{Time} magazine misnamed as the "Consortium of Behavioral Scientists" what {Time} described as "a secret advisory group of 29 of the nation's leading behaviorists," directing President Barack Obama's catastrophic policy, of pouring out trillions of dollars to prop up the London-centered offshore finance swindle. The group of economists is actually called the Behavioral Economics Roundtable, based at the Russell Sage Foundation in Washington D.C. The "behavioral economics" project has been tightly organized and run jointly since 1986 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundaton.
Through these and related institutions, the project's sponsors are the same clique of London-directed strategists who created the Hitler and Mussolini regimes, and ran the propaganda war against President Franklin Roosevelt. After World War II, these British empire strategists revived fascist economics and psychological manipulation methods to attack and reverse Roosevelt's legacy.
The Empire's Irrational Subjects The Israeli kook psychologist Daniel Kahneman, called the founder of behavioral economics, was an apostle of brainwashing expert Kurt Lewin. Kahneman has described his own Israeli army experiments, based on the psychological warfare methods of Lewin's bosses in London's Tavistock Institute: the study of soldiers' vulnerable minds in "leaderless groups." Kahneman met Alfred P. Sloan Foundation vice president/psychologist Eric Wanner in 1982. Wanner, previously employed by Britain's Sussex University, home of the Tavistock Institute, took Kahneman under his wing. Wanner soon afterwards became chief executive of the Russell Sage Foundation, and, in 1986, he instituted the Behavioral Economics Project, run jointly by the Sloan and Sage Foundations. Both foundations, as will be reported below, were central to London's post-World War II fascist revival.
This began before the war was even won. In 1944, Montagu Norman had stepped down as governor of the Bank of England, after two decades directing the London and Wall Street promotion and funding of the Hitler dictatorship. Norman next created the World Federation for Mental Health, managed by leaders of the pro-Hitler Cliveden Set under the presidency of Tavistock Institute director John R. Rees. Heading this London initiative within the U.S.A. was Kurt Lewin, working for Tavistock with Rockefeller money arranged by Russell Sage Foundation operative Raymond Fosdick. Lewin set the tone for what is now called "behavioral economics"--instead of a republic's government serving rational citizens, an empire's oligarchy rules its subjects by playing on popular ignorance and irrationality. Lewin mused in his 1941 book, {Time Perspective and Morale}: "One of the main techniques for breaking morale through a 'strategy of terror' consists in exactly this tactic--keep the person hazy as to where he stands and what just he may expect. If, in addition, frequent vacillations between severe disciplinary measures and promises of good treatment, together with the spreading of contradictory news, make the cognitive structure of this situation utterly unclear, then the individual may cease to know when a particular plan would lead toward or away from his goal. Under these conditions, even those individuals who have definite goals and are ready to take risks will be paralyzed with severe inner conflicts in regard to what to do."
Sloan, Sage and the Project The two foundations running the Behavioral Economics Roundtable have extended this project and put their Behavioral operatives into the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER--an anti-labor think-tank funded entirely the right-wing Olin, Bradley, Scaife, and Smith Richardson Foundations), giving many Roundtable Sage-Sloan paid operatives an NBER label. Arrangments with NBER, have been supervised by Sloan Foundation Program Director Michael S. Teitelbaum, who epitomizesthe unashamed Hitler legacy at Sloan. A former Oxford University faculty member, Teitelbaum was a key American instigator of the return of the Nazi race psuedo-science called eugenics. From his Sloan base since 1983, Teitelbaum spread eugenics and anti-immigrant filth into Congressional deliberations. He was presient of the American Eugenics Society from 1985 to 1990, and vice president of Sloan Foundation in the late 1990s, as "behavioral economics" was revved up.
