Stiglitz grieves, as do I

1/7/2013 10:22 PM

Even though the brain’s burning all day, I write late at night, because if I sat down at the start of the day, and wrote as I thought about stuff, I’d blow through the day without getting anything else done. No exercise, no meals, no laundry…believe me, I’ve seen it in others. The personal hygiene issues alone put me off the idea. But I need to write. So I’m trying to keep it to one thing, once a day. We’ll see how this goes.

So I took the weekend off. Time to get back to it.

I was listening to an interview of Joseph Stiglitz on Fresh Air's podcast. It’s from a little while back, but you can listen to it, it’s only about 20 minutes. Near the end, he says something I’ve heard in other contexts, maybe even from him (on a Daily Show interview?) As a professor at Columbia (in addition to being the 2001 Nobel winner for Economics) he sees the financial industry suck up a huge percentage of the brightest students, looking for the big payday. Others have wondered what progress in how many fields might have already been made, or might be made in the future, if these minds were applied to the classic fields, or even the new internet industries, instead of working to create the next great credit card fee, the next version of mark-to-market pricing (remember Enron?), the next algorithm to anticipate currency differences and create arbitrage transactions at the rate of, not millions, but billions of  times a second.

A fair thought, I thought.

But then I thought a little more. While the average CEO in the US is now making well over 400 times what the line worker is making at his company, the average financial services CEO’s income is outstripping that of CEOs in other industries, and the starting level salary for the positions those bright Columbia graduates get in Finance is far above those of their student cohort entering any other fields.

Why? Why so much more? It’s not that they are so much brighter than the other ‘A’ students that turn the industry down. And it’s not the quality of work they do. Have you noticed the complete collapse of the American Banking, Finance and Reinsurance industries, after doing this for a couple of decades? No? That’s only because the lowly public-service cohort from Columbia and all us other left-behinds had to bail out those industries, for well north of three trillion dollars in public funds (I said “Trillion”, because I’m including the free loans from the Fed.)

I wonder if it’s not precisely to prevent progress in other industries. 

Because they want to keep the game the way it is. Not just legislatively, by lobbying to prevent any oversight or reinstatement of effective regulations like Glass-Steagal, but also competitively, by preventing innovations that would threaten their current investments. By sucking up as many technical field prospects and converting them to the uselessness of fine-tuning customer fleecing methods, there are fewer high-end scientists and engineers to develop the battery that stores energy forever, or the actually-safe fusion reactor. And while the inspired will still be out there, not chasing the dollar but driven by their vision, there will be fewer engineers, fewer researchers, fewer scientists to do the support work that every dream needs to become reality. Which means fewer variables for the predictive algorithms they're using in the Financial Industry.

“A few years at GoldmanSachs, and then I’ll get back to that spray-on solar paneling with the money I make there” soon becomes “But I need this year’s Maserati” and a spouse’s “Can we go to somewhere in Spain this weekend?” and the kids have to go to…well, wherever they breed those horrible products like the Rom-nauts and Meg Whitman’s bully boy of a son. Plan B becomes the only plan, burying a great idea, a dream, a different future for America, or at least forestalling it for a few more years while the Exxon dividends and the Eli Lilly stock splits keep on coming.

I grieve a bit. Not just for the success with which the Financial Industry has become 40% of the profit-making in America, without a single idea useful to anyone but the industry. But also for all the ideas that have died, because of all the bright minds, all the creativity, all the dreams, that have been diverted or shut down by money, nothing more than money, dangled in front of the students that are the future of  America.

Maybe that's why America is working so hard to get students into debt....but that's for another screed on another day.

1/7/2013 11:10 PM

 

What "Full Faith and Credit" Isn't

This'll be quick because I'm doing it from my tablet, and these things weren't meant for typing.
Every time I hear "full faith and credit" in discussing the debt limit, whether it's Rachel or Lawrence or the Big O himself, I want to throw a brick at the screen. Because that phrase, from article IV, sxn I of the Constitution, is about states' responsibilities to recognize the actions of other states. Like convictions, and contracts, including marriage contracts. Get married in one state, you're still married when you go to another. This is why DOMA was passed, not just to get the feds off the hook on benefits to gay couples, but (unconstitutionally) to void this part of the Constitution when it comes to same-sex marriage contracts.

