Deep Slices Of Trouble

The last ten years have not been easy on Americans, psychologically. We've had our innocence and hubris shattered, a moron President who tried to falsely raise our spirits and hopes by raping two other nations, another President who promised hope and change but who has had troubles not only with the "loyal" opposition, but the morons in his own party who can't pass legislation if you spot them 60 votes in the Senate, and two economic crises that threaten the very underpinnings of what it means to be an American: an unlimited future.

 

And now, we're starting to see those crises work their way into our bloodstream. Literally.

 

Item 1 -

But it's America that has become the world's preeminent fat-making machine. To dismantle it we need a coordinated, comprehensive plan of attack, one that pairs individual responsibility with a social construct that fosters good nutrition and a healthy lifestyle. We need to be surrounded by food that makes us well, not sick. We need schools and workplaces that reward us for exercising our bodies, not just our brains. "If you want people to make the right choices, they need to have the right choices to make," says Dr. William Dietz, director of the CDC's Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity. We need forceful and well-enforced policies, a government that invests dollars in improving the diet of school kids and puts limitations on the advertising that targets them. We need Americans to perceive obesity as a personal threat to themselves and to their children, not as somebody else's problem. We have a long way to go.

In New York State, there is a brutal ad campaign going on now that centers around the so-called "sugar tax," a tax on soft drinks and fruit juices that will be assessed based on the amount of sugar in a drink. I support this tax, just as I would support a tax on beer, wine, guns, tobacco and gambling if these did not already exist. The role of government is not to protect its citizenry from enemies foreign and domestic, and among those domestic enemies are corporations whose love of profit countermands their common sense and love of their customers.

Corporations spend billions of dollars a year on research and development of products that are blatantly unhealthy for us. While sugar is energy, too much of a good thing is no good. The problem is, drinking a sugary soft drink makes us feel good. Hell, they are marketed to us as life-improving and mood-altering substances, and there seems to be precious little difference from how a soda is sold to you and I, and how a prescription drug is sold to us. And drugs are controlled substances. Maybe it's time we were honest about soda and candy.

And because they make us feel good, we turn to them in times of crisis and need. Which brings me to item 2:

The most common assumption is that people are irresponsible and that they are not wise about their money. It's basically victim blaming … an attempt to shift the blame onto individual consumers. The other point of view on this issue is that it is primarily the fault of predatory lending practices--the "evil" credit-card companies. I'd say there's some truth to both views, but it's not that simple.

One of the most important factors is the easy availability of universal credit, plus the fact that the marketplace [is open to us during] every waking moment. Because purchases can be completed so quickly, they're very unlikely to be interrupted by a prudent thought. A third reason why people are going broke is the basic insecurity of our economy. If you have a consumer society where no one is saving—where no one is encouraged to save—and millions are in debt [and then] you hit them with a jolt to their income, they're instantly going to be in trouble.

That article, written in February 2008, has become more and more true as the months has unfolded. Right now, the crisis lurking in the tall grass is consumer credit debt: car loans, student loans, credit cards. Americans have worked hard to bring all of these down, but as incomes decay and erode due to inflation and poor economic conditions worldwide, more and more of these are going to go into default.

The best estimates of consumer debt runs around $2.5 trillion dollars, and this is debt that is secondary to things like mortgages. This represents car loans, credit cards, lines of credit, and payments on those along with mortgages equal about 13.1% of after-tax income to Americans.

The real problem lies in the fact that a substantial number of Americans make absolutely no dent in their debts: they pay the minimum balances. This type of debt is intended for short term fixes, but instead have become long-term obligations that must be paid off at some point, but not today. And they don't go away if you lose your job. There's no house to walk away from and let the bank have.

Much has been made of "underwater mortgages," mortgages where the balance owed is more than the resale value of the house securing the loan. But think about this: of that $2.5 trillion, almost none of it represents an asset that can be sold to reduce the indebtedness. It's all money that's been pissed away to pay for food, clothing, a car, toys and games.

In other words, you'll be paying in 2030 for a vacation you take this year. If you're still able to. And mind you, that's not to say we as a nation have been completely irresponsible: much of this indebtedness flows from the un- or underemployed, people with catastrophic illnesses, people who divorce, people who have unplanned pregnancies. People who meant well, but life threw them a curevball.

So if you've been wondering why all of a sudden, your "friendly banker" has been charging you fees for things you never paid for before, or has been working hard to make it deliberately harder to pay your credit card on time so he can collect late fees, or has been urging you to just spend more, well, this is why: he has to mine the good credit in order to cover his likely losses on the bad.

That's not going to improve the mindset of the people of this country. We're heading to a crisis of confidence, and in crisis, as I've discussed before, comes along the black horse.

 

 

You Can Stop Calling Him "Shirley"

RIP Peter Graves

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) iPad pre-orders opened today. Yes, I ordered mine, despite the misgivings some have expressed.

 

2) Things are heating up in Israel and the West Bank. Three words: Stop. The. Settlements. The US cannot afford to get involved in a conflict between the Israelis and the Arab World. Or can we? One way to grow out of a recession is to launch ha full-scale war. This has to be among the options being weighed.

 

3) There's a serious problem in this nation: only 20% or so of people of college age currently will ever graduate from college. This will help improve that number, but not by much. The highest that rate has been in this country is 30%. That's pathetic for a nation where you allegedly have opportunity.

 

4) It saddens me that it took nearly ten years to decide to do the right thing by first responders at Ground Zero. That's shameful in a nation that, for eight years, was touted by the previous administration to have robust growth.

 

5) Great choices all, Mr. President!

 

6) There's a great six part series on Slate.com on an international crisis I bet you never even knew existed.

 

7) A little sour lemon with your Teabagging, sir? I wondered how much longer the ridiculous TeaBaggers movement could avoid dealing with the Jesus freaks. Get the popcorn, Mother!

