Cost-Benefit Analysis

The only surprising thing about this story is that AOL is still apparently a going concern. Who knew?

We're going to be seeing more and more stories like this in the years to come, of outsized health care costs being spread around to everyone. This is because the numbers are what they are, politics aside. Five percent of the population accounts for almost half the expenditures, and that's just the start of it. Everything is a hockey stick, as far as tracking proportional usage.

Socializing medicine by definition means that the other ninety-five percent who make up the other half of expenditures are effectively subsidizing those five percent. Meanwhile, the usurious charges and rates have been completely unaffected by the ACA or private insurance plans.

The racket remains intact, and that's the real problem. How does an infant rack up a million-dollar hospital bill? Instead of plugging the book and harping (rightly) on the HIPAA violations, the article practically begs for an itemization of services. Of course, looking at the EOB would also constitute a HIPAA violation. But it would be helpful to all concerned to get a look at how much things cost.

Tim Armstrong may be an overcompensated asshole, and he's almost certainly not taking a hit on his $12m compensation package. No, better to engender resentment among the working dogs by making sure they have a good idea of what's affecting their 401(k) plans. But all that still doesn't mitigate the fact that consumers are getting rooked by the health care industry, that healthy people are being forced to subsidize unhealthy people, that people with coverage are paying ridonkulous costs to cover people who can't pay for their care.

The moral argument is separate from the financial argument; obviously the moral thing to do would be to have -- wait for it -- the single-payer system we were promised before Ted Kennedy died, the Democrats ran a terrible candidate to replace him and lost their supermajority, and Scott Brown fucked everything up. But we got what we got, things cost what they cost, and people who are now having to pay into the kitty are having to adjust their expectations.

There is no solution. Much like being patient with what's left of your political system, hanging your hat on dickless incrementalism and the Lucy's football promise of Real Change, you're going to have to dial down your expectations of just how much socialized medicine will make your life better. Yes, if you need health care but have no coverage and cannot get on a plan through your job, it's great. But the problem has been trying to soft-sell the cold fact to people who do have coverage and don't use it that it's going to come out of their end, instead of making the CEOs and HMOs and the rest of these high-toned assholes share the pain.

(Bearing in mind, of course, that the family in the article had coverage through their employer. That's yet another area where we're getting fucked; I work for the gubmint and I got socked with an additional $200/month taken out of my paycheck for the exact same coverage, that I don't use in the first place. There's my student loan payment.)

In another ten or twenty years, with a little luck and a lot of help, the ACA will be a lot like Social Security is now, almost untouchable by politicians. But its biggest hurdle to overcome, ironically, comes from the fact that you need to convince the people who need it least and are least likely to vote in general -- young people -- to support it. The people who need it and will use it -- old farts and boomers, getting ready to retire and scavenge every fucking dime of Medicare and Social Security they paid in and then some -- are the most likely to vote, and to vote against the ACA, figuring that they already have their fucking ladder, the rest of us can just go find another staircase or something.

It's not a matter of blaming sick people for being or getting sick. Sooner or later, that fate and more awaits us all. It's a matter of who gets stuck paying for it all, and what kind of care they get for their troubles.

Politics By Other Means

So apparently the USDOJ has decided to step in and do something about widespread corruption in soccer's governing body, FIFA. Anyone else find this a bit weird?

In America, we decide who will be imperial custodian for the next four years -- thus serving as the figurehead for the decisions on where our perpetual-war-for-perpetual-peace campaign will touch down next -- by letting billionaires throw impossible amounts of money at a permanent-campaign machine, in order to provide the illusion of choice, between two maroons whom you wouldn't trust to clean your rain gutters. It is a system rife with incompetence, hypocrisy, nepotism, influence peddling, voting fraud and intimidation, ignorant and deceptive analysis from unqualified commentators, and worse. Its principal figures would, in a rational universe, be frog-marched to the nearest penitentiary, or at least be forced to find an honest means of employment.

The rest of the world, weary from the industrial-scale death and destruction of the previous century, have chosen to place their collective faith in institutions, especially international sports institutions, such as FIFA and the International Olympic Committee, both of which abide banana-republic levels of corruption as a matter of routine operations. That the appropriately-named Sepp Blatter is a crude peddler of thick envelopes is of little concern to the billions of fans who sublimate their violent urges through a frequently scoreless game that gets decided on penalty kicks.

Where the average 'murkin, steeped in his usual jingo juices and misunderstandings of history and geopolitics, really doesn't know all that much about the finer details of what his country's up to (not that it would matter; even if he knew, he still wouldn't care), the average Euro knows exactly what FIFA and the IOC are all about. Last year's World Cup in Brazil, with practically single-use stadia being built out in the middle of nowhere, and favelas being cleared both for last year's Cup and next year's Olympics, made it pretty clear that this is How Business Is Done in much of the world -- a stroke of the pen, the passing of cash-stuffed valises, the barrel of a gun.

