Spies Like Us - by Edmund Connelly
Just after St. Patrick’s Day of this year, my review of Jeff Gates’ new book Guilt by Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War appeared. The reference to deception and self-deceit in the subtitle are apt, for Gates explains that these techniques are responsible for America’s war in Iraq, among other things. “The war in Iraq is the product of a trans-generational syndicate skilled at displacing facts with (false) beliefs.” In such a short book, Gates makes great claims. For instance, he writes that “those masterful at manipulating thoughts and beliefs are also responsible for enabling organized crime to expand to a global scale.
As we now watch the unprecedented spectacle on Wall Street — venerable firms collapsing, the government giving bailouts to survivors, and now fat bonuses spread around financial firms such as Goldman Sachs — it’s instructive to contemplate how trillions of dollars can come and go. Yes, trillions. Not long ago we rarely heard that word. Instead, billion was the term for large sums of money, as the old economists’ joke shows: “A billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Now, however, a billion serves in the way that million used to. If it’s any consolation to taxpayers who are footing the bailout bill, Russians not long ago were bilked for a similar amount. In his book, Gates claims that the pillage of Russian wealth in the 1990s is of a piece with the ongoing economic meltdown in the West now.
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