 

8) The competitors in the 2010 NCAA college basketball tournament will be picked this weekend. My Cinderella pick this year is West Virginia, who I think will surprise a lot of people with how deep they get in the tournament.

 

9) Wolves eat teacher. That will become, unfortunately, a more common headline.

 

10) Facebook punked out, probably because Glenn Beck cried.

A Diversion From My Usual Rantings

Normally, I'll ignore some dumb celebrity's tragedy because a) other people are more interested in it than I and therefore will be either more informative or more entertaining and b) I really, truly, honestly could not care less.

 

Something about Corey Haim's story resonates with me, however.

 

I think this story of a child star gone and stayed bad is one that highlights a really despicable part of the business: the way this supposedly "liberal" industry chews up and spits out people.

 

Mostly actors, of course, but also directors, writers, crew, administrative people and so on.

 

One of the big reasons I never even tried to become famous was I saw the price fame demanded back in friends who have made it. You lose your soul. You become this 24/7 publicity machine, simultaneously trying to promote yourself (which I find odious enough) while trying to promote a thing, a movie, a film studio, a production company, a director (OK, not so much a thing, but an externality).

 

Why? That's the deal you make with the devil. One hand washes the other, but neither hand really wants to wipe your ass. So long as you keep scrubbing, you'll get scrubbed and thus have the delusion of keeping clean. So long as you make money, in other words, for the product, you'll be treated like someone.

 

"I cudda bin a contendah, I cudda bin SOMEbody!" There's not a lot of difference between a prize fighter who throws a fight and an actor who does it for the money. Eventually, you'll be asked to go in the tank for someone else.

 

This is, where I think, Hollywood gets out of hand and invasive. The lure of stardom, of easy money, is powerful. The studios know this and so can let you peek thru the keyhole if you have even the slightest bit of marketability (talent never comes into it. Never.) but to get the door open, you have to know the Wizard and the only way to know the Wizard is to sell yourself out.

 

Acting is not hard work.

 

No, let me rephrase that: most of the acting you see on TV or in movies is not hard work. It should be hard work, but we've settled on a system where the ad campaign will draw people to the box office to see pretty people in extraordinary circumstances and hopefully, they'll feel good enough about what they're shown to tell other people about the movie. This kind of acting, shallow, superficial, cartoonish, that's easay work. Stand on your mark, deliver your lines, and if you're supposed to be funny, you might get a laugh.

 

The hard work of acting, the painful work, is divesting yourself of your ego and presenting a portrayal of a real person, fleshed out from your own experiences and therefore living your pain. You present your reality through this character by living his life.

 

That. Hurts.

 

One of my favorite actresses (you've probably never heard the name, I bet, so I won't embarass her) is also one of my favorite people on the planet. I've worked with her. I've seen the work she puts into a character. She appeared in a trilogy of blockbuster films...which is clue enough. She created a very real character, one who appears on screen and you can pretty much instantly identify her story.

 

So real, in fact, that I had to be told it was her doing the role. I didn't recognize her, didn't even know she was in the first film until I got an email from my acting teacher.  Oddly enough, she has her life together. Maybe she's a bit neurotic, but you know what? She's one of the most grounded people I know and she's 20 years younger than me. Women my age aren't as put together as she is.

 

Now, I've never seen a Corey Haim film. I can only presume that he was one of the basically interchangeable actors of the 80s and 90s, pretty faces who could barely recite a line, but was sooooooooo cute they ended up with a teeny bopper fan club. I mean, I've seen Corey Feldman in movies, and I know he's for shit and since they are pretty much equivalent, I can surmise Haim was about that level.

 

So how does a human being reconcile being bad at what they do with the stardom that is thrust upon them because they were in a cult classic (like Lost Boys) or a teen exploitation film (like License To Drive), both of which earned gobs of money for the studio? How do you go through life knowing that Jason Patrick or Anthony Michael Hall could replace you at a moment's notice in any film and probably do a better job?

 

In other words, how stressful is your life knowing you're walking a tightrope that only you can walk and the rope is fraying?

 

The studio system in America sucks dogtails, but worse than that is the damage it causes to people who work in it. Now add to that the fact that most actors start out in the business fresh out of school, because God forbid we have a real movie system that portrays real life situations and drama that involve an ounce of physical maturity, and you have a recipe for repeating disasters. Like Corey Haim. Like Heath Ledger. Like...well, name five actors who died last year of anything other than old age, and I'd bet at least two fit this description.

 

Sad. Really.

So, I Took A Night Off...

...and went to Nerdstock last night.

 

There's been a theme running around my mind, and apparently other people's minds, about the psychologic future of America and Americans (read the comments in the thread in particular).

 

Mourning has come to America. The instillation of fear by the right wing (and by some on the left) is complete. We seem paralyzed.

 

Barack Obama's election was supposed to be about hope and change, but the GOP marched in opposition, and threw all their considerable financial weight behind the astroturfed TeaBaggers, and succeeded in punching holes in that optimism, at least for now and at least to enough of an extent that it has become a narrative in the Mainstream Media.

 

How does this tie into Nerdstock? The lecturers at this event, Drs. Joseph LeDoux and Daniela Schiller, lectured about fear: how it works in and on our brains, the psychochemical processes, and more important, how experiments have dictated a new way to overcome fear.

The lectures, while generally at the lay level, got a little technical even for my massive manly brain-the-size-of-a-planet, but I can boil out a few bromides (err, no pun intended):

 

1) Fear is instantaneous learning. Evolution dictates that the engagement of the amygdala (the brain's center of fear) bypasses rational thought and creates an immediate and immediately learned response to fear. You can't afford to get it wrong a second time.