So remember, "full faith and credit" is in the news, and may be a deciding point at the Supreme Court this year during the Prop 8 review...but it doesn't have a damned thing to do with the deficit, the debt, the fiscal cliff or the debt ceiling. And when someone uses it that way, you'll know you know more than they do about the subject...and probably many more.

How Gun Safety Legislation Will Be Implemented

Yea, yea, no fucking way. Too many guns out there, what’s the point, the GOP is owned and operated by the NRA, the South will rise again, yea, I got all that.

I got 20 first-graders, shot dead, en masse, in their classrooms, in less than ten minutes. Did I mention that the coroner says EVERY one of them was shot multiple times? That means the power of several .223 rounds, traveling less than 40 feet, slammed into each of those tiny bodies, and transmitted an enormous amount of that power in shock waves than turned the insides of those little bodies to jelly, inflating them like little Macy’s Day floats before the explosive pressure forced that jelly out whatever vent it could find. Entry wound, exit wound, eyeballs, ears, use your imagination if you dare.

The first responders, the coroners, the police on scene, are all going to need therapy for…well, forever.

While all the gun-protectors, the NRA, the NMA, the GOP, have leapt to the protection of an individual’s right to bear tactical shoulder-fired missiles, much less semi-auto rifles like the one used to kill these children, the president has empaneled a commission, with Fiscal-Deal-Log-Jam-Breakin’ Vice-President Biden in charge, to draft policies and model legislation to propose to the nation.  

A commission. Which, as we all know, is where good intentions go to die.

Except.

Except how long’s it been since Gabby Giffords was gunned down along with a dozen others? Since the Colorado theater massacre? Since Newtown? Not many days. And there will be another. You can practically set your watch by it.

And when there is, that’s when the Commission can hand its proposals to the Senate, to the House, and DARE them not to do something, while the stories and video of that next assault blares from every media outlet (except FOX, of course). Even the most shameful of the shameless GOP will be forced to deal, and pass, if not the proposed legislation, then a version in that direction.

And this can be repeated every time there’s another, because there are so many guns, and so many people that just know the world is against them (hi there, Limbaugh listeners!) that we know this’ll keep happening. Just hopefully, slowly, less frequently.

And if the GOP balks, at any point, statistics says one of the parents of one of those twenty little children, who has seen the pictures of his or her child’s body after that shooting, will drop those photos on the NRA, the GOP, the Congress of the United States, the press.

No one will be able to avert their eyes. 

And no one will be able to stop that legislation.

A Park is Like the NRA’s Response to Newtown

I got some In’n’Out in Culver City, day before yesterday, after a movie. I wanted to sit in the park across Venice Blvd from there and read a book I’m slogging through. But the park hasn’t got any benches anymore. Not a one, in a park that covers an entire block, except where a theater stands at one end. I ended up sitting on the driest edge of the damp rim around the fountain in front of the theater. Gotta read, and gotta eat my carryout while it’s hot. But not one damned bench. Annoyed.

Twenty first-graders gunned down in their class rooms. Six teachers and administrators dead trying to protect them. Two other children, one in the first grade classroom that wasn’t entered, and a third-grader in another wing, were second cousins I’ve never met, children of a guy my age whose dad is my mom’s cousin. A guy who came to my dad’s funeral two years ago at Arlington cemetery, my dad who died at a ripe age. At eighty-seven, not seven.

The NRA’s solution to the problem of people walking around America with semi-automatic assault rifles with 15-, 20-, 30-round clips? We need to arm teachers. Because we need to defend our schools.

What the hell do these two things have to do with one another?

They both demonstrate solutions that avoid dealing with the problem.

The park has no benches, even though it is between several restaurants, a live theater, a movie multiplex, a classic hotel and a Trader Joes’s. Why? Because no one wants the homeless sleeping on the benches. And removing benches, making open space in the city useless to anyone, is cheaper than actually dealing with homelessness. And there are only so many benches, but there are so many homeless. Maybe Culver City will get lucky and someone will offer to buy the property to build more housing that’s too expensive, or more shops that are the same as all the rest, and it’ll be a two-fer: money to cover the shortfall that every city has in the post-Prop13 era, and no place to keep the homeless out of. Win-Win.