Not that we're shocked at the morality of all that, come on. Our problem is that we got left out. The US Soccer Federation lobbied pretty hard for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids, we obviously already have high-capacity football stadiums all over the country, and to get shut out of those opportunities was unacceptable. Especially to lose out to a sweaty, oppressive bunghole like Qatar, which will have to spend an estimated $220 billion (yes, $220B; that is not a typo) to build transport capacity and temperature-controlled stadia, presumably with the bones of their enslaved, abused migrant workers.

There is some serious money to be made here, and some openly corrupt dickhead Euro with a silly name has decided to shut American interests out of the picture, precisely because we already have the highways and venues. These sports events have become nothing more than a way for international construction conglomerates to get excuses to build make-work infrastructural upgrades. There's not nearly as much money in holding these events in places that already have those things. That's all any of this is about. Dio Fa!

Oversight

Just wondering what it might be like if this country had, say, a governmental agency that provided regulation and oversight on an untrustworthy and reckless financial industry. Even better might be if there was another governmental department that ensured that when financiers were caught doing awful things -- such as rigging currency and interest rates, money laundering for drug cartels, all the other things these fuckers have been caught doing over and over again -- that these crimes which literally affect everyone's lives and wallets would be prosecuted aggressively and appropriately.

When the next financial crash comes -- and rest assured, it will -- I hope Eric Holder understands his direct role in all of it, that his indifference and unwillingness to drop the hammer on these sociopaths only emboldens them. And I also hope that when it comes, and these thieves try to make us all pay for their bullshit again, that instead they are treated to tumbrels and guillotines.

Cruz Control

Wasting no time in his eternal quest to be Asshole of the Year, every year, Canadian-born Goldman Sachs spouse Rafael Edward "Ted" Cruz, Jr. flexes his fake vox populi muscles, taking on those eeeevil regulators who ensure that anonymous dipshits like you 'n' me have the same access to the public internets as he, "Ted" Cruz, has.

This is an issue where Obama is right and Cruz is wrong, plain and simple. In fact, precisely because our telecom system is really just a profit-sucking oligopoly that thwarts competition and innovation, Americans already pay more money for worse performance. Jesus H. Christ, Moldova -- noted primarily for being the poorest, most repressive country on the European continent -- has better performance than the US, like a 50% higher download rate.

I resent this stuffy, squawky little prick, Cruz, with his shrill voice and strident tone, really more of a male Sarah Palin than anything, with his stupid square-peg-round-hole metaphors. How the fuck is net neutrality anything like "Obamacare," which, it should be noted, is more of a success than a failure so far, despite literally half of the entire Congress actively working to ensure its abject failure?

The thing to keep in mind is, if you look at the various worldwide markets for internet service, North America has one of the smallest markets in terms of population, and by far the highest amount of market penetration at 84.9 percent. Europe is next, at 68.3%, followed by the tiny Oceania/Australia market -- smaller than California! -- at barely two-thirds penetration. By way of comparison, the Asian market, estimated to be nearly 4 billion strong, has less than one-third penetration. Africa, whose market is nearly four times the size of North America's has just 21.3% penetration.

That means that just about everyone who wants internet access in the US has it already, while there are other far larger markets out there waiting to be exploited. But where Europe and Asia actually have a competitive environment and government involvement in ensuring affordable, high-quality services, the monopolistic conditions here guarantee the opposite outcome.

Internet access is no longer a luxury, you need it to search and apply for employment, to access news and information, any number of things. Squashing Net Neutrality cements the monopolistic practices already in place, makes a bad situation worse, and more usurious (with, again, even shittier service) for the people who can least afford it.

From radio to television to HDTV to the Internet, the telecom industry has been one of the greediest, sleaziest rackets on the face of this planet. The airwaves, according to the FCC Charter, belong to the people. At least in theory. This notion has yet to actually be put into practice.

Protest and Survive

Great interview in one of the local free sheets, with a gentleman who did a couple years for the high crime of crashing a land auction. What's particularly galling about this case is that not only did the judge rig the jury selection process by stocking it with people who pledged their allegiance to his decree rather than their consciences, but that it wasn't even allowed to be discussed at the trial that the auction in question had been ruled illegal.

There are other worthy tidbits throughout, not the least of which involves a cop who, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, realized his basement was being shoveled out by on of the Occupy kids he had been told to truncheon in Zuccotti Park.

I differ from Mr. DeChristopher in his hope or belief that the cop might have been transformed even a little bit by such an encounter. Oh, it might have made him think a bit, but probably not enough to question seriously why he mindlessly did what he had "been told" to that kid and others like him, not enough to change the trajectory of his ways or beliefs.

DeChristopher's dismay (I was hoping for more palpable contempt, but the guy is simply too nice) for the chickenshit bien pensant liberal baby boomers is also choice -- and also not enough to get them to change their ways. They are clearly content to believe that shopping organic and voting Democratic is sufficient, that climate change is a problem for the next generations to figure out. They hung on, made their money, and they're going to by-god take as much of it -- as well as the health care and Social Security funding of the next generations -- with them as possible.

The problem is, since they have most of the money, they have most of the political power, and so pay for a system that keeps inert just long enough for them to finish their days in comfort, and then everyone who's left can start sacrificing.