 

2) Fear is very hard to unlearn. It takes only one event, say a terror attack, to learn fear. It takes any number of similar contextual stimuli without the fear-inducing event for the body to relax (the classic Pavlovian experiment where a rat is shocked when it hears a tone, and then hears the tone without shock: it still responds to the shock and it takes many repetitions to minimize the reaction).

 

3) Fear is usually controlled with medications: serotonin or Valium, as examples.

 

4) The research that the doctors performed suggests that another, more effective and less pharmaceutical therapy might be to replace the stimulus/response with another similar stimulus/response mechanism, but this time, one that will have less impact on the individual's daily life.

 

A click went off in my head as I listened. If the right-wing is instilling fear, and that fear is intrasigent in the American psyche then the only way, short of dumping a boatload of LSD (which short-circuits the amygdala) into the water supply is to replace that fear with another, equally fearsome boogieman.

 

Right now, the object of fear is Barack Obama, who represents the left and all that is wrong with the left wing in America: socialist, unAmerican, minority. All the things that play right into the fear response of middle Americans.

 

What we need to do is to pair Obama in the minds of these low-normals with another object of fear, and let that object gradually draw the fear away from Obama to itself.

 

What we need, in other words, is something the right wing could truly be afraid of, thus framing Obama as a more moderate and therefore more acceptable choice. We need a sacrificial lamb to run a left-wing opposition to Obama's policies and to be taken seriously.

 

But who?

Here's To Women

Today is International Women's Day.

 

Much can be said about the role of women in the world but I think the overriding point to note is that, as the majority gender on the planet, women deserve a larger voice in the way things ought to be.

 

It seems that when women run a country, it seems to be run just a little more equivalently. There are exceptions of course...Maggie Thatcher springs to mind...but those exceptions seem to be mostly influenced by hard-line autocratic political machinery rather than a woman's passion and dedication.

 

Given what a woman has to go through in order to be heard even on a local level, it seems to me that successful women have what we Finns call sisu, or a stick-to-it-tiveness that eventually melts opposition away.

 

And that's unhealthy. Opponents should be swayed by argument and logic, not by "Here, let her have what she wants."

 

Indeed, part of the conservative backlash in this nation is the self-perception on the part of conservative men that they've "given in," which allows them the illusion that their arguments were petty, weak, and wrong-headed. It's not the argument that's wrong, the logic goes, but the arguer who was weak.

 

Which is why stupid ideas like "tax cuts = wealth for all" still hang around despite thirty years of facts and evidence compiled against them. Worse, there's an element of fear, of loss of control, influence and entitlement that makes conservative men (and their chattel, conservative women) into mindless automatons unwilling to listen to new ideas that mean progress.

 

We liberals are sort of stuck with this, and praise the Lord for that. I'd rather be on the front end of where the world is headed than on the ass end: the view is better and it smells infinitely preferable.

 

Here's to women. Long may they reign.

 

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Um, oops! This is definitely not good news.

2) Clearly not a terrorist attack, cuz, you know, he was white.

3) I presume from the coverage I've seen, his body language and uncombative postures, that David Paterson will resign shortly.

4) The Oscars are this weekend. Yet another wasted Sunday night. I get the sense that George C. Scott was right to ignore them.

5) More than you wanted to know about touchscreen technology.

6) Why your next diet might include a glass of Lysol every day.

7) Bill O'Reilly: burrrrrrrrrrrnt!

8) Y'know, you think this is a "nanny state" issue, but read more closely: the kid had been warned on several occasions to stop pointing his finger and making *bang* noises. That the parents didn't tell the kid to quit it before he gets into trouble is abusive parenting.

9) Oh, so it WASN'T the urine that killed him? PRO-TIP to my younger, less-experienced-at-being-drunk readers: never pee near wires, even if they're insulated.

10) No, the man's name was not Jean Valjean.

Would Health Care Reform Help You?

(ed. note: I'm turning the blog over to my friend, Barbara O'Brien, for an important discussion)


Many obstacles and stumbling blocks remain in the way of health care reform. The House and Senate bills will have to be merged, and then the House and Senate both will vote on the final bill. We don’t yet know what will be in the final bill, or if the final bill will be passed into law. Passage will be especially difficult in the Senate, where it will need 60 votes to pass. It is still possible that after all this angst, just one grandstanding senator could kill the whole thing.

But just for fun, let’s look at what conventional wisdom says will be in the final bill and see if there is anything in it that will be an immediate benefit to people with peritoneal mesothelioma and other asbestos-related disease.

It is likely that the final bill will provide additional funding for state high-risk insurance pools. Currently more than 30 states run such pools, which are nonprofit, state-sponsored health insurance plans for people who can’t buy insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The biggest problem with such pools is that, often, the insurance they offer is too expensive for many who might need it. Both the Senate and House bills provide $5 billion in subsidies for state high-risk pools to make the insurance more affordable.

Under the Senate bill, beginning in 2014, private companies would no longer be able to deny coverage to adults with pre-existing conditions, nor could they charge higher premiums for people with pre-existing conditions. Until then, the state high-risk pools could provide some help.

Closing the Medicare Part D coverage gap — also called the “doughnut hole” — is another potential provision that could help some patients with asbestos-related disease. The “doughnut hole” is the gap between the coverage for yearly out-of-pocket expenses provided by Medicare Part D and Medicare’s “catastrophic coverage” threshold.

For example, in 2009 Medicare Part D paid at least 75 percent of what patients paid for prescription drugs up to $2,700. After that, patients must pay for all of their prescription medications until what they have paid exceeds $6,154. At that point, the catastrophic coverage takes over, and Medicare pays for all but 5 percent of the patient’s drug bills. The final health care reform bill probably will provide for paying at least 50 percent of out-of-pocket costs in the doughnut hole.

