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“Everybody here sells his time for money. It’s like taking a mortgage against your life.” – Dr Dick Solomon (3rd Rock from the Sun, “I Enjoy Being A Dick”)

Although the quote “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil” is an oft-malighed, often quoted Biblical “New Testament” passage which is used by quite a few bible-thumping born-agains, I started thinking about the reason why money would be such a powerful motivating force.

A quick search on “money” comes up with a history on how money is to be exchanged for goods and services. Chris Martenson’s “Crash Course” says that money is a claim on human labor. We can then infer that human labor is indirectly exchanged for goods and services, but know from experience that the value of peoples’ labor varies greatly, even among the people in a single country. It can then be deduced that the value of all peoples’ labor, and therefore time, is not equal.

Is it not exceedingly possible that money is an indicator that your time is more valuable than your neighbor’s time? Is it not also possible that it implies that your *life* is more valuable?

This is the prevailing sentiment in our Capitalist society, which places a greater emphasis on the acquisition of money than the health and welfare of its own people, usually by arguing that the government *they* elected can’t work properly because it’s full of the incompetant people *they* elected, and that in the face of every feasability and critical analysis, that the “free market will solve everything”. And I quote: “Just because Americans are uninsured doesn’t mean they can’t receive health care; nonprofits and government-run hospitals provide services to those who don’t have insurance, and it is illegal to refuse emergency medical service because of a lack of insurance.” (from the previous link) Apparently people who have less money than you are perfectly entitled … to clog up emergency services rather than being able to seek preventative medicine, which is far more of a solution than creating clusterfucks in emergency rooms, not strictly for saving money, but for keeping people off gurneys.

Getting back to the point… is one person more valuable than another based solely on their earning potential? I seriously doubt that the CEO of Bear Stearns, who destroyed the equivalent of millions of hours of human labor, is somehow a more valuable human being than a bricklayer who works for an hourly paycheck, yet we place far more importance on the CEO by compensating his time with more equivalent labor.

And “European Socialism” is *so* horrible…

I think that after reading things like this about taxpayer outrage at executive level bankers raking in performance bonuses for apparently tanking the world financial system, I’m starting to think that we’re wrong about the outrage.

Not that we shouldn’t be outraged about funnelling money to jackholes who buy and sell people like me during lunch … more that they really should get performance bonuses if it’s based on *performance*.

Look at what they’ve done: the upward motion of wealth from retirement funds and other previously untouchable funding sources, along with the end of the ownership society, yet their stockholders are still seeing money thanks to wheelbarrow loads of cash money straight from your grandkids’ future earnings. They’re raiding the *federal* coffers, eating tax money previously only available for bombing dark people and educating children, and moving that money into their vaults. I mean, if that isn’t an amazing performance, what is?

They tank the system, then get our money. Take a bow, you fat greedy pig fuckers. Hopefully a few more of you get cold-cocked before this thing blows over.

There has been, for some time, debate in the United States regarding healthcare “reform”, as our current system does not serve a fair percent of the population, and out of those served, many are “underinsured”. From Michael Moore’s Sicko to Howard Dean’s offer to present the issue in front of Congress, there is no doubt that the system is horribly, horribly broken.

I believe the issue is a systemic one, hinging on the broken premise that “private insurance”, that is, pay-for-play insurance funded by either direct periodic payments or employer contributions, is a far superior method of providing healthcare. A publically traded company has a primary obligation to its shareholders and their dividends. This is a bit of an issue with health insurance, as the “proven way” of increasing margins is denying coverage to people.

Health insurance (otherwise known as “coverage”) is meant to provide healthcare without substantial out of pocket expenses, in an effort to keep your average worker from going bankrupt in the case of a medical emergency. Unfortunately, ever since Dick Nixon handed us over to the HMOs with the “HMO Act”, we as a people have been at the mercy of an industry whose sole purpose is to deny the majority of claims for coverage. There have even been deaths reported when insurers have failed to cover life-saving procedures. Many, many more slip through the cracks in the form of people who cannot received preventative maintenance through regular checkups, instead using emergency rooms and clogging that part of the healthcare system when their problems have reached a critical point.

Unlike other civilized countries, the United States says that it supports the “free market”… except when it doesn’t. Supports fiscal responsibility … except when it doesn’t. The “free market” and government administered health care are not mutually excusive — just that private insurance has much higher cost due to its profit margins. Of course, the jackholes at the CATO institute would like you to believe that it’s oh-so-much-more-expensive … because “Private insurers incur administrative costs to make sure they (and their customers) aren’t getting ripped off.”. Sure does sound like you’re going to get *way* more false positives, as if you weren’t dealing with a “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” situation to begin with.