I don't think Americans of any generation will start to take climate change seriously until there's a truly catastrophic -- and I mean like mid-five figures of casualties -- event, something like twenty Katrinas or Sandys all at once, on an "important" US city like Los Angeles or New York. Somebody famous will have to perish.

And even then, because the system more than anything counts on inertia, counts on people's willingness to be distracted from their fate for just one more day, there's always the chance that it'll go away. Think of the huge events of this new century already, man-made or natural -- 9/11, Fukushima, Katrina, the extended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. After all the news coverage and the hand-wringing in the aftermath, what actually changed in the wake of any of these things?

Did 9/11 change our approach to dealing with the Muslim world? No, we still prop up corrupt petrocrats, sell them weapons, let them oppress their people into a senseless rage, and then wonder what the fuck is wrong with "those people". Did we take any measures that showed that we take seriously the clear ramifications of global warming and carbon concentration in the atmosphere after Katrina or Sandy or the 2004 tsunami? You tell me.

Consider -- in the space of a few minutes, nearly a quarter-million lives in fourteen countries were ended, and hundreds of thousands more transformed, by the tsunami. Yes, it was caused by an earthquake, and no, there wasn't anything man-made about an undersea subduction. But it should have been a potent reminder of the power of nature, and the powerlessness of humans to stop it.

It's not just Americans, though we certainly set the stage for all this. The Chinese and Indians, after all, are just following our model, empowered by the blessings of globalization and the credo of The Chicago Group. It's difficult to blame them for wanting to catch up with us in standard of living.

Yet that bears consequences, when 1 in every 3 humans lives in China or India, and 1 in every 2 -- think about that, especially if you're in America, which has comparatively sparse population density overall, every second human being -- lives in Asia. And most people live in cities, and most cities are near oceans, and the levels are rising, and will take as long or longer to reverse than they did to set in motion.

We don't all have to go full eco-activist and go to prison, in a system that's rigged to begin with. But if enough people, just in the US, looked at the three primary factors -- what/how we drive; what/how we eat; what/how we consume in general -- all of which are within lost people's control, a real dent can be made in this very real and growing problem.

Misdiagnosis

So now that Very Important People are showing how aware they are of this inequality thing, alarums have been raised, and remedies proposed. Here OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria throws some ideas into the ring for consideration:

Main remedies are activation policies, meaning get services in the governments that will get the people who are unemployed or seeking for employment with the job opportunities.

This is not being done enough. The United States spends one-fourth of what the rest of the OECD countries spend on this particular service, getting the unemployed or seeking employment with the employment opportunities.

Second, skills, education and skills. There’s a big mismatch between the skills and what the market is demanding. Therefore, your — you have people have diplomas, but they can’t do very much with it. Third, use a tax structure and use a budget in order to support companies that may be providing jobs or better opportunities.

And last but not least, remember, this is a problem that is affecting the capacity of the United States to get the people at the lowest revenue levels and at the lowest education levels to get up in the ladder, in the social ladder, in the ladder of opportunities.

Ah, the fabled "ladder of opportunities," esteemed tool of the privileged class who long ago pulled it up after using it. Look, Angel, chanting "jobs" and "education" like some oligarchist mantra means nothing at all when there are few jobs worth having anymore, far too many individuals chasing all of those jobs, and higher education is a fucking racket.

The implicit promise of the "jobs 'n' college" evangelists is that those things work hand-in-hand to improve the lives of individuals. And that's how it should work, certainly.

But the reality of it is that rather than a promise, it's more of a threat -- that if you don't go to college, and set yourself up for 10-15 years of indentured servitude in order to pay off the costs of said college, after which maybe you can start making real money, if there's enough jobs in your area, etc., etc., you're screwed.

These rackets serve not only to enrich the coffers of those who run them and profit from them, but they serve an ancillary purpose -- the masses of people who are herded into these rackets, and get on the financial hook, are instantly rendered compliant, complicit in the racket. They now have a vested interest to not be disruptive, to not ask too many questions -- or the wrong questions, such as why wages stagnated while productivity doubled, why the only people to profit during the so-called Great Recession were the already wealthy, why the "practical" thing to do with the one life you've been given is to be some indentured wage slave to some bastard who will fuck you over at the first opportunity, if it will make his stock portfolio go up a quarter of a point.

They don't want you asking questions, or protesting your ration of crumbs -- not that it matters; should you find the sack to get on your hind legs and say something out loud they'll just send Erin Burnett or some other water-carrier down to make fun of you, marginalize you before your plaint even gets a fair hearing.

They would prefer that you either go along to get along, or just say "fuck it" and give up your eternal tilt at an indifferent windmill. I don't think it can be overstated, how little the elites give a red-hot monkey-fuck about you, your families, your communities, your country. Make no mistake, as far as they're concerned, you're either a tool for them to use, or an impediment to their efforts. That is the extent of what you are to the people who actually run this country, run the world.

Serious People jabber about this condition of persistent, escalating inequality, make modest proposals, hem and haw as if this is some trick of the tail, a logistical impossibility to correct. Folks, it is almost heartbreakingly simple, and it does not have to involve tumbrels and guillotines (though you'll get no argument from me should it go in that direction).

