Alors que le nouveau pr\u00e9sident Obama pr\u00eatait serment, Tom Engelhardt, de TomDispatch.com<\/em>, s’est arr\u00eat\u00e9, ce m\u00eame 20 janvier<\/a>, sur la situation de la crise (la grande crise centrale, la crise financi\u00e8re et \u00e9conomique etc.). Il s’y est arr\u00eat\u00e9 notamment parce qu’il a relev\u00e9 deux phrases lors de la derni\u00e8re conf\u00e9rence de presse du pr\u00e9sident Bush (GW l’a nomm\u00e9e \u00abthe ultimate exit interview<\/em>\u00bb), sur ce que l’ancien pr\u00e9sident savait de la situation \u00e9conomique lorsque la crise a \u00e9clat\u00e9 en septembre 2008.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00abIn fact, our last president in that remarkable final news conference of his (the ultimate exit interview, he called it) in which he swanned around, did his anti-Sally Fields imitation (you don’t like me, right now, you don’t like me!), sloshed in self-pity while denouncing self-pity, brimmed with anger, and mugged (while mugging the press) even blurted out one genuine, and startling, piece of news. With the Washington press corps being true to itself to the last second of his administration, however, not a soul seemed to notice.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbReporters, pundits, and analysts of every sort focused with laser beam predictability on whether the President would admit to his mistakes in Iraq and elsewhere. In the meantime, out of the blue, Bush offered something strikingly new and potentially germane to any assessment of our moment.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbHere’s what he said:<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbNow, obviously these are very difficult economic times. When people analyze the situation, there will be this problem started before my presidency, it obviously took place during my presidency. The question facing a President is not when the problem started, but what did you do about it when you recognized the problem. And I readily concede I chunked aside some of my free market principles when I was told by<\/em> [my] chief economic advisors that the situation we were facing could be worse than the Great Depression.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbSo I’ve told some of my friends who said you know, who have taken an ideological position on this issue why did you do what you did? I said, well, if you were sitting there and heard that the depression could be greater than the Great Depression, I hope you would act too, which I did. And we’ve taken extraordinary measures to deal with the frozen credit markets, which have affected the economy.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbHold onto those worse than the Great Depression greater than the Great Depression comments for a moment and let’s try to give this a little context. Assumedly, our last president was referring to his acceptance of what became his administration’s $700 billion bailout package for the financial system, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. He signed that into law in early October. So for crude dating purposes let’s assume that his chief economic advisors, speaking to him in deepest privacy, told him in perhaps early September that the U.S. was facing a situation that might be worse than the Great Depression.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tL\u00e0-dessus, \u00e0 la lumi\u00e8re de ces d\u00e9clarations de GW Bush rappelant son degr\u00e9 de connaissance de la situation en septembre 2008, Engelhardt fait un rapide rappel de ce qu’a \u00e9t\u00e9 la position officielle sur cette question tout au long de l’automne, alors que la situation \u00e9conomique s’effondrait.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00abBy then, the Bush administration had long publicly rejected the idea that the country had even entered a recession. As early as February 28, 2008, at a press conference, Bush himself had said: I don’t think we’re headed to a recession, but no question we’re in a slowdown. In May, his Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Edward Lazear had been no less assertive: The data are pretty clear that we are not in a recession. At the end of July in a CNBC interview, White House Budget Director Jim Nussle typically reassured the public this way: I think we have avoided a recession.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbBy late September, the president, now campaigning for Congress to give him his bailout package, was warning that we could otherwise indeed experience a long and painful recession. But well into October, White House press spokesperson Dana Perino still responded to a question about whether we were in a recession by insisting, You know I don’t think that we know.