Reproof 2010-1

REPROOF / 2010-1

While everyone’s noses were to the grindstone the country was sold…as were the grindstone’s.

Tentative Steps to Policy Reform

How exciting is it to have pushed back on predator “health management” corporations and achieved a step toward health care reform? A refreshing turn of the dog wagging the tail instead of the reverse, (yes?); almost as exciting as actual reformation of the student loan corporate boondoggle the week following the enactment of the health care bill.

We the people, through our government, have been victims to; insurance scams that were hybrid public service / private business models structured to attach to the treasury like a lamprey, student loan lenders to produce a more educated populous and ensure a better future, and HMO’s as restructured non-profits to more efficiently ensure health care availability. Are you buying that? You did when it was secretly negotiated in the 70’s, when it was continuously tuned for maximum profit and client detriment.

Well dear client, these recent efforts to push back have been a very effective litmus tests to prove that we are a big, unhealthy, dissuaded and schizophrenic dog being wagged mercilessly by a highly unified corporate construct tail.

The two parasitic business constructs, masquerading as social services, received different results from recent government push backs that were determined by prior malfeasance; rather than any will of the people. The financial deregulation induce economy crash weakened the bargaining position of banks to rationalize their win-only, over-lend, student loan middle-man position. Thus lobbyists could not sell continuing backing of these sleezoids, who would produce fail-certain debtors and dump them onto the government for full reimbursement (like mortgage over-lending but with government guarantee!) (1)

Thus, only because the entire investment banking sector almost killed its host of highly bred blind consumers, student loan banks were forced to detach. One moderate tapeworm passed from the federal treasury gut and left room for the bigger competitor to dig in deeper.
Without a crisis as visible as the economic crash, HMO’s and health insurers wrote a thousand pages of trite crap extolling their expertise in collecting money, denying treatment and being indispensable to obstructing what should be a service rather than a business. The legislature than argued any political issue not relevant to doctors, hospitals, health nor healing, and passed the industry written bill. We have effectively agreed, in 1000 pages of verbosity, that the current industry can continue to apply their “expertise” until they, like the financial sector, kill their host and substantive (not cosmetic) change might happen.

How did we concur?! A non-profit of people unified to provide a civil necessity like good health will always be more effective and efficient than a profit group unified to maximize profit by not wasting your premiums on your health support. The non-profit out-competes them for our benefit over their profit?

What unified construct must we build and support to out-compete them for our benefit over their profit?

(1) Johnston, David Cay; Free Lunch:…Ch. 14. See book review below.

Afterword: Prison Analogy

The inevitable result of a degenerative process is logically analyzed by ‘reductio ad absurdum’ – reduction to an absurd extreme. If a bureaucratic process in question has an analog to prisons, that process will exist in its most dysfunctional state and serves as a ‘reductio ad absurdum’ example.

Medical service is just such an analog. Inmates are exclusively a liability whereby efficiency is developed in avoiding any medical expenses until an inmate leaves or dies. This is achieved primarily by avoiding diagnosis until discharge from prison or death.

The business sector has to compete for customers and cannot be as treacherous as prison medical administrators; the analogy still holds that customers are liabilities to be minimized. The business sector will likely continue to avoid medical expenses for different reasons and by different means than a prison but the reductio ad absurdum still holds that medical services as a pure liability to an intermediary; HMO/insurance corporation or prison comptroller; cannot justly be called services (see reference above to business masquerading as social services). U.S. civilian health care may not reach the prison extreme of denial but it sure appears that consumption (or attempts to access) of health services is as equally frowned upon by supposed health care providers as prison administrators.

Global Economics, Universal Failures

Humans are collectively degenerate. In large groups we become self-destructive with congenital fits of delusion, competitiveness and egoism. Every failed culture; past, present and future; starts with a veil of cooperativeness that holds until the dry rot of deceptive and internecine behavior consumes the culture and begins to eat the veil. The veil of free market cooperation – an economic charade – is definitely threadbare in the U.S. due to multi-generational consumer rapacity, but; does anyone know how rotten the whole culture, behind the “keep buying and trading” jingoism veil, has become?

There is exposure of the economic charade and most likely the beginning of an end game phase (1) of declining capital, desperation and a drastic restructuring (if not collapse) of the perpetrator/victim economics.

Greece has caught the worst of U.S. bad debt fever. The European Union (mostly Germany) and IMF (International Monetary Fund) are throwing out $148,000,000,000 palliative similar to the U.S. stimulus and T.A.R.P. relief disbursements. Goldman Sachs is the acknowledged leader in bad debt trading and the biggest player in this interlinked global fiasco. That corporation’s shot-caller, Lloyd Blankfein, has testified to the U.S. Congress that the $2,400,000,000 profit of 2009 (and $1,000,000,000 first quarter this year) for infecting the developed world’s economy is the natural consequence of Goldman Sachs performing “God’s work.” GODman Sachs?!

Reality, in contrast to their theological cop-out, is that the current state of world economics is integrated, self-defeating, and anti-social so far beyond normal psychology that only a zoologist could perform a behavioral analysis. Somehow the greater primate, economis tyrannus, has taken the world from the industrial revolution to a state of pollution, inequity, hostility and social failure that should only occur in anaerobic mold. (Thus, animal behavioral analysis was too generous and botany may be the specialty most capable of explaining such illogical self-destruction).

The culmination of manipulation, redistribution and corporate subjugation of developing economies has given the gifts of: over-fishing, oil spills, dictatorships, malnutrition, poisoned water and air, financial crises, stressed food chains, lost biological diversity, reduced disease resistance and life spans, declining education in supposedly “developed” countries… We have become so toxic to ourselves that every prognostication of human self-defeat is in the early stages of being proved correct.

We have let economis tyrannus dictate bad policy and over-clever us for so many generations that failure in now imminent. Recovery, in any form suggested by “muddling toward frugality” (2) is likely lost. Although the suggestion of returning to a form of agrarian tribalism is impractical for our decadent culture, the underlying economic implications are imperative. In fact, the long-term world survivors will be the tribal size sub-cultures of societies that did not participate in and/or resisted the false allure of the know-it-all cutting edge of the self–extinction world of econimus tyrannus – who is till trying to steamroll the developing world with false promises of “economic development,” and the developed world with full privatization (civil abdication to the corporate construct).
(Conclusion in next issue.)

(1) See Reproof 09-5 “21st Century Democracy Regression” asking: “What will be the post-mortem cause of the demise of the U.S. republic?”
(2) “Muddling Toward Frugality” published mid-1970’s, described the social and cultural reversals required for long-term U.S. stability.

Book demi-review: “Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With The Bill)” by David Cay Johnston - Inspiration for accompanying cartoon. Explains how all large commerce in U.S. is subsidized and “free market” does not exist. …full reviews next issue…