This effort bears rotten fruit in the person of a leading behavioral economist Alan Kreuger, whom President Obama has nominated to be Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Policy. Though not yet confirmed, Krueger has already been advising Treausury Secretary Tim Geithner during the catastophic bailouts. Kreuger has been a director of the Russell Sage Foundation, a Sloan Fellow, an NBER Olin Fellow, and Krueger is a longtime staff leader at the eugenics movement's Office of Population Research at Princeton University. American Eugenics Society founder Frederick Osborn created that office at Princeton in 1936, the year after the eugenics movement triumphed with the passage of Hitler's Nuremberg race laws. (The office now advertises a workers' efficiency survey being conducted by Treasury-designee Krueger and his fellow Princeton faculty member, behavioral economics originator Daniel Kahneman.) In that nightmare of the 1930s, Alfred P. Sloan was among the small circle of leading pro-Hitler industrialists in the United States. Sloan had been made chief executive of General Motors in 1923 by GM's co-owners, the J.P. Morgan bank and the DuPont chemical enterprise. In 1934, Alfred P. Sloan and Morgan-DuPont financial executive John J. Raskob founded the American Liberty League, and at the same time, the Sloan Foundation. The Liberty League organized American pro-fascists to attack President Franklin Roosevelt, while carrying on propaganda favorable to Mussolini and Hitler.
The Sloan Foundation's assets were based on shares of General Motors, whose Opel division produced a large proportion of Germany's exports for the Hitler regime throughout the 1930s. The Russell Sage Foundation, a British Empire agency planted within the United States (with money from Wall Street speculator Russell Sage's widow), was X-rayed in the 1976 reference work {Carter and the Party of International Terrorism}, published by the U.S. Labor Party: "Since its incorporation in New York State in 1907, the Russell Sage Foundation has served as the major Fabian Society-Fabian Research Bureau operation in North America. Russell Sage has been the pioneer institution in the building of a 1984 [Orwellian]-style police infrastructure in this country: in the nazification of the federal judicial system; and the development of computer technology as a technical up grading of centralized Wall Street black propaganda control over every facet of the mass media in the field of overt criminal and terrorist activity ... since its engineered takeover of the New York City rackets during the late 1910s [Sage] has been maintaining an ongoing program of crime profiling....
"Under the stated purpose of scientific social work, Russell Sage initiated a wide range of projects [aiming at] the creation of a centrally controlled, mass-social-control apparatus. Russell Sage conducted the earliest program in co-participation (Mackenzie King's profiles of the Rockefeller family Colorado mining companies) and working-class profiling [in] Pittsburgh and San Francisco....)
"[In World War One] Russell Sage moved its offices to Washington DC, and took over the Department of War. The Foundation [with its London background]--in that government capacity--organized the entire logistical and support operations for the U.S. war effort [in the alliance with Britain]. Personnel placed in the State Department took control over all German-American assets for the duration of the war. Col. Ayer of Russell Sage was one of President Wilson's chief negotiators and advisers at Versailles; he later assumed charge of the postwar German reparations and through this, was instrumental in creating the Anglo-American networks epitomized by the activities of [Hitler intelligence executive] Adm. Canaris and [London-controlled Nazi regime-designer] Hjalmar Schacht. "Russell Sage [later concentrated on] funding of Raymond Fosdick [head of Rockefeller Foundation who coordinated with publicist Ivy Lee and Morgan partner Thomas Lamont in directinginternational finances and public relations for the Mussolini and Hitler regimes] and supervision of German military buildup during the Weimar period.
"[Just as] the original Fabian Society used visiting fellow programs [to recruit] long-term agents of influence, the Russell Sage maintains a network of leading operatives in every major university in the United States.... Among the notable individuals [created as Russell Sage projects were]: "Charles Hamilton, sponsor of Stokely Carmichael's Black Power project; ... Daniel Bell, [author of {The Coming of Post-Industrial Society}]; Alvin Toffler, author of {Future Shock}; Kenneth Boulding, the zero-growth convergence theory planner; University of Chicago psychological warfare [strategist] Morris Janowitz; top brainwasher Edward Shils; Columbia University counterinsurgency warfare planner Amitai Etzioni; LEAA founder James Vorenburg; Institute for Policy Studies terrorist controller and labor counterinsurgency expert Paul Jacobs; and the leading European-based linguistic brainwasher and left countergang controller, Alvin Gouldner of {Theory and Society}."
The Obama Vortex This London "black-ops" project, behavioral econonomics, has embedded its operatives all over the Obama Administration. Sage Foundation director Thaler is a linchpin of the scheme. Thaler originally managed the Sloan-Sage sponsorship of Daniel Kahneman to "define that field" of economics" Thaler runs a multi-billion dollar private asset fund (Fuller & Thaler) employing Kahneman as a director. Thaler's private fund took over from Russell Sage the financing of the Project inside NBER.