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbLest you imagine that this no-recession verbal minuet was simply a typical administration prevarication operation, for much of the year top newspapers (and the TV news) essentially agreed to agree. While waiting for economic confirmation that the nation’s gross national product had dropped in at least two successive quarters, the papers reported increasingly grim economic news using curious circumlocutions to avoid directly calling what was underway a recession. We were said, as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan put it in February, to be at the edge of a recession, a formulation many reporters picked up, or \u00ab\u00a0near one, or simply in an economic slowdown, or an economic downturn.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbAt the beginning of December, the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private group of leading economists, made official, as CNN wrote, what most Americans have already believed about the state of the economy (no thanks to the press). We were not only officially in a recession, the Bureau announced, but, far more strikingly, had been since December 2007. For at least a year, that is. Suddenly, r\u00e9cession was an acceptable media description of our state, without qualifiers (though you can look high and low for a single major paper which then reviewed its economic labeling system, December 2007-December 2008, and questioned its own coverage.) Recession simply became the new norm.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbNow, as times have gotten even tougher, it’s become a commonplace turn of phrase to call what’s underway the worst or deepest economic or financial crisis since the Great Depression. Recently, a few brave economic souls in particular, columnist Paul Krugman of the New York Times have begun to use the previously verboten d word, or even the GD label more directly. As Krugman wrote recently, Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression. But he remains the exception to the public news rule in claiming that, barring the right economic formula from the new Obama administration, we might well find ourselves in a situation as bad as the Great Depression.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tCes remarques sont int\u00e9ressante, d’abord pour justifier la question centrale de l’analyse d’Engelhardt (mais dans quelle situation sommes-nous r\u00e9ellement?), ensuite et, surtout pour notre propos, pour constater que l’information, l’analyse, la communication, sont devenus des facteurs absolument relatifs, qui sont utilis\u00e9s mais aussi per\u00e7us<\/strong> comme tels. Cet \u00e9tat de chose impos\u00e9 par des ann\u00e9es de manipulation et de relativisation de l’information aboutit, en un temps de crise majeure comme le n\u00f4tre, \u00e0 une situation de d\u00e9sordre plut\u00f4t que de manipulation d’une partie par l’autre. Cela est mis en lumi\u00e8re par la remarque que fait Engelhardt que l’\u00e9volution du sentiment de la population US s’est pass\u00e9e d’une bonne information du gouvernement, et de la presse officielle, stupidement et aveugl\u00e9ment complice dans ce temps d’hyper-conformisme; cette \u00e9volution a impos\u00e9<\/strong> une modification de la position officielle: \u00abAt the beginning of December, the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private group of leading economists, made official, as CNN wrote, what most Americans have already believed about the state of the economy (no thanks to the press). We were not only officially in a recession, the Bureau announced, but, far more strikingly, had been since December 2007. For at least a year, that is. Suddenly, r\u00e9cession was an acceptable media description of our state<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tIl s’agit d’un formidable facteur de perte de contr\u00f4le de la part des directions, politiques et autres, \u00e9manant de l’establishment<\/em>. C’est un \u00e9pisode nouveau de la fable sans fin de l’arroseur arros\u00e9: \u00e0 force de manipuler, de contr\u00f4ler, de relativiser l’information jusqu’\u00e0 aboutir au virtualisme o\u00f9 les manipulateurs eux-m\u00eames croient \u00e0 leur manipulation, ces manipulateurs ne savent plus vraiment o\u00f9 en est l’effet de l’information officielle, et encore moins la perception du public. Ils se trouvent de plus en plus men\u00e9s par la perception du public qu’ils d\u00e9couvrent \u00e0 mesure pour fixer ou r\u00e9ajuster leur v\u00e9rit\u00e9 officielle.