You may have heard the bills include budget cuts to the Medicare program, and this has been a big concern to many people. Proponents of the bill insist that savings can be found to pay for the cuts, and that people who depend on Medicare won’t face reduced services. But this is a complex issue that I want to address in a later post.

The long-term provisions probably will include many other provisions that would benefit patients with asbestos-related disease, including increased funding for medical research. Although there are many complaints about the bill coming from all parts of the political spectrum, on the whole it would be a huge benefit to many people.

— Barbara O’Brien
March 4, 2010

Truly Irked

Erik Erickson, or as I like to call him, Irked Irksome, is a doosh.

You know, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the states that pay the least amount of unemployment benefits over time have the lowest unemployment and when we keep subsidizing the behavior, the behavior continues.

Irk needed to do more work.

For example, here's an analysis of unemployment by population density, most unemployment versus state ranking in density:

Michigan - $362     14.6%     16
Nevada - $362     13.0%     42
Rhode Island - $641     12.9%     2
South Carolina - $326     12.6%     21
California - $450     12.4%     11
Florida - $275     11.8%     8
North Carolina - $476     11.2%     15
Illinois - $511     11.1%     12
Alabama - $235     11.0%     27
Oregon - $463     11.0%     39

You'll note that of the top ten states in unemployment percentage (as of 2009) only two rank in the bottom half in population density (which also correlates to cost of living, which directly correlates with the amount in unemployment insurance.)

Of the last ten states in population density, only one has a rate over ten percent (roughly the national average)

Alaska - $320     8.8%     50
Wyoming - $387     7.5%     49
Montana - $386     6.7%     48
North Dakota - $385     4.4%     47
South Dakota - $285     4.7%     46
New Mexico - $455     8.3%     45
Idaho - $364     9.1%     44
Nebraska - $298     4.7%     43
Nevada - $362     13.0%     42
Utah - $427     6.7%     41

It gets better.

Of the top ten states in terms of unemployment benefits paid, only one ranks in the bottom half of population density

Rhode Island - $641  2
Massachusetts - $628  3
Connecticut - $576  4
New Jersey - $560  1
Pennsylvania - $547  10
Minnesota - $538  31
Hawaii - $523  13
Washington - $515  25
Illinois - $511  12
Maine - $496  38

But here's the kicker: the ten states with the lowest unemployment benefits, and their ranking by unemployment percentage (10% being roughly the national average)

Michigan         1
Nevada                    2
DC                         6
Wisconsin             30
Delaware             25
South Carolina         4
Alaska                 29
Georgia         16
Missouri         19
Nebraska         49
South Dakota         50
Florida         7

So Irk's little benefits = unemployment is absolute and utter bullshit.

 

 

Godspeed Jon Swift

I'll miss you.

 

Story here.

 

UPDATE
The problem with posting on the fly as I have to is that I can't really say what I want to say.

Jon Swift, or as we now know, Al Weisel, was a writer to envy, and I often did. His talent and dedication to both entertain while informing was unparalleled in Blogtopia (© Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo). He was always willing to lend a hand to a C-List blogger like me, and would sometimes comment here or email me if he thought a piece I had up was particularly interesting.

I envy him his ability to remain in character while writing words that thoroughly skewer that character's outlook. I wondered sometimes if he cringed at some of the things he was forced to say in order to get to his point.

He was Stephen Colbert, only funny without being a cardboard cutout. Clearly, he thought his way through positions he abhorred and found the comedy inherent in the ignorance it took to hold ludicrous thoughts.

He was a humourist's humourist. His ability to mine irony and poignance did not end with him. He died on the way to his father's funeral of a broken heart, literally. Not only that, but the last post he left us, almost a year ago, was acknowledging a friend's terrible tragic loss.

Its title? "Sometimes There Are No Words". It was on that thread that his mother notified us of his loss. I like to think that he looked down, cringed at first, then got the joke.

Here's to you, Mr. Swift, Mr. Weisel! A scotch in your honor, with a glass turned upside down.

Unless, you know, you'd like to return and share it with me...

We Used To Call It "Trust Busting"

Finally, some rational thought from the Federal Reserve:

"I think the disagreeable but sound thing to do regarding institutions that are TBTF (ed. note. Too Big To Fail) is to dismantle them over time into institutions that can be prudently managed and regulated across borders," he said. "And this should be done before the next financial crisis, because it surely cannot be done in the middle of a crisis."

Adam Smith would roll over in his grave to understand how perverted his elegant economic system, for all its initial flaws, has become, corrupted by the aggregation of money, power, and influence. He intended for small businesses to compete against each other to provide goods and services to consumers.

Indeed, our Founding Fathers had a great and long debate about even opening up a national bank which would serve as a 800 lb gorilla in the banking system to provide leverage against large business combinations attempting to wrest control of the national money supply. Inevitably, businesses of all sizes fail. It's just a question of time.

If a major multinational bank fails, it doesn't just hurt its employees and shareholders as we've seen. It threatens the entire nation, from its financial security right down to its physical security.

And that's not good.

"Too Big To Fail" is, quite simply, too big. Full stop.

We've discussed on this blog the marvels of distributed power generation. Money is power. Banks should be hacked down to manageable sizes that service the communities they are located in, with no direct entanglements in regions where they have no business being in, and I don't just mean geographic. I mean economic sectors, business sectors, even political sectors.

Will this harm the banking system? I don't think so. I think the system will evolve, perhaps parent corporations that can hold smaller banks under an umbrella, with governmental oversight to make sure there isn't as much crossover as there is now will be established.

One thing is certain: the banking system we have now is on the road to yet another collapse. Businesses fail. Industries fail. Banking will fail again unless we address the inherent flaws immediately.

 

Postage Due

One of the more idiotic things about conservatives is this crying need to privatize everything, as if somehow private companies could do a far better job than the government in everything.

