fighting for the South Vietnamese because the South Vietnamese would not fight, committing themselves to a conflict that would, in their own view, have the same ultimate outcome as retreat.   They themselves did not see their own strategy as leading to success.

According to McNamara, the cabinet's inability to think rationally about Vietnam was not due to the military's manipulation, as David Halberstam claims in The Best and the Brightest, and it wasn't due to groupthink as Irving Janis speculates in Groupthink.  Rather, it arose from inability to come up with an imaginative, effective strategy of the kind that Col. Thomas X. Hammes describes in The Sling and the Stone.  In other words, the decision making was a failure attributable to bounded rationality that James G. March and Herbert Simon describe in Organizations.

This explanation differs from any that appeared in the news media at the time and from any that appears in the news media today concerning government policy making. The federal government is unable to solve problems because it is corrupt and because it lacks the ability.  But progressivism is based on the assumption that government can solve problems.

News media personnel are educated in universities that respond to Wall Street's needs and then work in firms that Wall Street owns.  To advance they must please managements whom Wall Street hires.  The American news media, like Pravda, offers a steady stream of propaganda that defends the interests of a failed political establishment, a totalitarian state and a corrupt elite.

Zeitgeist--the Movie

I noticed this five-part video on Youtube and embedded it below. It is about 65% accurate, which makes it 65 times more useful than anything you will seen on television news this year.  Rather than take facts from the movie, use it to stimulate reading.  Much of what's in the videos won't be supported by more detailed research.

I don't like the conspiracy theory aspects of these films and wish the implication that 9/11 was a Rockefeller conspiracy had been omitted. That's emabarrasingly absurd.  It is untrue that Robert McNamara said that the Golf of Tonkin attacks "never happened" or were a "mistake". He said that one of them occurred and one of them didn't. You can see this in the 2003 movie/interview Fog of War. There are numerous other mistakes. As well, I found the fifth part to be ridiculous.  Love as a political tactic is fine, but if the public cannot figure out that the Fed is destroying their future I'm not sure what deciding "life is a ride" will accomplish. That said, the movie does open your eyes.

Much of the history is useful, such as the discussion of  Prescott Bush's involvement with the Union Bank and the Nazis and the background of the Fed. Some interesting quotes from Woodrow Wilson are included.  The stuff about chip implants is worth watching.  The comments about the education system's serving as a counterpart to inculcated stupidity via mass media are spot on.


At first I liked the Patriot Act.  Now I don't.  Although I reject conspiracy-based theories I am convinced that government uses war to curtail civil liberties and that this has occurred in the past ten years.  I also see both the Democratic and Republican Parties as well as Congress, the President and the US Supreme Court as threats to my well being that exceed the threats that terrorists pose.  Which is not to say that terrorists don't exist or that they are a figment of Nick Rockefeller's imagination.  But Washington must not be permitted to accumulate power by using terrorism as an excuse.

It is unfortunate that opponents of the Fed fail to follow the KISS strategy--keep it simple, stupid. Occam's Razor is a guide.  That is, the simplest explanation is the best:  "plurality should not be posited without necessity."  Conspiracy theories fail the KISS and Occam's Razor standards and should be chucked.