A University of Chicago professor, Thaler closely consults his younger faculty colleagues Austan Goolsbee and Cass Sunstein, two Obama advisors who were initiated into Thaler's behavioral economics clique.
Sunstein co-authored Thaler's book, {Nudge}, on how the regime can engineer people's choices without their knowledge. President Obama has chosen Sunstein as U.S. Regulatory czar--administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein's wife is Samantha Power, a longtime paid George Soros agent specializing in provoking wars in Africa, who now runs "multi-lateral affairs" (the London connection) in Obama's National Security Council. Goolsbee was notorious as the radical Free Trade chief economic adviser to Obama's Presidential campaign. Like current Obama chief economic adviser and fellow behavioral economist Larry Summers, Goolsbee worships the late University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. Goolsbie eulogized Friedman ({New York Times}, Nov. 17, 2006) for "scientific economics."
The London-Wall street sponsors of behavioral economics want to get away with crushing austerity as policy outcome in the present systemic collapse. From the Aug. 6, 1923 {Time{ magazine cover lionizing Benito Mussolini, throughout the 1930s, they claimed that {Il Duce} was brutal, but "he made the trains run on time."
Goolsbee invoked that Mussolini legacy in the title of an article, "Where the Buses Run on Time" (Slate, March 16, 2006), to praise the behaviorist speed-up of bus drivers made possible by Milton Friedman's economic program under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Goolsbee argued that Chicago should use the methods for reducing wages and speeding up bus drivers, that had been successful outcomes of the Chilean fascist regime.
THE ROUNDTABLE 29
{The Russell Sage Foundation identifies the "Behavioral Economics Roundtable" members as:}
1. Henry Aaron, Brookings Institution;
2. George Akerlof, University of California, Berkeley;
3. Linda Babcock, Carnegie Mellon University;
4. Nicholas C. Barberis, Yale University;
5. Marianne Bertrand, University of Chicago;
6. Roland J. M. Benabou, Princeton University.;
7. Colin Camerer, California Institute of Technology;
8. Peter Diamond, Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
9. Jon Elster, Columbia University;
10. Ernst Fehr, University of Zurich;
11. Robert H. Frank, Cornell University;
12. Christine Jolls, Harvard University;
13. Daniel Kahneman, Princeton University;
14. David Laibson, Harvard University;
15. George Loewenstein, Carnegie Mellon University;
16. Brigitte Madrian, University of Pennsylvania;
17. Sendhil Mullainathan, Massachusetts Institute Technology;
18. Edward D. O'Donoghue, Cornell University;
19. Terrance Odean, University of California Berkeley;
20. Drazen Prelec, Massachusetts Institute Technology;
21. Matthew Rabin, University of California Berkeley;
22. Thomas Schelling, University of Maryland;
23. Eldar Shafir, Princeton University;
24. Robert Shiller, Yale University;
25. Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago
26. Richard Thaler, University of Chicago;
27. Jean Tirole, University Sciences Soc. Toulouse;
28. Richard Zechhauser, Harvard University; and (until his death), Amos Tversky, Stanford University.
MISBEHAVIOR IN RUSSIAThe knives are out for Larry Summers, former Harvard president, behaviorial economist, director of the National Economic Council for President Barack Obama. The {New York Times} (April 6, 2009, "A Rich Education for Summers (After Harvard)") speared him as a fanatical hedge-fund operator and multi-millionaire.
His Harvard protege, the prominent behavioral economist and mass corruptionist Andrei Shleifer, is part of what the {Times} called the "small circle of financial professionals, particularly hedge fund managers," that Summers has "cultivated ... to serve as an informal brain trust. He consults with them on policy matters from his perch in the White House." In the early 1990s, Summers was chief economist for the World Bank, coordinating the privatization and looting of Russia with Vice Premier Anatoly Chubais. While Summers' man Shleifer and Harvard University were then being paid by the U.S. government to advise Chubais and the Russians on privatization, Shleifer's wife Nancy Zimmerman was running a hedge fund out of the back room of Harvard's USAID-funded privatization project office in Moscow.
Put in charge of setting up a stock market, and engineering other post-Soviet projects, Shleifer engorged himself on the resultant stocks and bonds, while Russia slid into misery. The U.S. government sued Harvard, Shleifer, and Zimmerman under the False Claims Act. Harvard and Shleifer reached an agreement with the Justice Department in 2005: Harvard paid $26.5 million to settle; Shleifer paid $2 million in damages, on top of his wife's firm's $1.5 million in damages.