The fact of the matter is that as long as private insurance companies have to make a profit, their best interests are simply not to make you healthy or pay for anything to help you get healthier. Anything to that effect is purely coincidental. Their primary motivation is to juice you for money to feed their shareholders, not to make you healthier. Don’t listen to them, they’ll do their best to speak in reassuring tones and tell you about the “social good” and the “free market”. But trust me, they’ll step over your rotting corpse on the way to the bank, and won’t even give it a second thought.

Single payer insurance. Say it with me …

After an actor, a CIA spook, a Republican in Democrat’s clothing and a moron, we finally have a President willing to let us become an *adult* nation. President Obama just announced that he wanted to create a high speed rail system in the United States. Hell, even the cheese-eating surrender monkeys in France have had one of those for *years* … I’m sure that the trucking lobby, oil lobby, or some other lobby I haven’t though of, will stymie this and kill it somehow, but at least we’re trying, finally.

All we need now is a distributed energy generation system and electric vehicles for short transport, and we’ll finally be ready to kick the greasy black dragon.

Why is it that we have such a strong built-in need to survive when we’re miserable most of the time?

I guess that’s the biological imperative making sure that we perpetuate the species, in the same way that our genes fighting for dominance is most likely the root cause for our Randian inability to coexist with others without eventually trying to climb to new heights by stepping on them. I’m not really an Ayn Rand fan, if you haven’t gotten that from reading the last few sentences …

In another aspect, our need to succeed is a good part of what seems to make us miserable, in that we’re mostly taught to either (a) be happy with everything because this is what you have and God’ll give you a cookie when you’re wormfood or (b) nothing is *ever* enough. Neither of those mentalities really does much good for us as a collective of people, and I really wish that there were some easy solution that I could pull out to make everything all better. Unfortunately, people are beholden to their ingrained beliefs, and people rarely change. Anyone who says otherwise is probably selling something.

I’ve been asking who we’re attempting to save with this bailout idea, and I’m not liking the answers I’m getting.

Paul Krugman has some good insight into why Keynesian economics are the best way of attempting an economic recovery. I’m not disagreeing with him, I think he’s right on the money, so to speak, saying that pumping money into project work will circulate money in such a way that the economy is allowed to recover. That’s my two cent translation of the information regarding that particular school of thought, but it gets the basic point across.

What I don’t understand is banks. The primary economic purpose of banks is theoretically to lend money (and to a lesser extent to store it, though that really is just a way to the end goal of lending it). For many years after our last major economic disaster, banks weren’t allowed to double as investment firms, since saving and risking aren’t exactly two concepts that go hand in hand, no matter what some weaselly fuckers tell you. Retirement and pension funds have been dumping money into “safe” investments for years in an attempt to beat out our fiat currency system’s built in inflation — but at some point, the backing financial institutions moved to solely using a rating system which couldn’t identify so called “toxic” mortgages and other nasty non-earners. And so we watch everything take a nose dive.

But the banks simply aren’t loaning money fast enough to satisfy an economy which had made the transition from cash and carry to the so-called “ownership society.” We’ve been pumped so full of the get-rich-quick mentality along with the Futurama mentality that mortgaging your life for a house and a few cars used to actually make some sort of twisted sense.

I just don’t see where this is going. Most retirement funds are mostly gone, and it’s been shown pretty well that asshats like AIG are going to pay back the important people first. So, we’re going to dump incredible, unbelievable loads of money into paying off brokerage firms that bent us all over to accelerate the upward motion of wealth, moving money from retirement accounts and house payments to the hands of a small group of uber-elites. The same people who are going to profit from this are the same people who *aren’t going to loan money* to anyone. And banks are in a state of denial, assuming that *anyone* is going to pony up 1:1 assets for their garbage. What was deal about attempting to keep people in their current mortgages by working out repayment plans instead of renegotiating them down to a *sane* value?

If we’re going to have the Federal Government bail out individual accounts through the FDIC, why not simply fund the FDIC at a greater rate instead of starving it as we’ve racked up 20 bank failures before the third month of 2009 has finished? Companies are hoarding money, people are hoarding money, no one is going to *spend* said money. As near as I can figure the main beneficiaries of the current banking system are the very, very rich, and at the current FDIC cap of $250,000, we’d be more or less resetting the game. Incredibly rich people might lose out, but I don’t see everyone else doing so badly.

