That is the big picture of the fact that Greek PM Papandreou started pushing for a referendum on the Greek bailout, and was forced to back down under international pressure.

When we look at both international financial policy, and international trade policy, it is predicated on the idea that ordinary people will never support these policies, because they are simply too stupid to understand the bigger picture, and see that these policies are too their benefits.

What the very serious people don’t understand is just why the ordinary people don’t like this.

The fact is that we are dealing with tribal issues, and the people at the top, the ones who make these policies, have very little meaningful interaction with the people who actually produce the stuff that makes the economy work.

They go from the equivalent of Phillips-Exeter to Harvard to Wall Street to Washington to Wall Street to Washington to Wall Street to Washington ………

The reason that people don’t support these policies is because they see the effects on their lives of the policies that favor multinational corporations and mega-banks, and these effects are negative, while the policy makers, who roomed with the banksters and the executives to be at college, simply have no clue as to how the other half (actually 99%) lives.

The fact that this has been aggressively sold for decades, and a society which embraced the Snuggie^® with open arms has rejected these policies.

While it is true that the commons are not universally correct, the fact that the public has continued to be extremely skeptical despite a full court press does seem to indicate that there is a disjoint between the conventional wisdom and the reality.

After all, we have advertising firms that could sell snow to Eskimos with a 6 month campaign.