As Summers defended the looting of Russia and Shleifer's role in it, Harvard paid most of Shleifer's damages and kept him on the faculty.
The cited {Times} article names only Nancy Zimmerman, and not Shleifer himself, as being in that Summers circle of hedge fund managers. The same {Times} article makes a reference that points in the direction of the underlying behavioral economist takeover of the Obama Administration: "Among these [hedge fund] insiders are Kenneth D. Brody and Frank P. Brosens, the founding partners of another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, for whom Mr. Summers did consulting work from 2004 to 2006. Mr. Summers reached out to Mr. Brosens in December to discuss the Obama administration's economic priorities. This year, he campaigned to have him run the federal office overseeing the $700 billion bailout program. Mr. Brosens withdrew his name from consideration last month." The cited Kenneth D. Brody (Brosens' partner) is himself the Treasurer of the Russell Sage Foundation, the central channel through which the behavioral economics project has been foisted on the American government.
{--Anton Chaitkin}
Paolo Sarpi:
THE VENETIAN ROOTS OF 'BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS'While {Time} magazine's (April 13, 2009) expose of the "behavioral economists" surrounding President Barack Obama has put an important spotlight on a dangerous disease, infecting the economic decision-making at the Oval Office, the author of the expose only scratched the surface of the actual evil underlying this hedonistic madness.
The bestial notion of man as an irrational creature, driven by overwhelming impulses to seek pleasure and avoid pain, which is at the heart of the so-called "behavioral economics" dogma, came directly from Venice, the wellspring of all modern financier oligarchism. The author of this schema, which ruthlessly rejects actual human creativity, was Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623).
A Servite monk who rose to be the leading theological and juridical authority for the Venetian doge, Sarpi waged a war against the Catholic Church, and, despite his nominal status as a leading theologian, argued against the existence of God. In correspondence with Francis Bacon, mediated through the English ambassador to Venice, Henry Wooten, Sarpi argued that man can only know the world through his senses. Thus, Sarpi was the author of the radical, anti-cognitive empiricist doctrine, later codified by successive generations of English utilitarians, from John Locke, to Bernard de Mandeville, to Adam Smith, to Jeremy Bentham.
Sarpi took a leading role in the Venetian faction known as the Giovanni (Youth), who argued that Venice could not retain its financial and political power over Europe through its base in the Venetian lagoon. Sarpi and the Giovanni not only promoted the Protestant break with Rome, they redeployed Venetian power into northern Europe, through the successive takeover of the Netherlands and England, via the creation of Venetian-controlled trading companies, including the Venice, Turkey, Levant, and, eventually, the Dutch and British East India companies. It was this financier-oligarchy, that took over England, and, at the same time, promoted the radical empiricist dogma that has beenthe key to oligarchical power ever since. It is from Sarpi's descendents, particularly the radical hedonist Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), that all of the essentials of "behavioral economics" derive. Indeed, a 2004 paper, published by the British Fabian Society's London School of Economics, titled "Utility Theory from Jeremy Bentham to Daniel Kahneman," makes the case explicitly.
Essentially plagiarizing Sarpi, Bentham, in his infamous {An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation} (1780) wrote, "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.... Every effort we make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. The principle of utility--the greatest happiness or greatest felicity principle--recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation.... Systems which attempt to question it deal ... in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light." Bentham was not only the chief philosopher for the British East India Company, during the tenure of its Secret Committee chairman, Lord Shelburne. During Shelburne's brief tenures as foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, Bentham founded modern British intelligence.
Bentham first caught the attention of the Venetian-minded Shelburne for his diatribe against the American Declaration of Independence. In October 1776, Bentham wrote: "This, they 'hold to be' a 'truth self-evident.' At the same time, to secure these rights they are satisfied that government should be instituted. They see not ... that nothing that was ever called government ever was or ever could be exercised but at the expense of one or another of those rights, that ... some one or other of those pretended unalienable rights is alienated.... In these tenets they have outdone the extravagance of all former fanatics." Bentham's hatred of the American Revolution and the principles of republican government were totally consistent with his Sarpian belief that man is a beast, pure and simple. That Sarpi and Bentham are the intellectual architects of the perverse doctrine of hedonistic "behavioral economics" ought to wake up some patriotic stirrings among some in and around the Obama White House--before it is too late.
