GALLUP: AMERICANS' CONFIDENCE IN CONGRESS AT LOWEST LEVEL EVER … Nine in 10 Americans say they have no confidence in Congress, ranking it last on a list of 16 institutions for the fourth straight year, Gallup said Thursday. The 10 percent confidence level is the lowest level registered for any institution since Gallup began this poll in 1973, Gallup said. – UPI

Dominant Social Theme: Congress is loved individually, despised as a group.

Free-Market Analysis: Surely this is a trouble number, that only ten percent of the US population has any confidence in the US Congress. Of course, we are aware that these same individuals may have more confidence in their own congressperson than in the larger group.

But still this is an abysmal number. Combine it with the disaffection that more and more are feeling for President Barack Obama and his administration and it would seem that the US's political institutions are having a kind of crisis of credibility.

To be sure, it is perhaps moderated by the confidence shown in other authorities, as expressed by elevated levels of support for the police and military.

At 76 percent, Americans said they were most confident in the military. Small business and the police also ranked high, at 65 percent and 57 percent, with Americans expressing "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in these institutions, the Princeton, N.J., polling agency said. Also at the bottom of the list were health maintenance organizations, at 19 percent, and organized labor, at 21 percent. Confidence in Congress has been at its lowest points for several years, Gallup said. The high point was in 1973, when 42 percent of Americans said they had confidence in Congress. Results are based on nationwide phone interviews with 1,529 adults conducted June 1-4. The margin of error is 3 percentage points.

But we would point out that we are not sure that US citizens have as much faith in the military and the police as this survey suggests. Anyway, we really don't know how questioning 1,500 individuals provides a definitive snapshot of US opinions and beliefs.

In fact, we are sure that given the lingering results of the Great Recession, a black market apparently in the trillions and a general sense that the official facilities of US society are either under attack or ineffective, that this survey is signaling a significant level of discontent.

What is more puzzling to us than this public perception is the way the mainstream media is currently inciting – whipping up – this sort of discontent.

We follow dominant social themes … yet this is new to us. The mainstream media – which has a vested stake in the current environment – has in short order spent a good deal of time on an IRS scandal, an AP-spying scandal and has now determinedly blown up the largest scandal of all … the establishment of an aggressive US military-intel complex aimed at US middle classes themselves.

We are not sure of the reasons but we know we've never seen anything like it, or not, perhaps, since Watergate …