The mechanics of a capitalist society, to the extent that we still live in a truly capitalist society, are premised on carrots and sticks, incentives and disincentives. Ideally (heh), the carrots and sticks should be applied as needed, regardless of the situation. From a purely systems analysis perspective, it's not supposed to be a question of who applies those carrots and sticks, so much as what applies them. In systems dynamics, they are applied to optimize the overall efficiency of the system.

In the post-World War 2 era, it worked that way for a few decades. Americans of that time realized that an empowered working class spent its money on goods and services, thus enriching the companies who produced those things. Rich people paid taxes, and paid their workers a wage they could live on and spend money on. It was tacitly understood by all that incentives and disincentives would be applied by the system to keep the machine humming.

But as you may have noticed, it no longer works that way. Rich people and corporations get carrots, everyone else gets sticks. There is nothing resembling even application. This is because the system is no longer run and maintained by systems people, relatively non- or bi-partisan people who understand the utilitarian notion of the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

In deregulating the finance and lobbying industries, Saint Reagan essentially sold the system to the elite money class, who of course simply run it for their own benefit -- and everyone else's detriment. It is not enough for them to gain, everyone else must lose in the process. Saint Clinton continued this new dynamic and globalized it, put the final nail in the coffin with the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Bush the Lesser drove the cock home with the jackhammer fury of a thousand Ron Jeremys, Obama has done jack shit to remove said cock, and if you think either Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush will ever consider not doing whatever Wall Street tells them to, you should really stop huffing industrial solvents.

On and on it goes. It will continue, probably worsen for most. It will not change, no matter how much you wish, no matter how fervently you participate in the useless voting ritual. It is true that only one party wants to get rid of the EPA, Department of Education, the minimum wage, a woman's right to choose, and so on. But it is also true that neither party will ever stand up to the people who have perpetrated this economic monstrosity that pervades everything else, not even a little bit.

I feel like a broken record most times anymore, bringing up this topic. Not because I'm bored with it -- far from it. I'm utterly fascinated by this tiny claque of transnational merchant princes, who actively -- deliberately, mind you -- are on an open mission to fuck this country over, and everyone in it. I'm fascinated by people who have more money than they could ever spend, and yet it's still not enough for them. I'm amazed by people who look at the millions of lives they adversely affect as some big fucking game.

I'm fascinated by the poor people that these soulless fuckers rook into voting against themselves, an enormous swath of chickens who can't wait to enthusiastically show their support for good ol' Colonel Sanders. How could you not find these people interesting. how could anyone not watch this dynamic and be compelled by its narrative, by its inevitable outcomes?

And people like Angel Gurria fascinate me perhaps most of all, because Gurria probably thinks he means well. These dogsbodies of the merchant princes, they should know better -- I mean, they do know how to read fucking spreadsheets and charts, right? But they seem sincere in their convictions that if "we" just made "opportunities" available for "them" to bootstrap themselves, the problem would solve itself. No matter how much evidence over the last generation is available and observable, they faithfully hew to their standard "remedies" -- go through the "higher education" racket, get balls-deep in debt so you can get a better job (doing what?), spend most of your working life trying to repay that debt and not get your job shipped to Asia. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

So I mentioned that this situation is simpler to resolve than the Serious People make it out to be, and it is. But there has to be willingness to use carrots and sticks on everyone, not just carrots for the owners and sticks for the peons. Incentivize keeping companies stateside and not exporting labor. Incentivize paying a living wage. Disincentivize screwing your workers, the way shitheel companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald's have become accustomed to doing. Make corporations pay their fucking taxes. Disincentivize offshoring profits. Disincentivize overcharging for college education. Start a massive infrastructure work project, like Eisenhower did with the interstate highways. Enact a 1-2% redistributive tax on the "high net worth" assholes, say, anyone with over $10M in wealth. Spread it around. Institute a one-time debt jubilee, paying down either a certain percentage or amount of interest-bearing debt on people's homes and educations (which are usury and overcharging in the first place). The Masters might be surprised at how quickly the economy surges from such measures, and everyone, including the owners, would actually profit from these measures. After all, if the peons have more money, they will buy more stuff. Shocking, I know.

Obviously none of this will ever happen, but what's really pathetic and disheartening is that no one with access to the corporate media would even consider mentioning such things. If there's a system that's incredibly self-regulating, it is the system that manufactures "official" opinion and consent. And the pillaging of the rentier class will persist for exactly as long as the peons are willing to put up with it.

Money Grab

I guess the thrill of hosting the Olympics is now officially gone, and good riddance. Notice that not a single one of the venues listed in the Deadspin article is in the US. Not that we're above that, mind you; there's never a shortage of municipalities begging to force its own citizens to build a playground for millionaires playing for teams owned by billionaires.

Watching the Olympics used to be a thrill when I was a kid; I still remember watching the Innsbruck and Montreal Games in 1976. There wasn't a particular favorite sport, but certainly the various "death on ice" events -- your bobsled, your giant slalom, etc., were exciting, the gymnasts were impressive, and the camaraderie and competition between athletes from various nations seemed evident.