{--Jeffrey Steinberg}
THE DANIEL KAHNEMAN, AMOS TVERSKY SWINDLEApril 8 (EIRNS)--The short version of Behaviorist Economics is that it can be considered as the carryover of the pseudo-science behind the Revolution in Military Affairs into the civilian sphere. On the other hand, it also clearly reflects the hedonistic calculus of Jeremy Benthem and Bernard Mandeville. Its origins can be traced to two Israeli behavioral psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tverski, both with experience in and employed by the Israeli Defense Forces, who began a long collaborative career by 1968.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1934, Kahneman spent his youth in France, where his father was director of research for a chemical company "directed by the financial mainstay of the Fascist anti-Semitic movement in France in the 1930s," as Kahneman recalled in his autobiography ({A History of Psychology in Autobiography}). At the end of the war, the family embarked for Palestine. Kahneman received his Bachelor's degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1954, majoring in psychology with a minor in mathematics. A favorite professor there introduced him to the work of Kurt Lewin, especially Lewin's "force field from the outside." He was so taken by Lewin's theories that he still teaches them today.
After graduating, he served in the Israeli Army for four years, three of them in the psychology branch of the IDF. One of the projects he worked on was selection of individuals for officer training, using methods based on World War II British manuals. In a test involving a leaderless group, he experienced what he called the "first cognitive illusion I described," which he named "the illusion of validity." In his Nobel Prize-winning autobiography, he wrote, "puzzles with which I struggled at the time were the seed of the paper on the psychology of intuitive prediction which Amos Tversky and I published later." Kahneman is known as a leader in the field of hedonics, with a emphasis on the matter of the "framing" of decision-making (how a question is "framed" will affect the answer).
The two began publishing in the early 1970s, with the seminal work, "Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases," published in {Science} magazine in 1974. At the end of that detailed work is a note, indicating that their research "was supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense [DARPA] and was monitored by the Office of Naval Research" under a contract to the Oregon Research Institute, with additional support "provided by the Research and Development Authority of the Hebrew University."
Behavioral Economics Is Born Kahneman and Tversky spent time in Israel, the United States, and Britain, each spending time at Cambridge, and, in 1978, both arrived at Stanford University, at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. It was here that they met University of Rochester-trained economist Richard Thaler, and the "science" of Behavioral Economics was born. The next year, 1979, saw the publication of the fundamental work of the new science, {Prospect Theory, Analysis of Decisions Under Risk,} by Kahnemann and Tverski. Subsequently, the two also published works along with Thaler, and others, notably, a British Columbia-based behavioralist Jack Knetsch.
In 1982, the grouping was "institutionalized," one might say, by Eric Wanner, who was then the head of the Sloan Foundation, and who proposed funding an integration of behavioral psychology and economics. A year later, when Wanner became president of the Russell Sage Foundation, he brought the psychos along with him, and began to fund the project, which continues today. The first step was to send Thaler to the University of British Columbia, where Kahneman was teaching, to work with him for a year. At this time, Jack Knetsch, another economist who figures prominently in this field, would have been at UBC, as well.
It was at Sage, that Kahneman and Tversky, along with Knetsch produced a work in which they tried to give their "Prospect Theory" a historical grounding, citing four works of theoretical "heritage," one of which is the work of John von Neumann and David Morgenstern. The result was "Fairness and the Assumptions of Economics," published in a special issue of {The Journal of Business}. Kahneman received half a Nobel Prize in 2002, for "having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision making under uncertainty." He is today at Princeton. Tversky died from cancer in 1996.
In 1995, Thaler, who continues as a director at the Russell Sage Foundation, came to the University of Chicago. At Chicago, Thaler made a quick convert and lifetime associate of Cass Sunstein, a professor of law, who quickly picked up on the ideas and spread them to the legal profession, causing a minor revolution in teaching methods which continues today. Sunstein became a close associate of Barack Obama, who was also resident at UC at that time, and led Thaler to him at a 2004 Illinois Senate campaign event. Thaler's response at the time: "You know, he seems like the real deal."
Thaler, in addition to being an economics professor at the University of Chicago, is still on the board of the Sage Foundation, which also houses the vaunted Consortium of 29, the Behaviorist Economics Roundtable, founded in 1992.