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tIl s’agit d’un facteur formidable d’acc\u00e9l\u00e9ration du d\u00e9sordre, le d\u00e9sordre alimentant son propre d\u00e9sordre, et, par cons\u00e9quent, de r\u00e9duction de l’autorit\u00e9 et du cr\u00e9dit de la direction politique. La chose accentue encore la perte de contr\u00f4le de la situation, aggrave sans cesse la crise par la perte de confiance. Ce refus de plus en plus affirm\u00e9 de l’information officielle, y compris l’information institutionnalis\u00e9e, implique au-del\u00e0 de ses aspects techniques un refus de plus en plus fondamental de toute confiance. On notera que cet aspect des choses est par exemple un \u00e9l\u00e9ment fondamental de l’analyse que fait actuellement le groupe LEAP\/E2020 de la situation \u00e9conomique, dans la pr\u00e9sentation de son dernier bulletin GEAB n\u00b031 du 15 janvier<\/a>, que nous signalait un lecteur:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00abLa difficult\u00e9 est qu’un nombre croissant d’op\u00e9rateurs ne font plus confiance aux indicateurs et instruments de mesure traditionnels. Les agences de notation ont perdu toute cr\u00e9dibilit\u00e9. Le Dollar US n’est plus qu’une fiction d’unit\u00e9 de mesure mon\u00e9taire mondiale dont nombre d’Etats tentent de se d\u00e9gager au plus vite. Donc toute la sph\u00e8re financi\u00e8re est \u00e0 juste titre suspect\u00e9e de n’\u00eatre plus qu’un immense trou noir. Pour les entreprises, plus personne ne sait si les carnets de commande sont fiables puisque, tous secteurs confondus, les clients annulent massivement les commandes ou n’ach\u00e8tent plus, m\u00eame quand les prix sont cass\u00e9s, comme le confirme la forte baisse des ventes de d\u00e9tail de ces derni\u00e8res semaines. Et pour les Etats (et autres collectivit\u00e9s publiques), c’est dor\u00e9navant l’effondrement des recettes fiscales qui fait craindre une envol\u00e9e des d\u00e9ficits pouvant entra\u00eener l\u00e0 aussi des faillites.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tCette situation de la politique moderne, ou de l’\u00e9tat de non-politique caract\u00e9risant l’\u00e9poque de la postmodernit\u00e9, a \u00e9t\u00e9 acc\u00e9l\u00e9r\u00e9e jusqu’\u00e0 prendre une allure de substance gr\u00e2ce au ph\u00e9nom\u00e8ne de la communication bien s\u00fbr. Le ph\u00e9nom\u00e8ne de communication, dont la puissance faisait croire \u00e0 ceux qui l’activaient qu’ils seraient ainsi \u00e0 l’abri de toute surprise dans leur entreprise, s’est r\u00e9v\u00e9l\u00e9 \u00eatre \u00e0 double face (au moins, en r\u00e9alit\u00e9, \u00e0 multiples faces, insaisissable, certes). Il est utilisable par tous, par d\u00e9finition, comme le savent notablement les utilisateurs d’Internet, avec le cr\u00e9dit qu’acquiert l’information non officielle sur le r\u00e9seau. Les canaux officiels ont perdu, dans cette affaire, le cr\u00e9dit qui renvoyait \u00e0 leur l\u00e9gitimit\u00e9, qui faisait, \u00e0 bon ou \u00e0 mauvais escient, leur autorit\u00e9. Le r\u00e9sultat est la situation de d\u00e9sordre que l’on observe aujourd’hui, o\u00f9 les autorit\u00e9s n’ont plus ni autorit\u00e9 ni l\u00e9gitimit\u00e9 alors qu’elles continuent \u00e0 dissimuler analyses et informations, et pourtant oblig\u00e9es de suivre certains courants non-officiels, ou populaires, qui leur imposent des situations et des \u00e9valuations qu’elles ont tout fait pour \u00e9carter ou pour dissimuler. Le syst\u00e8me g\u00e9n\u00e8re automatiquement, par la cr\u00e9ation de sa puissance dont il veut dissimuler la substance, le contrepoids de cette puissance, qui tend \u00e0 annuler les effets de sa propre puissance et \u00e0 mettre \u00e0 nu cette substance.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \tMis en ligne le 22 janvier 2009 \u00e0 07H33<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Alors que le nouveau pr\u00e9sident Obama pr\u00eatait serment, Tom Engelhardt, de TomDispatch.com, s’est arr\u00eat\u00e9, ce m\u00eame 20 janvier, sur la situation de la crise (la grande crise centrale, la crise financi\u00e8re et \u00e9conomique etc.). Il s’y est arr\u00eat\u00e9 notamment parce qu’il a relev\u00e9 deux phrases lors de la derni\u00e8re conf\u00e9rence de presse du pr\u00e9sident Bush… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[7287,3015,3621,3228,3083,5106,1381,2891,3100,1786,3555,3616,610],"class_list":["post-70480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloc-notes","tag-autorite","tag-communication","tag-confiance","tag-crise","tag-depression","tag-e2020","tag-engelhardt","tag-grande","tag-information","tag-leap","tag-legitimite","tag-manipulation","tag-virtualisme"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}