What about businesses? They need credit to function, don’t they?

I’m starting to think not. Most business start with investor funds and grow to pay them back, so we might have to clamp down on executive level pay, but maybe, just maybe, we might see more equality for workers.

Do I think this has a chance in hell of happening? Hell emphatically no. Everyone from the President on down to the dregs of Congress has their pecker firmly lodged in the great behemoth that is the banking system, and I don’t think they really want to see their money go down in flames. I mean, why would you slave away at a forty hour work week, when an MBA and puckering for a few buttcheeks will have you making “real” money that lets you get “real rich.”

I’m thinking that the only thing that keeps the American machine working is that the cogs of the machine have dreams of being at the helm. We promulgate the fiction that everyone can be rich, yet the reality is that most will spend their sweat equity making a very few incredibly wealthy. The dream of America used to be living without opression, now it’s attempting to use the spectre of Naked Capitalism to step on everyone else to get ahead. Remember, every time you get richer, someone else gets poorer.

I really have come to dislike bowling as sport or pastime. I can’t figure out why, but I seem to forget everything I’ve learned at the immediately previous bowling experience. And it’s things like that which make me inclined to believe that it’s a “sport” more of either dumb luck, raw repetition, or some curious combination of the two.

There’s also very little class ever associated with the game or those who champion it, much as the mullet-festooned NASCAR afficionados in their brightly colored baseball and feed caps, anxiously craning their necks to armchair jockey their favorite driver past the finish line.

I usually assume that a game is a sport when the players need to be in peak physical and mental condition to compete. There seems to parade an endless array of sociopaths and slightly out of shape senior citizens, along with their few but loyal youthful compatriots, anxiously awaiting heavy and dinged plastic to almost miraculously emerge from the possibly labrinthine underbelly of their establishment of choice.

I don’t pretend to understand it, but I suppose thst I’ll have to keep playing, at least as long as I have to. There’s only so much pointless frustration and endless second guessing I can deal with before I’m ready to throw in the towel. At least until *that* becomes a sport.

This saturday night I had the pleasure of going to see Gordon Bok, one of the finest living folk singer/songwriters, at the Connecticut Audubon Society location in Glastonbury. I’ve been a fan of his since his Bok/Muir/Trickett days, and haven’t gotten a chance to see him live since seeing him at The Sounding Board. And yes, his voice is just as awesome as it was back then, and his storytelling skills have improved with time.

Besides two children who were dragged by their parents, I was the youngest person in the room by at least ten or fifteen years, which was a little disconcerting. I did, however, get to sit in the third row and get some great shots. They’ll be up on flickr when I get the chance.

I hate Windows Mobile. It’s a horrible, horrible operating system. Phones and devices based on it are just as awful.

My Blackberry started exhibiting very odd behavior and disconnecting from the mobile network about every 30-45 seconds, so I flashed the firmware and shouted some incantations of the dockworker variety before giving up and pronouncing it dead. My job was nice enough to furnish me with a replacement, which unfortunately runs WinMo.

I think I’m going to send a map and flashlight to Dan Hesse so that Sprint can have some help finding and removing its head from its rectum. After some initial idiotic comments from Hesse regarding how Android “[isn't] good enough to put the Sprint brand on…” (which interestingly makes me wonder what kind of dog food they do put their brand on), I’ve been cursing about the lack of Android on the Sprint network. I’ve used the T-Mobile G1, and that phone, despite any of the “it’s not an iPhone” mooks’ commenting, is a very nice phone with a nice open platform.

Can you hear me, Sprint? I don’t know why you’re dawdling, but you might as well bury WinMo. It’s a horrible, horrible platform coupled with awful phones. Also, ditch HTC if you can. I’d rather see Motorola or Nokia (or even … ugh… Samsung or LG) try their hand at an Android phone. You’re not making any friends by making us wait for a decent phone technology.

(As a sidebar, whoever came up with that lame rollerball on the Pearl and Curve should be taken out back and shot. It’s horrible. Well, not as horrible as the roller on the side of the 870x models, but still pretty horrible.)

For anyone keeping track, I’ve been delicious-tagging any new story I come across which describes something awful going on today with the tag “bastards”. So, here is the link for that ever-growing list, if you’re ever bored and have nothing better to do than lose faith in humanity:

http://delicious.com/whatsyourmeme/bastards