But now it's just a big ol' hustle, stuffed with inane "human interest" stories and infinite commercials on an endless loop. I mean, they have to recoup the money somehow, we all get that. But it's about as entertaining and inspiring as watching flies fuck (as my kindly great-grandmother used to say in Sunday school).

Even people who enjoy watching sports -- and I'm definitely one of them; I watch a decent amount of NBA and MLB during playoff seasons, and am pretty much encyclopedic on college and pro football at this point -- have to admit that it's at best a diversion from real, pervasive issues, and at worst a system that grinds up the bodies of young men for the costly amusement of fans, the expense of taxpayers, and the benefit of owners only.

The Olympics have fallen into this trap as well; long ago, they abandoned the pretense of "amateur" -- as in, non-professional -- competitors on the world stage, which makes the whole thing even more of a shameless joke. It's sad, but it's up to people whether they want to keep supporting this racket or not.

I Got Your Stimulus Package Right Here

On the fifth anniversary of the "stimulus," it's not unfair to ask what precisely it stimulated. You can see pretty effective breakdowns of ARRA funds here and here, itemized and tabulated six ways from Sunday. There are descriptions of plenty of beneficial projects.

But it's also important to look at results, to ask why, for example, if over $98 billion was spent on transportation and infrastructure, so many of our bridges and highways are on the verge of collapsing. Why, after spending nearly $19 bn on health care, is the health care system still such a monumental clusterfuck, an issue that essentially works out to a 20% productivity tax, where wealth is extracted and siphoned upward for shareholders and exec bonuses.

Speaking of extracting and siphoning, how is it that after putting over $41 bn in stimulus money toward "energy," presumably at least some token efforts toward conservation and efficiency, the best this administration can point to is fracking, and pipelining tar sand bitumen? Does this sound like a tremendous bang for your hard-earned tax dollar?

Surely jobs were created and preserved by these and other efforts, so even as a stopgap there is some efficacy. But I said it at the start, and nothing has happened to change my mind -- at least some of the stimulus should have gone to households, rich and poor alike, some flat amount across the board, say $50,000 per household. You would have seen an aggregation of activities centered around three main goals -- spending, saving, and eliminating debt.

That last one is the killer, as our debt ratio has skyrocketed, with no way to get it back down to where the average person can save, or even have discretionary income to put back into the economy. This is a situation that I strongly and sincerely believe is not accidental or coincidental. It is by design -- the owners continue their accrual without missing a beat, while the rest barely manage to hang on, making them even more desperate to cling to whatever straws are left, to accept the few crumbs that still fall from the table.

It's a patronage system, so the stimulus pelf was going to patrons regardless of which party supported what policy. But imagine for just a second how much more successful it would have been to have at least part of that money go directly to taxpayers and consumers, rather than finance weasels who pulled the money at 0%, hoarded most and lent the rest to the peons at interest -- or just rigging the interest rates in the first place. Nice racket you got there.

{Update 2/21/14 20:00 PST:  Looks like The Krugster had the same bright idea there.]

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Not to read too much into a typical tearjerker type of "news" article, but as we head into the morass of health-care "solutions," you are going to be seeing more and more of these sorts of things, even though they have been there all along.

All the fear-mongering about "death panels" ignores the obvious situation, one that anyone who has had the misfortune of falling into the system knows all too well -- there are already death panels, insofar as there are individuals and groups of people, faceless, distanced from the emotional impact of the situation. They're called insurance companies, HMOs, or in this case, doctors who have to make difficult decisions with scarce resources, and may even be providing less-than-optimal palliative care.

The dirty little secret about health care costs is not really much of a secret at all -- nearly half of all costs are expended on about 5% of the overall population, while half the population use little or no resources of the system at all. (This in itself is something of a potential future problem, as the success or failure of (sigh) health care reform is predicated to a huge extent on what is euphemistically known as "prevention and wellness," part of which is the usual eat-less-exercise-more exhortations, but part of which is getting at least semi-regular checkups. The thing about doctors is that no one visits them until they're already ill.)

Even without knowing all the gnat's-eyebrow statistical specifics, most of us intuitively understand that this is very much an 80-20 deal, that most of the costs and expenditures are being directed at a very small portion of the population. What that hammers out to is that the public ends up subsidizing very expensive procedures for a variety of conditions, some of them catastrophic, some of them chronic, some of them by-products of lifetimes of poor impulse control and decision making.

That is part and parcel of risk-pooling, of the vaunted social compact; we take care of those who need it now, with the understanding that it will eventually be our turn. Of course, as with Social Security, there are groups of people who statistically pay into the system, yet never collect what they put into it -- smokers, drinkers, African-Americans, and other demographics with relatively less-than-average life expectancy. And yet, at some point, somebody -- or somebody else -- has to foot the bill for all these great machines and techniques and doodads and optimized revenue models. We could always look into more efficient systems, but what's the fun in that?