 

Case in point: The US Postal Service. The USPS is mandated to deliver mail to every single household in America, and to do it for a flat rate. A letter costs 44 cents, whether it travels one mile, ten, or three thousand.

 

Conservatives would have us privatize that service, somehow ensuring that the statutory service provisions would survive privatization. They wouldn't, as anyone who's waited for the UPS man to come can tell you.

 

Now, however, we've reached a point where we may have to make changes to the Postal Service:

WASHINGTON—U.S. Postmaster General John Potter expects to deliver more bad news Tuesday to postal customers, employees and Congress, revealing forecasts for continued losses that can be stanched only with higher prices and reduced service.

Faced with mounting red ink, the Postal Service will seek to cut back mail delivery to five days a week starting next year, to raise rates on some postal services beyond what it's currently allowed to charge, and to impose emergency rate increases.

A plan the Postal Service will file with the U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission later this month aims to scale back delivery in 2011 from the current six-days-a-week schedule. Discussions with postal regulators over rate increases are under way as well; increases being sought could result in sharp increases in some postal rates, including for newspapers and magazines.

The US Postal Service operates as a not-for-profit agency. This is a good thing. It keeps our mailing costs down.

The problem, to me, seems to come in the form of the admixture of a not-for-profit agency saddled with the burden of providing service to for-profit companies. Now, toss in the Internet, meaning e-mail, online bill payment, and online reading materials that used to be delivered by the USPS, and you begin to understand the problem.

There's enormous waste in the system that needs to be accounted for before we talk about cutting back services to five days a week. This wouldn't be the first service cuts imposed. Believe it or not, when I was a lad, the postman dropped off mail twice a day!

I know! Astounding, isn't it?

First thing we need to do is to reduce the volume of junk mail that clogs our mailboxes. Direct marketers, catalog operations, and other "snail spammers" ought to pay for the luxury of jamming my mailbox so full that sometimes I don't get urgent mail because it's been crushed into the bottom of my box.

A dual service, then, would be served by upping the bulk mail rate on non-periodicals. It would slow the tide of junk while providing a needed boost of cash. Trust me, catalog providers won't stop sending catalogs if we doubled the rate. Too, so many catalogs are now online that a smart marketer would send out fliers instead with a representative sample, directing people to a website.

Second, the USPS ought to get into tighter competition with the private carriers like Fedex. Fedex funnels their package services through central hubs like Memphis, TN, even if you're shipping across town. Crosstown packages could get a guarantee of overnight deliveries at prices deeply discounted from Fedex's. Hell, match Fedex pricing and promise same-day service, and the volume will jump (courier services charge a lot more, so the USPS would find itself in a mid-price point).

Third, encourage people to visit the post office more often. Open non-mail related kiosks, for one thing. How about a selection of greeting cards? Or newspapers, the same ones people get delivered? Give people a reason to go to the post office, and then give them a reason to buy there.

Those are just off the top of my head. Do you guys have any other ideas?

 

Payback Is A Bitch!

If only you had been a good soldier on healthcare, Mrs Lincoln.

An Admission Of Failure

By now, you've heard about the kerfuffle over the recent request by WellPoint Insurance in California for a whopping 40% increase in rates. Not being the CEO or CFO of WellPoint and not having studied their financial position carefully, I can't judge the fairness of this request.

However, little noticed in this request is an admission that insurers have failed to keep up, despite the bushels of money they've extracted from the pockets of the American working public.

Her testimony, and other statements she and other WellPoint executives have made, suggests that insurers can't profitably manage through periods of high unemployment. They can't price policies in a way that keeps healthy young people in the same pool as older people, producing a mockery of the very point of indemnity insurance. Despite a decade of unobstructed consolidation, which was sold to regulators as a way to control healthcare costs by creating mega-insurers like hers, her industry can't control healthcare costs.

In other words, the only way an insurance company can effectively make profits on private health insurance is to sell policies to enough healthy people to cover the costs of the older and sicker.

To put it analogously, the only way a car insurer could make money is to issue car insurance to people who don't drive.

Insurance of any kind is a bet: enough people will feel uncomfortable without it that they'll purchase peace of mind to cover those who really need help with their bills. As an insurer, if you keep up, and you'll make money. Don't keep up, and you'll lose.

So here's the thing: if insurance companies are losing customers as people lose their jobs and can't keep up, why aren't the costs of medical care coming down proportionately?

It's true, we as a nation are getting older, and sicker. We have an obesity crisis across the land that's had reverberations in diabetes, colon cancer, strokes and heart disease, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. A sicker nation means more spent on healthcare, and as we've learned in Econ 101, a higher demand forces prices higher.

But a higher demand does not force costs higher and there's the rub. It's no coincidence that the AMA has opposed a public option because the government would be the 800 pound gorilla in the room that would force everyone, from insurers to patients to doctors, to take account of its actions.

There's only one way to lower prices on a supply-and-demand basis. If you can't lower demand, then obviously the thing to do is to raise supply: bring more availability to the market place to increase competition, which will lower prices across the board and will create a market force that will dampen down the costs of medical care.

Add to that the influence (or spectre, depending on how paranoid you get) of the Department of Justice subpoenaing your billing records or the IRS auditing your tax returns to ensure compliance with cost-cutting programs, and medical costs will quickly come down.

In truth, classic economic theory practically demands a public option, with a mandatory buy-in, which will create market forces to bring prices down. This is not unheard of in American society: we did it with our power utilities until they were deregulated, and we were fine with putting together an infrastructure that could be privatized eventually, even if the privatization became a mess after Republican greed got its mitts on it.

A New Look

Well, after ages of looking at the same retarded* template, and watching it gather kipple like the corners of a flat in Bexhill, I decided to upgrade my blog's look.