Same thing at the schools. Why deal with the 300 million guns that are available to use any way a loonie, a drunk, an angry husband or a divorced father or a fired employee or a bankrupted homeowner or a TeaBagger in ObamaLand wants to? (Ask the Secret Service about that last group.) Why not just have parents live in fear every day their kid goes to school?   Why not scare the bejeezus out of children every day as they pass through metal detectors, wands, past armed guards with automatic weapons. Guards who, of course, will be paid so much, trained so well, screened so extensively, that they would never take the school hostage because their wife just left them, and took the kids, too.

Why deal with the problem? It’s expensive, it takes time, and it’s different. It changes things, and it means that what has been done before, to cause the problem and to avoid the problem, is, as a matter of fact, THE REAL PROBLEM.

My comfort in a park, or schools held hostage, are both problems that rarely occur in other civilized nations, at least not in my travels. No other nation makes parks that can’t be used. Nor schools that must be defended. Except in Talibanistan (see my 1/1 post). But the NRA thinks making teachers into soldiers and schools into cold war bunkers is the way to go.

I’m sure they’d solve my park problem by just shooting the homeless.

How not to treat women, "Dickless Dicks" edition

I was going to write about this elsewhere, but I wanted to post something to start the year off, New Year's resolution and all. I was listening to Greg Proop's podcast today, the 'Vampires' episode he did in Dublin a couple months ago, where he gets all "preachy" about the Indian medical student studying in Ireland, who, in her 17th week of pregnancy, suddenly complained of back pains, presented at the hospital, and within five days was dead. Because "Ireland is a Catholic country" as one of the attendings said, in refusing her the abortion that would have saved her life. So she's dead, the baby's dead, the husband and both families are devastated, but Ireland has "one of the finest medical systems in the world."

I'd almost forgotten about her horror show, because the news moves so fast. I was glad to be reminded. She seemed to be part of a news thread that no one was picking up.

Because meanwhile,  in Pakistan, a middle-school girl was targeted for assassination, and shot in the head, because she advocates that girls learn to read. Please reread that sentence. Remember, Pakistan has nuclear weapons. These are the kind of men that have nuclear weapons in Pakistan. At least Pakistan didn't claim to have a medical system of any quality at all, being a third-to-fourth-world operation spending its money on nuclear weapons. No, they shipped her comatose body off to England, where it appears she will continue to advocate for girls to learn to read, now that she's out of the coma. Assuming she can walk.

Meanwhile, in India, which from most Americans' viewpoint is just more of Pakistan (or is it the other way around) six assholes with tiny dicks lured a couple onto a party bus the couple mistook for a regular public bus. (Can you make that mistake in America? Anywhere? Even in Mississippi?) Then these guys rode around Delhi, I think, for several hours raping the woman, (again, a student) and because their dicks were so limp and useless and ashamed of being seen by other men, these assholes started fucking her with a metal rod. Which, as you may know, is not as well-suited for sex as a male organ. By the time the police found her, dumped at the side of the rode, there was nothing the wimpering third-to-fourth-world medical system of the nuclear power that is India could do for her, so she was sent, again in a coma, to Singapore, where she died in short order from massive organ failure. Having every organ below your lungs pierced by a metal rod from inside'll do that to a girl.

All of these crimes were committed by men. Scared, stupid, dickless men, which unfortunately, in my experience, describes most men. Not just over there. Here too. Remember the Team Rape that the Republicans put on the ballot across America in 2012.

And the law or the law enforcement of these countries, ours included, does fuck all about this treatment of women. I don't know about Pakistan or India, except that the former's Muslims and that latter's Hindu both seem to agree that women should be kept home, barefoot and pregnant, stupid and silent, or they'll get a whipping. That sounds so familiar, here in the states.

