Uncle Sam's Cabin

Via Charles Pierce, here's a little tale that oughta make your blood boil. The entire article is excerpt-worthy; suffice to say that there's a modernized version of the old southern work farms going on here, except this one is a food-industry-created temp agency where the "employees" don't get paid at all.

Should anyone be surprised that this particular slave-diversion outlet pretends to be a christian rehab, even though most of the "participants" have committed no drug-related crimes? No more than one would be surprised that the vile cow overseeing this scam is well-paid, runs some of the slaves to work her daughter's egg farm, etc.

Most exposés of the ever-expanding, ever-more-privatized carceral state focus (with good reason) on the disproportionate ratio of minority inmates exploited and abused under the system. But it's really a socioeconomic issue -- the slave drivers are just as happy to exploit poor whites as they are any other poor person. The race of the exploited person doesn't matter nearly as much as the captivity of the victim, the complete inability to fight back or resist against the evil perpetrated on them.

Considering the article mentions plenty of popular food brands that buy product from these slave farms, it would be nice to think some sort of economic pressure could be pushed onto these companies. In the real world, however, this is an unfortunate fart in a now endless hurricane. Beef is relatively easy to buy locally sourced, chicken much less so. But maybe if enough people hear about this atrocity, these monsters can be shut down and shunned.

In the meantime, this serves as an apt metaphor for the way our wonderful world really is:  you're either profiting from the racket, or being victimized by it. That's their ultimate goal.

The Evil of Banality, Part Two

The commemoration of Independence Day is always an opportunity to reflect on the good things about this country, even if for too many of our fella 'murkins it seems to be a chance to gorge on food and blow off our fingers.

After the last two years and counting, it seems now more to be a chance to reflect on whether we have the collective will to keep those good things and move forward. It's all well and good to write ourselves missives about how we can outlast the senile, doddering oaf currently at the helm. But we need to start working on how to overcome the factors that put him there in the first place, remembering once again that he is the symptom and not the disease.

The bigger problems are much more pernicious. All the wondrous technology we take for granted now, most of which was unimaginable just twenty years ago, was supposed to set us free, presumably on an ocean of infinite information and enlightenment. Instead, it has become the two-fisted tool of the would-be oppressor -- free porn (not just sexual, but things like "reality" teevee and celeb-sniffing and political bafflegab would count as well) for the masses, and tools of control for the owners.

Both are nothing more than sophisticated distractions, one more troubling than the other, but both working hand-in-glove. It's bad enough that people are besotted with kardashians (no longer capitalizing that word; they are merely nouns and objects), fake hook-up shows, and bottled lies from suspect content providers. What's even worse is that one party has systematically gerrymandered itself into a position of dominance, that their agenda is unabashedly regressive and ruinous. They seriously do not give a shit about anything but power, and are nakedly hypocritical in their pursuit of it.

And yet, gerrymandering or no, someone keeps putting them there -- or more accurately, many voters are putting many scumbags in there, over and over again. It's such a cheap cop-out to attribute it to voting habits, social influence, media bias. Individuals should take responsibility for their choices, and suffer the consequences for their poor choices, isn't that what we keep hearing? Failure to pay attention to reality is not an excuse, it's the con artist's invitation to do what he does best.

From the second New Yorker article linked above, let's take Texas Governor Greg Abbott as an example. Abbott was in his mid-twenties when he was paralyzed by a falling tree. He had no medical insurance, but sued the homeowner and the company that failed to identify and remove the tree, and won a settlement of about nine million dollars. Once he got into power, Abbott successfully got tort settlement amounts in Texas capped at $250,000.

It would be difficult to find a more stark example of how these fucking people think, how they don't even blink at their own rank hypocrisy. Abbott proudly belongs to a party that looks at uninsured people who fall into misfortune, and tells them to go fuck themselves. I think it's a goddamned shame that when Abbott had his accident, he wasn't stuck with the consequences of the very policies he has always supported. They should have dragged his broken ass into the street and told him he was on his own -- no payday, no free medical care. That is exactly what he thinks should be done to everyone else. Real christian of him.

So vile people have figured out how to use technology to do more efficiently what they have always done -- turn the lower classes against each other, against themselves, while the owners continue hoovering up all the wealth. They won't be happy until they have it all for themselves, and probably not even then. It is a pathology, a sickness of the soul they profess to believe in, but somehow never act accordingly. They always find some bullshit excuse to justify their rotten behavior. They have no shame, mainly because their constituencies keep letting them get away with it.

Voters are such cheap dates, it turns out. You don't have to take them to dinner, buy them flowers, any of that shit. You just tell them what they want to hear, empty platitudes and hoary bromides, scare talk about the other, whoever it is this week. And they buy it, every fucking time. Because it's easier to believe than to think rationally and skeptically. It lets them get back to their goddamned nothing that much more quickly. Who has time to read?

As a result of too many of our peers being stuck in their rut, content in having the intellectual lives of farm animals, we find ourselves in a bit of a pickle now. It has culminated -- again, for now, as this is systemic -- with the aforementioned doddering old man. He promised to fuck shit up, and that is one promise he is intent on making good on.

He is doing his grim best to non-strategically bluster the world into a nuclear conflagration. It may be us going at it with the Norks to defend Japan and South Korea, or it may be the "let's you and him fight" gambit he's trying with the Chinese -- who, like the Russians, see this fucking clown exactly for what he is, and are playing him as such.

It is actually something of a surprise that throughout, the stock market has held firm, even gained for the most part. Economic statistics tend to be lagging indicators, but one factor that was always presumed to be a given was stability, lack of volatility. Institutional investors do not typically like rolling dice and trying to guess what's coming day to day.