Hope you like it as much as I do. I'll be tweaking the settings as I go. The final straw was the fact that, for some strange reason, my sidebar ended up under my posts.






* Sorry, Sarah, I calls 'em like I sees 'em

Say A Word For The Salt Of The Earth

David Paterson was the accidental governor. He probably had no business being there, but who could possibly have foreseen that Eliot Spitzer would turn out to be such a massive disappointment in his personal life?

 

Still, he was thrust into the limelight, unprepared, and tried to make the best of a bad situation. He was the voice of reason when the state senate was threatening to boil over into a militarist dictat.

 

Thank you, governor.

 

That said, I'm happy that he's come to this decision

Gov. David A. Paterson announced on Friday afternoon that he was ending his election campaign and would not run in November.

Mr. Paterson, his administration caught up in a whirlwind of allegations about its intervention in a domestic violence episode involving a top aide, ended his campaign less than a week after it officially began. But he defiantly denied any wrongdoing in the burgeoning scandal over his involvement in the abuse case.

The final straw was his special assistant, David Johnson, and allegations that he was a serial abuser of women. He was forced to turn the investigation of his administration over to his likely opponent in the Democratic primary next year, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

In short, he was screwed into office and now screwed out of it.

Paterson's was a landmark governorship. He was the first legally blind governor elected in New York State, as well as the first African American governor in our history. Paterson's accomplishments, his father's influence notwithstanding, are many, and we should take a moment and salute him for coming this far.

Sadly, he fell short, and accumulated ridicule almost from his first day in office for his open marriage. That admission did not inoculate him from sex scandal rumours, including one horrible abuse of the journalistic process perpetuated by the New York Times.

Apparently, despite a buildup that promised a story more salacious than Fanny Brice, Paterson got nebulously involved in the dispute between Johnson and the woman who alleged Johnson assaulted her, but even at that, his involvement sounded more like he supported her story than defended Johnson.

This was not the first time that Paterson sent chilling signals. He had state police investigate then-state senate majority leader (and now convicted felon) Joseph Bruno.

His administration was all but in the toilet anyway, and his popularity ratings made Dick Cheney smile. It's sad, but he could have been so much more and ended up so much less.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Congratulations to the US Women's Hockey Team. They may have lost, but they played a spectacular game, only slightly less perfect than the Canadians. I watched most of the game, and the ladies never really seemed to lose their nervousness.

2) But there's no climate change!

3) The Ten. Billionth. Song.

4) I thought this answer was rather obvious: everyone, but especially the insurance companies. It doesn't help that Americans are generally fat, lazy cows who are stupid about what they eat, but if insurance companies had taken a smarter approach to how and what they insure, we wouldn't be in this mess.

What's wrong with reimbursing people for staying healthy? For losing weight (some insurers do these), for going to the gym, for quitting smoking, for any number of pro-active steps a person can take? A full reimbursement, I'm talking about, not some $400 sop at the end of the calendar year. Why not pay for checkups at a higher pro-rata basis than for emergency care for preventable illnesses? None of this is rocket science, and all of it would have kept healthcare costs down.

5) Not much was accomplished at Healthapalosers yesterday. I didn't expect much. It really was intended as a line in the sand for Republicans: get them on record opposing universal coverage and limiting the costs of healthcare.

6) When your whale kills three people, don't blame the trainer (and last to die.) Whales, like people, have personalities. Some are nice and even tempered, others are irrascible curmudgeons who will get nasty. And I consider myself a nice curmudgeon!

7) OK, so maybe I was wrong earlier this week, and maybe this is the real thing.

Maybe.

8) Twitter is for Twits, v45.9

9) Poor guy

10) "Johnny, do you smell gas down there?" "I dunno, Ma, I'm trying to thaw these...." BOOM!

Bet You Didn't Realize This

One big reason why your health insurance bills, as well as your medical bills, have been skyrocketing is...lack of competition!

The House voted Wednesday to strip health insurance companies of their exemption from federal antitrust laws, a Democratic measure that could resonate with public concerns about insurers but that has an uncertain future in the Senate.

The provision passed on a 406 to 19 vote, with most Republicans joining all the House Democrats in voting for the measure.

President Obama has said he favors the idea of repealing the exemption, and House Democrats say doing so would add scrutiny to the practices of health insurers. "The American people want and need this protection," said Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.)

Basically, the regulation and oversight of insurance companies was done on a state-by-state basis after a 1945 anti-trust exemption was passed. Nominally, this was supposed to avoid collusion, price manipulation, and other lovely outcomes of monopolization.

Except...well, when you have major corporations who can talk to each other about what they're doing in New York as opposed to Montana, and yet, Montana and New York's attorneys general do not or cannot talk to each other on how to handle it...I said it the other day: in confusion, the more powerful force will manipulate the situation to aggregate more power.

A state or two is not as powerful as a multinational insurer with lobbyists in Congress.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office believes this repeal will do little to lower insurance premiums. I disagree. That might be true short term. It will take a while for Congress to bone up on insurance and monopolies. Long term, however, I think this will dampen increases and perhaps even lay the groundwork for lower rates.

If. We. Have. A. Public. Option.

It's funny how Republicans seem so scared of free enterprise. They don't seem to mind the anti-capitalist conglomerates that fund their campaigns, but they mind someone bigger coming along to bully them.

Weird, that.

 

 

 

Um, Better Him Than Me?

Ellen DeGeneres: Simon Cowell "Wants Me"

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

 

E Pluribus Unum

This story annoys me:

Republican Congressional leaders on Tuesday rejected President Obama’s challenge to come up with a single comprehensive proposal to achieve his goal of guaranteeing health insurance for nearly all Americans.

 

But they said they would attend a televised forum to discuss the issue with Mr. Obama on Thursday, even as they voiced doubt that he and Congressional Democrats were acting in good faith.