As a kid, I read tons of sci-fi, and watched more than my share of Twilight Zone and such. So I have, let's say, an enhanced appreciation for the somewhat ironic notion that humanity's capacity for technological innovation consistently surpasses its ability to adapt its social systems to accommodate those improvements. We saw this in the recent Iraq War -- wounded military personnel sustained catastrophic injuries that would have killed them instantly even ten years earlier, so they came back to a dead economy with no jobs in the first place, but with the added obstacles of frequently having to relearn how to walk, or use prosthetic limbs, or deal with the psychological trauma of disfigurement, or just being in combat at all.

The comments section in the CNN article is as interesting as it is predictable -- polarized, diametrically opposed camps of "so sorry, gotta let the cripples die" hard-nosed realists and "every life is precious and invaluable" super-idealists. Of course every life has value, of course you want to save everyone. Most importantly, of course we all want to believe that cost is not a consideration, or at best a tertiary consideration. But -- and this seems particularly to be an issue in the organ-transplant arena, where there simply aren't an abundance of suitable matches to be had, thus a scarcity in viable resources -- it is a consideration all the same. If the heart-transplant surgeon has one heart to work with, and two suitable recipients, chances are (all other factors being more or less equal) they'll go with the more viable recipient -- that is, the one that has the best shot at living a longer, more healthy and complete life.

It's easy to slam the "who made these people God" card when it suits them, but when they need someone to remove their kid's brain tumor, that's exactly the sort of person they want nosing around in the hippocampus. In the meantime, these issues of cost and allocation are only going to get more pronounced. Aside from "eat less, exercise more, relieve stress, take up yoga," it's difficult to impart any real advice on how to prepare for it. Don't get sick. Get a better job so you can afford the higher premiums.

If we're not going to address the elephant in the room -- that maybe hosing a captive market with $77 gauze pads and usurious geographically-based pricing models, so that insurance/pharma/HMO CEOs can get the eight-figure salaries they're entitled to, as enshrined in the Bible and ratified in the Constitution, isn't the most efficient way to run a system -- then this is what you get, forever and ever amen. Is anyone surprised by any of this?

Shit Happens

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Money for Nothing

So Larry Summers is out, and maybe Janet Yellen is in. I'll believe it when I see it, but it really doesn't matter much anyway. What's she going to do, stop giving interest-free money to the banks to lend to the peons?

Since we have Asians to make our shit for us, our economy is predicated on a few people keeping everyone else in perpetual debt and wage slavery. There is nothing else; no Fed monetary policy change is going to affect that. The "jobless recovery" will continue to be defined by more min-wage mcjobs and more people forced to make money on the side just to survive. Green grass and high tides forever.

The pernicious issue of wealth/income disparity could be solved tomorrow, either with some sort of (at least partial) debt jubilee, a bailout of the working class, or some combination. But that won't happen no matter who helms the Fed, whether it's Larry Summers, Janet Yellen, or Noam Chomsky. This machine operates under certain rules of political physics, and they are unalterable.

Transactional Morality

You have to give Conor Friedersdorf some credit for writing about a contentious issue with sensitivity to both sides of said issue. But as with the self-inflicted travails of Paula Deen several months ago, one needs to look beyond the fripperies of "human rights" and "tolerance" of "both sides" of these things.

As a lifelong diehard fan of professional and college football, I absolutely get that people want to believe that the televised broadcasts of games are there to enable them to watch their favorite teams compete, and that the commentators are selected for their ability to entertain. Sure, and the nightly news is there to inform you, right?

Look. Sports and news broadcasts exist to sell you shit, period. And with sports broadcasts especially, this is even doubly or trebly true -- since unlike the news broadcast in between the endless commercials for insurance and pharmaceuticals and big ol' pick-'em-up trucks designed to make you feel better about your tiny dong, the televised game also implicitly sells tickets and swag for the teams and the league.

It's a sports broadcaster's job to keep customers coming, and clearly Fox thought his comments might drive away customers, just as the Food Network thought Paula Deen's comments might drive away customers. These were not (at least not predominantly) moral considerations driven by political correctness. These were business decisions; in fact, it is entirely plausible that if James' and Deen's respective comments were found not to be impactful to the bottom line, their employment statuses would have been unaffected.

Individuals make moral decisions, but organizations do only when it is advantageous to do so, and I think that's something opinion writers tend to forget, which puts them into the position of begging the wrong questions. This is also a symptom of financial reporting, as perfectly good writers and thinkers persist in grabbing the wrong end of the stick.

As long as the government is giving free money to the banks to turn around and soak the peons, there is no "crisis," nor even a problem, from the viewpoint of the usurers, for whom the economy and the political system run. So the reporters and observers ask their plaintive questions of what needs "fixing." It's fixed, folks, take a closer look; if you're Goldman Sachs there is no problem. The object of the "economy," such as it is, from the rentiers' perspective, is to keep as many people as possible is a state of perpetual debt. This is accomplished primarily by chronically depressed wages, due to outsourcing and siphoning all profits from worker productivity gains at the top levels.

With non-stop news cycles and practically infinite modes of commentary, it is still a bit weird, if not terribly surprising, that so few "mainstream" media folks are inclined to simply see things for precisely what they are. The continuing, increasing rates of wealth inequity and hyperconcentration of wealth, and the domination of rackets in captive markets (especially health care and higher education), constitute the greatest threat to the well-being of American society.