But I spent some time a few decades back, with an Irish city councilman in Cork. And, finding that I had an interest in politics, he gave me a copy of the Irish Contitution. Pale green softback, each left page in English, each right one in Gaelic, approximating a translation on a page-by-page basis. I still have it. I read the preamble when he handed it to me. We had a loooong discussion about our First Amendment after that. Here's the preamble:

"In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred,

We, the people of Éire, 

Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial,

Gratefully remembering their heroic and unremitting struggle to regain the rightful independence of our Nation,

And seeking to promote the common good, with due observance of Prudence, Justice and Charity, so that the dignity and freedom of the individual may be assured, true social order attained, the unity of our country restored, and concord established with other nations,

Do hereby adopt, enact, and give to ourselves this Constitution.

"
And that right there is how that fucking doctor in Ireland let that woman die in screaming pain. Because Ireland is a Catholic country, and it nailed its fealty to the Christian God in the first sentence of its Constitution, even before it claimed to be something to help its people. Kinda like them Moooslims do that Sharia law thing.
All written by men, all claiming God's will, all because they're afraid of women. Christ, it makes me want to cut off my own dick, just so I can't be mistaken for one of these assholes.

The people of India are marching for these six cowards to get the death penalty. I can think of several far more imaginative penalties, ones that would have the added bonus of continually reminding every other man of the consequences of abusing women.

Because, guys, we scare women. Do you wonder why?

Help me, I love them both...

I hold in my hand page D5 of yesterday's LA Times. That's in the 'Calendar' section for you out-of-towners. Below the fold are two ads for concerts.

One is for 'An Evening With The Monkees'. Yes, Davey just died a few weeks ago, but Michael Nesmith will be on the tour. One night only, at the Greek, in November. I was a huge fan when I was eleven, and have Rhino's 4-CD complete box set. I even own "Justified", their reunion studio album.  Want to go.

In the other ad, and much sooner, The House of Blues on the Strip has the Dead Kennedys. These guys got me through my final, and successful, attempt at college. I sat for a Numerical Analysis final for my Comp Sci degree with 'Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables' blasting in my ears from an Aiwa cassette deck. My wife's an Elvis fan, yet somehow does not appreciate Jello Biafra's rendering of 'Viva Las Vegas'...strange..."Lot's of lovely women, the dice stay hot, got coke up my nose to dry away the snot. Viva Las Vegas!" What's not to love? What can't provide at least a modicum of  anger management to a ferocious late bloomer? 

The flip-side to that cassette was FEAR's 'More' Beer', but true to form, I only needed about half the allotted time to finish the exam. Finished 'Viva Las Vegas' as I dropped the blue book on the counter. It always has a little wobble in the recording speed just at the end. Thought it was my cassette, or the deck, but it's still there on the officially-released CD, so I guess they screwed up the original tape or pressing. Ah well, it's the scars on the leather that prove its authenticity...

What does it say of my tastes that I still like both of these bands? Secret hint: I went to the Weird Al concert on Sunday night.

The common thread in my taste is: I like bands that sound like they're enjoying making the music. Even if the music sounds fucking angry.

It's been a while...

...and some thing's have changed. Just got back last weekend from a vacation that I didn't need to come back from, at least not for work. The day before I was scheduled to leave, my contract was ended, in my third meeting of the day, at three in the afternoon. Well, it was a three-to-six-month contract that'd lasted well over seven years. But the end was abrupt nonetheless.

Some introspection is due, as well as some housecleaning, both literal and figurative. You should see the rat's nest that is my office. Or rather, my wife would wish you wouldn't. Maybe in making a dent in that I can find some peace in letting go of some, hopefully many, of the beginnings of various projects, the remnants of past interests not so much abandoned as put on hold.

Dawn would like me to take some time off from "work", without wasting time or being on some kind of slacker vacay. I need to build new programming skills, as mine have become worthless over seven years of babysitting a company's so-to-be-abandoned system (seven years? soon? whaaaa?) Which assumes I want to go back to programming.

And of course, there's the coming apocalypse, aka Election 2012.

So I have some time right now, maybe the last third of this year, to take a step back, to step off for a while, to rebuild and refocus. But I've got decisions to make also.

Which include what to write about. Some personal. Some political. All mine.

Here I go.