You know what? Don't fucking bother. McConnell, you can take your Boehner and shove it sideways.

 

This is America. "E Pluribus Motherfucking Unum," beeyatches! Obama is graciously including you in this meeting not as a sop to you and your pathetic little base but as a means to try to get you to nut up and engage yourself in this very important discussion.

 

And he has been more than patient with your pasty little asses.

 

The threat earlier this week to take the entire health care reform issue to a reconciliation vote was not an idle one. This summit is your last chance, I suspect. President Obama has played  nice, but as the movie says, "be nice until it's time to not be nice".

 

It's quite near time to take the gloves off. And trust me, GOP, you don't want in an election year to go back to your constituents to find out why their precious pork has been pulled by a President who doesn't feel in the mood to spend money he has to borrow.

 

Look, I'm all for consensus building, and I'm all for inclusion. I would love to live in a world where we come together and try to recreate Eden, where no one suffers and no one feels slighted and everyone can have all that they need.

 

But Republicans simply won't do that. They don't want a state of grace for all people, just for a select few who happen to have a bit more of the green pieces of paper that our pathetic and moronic society is forced to live off.

 

They would rather see the rest of us die than to extend the decent hand of humanity to help others up.

 

Flat out, that's the truth. They are so blinded by their greed and ignorance that they cannot put it aside for even one minute to see that people are dying out here for want of adequate healthcare and it will only get worse.

 

So...fuck 'em. Pass the bill, and move on.

Reading Pat Boone...

...is like watching a monkey try to fuck a football:

Just today, before I sat down to write this, I saw Anderson Cooper on CNN and Bill O'Reilly on Fox trying to figure it out … and missing the point entirely. Anderson, a very smart man, was asking Ron Paul why "the tea party hasn't endorsed your son, running for Congress?" I didn't wait to hear Paul's answer, but I was laughing at Cooper's lack of understanding of the "tea party" itself. It's not an organization, a political "party"; there are no paid flacks laying out strategies in a back room, painting signs for out-of-work folks to parade in public places, hardly knowing what the slogans are about. It's not a long planned, well laid out agenda aimed at toppling some party or promoting another – or even creating a new one.

Mind you, this came on the heels of Boone practically whining about how no one noticed that *he* was the first person to call for a New Boston Tea Party:

On March 7, a year ago, in this space I called for "A New Boston Tea Party." Though I hadn't heard anybody else proposing it, I soon learned that others were spontaneously and independently calling for the same thing.

OK, so let's get back to the topic I was going to write about. Remember, Boone said this was not an organization.

Yet, the very next line after making that point, we find this....Have you seen our Tea Party Store? Everything you need to express your outrage with the Obama Socialist Express

Once more:

What liberals and party bosses and jaded people in the media can't seem to comprehend is that nobody started this, nobody organized this, no secret big money funded it, and nobody is orchestrating it now!

And:

Have you seen our Tea Party Store? Everything you need to express your outrage with the Obama Socialist Express

Or:

Sarah did a pretty good job of explaining there is no governing authority, nobody presuming to tell the huge, disparate, diverse horde of citizens what they have to say or not say.

And:

Have you seen our Tea Party Store? Everything you need to express your outrage with the Obama Socialist Express

Did you get that? Now get this:

Hundreds of thousands, perhaps in aggregate several millions of Iranians have taken to the streets, the parks, the plazas, also chanting and yelling and waving placards, also demanding that their governing authorities listen to them and do their bidding.

That's right! He equates the Teabaggers, a small group of disgruntled sheeplejerks whining about the ultrarich paying a few dollars more in taxes with people trying to get free of a repressive religiocratic regime!

I wonder if the Iranians can buy T-shirts?

 

Bristol Palin To Make Acting Debut

One hopes it will turn out better than her stab at being a wife.

 

Nice take down of Grandmama here.

 

Y'know, I often wonder if Bristol allowed herself to get pregnant because she, like so many teenaged moms, saw it as a way out of a bad home. Certainly, living with that cellophane skinned former "beauty" pageant contestant, Bristol must have suffered enormous degradations.

 

"Sit up straight! Why can't you lose weight? Stop picking your fingernails!"

 

These are etched into the young skin of Bristol Palin's face, and it's sad to see her suffer such abuse at the hands of someone who clearly had children for one of two reasons: to be the dutiful wife (not likely) or as props to litter her political stage.

 

I think Tripp was an accident that was meant to happen.

 

This Is Your Brain...

...this is your brain on Lohancohol.

 

Any questions?

 

 

Turkey Hash

Not that this is America, and not that this is a Bush ploy, but it sure could have been!

Turkish investigators grilled more than 40 military figures on Tuesday, including the retired heads of navy and air force, after mass arrests over an alleged plot to oust the Islamist-rooted government.

In the most dramatic move to date against the armed forces, anti-terror police detained the suspects Monday over a purported plan codenamed "Operation Sledgehammer", drawn up in 2003 soon after the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power.

Investigators say the suspects planned to bomb mosques and escalate tensions with Greece in a bid to force the downing of a Turkish jet over the Aegean, thus discrediting the government and ultimately leading to its downfall.

Turkey has long been a fairly reliable ally for the US in the Middle East region. In its bid to have full membership in the European Union, it has accepted its role as bulwark against the Islamist wave in less hospitable countries it borders. A strong democratic tradition coupled with a vigilant military (for those occasions when an Islamist government has taken over the reins) has kept Turkey in good standing with the West.

And yet, once again, the military was about to step in.

The Turks are at the center of several controversies in the region that will require US attention, most notably its attitude towards the Kurdish population that it shares with Iraq as well as its frosty relations with Greece and Armenia.

So they are a strategic partner with America in preventing terrorist attacks, and in keeping diplomatic channels open. Likely this is why long term strategy of the US has been to keep Turkey our partner.

