by Les Swift
The Revolt of the Lemmings - What would happen if some of the lemmings refused to jump off the cliff?
For months, I'd been trying to score an interview with one of the leading pundits, with no success. Neither the Screamer nor the Money Bunny, nor any of the other barking heads would return my calls. Eventually, after much hemming and hawing, a publicist for the pundit cartel snottily informed me that since I was neither on the Forbes billionaire list, nor the secret Goldman Sachs list of approved journalists, no one would give me the time of day.
That's nothing new. The spin-doctor cult is relatively small, and they really only feel comfortable talking to each other. Outsiders are unreliable--you never know what they might say. They might even let out a truth or two. Still, in any profession of cynical whores, there are usually some willing to spill the beans.
I finally located a woman who had been one of the stars for a while, but who had faded into relative obscurity. Her mind still worked as well as it ever had, but she had lost her perkiness, and had been replaced by a newer, hotter model.
During her heyday she had been on the "A"' list, attending all the
right parties, carousing on corporate jets, getting all the best
interviews. But that had all abruptly ended when she lost her anchor spot.
Now, she seemed almost pathetically grateful for the attention, even from
a nobody like me.
Much of what she had to say was banal and boring stuff: typical
corporate greed, posturing and backstabbing. After a while, though,
her need for revenge overcame her sense of discretion, and she began to
reveal some secrets.
"There was this training course we called the 'lemming course,' " she
said. "It had a different name, but everyone called it that. Behind all
the fancy psychology, the idea was herd management, how to keep all the
lemmings headed for the cliff.
"Keeping the herd together and moving in the right direction is a major part of our job," she said. "Not to mix too many metaphors but we're like the sheep dogs, whose job is it is to keep the sheep in line as they are herded into the shearing pens or the slaughterhouses. If they get frightened and run, it makes the whole harvesting process much more difficult."
I was surprised, to say the least. Not by the description of how the system worked, but that she would so blithely admit it. "So you knew you were lying," I prodded.
"Of course we were lying, my dear. You don't think we get the big
bucks for telling the little people the truth, do you? As financial pundits, our job is to calm people's fears, and keep them in the market. The last thing we want is for the little people to panic and start selling. That would ruin everything!
"What we really are," she continued, "is publicists for the big money boys, the banks, the corporations, the families who run the show. Our job is not to reveal, but to hide what is really going on. You never tell the sheep they're about to be turned into lamb chops! They'd stampede, if you did."
"I can see where that would be relevant today," I replied. "Is that what the lemming course was about?" "Sure," she said.
"The trick is to treat each lemming individually, giving a different explanation of why each one goes over the cliff. This lemming was too free with her money, that lemming saw investment opportunities at the bottom of the cliff, that sort of thing. Make it all individual actions, to hide the way the whole herd is being driven.
"Take the stock market, for example. We have a list of stock responses, if you'll pardon the pun, to big market drops. Profit-taking, the market needed to rest, inanities like that. Usually followed up with some nonsense about how some expected it to be worse, so we actually did pretty well. The old 'lipstick on the pig' trick. Works like a charm.
"Even better, when something goes wrong, we tell the little people it was all their fault. We blamed the derivatives blowout on a few homebuyers! And got away with it!"
"You were pretty good at that," I said, flattering her to keep her talking.
"One of the best," she cooed. "I could sweet talk people into believing a 500-point drop in the Dow was good for their investments. I fed them that crap day after day, and they kept coming back for more. They loved me. Then some network jerk decided that I wasn't hot enough anymore, and replaced me with some blow-dried bimbo. But she can't sell it like I could, and the lemmings are getting nervous. Some of them are beginning to suspect that jumping off the cliff might not be the smart move. Your guy isn't helping any, with all that talk of breakdown and a dead system, and all that rebuilding with a commitment to the General Welfare crap. He keeps telling them they're headed for the abattoir, and they're starting to listen. He's just ruining the harvest!''