All the more reason that no politician from "either" party will ever do a goddamned thing about any of it. They are being paid to let it ride. Those are the questions that need to be asked, at least as often as whatever tedious celebrity-sniffing bullshit gets offered as "news," or even "entertainment."

America the Lootiful; Or, Detroit Hock City

The estimable Charlie LeDuff has news for all y'alls looking at Detroit's tribulations and having your SMH moment at "those people":

So Detroit files for bankruptcy. What does this mean? Pay close attention because it may be coming to you soon, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia. In 2011, Moody’s calculated the unfunded liabilities for Illinois’ three largest state-run pension plans to be $133 billion. (It is expected to be even larger this year.) That’s the size of six Detroit bankruptcies — give or take a few hundred million.

Of Detroit’s debt of at least $18 billion, about $7 billion is secured by collateral like casino revenues and utility taxes. That means creditors — big banks — will get paid. Of the remaining $11 billion or so in unsecured debt, about $9 billion is owed to retirees and current municipal workers, people like firefighters and police officers. These debts come in the form of promised pension checks and health care benefits, all backed by a false, unsecured promise. These are the people who are likely to lose out.

And of course, all of these costs are driven by the exorbitant "health" "care" racket. All those public service workers, people who were dumb enough to trust the promises of the system, don't have to be screwed over. But they will. It's just business. And it will be reiterated, many times, many ways, in many cities around the country. Stay tuned, more fun times are ahead.

Business Class

This bit of apologia may turn out to be the Rosetta Stone of the economic collapse, when all is said and done. Any manager who literally Joe Biden believes that all positive NPV projects should be accepted has pretty much cogitated him/herself out of a job.

Theoretically this is why a decent portfolio manager would also be running regression analyses on the full beta of the portfolio, not just grabbing at anything and everything that pulls a "positive" NPV when run through Excel. You don't need to pay someone six figures and stock options in that; you can pretty much train a chimp to push buttons.

Not only that, but sheesh, if we are talking about a "project" which doesn't actually produce anything, but is a credit default swap on a put option on a collection of tranched subprime mortgages that have been laundered through the wringer of endless mortgage rebuyers and robosigned bullshit, then you are no longer talking about economic production. You're talking about a bookmaking operation, a casino, one whose business model is predicated on having the government give it money at 0%, so's it can turn around and lend it to the peons at 3-30%, depending on your particular mode of interaction with the beast.

Don't ask why, if the gov't can lend money out at 0%, why it can't do microloans to individuals at that rate, thus allowing said individuals to put money directly back into the economy, while disempowering a parasite class of middlemen and spreadsheet grifters. What's left of this economy is based on usury and racketeering, pure and simple.

At this point, that applies to higher education probably more than anything else in the American system, aside from health care. If you have to go $100K or so into debt to secure an advanced degree and enhance your earning power, but the jobs aren't out there, so you're on the hook for 15-20 years instead of 5-10 -- like it used to be before tuitions went through the roof -- the bottom line is that that's a full decade or so where you are unable to spend into the economy. Trust me on this; if I wasn't making barely median wage and still facing about $60K in student-loan debt, I'd be spending my earnings, not hoarding it in the Caymans like the Scrooge McDucks who really run this banana stand.

Get back to obsessing over royal babies and Kanye West and man-bites-dog stories that have nothing to do with you. Go back to sleep.

Public Service Announcement; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Debt Bomb

We all know this fact intuitively, but it still bears repeating and reminding ad nauseam -- all debt, whether it's your own personal household debt, or the debt incurred by your municipality, county, state, whatever, is someone else's equity. Just keep that in mind at all times when observing how the Masters of the Universe continue to find creative ways to rejigger the usury on their 30:1 leveraged derivatives on assets that frequently don't exist in the first place.

When they talk about "solvency," what they really mean is making goddamned sure that you and your kids and your grandkids and so on remain on the hook to paying them in perpetuity to the value they removed from your economy to hoard offshore. This is an important point, since the banksters' plaint is that they are worth the pelf they accrue, because of the value they add. But the only value added goes to directly to them, and comes out of everyone else's hide.

This is not politics, especially since they rent both parties. It's just math. It's simple -- if you have debt, the entity whose equity your debt affects has a vested interest in keeping your dumb ass on their balance sheet as long as possible. This is what I mean when I talk about "debt peonage" and "wage slavery," which are mutually reinforcing phrases.

If you make just enough money to get by, but never ahead -- as the majority of Americans do -- then you are on the hook forever, unless you're smart and lucky, and design the next hot app or whatever. Hard work alone will not do it anymore; there are plenty of folks out there busting ass at two or three pud jobs, who will never get off the hamster wheel.

Get the Frack Out

The fracking mishegoss is quite simple to resolve -- if you support it, even in theory, you should be willing to rent out your backyard for it, then. Enjoy the sinkholes and poisoned water table. This is the biggest ripoff; they're going to pollute and wreck these towns and poison the inhabitants, and scuttle off with the profits, while the taxpayers foot the bill for the environmental cleanup and health-care costs.

