Another Effect

Beyond short attention span, the impression that the real world is divided like television into different channels and episodes, so that synthesis of information to form an understanding of the real world is hampered. (Indeed synthesising elements from the different discrete stories the media packages is derided as paranoid. You have to be psychotic to notice that currently unfolding events required the removal in advance of Spitzer from the New York State Governor's mansion just as the Enron caper end game required the removal of Davis from California's.) When asked on Democracy Now about the the case against Paul Kagame, and the assassination of the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi which ignited the genocide, a US courtier intellectual responded with an almost comically overt insistence on this fragmentation; I don't think that's part of the same story. We can be sure not only that events in DR Congo, Iraq, California, Albany and Bolivia have nothing to do with those on Wall Street and in the City of London, but that separately reported events on Wall Street and in the City of London have nothing to do with one another.

So the $9 billion that Governor Grey Davis was in the process of recovering for California from Enron: the extraordinary recall vote and the conspiracy to place the high name recognition Schwarzenegger in his place to forgive Enron's fraud and plunder, is not figuring as part of the story of California's current problems, even though the figures are so close.