 

But...

 

While it's a stretch to say that what is happening in Turkey could happen here, the job of this post is to stretch. So yes, I'm admitting that this is an entirely made up scenario, but given events of the past ten years, I don't think it's impossible any longer.

 

The way the nation has been torn apart with regional and ideological fights, not only "us against them" but "us against us," weakens us. It makes us vulnerable to predations both internal and external.

 

Internally, the economic crisis plus the ginned-up infighting, coming mostly from the far right, has created instability. Instabilty tries to correct itself, but that takes time. It also leaves opportunity out there for power grabs, both by thems that ain't got but more likely, by thems that gots.

 

See, if you look carefully at the American economy in 2008 and 2009, who got hurt? It wasn't the banks, altho they suffered some pain. It sure as heck wasn't the car companies: GM has new owners, but that's about that.

 

No, it was you. And me. And millions of Americans who put money into our homes and our retirement plans. Money that was never guaranteed by anyone.

 

Given the predatory nature of American corporations these past thirty years...I mean, come on! Is it fair they asked for free speech with all the money they can generate?...we can assume that whatever power they could grab, they did.

 

Power is a self-reinforcing thing: get a little, and it builds on the power you already had, which attracts even more power. Yes, eventually things fall apart and chaos reigns, but in a society like America, it's not hard to conceive of a situation where one company or sector amasses so much power and influence, like MicroSoft in computers and software, or Wal-mart in retail, that it can dictate terms not only nationally but globally.

 

Is it so hard to imagine a situation where that power is extended to governance? To even the military? Krupp and the Nazis. Boeing and the state of Washington. Both examples of a corporation wielding influence over a government.

 

And if it's already happened from time to time, how hard is it to imagine a situation where the military becomes a corporate police department? Posse comitatus notwithstanding, what if instead of US forces, Blackwater or KBR was sent in to quell civil uprisings against this form of tyranny? Troops like those were used in New Orleans after Katrina. It's not hard to imagine them being deployed against, say, students sitting in at Columbia.

 

With the full-throated backing of the hate-mongers on the right.

 

I wonder if, even then, they'd realize what they have wrought on this great nation with their bluster and insanity?

 

The Bloom Box

Pretty weird stuff here:

He invented a new kind of fuel cell, which is like a very skinny battery that always runs. Sridhar feeds oxygen to it on one side, and fuel on the other. The two combine within the cell to create a chemical reaction that produces electricity. There's no need for burning or combustion, and no need for power lines from an outside source.

I'm sniffing the cold fusion craze...

Dumbfuck Of The Year

They grow 'em stoopid in Tin-ass-cy:

SO HERE’S A QUESTION: Would a default on Treasuries accomplish what the Balanced Budget Amendment was supposed to achieve, by forcing the government to spend no more than it takes in?

I dunno, Glenn...would shoving a stick in your ass make you smarter than wood?

Bruce Bartlett goes over the reasons this latest moronic trope floated by the Right Wing Talking Trash Elmo doll won't work.

1. The Treasury can never default on the debt
[...]
2. Even if the Treasury somehow defaulted—that is, failed to make a timely interest payment—it would not achieve what Reynolds and other conservatives wish: an end to all federal borrowing and de facto imposition of a balanced budget by cutting all spending in excess of revenues.
[...]
3. The disruption to financial markets, commerce and the well-being of all Americans from a Treasury default are really beyond my ability to fully describe. But here are a few points to ponder. Interest rates would skyrocket to unprecedented levels, which would cause a collapse of private borrowing and massive capital losses for all bond holders, which include pension funds, insurance companies and foreign central banks, among others. It might be impossible for pension funds to make payments to millions of individuals depending on them for life itself.
[...]

...Bartlett goes onto mention that the cost of borrowing for the United States would skyrocket, since our Treasuries are back by "the full faith and credit" of the US government, which of course would default as quickly as the bonds.

Reynolds, of course, backpedals in the face of such an exhaustive and detailed analysis of what one can only hope was an opiate nightmate.

But since this has become a fairly common trope among the chattering monkeys on the right wing porch as it ties in neatly with the Teabaggers and the Paulists, you need to be aware of it.

First off, we've already been through a dry run of an American bankruptcy: the stagflation of the late 1970s, early 1980s, caused in large part by the OPEC nations holding the rest of the world hostage: de facto, we were operationally bankrupt as a nation.

How? When the Fed tried to loosen up the economy, there was no proportionate increase in economic activity. The money went to oil. This created an inflationary spiral and next thing you know, we've raised interest rates (the prime reached not only double digits, but approached 20%, a rate usually associated with third world military juntas).

Which only served to dampen down the economy.

By the way, we are currently in the middle of yet another stagflationary period. Oil, again, played a large part in it. Remember $5 a gallon gas? It wasn't that long ago.

Odd, considering we had two oil men running the country at the time it kicked off.

Monetary policy hasn't worked this time, either, as the money supply was pretty much dried up going in, due to low interest rates and the availability of cheap mortgages drying up investable cash reserves.

But I digress into territory not suited for a blog devoted to snarcasm.

Too, defaulting on national obligations is not like going to bankruptcy court because you can't pay your mortgage anymore. China (which has started dumping Treasuries, so beware) isn't about to accept pennies on the dollar in exchange for a clean bill of health.

We will be forced to pay it back in some form or other. If you don't believe me, just think of how we've bullied and badgered third world nations to repay their debts to us, funds that could have been used to improve infrastructure, or for economic development.

You'll note the Bushies only got involved because they wanted Iraqi war debts forgiven, and Iraq sits on the second largest oil reserve in the world.

If anything, defaulting on American treasuries would force even more spending on domestic social programs, while forcing the United States to cut back on its defense programs.

Hm. Maybe it's not such a bad idea, after all!