This is wretchedly similar to the arguments surrounding the viability of the Keystone XL pipeline. Let's break that one down to exactly what it is -- an expensive, unwieldy system designed to move low-EROEI oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico to be exported. It does nothing for domestic energy stability, it merely puts more money in the pockets of the have-mores, at the expense of the people who have live near its 1,500-mile length.

But the precious few jobs it creates for a couple years is better than nothing at all, right? Especially when everyone else will foot the eventual cleanup bill.

Back to School

Like I keep sayin', the American higher education system is a racket now. Pass it on.

Law of the Jungle

Continuing in a long line of truly wretched attorneys general, and not content with his other hobbies of griefing potheads and selling guns to violent Mexican drug cartels, Eric Holder and his DoJ have apparently found their latest high-profile quest:

The complaint, which can be seen here, describes what an FBI agent involved in the case called an “extensive, sophisticated, organized scheme.” A ring of people, ranging from a 31-year-old credit counselor in Philadelphia to a 74-year-old jeweler in northern New Jersey, allegedly conspired to make up fake identities, pump up credit profiles with more false information, and then run up huge unpaid credit-card bills.

All 18 people named in the indictment were charged with the same count of conspiracy to commit fraud, which carries a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine. Only 13 have been arrested. One is out of the country, and authorities are looking for the other four, according to a spokesman for the U.S. attorney for New Jersey.

The complaint describes something that resembles a multinational corporation—the enterprise “spanned at least 8 countries” (including Pakistan, India, China, Romania, and Japan), and at least 28 states. It involved the creation of 80 fake companies, more than 1,800 mailing addresses, 7,000 false identities, and 25,000 credit cards. It was as if the alleged fraudsters manufactured a small suburb, in which everyone had good credit at the beginning—only to walk away from big credit-card bills once they maxed out the plastic. The total cost is still being counted. But the U.S. says “final confirmed losses may grow substantially above the present confirmed losses of more than $200 million.”

Credit-card fraud is generally done with existing cards—crooks may hack the number, or get a new card sent to a different address, and then run up a bill until they get cut off. New account fraud is more difficult, time-consuming, but potentially more lucrative. The alleged fraudsters apparently read the personal finance literature on how to build and rebuild credit scores. They would apply for and receive low-spending-limit cards, make a few small purchases and pay down the balance. “This slowly increased the credit score of the false identities,” the complaint notes. Then, after the credit-card companies responded to the good behavior and improved scores by raising the spending limits, they would go on spending rampages and stop paying. This is also known as a bust-out scheme. “It’s not unique,” said Al Pascual, senior analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research. “It’s just that $200 million is huge. A bust out scheme of this scale is unprecedented.”

Ahahahaha. Right, unprecedented. Please, pull the other one. Counting all the unsecured derivatives out there, and the rest of the banksters' little perpetual grift machine, you're looking at probably over $200 trillion worth of potential economic devastation, completely out of control and totally unpenalized (except for the rare Bernie Madoff type who somehow forgot to rent themselves a handy pol or two). It's literally a million times worse than this credit-card fraud scheme, which is certainly sophisticated, but small potatoes in comparison. Yet all the feds do about that is appoint yet another inbred hack, an interchangeable fox to oversee the financial henhouse.

When the next financial collapse comes -- and rest assured, it will, and you and I and every other person not on Wall Street will pay dearly for it -- you can claim to have been distracted, perhaps, but you can't say you haven't been duly warned. The lack of priorities displayed by the authorities should provide enough clues in that regard.

"Thank You, America"

As if the bloodsucking financial industry hadn't plumbed the "no good deed goes unpunished" depths quite far enough, the fine upstanding folks at AIG are considering joining a suit declaring that we didn't bail them and their fucking failure bonuses quite enough. The suit is being led by former AIG head -- and future wormfood -- Hank Greenberg, who seems to be having a contest with Donald Trump to see who can more conclusively disprove the existence of karma. Greenberg will be 88 years old in a few months, which means that as soon as his lawsuit's done, he'll probably run for the US Senate.

Keep in mind that the $182 billion that AIG grifted from you and me is more than the entire total of the combined state deficits at the time of the bailout. (And goddammit, I knew those suck-up commercials had an ulterior motive. Hey, America, thanks for saving our asses -- maybe you won't notice while we're picking your pockets.) Maybe Greenberg can explain that one to the thousands of state workers across the countries who lost their jobs so that Hank and his fellow thieves could keep their Hamptons vacation homes. Because it's hard goddamned work upending the world economy into your own pocket.

Seriously, the next time the economy collapses -- and it will happen; these animals learned absolutely nothing, except that we're dumb enough to reward corruption -- let them fucking die, go find honest work. Have a debt jubilee, circulate some medium-sized lump sums into every household, rich or poor, and set the machine going again. It can't possibly shake out any worse than a greedy, grasping, claque ruining the country with banana-republic levels of income disparity.

The Fiscal Cliff Scam

Check this out, not really anything to add to it. Every element in the discussion of this "fiscal cliff" is explicitly designed to preserve and perpetuate wealth inequality, period.