But here we are. We'll see how long it holds out, and then something will come next -- the same but worse, because it'll be smoother, more likable, less of a blustery prick. Pick any number of "moderate" Republicans who talk a good game when the cameras are on, but go along with the most vicious of policies every single time.

Hope is not a plan, but it is a way to keep one's bearings when times are darkest. So it's not the worst thing to try to maintain the dim hope that eventually enough people will see who their real enemies are and vote accordingly, not just at the ballot box, but with their wallets. Find out who's supporting these vile, lying bastards and put them out of business.

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.

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.

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.

Return On Investment

Goldman Sachs executive/Obama economic policy advisor uses CDS payout to add to the indoor heated pool at his Hamptons spread.

I know The Krugster means well, and he is a Nobel laureate and all, but it's almost as if someone needs to break the news to him:

For the last few months, I and others have watched, with amazement and horror, the emergence of a consensus in policy circles in favor of immediate fiscal austerity. That is, somehow it has become conventional wisdom that now is the time to slash spending, despite the fact that the world’s major economies remain deeply depressed.

This conventional wisdom isn’t based on either evidence or careful analysis. Instead, it rests on what we might charitably call sheer speculation, and less charitably call figments of the policy elite’s imagination — specifically, on belief in what I’ve come to think of as the invisible bond vigilante and the confidence fairy.

Uh-huh, and the bond vigilante and the confidence fairy usually convene at that off-ramp from the Suck It Expressway to Go Fuck Yourself Boulevard, near the tent city. (See what I did there?)

I don't think Krugman really needs to be told that this all falls under the general rubric of "it's not a flaw, it's a feature", but sometimes you wonder. Any investor, whether it's someone like Warren Buffett who generally invests in tangible assets, or some bookmaking hedge-fund scumbag, cares only about getting a return. If they thought more profit could be generated by encouraging and laundering more stimulus pelf, they'd gladly sign on to it, so the fact that they're not interested is more troubling than even Krugman characterizes it.

One aspect of this is that institutional investors really do seem to have allowed themselves to dumb down considerably. This may be attributed to a variety of reasons: the lack of accountability and proliferation of politically purchased moral hazard; the preponderance of automated spreadsheet algorithms doing most of the day-to-day trading, rather than people investing in ideas and things; the indifference to the inevitable consequences (see reason #1).

What you have here is a very small cadre of highly privileged -- yet not necessarily competent or qualified -- people controlling an increasing share of the nation's aggregate wealth. Worse yet, since they know that the peons will bailout their careless fuckups, they have almost zero incentive to maintain even modest standards of intellectual or moral rigor in their profession.

So you have what you have -- a fat, bloated carapace of a nation being hollowed out by financial parasitism. I don't think anyone envisions or desires perfect economic equality; it is impossible and unenforceable. However, when your level of income disparity is behind such workers' paradises as Vietnam and Yemen, and is actually closer to Zimbabwe than to those two, you have a real problem. Take a look down the whole list; the US is basically neck-and-neck with banana republics and sub-Saharan despotates.

It seems that, between their pension fund shell games, their shameless greed, and their credit-default-swap shenanigans, they may have reached that magical equilibrium where they don't need the masses to perpetuate their scam. Therefore any "stimulus" or "infrastructure" spending is a waste for them; they would make more money taking put options on Paraguay's World Cup chances. I think Krugman suffers from the same problem Obama does -- the belief that if you make rational appeals to people's better angels, truth and reason eventually will out.

This would be true if we had an economic elite that cared about creating things, instead of merely owning shit. But once you get past the public philanthropy of the likes of Buffett and Bill Gates, whaddaya got? A sub-class of people whose vocation is the acquisition -- and, more importantly, valuation -- of phantom wealth, paper profits. Keep in mind what the mechanics of the "financial reform" bill have been about -- the ability to peddle worthless securities to credulous institutional investors (a huge mode of control in leveraging pension funds, and thus the working-class chumps who depend on them to, you know, survive); the ability to leverage bad bets at asset ratios of over 30:1; the ability to basically force the next two generations of taxpayers to negotiate at gunpoint, to pay for someone else's deliberate mal-fee-ance.

These things are not "mistakes" nor "accidents". These are all very easily foreseen consequences of decisions made with indifference, if not outright malice, aforethought. And now that their bad bets have been paid off for them, and the ROI is in Asia rather than Oceania and Europe, they couldn't possibly give less of a shit what happens to displaced workers and the foreclosed homeless.

This is a very important, fundamental point that seems to escape many commentators, who dance around the issue and wonder that the Masters of the Universe don't get the ramifications of what they're doing or proposing. I assure you, they get it all too well, they know precisely what they are doing, and what the results will be. Every time I see the Dow average go up, I automatically assume that it happened on the backs of the peons, that unemployment or foreclosures or family murder/suicides are experiencing an uptick. More often than not, that appears to be the case. Wall Street seems to routinely profit, exult even, in the misery of the masses.

The sooner people start disabusing themselves of the weird, wild notion that the top 10%, which controls 70% of the nation's wealth, has any sort of moral or practical stake in the bottom half's 2.5% piece of the pie -- beyond how to use government leverage to forcibly extract that -- the more clear the picture will be for them. In the meantime, the middle class, the most consistent element of political stability, is decimated, paving the way for the corporate robber barons and their idiot demagogue apologists.

Fait Accompli

I agree it's a national tragedy in the making that the Supreme Court has removed the "constraints" of corporate political sponsorship.



We can only imagine the nightmare of corporate conformity and control that now awaits our innocent political system, not to mention our heretofore unmolested way of life.



I, for one, applaud our new insect overlords. At least they, unlike us, actually get what they pay for.