All the News . . .

Opening the newspaper lately practically requires one to be either stoned, or equipped with a large flagon of wine, preferably red. This morning, for example: Joe Paterno and his partner in crime, the President of Penn State, have been fired.  Well good, I thought. They most closely resemble those Catholic Bishops and Cardinals, and their Nazi Pope, who thought it Ok to ignore the sexual abuse of young, vulnerable kids.

Then there was Italy. Turns out that Mister Sarkozy and Ms. Merkel have been discussing Europe without the Italians. Yeah, Mr. Berlusconi and his buddies in Rome are getting to be, well, hmmm . . . unaffordable. Italy seems to be going the way of Greece . . . and Ireland . . . and Portugal . . . Except that Italy’s too big, so they could well bring down the whole show. So, maybe Europe could be a Northern thing, without the pizza and spaghetti.

Oh, and then there’s that little notice that the Dover Mortuary—that’s the place where our dead serviceman arrive back into the US, after having been killed defending the US of A.—well that mortuary has been dumping remains of our  dead loved ones in a landfill. Yeah . . . a landfill. Oh and they forgot to tell anyone about their little practice. Nice huh? Nothing like the military honoring its fallen heroes.

On the environmental front, China is at it again: In the run-up to the international climate negotiations in Durban later this month, China has responded to efforts to ban the trading of widely discredited HFC-23 offsets by threatening to release huge amounts of the potent industrial chemical into the atmosphere unless other nations pay what amounts to a climate ransom.  In a shocking attempt to blackmail the international community, Xie Fei, revenue management director at the China Clean Development Mechanism Fund, threatened: "If there's no trading of [HFC-23] credits, they'll stop incinerating the gases" and vent them directly into the atmosphere. Speaking at the Carbon Forum Asia in Singapore last week, Xie Fei claimed he spoke for "almost all the big Chinese producers of HFCs who "can't bear the cost" and maintain that "they'll lose competitiveness".  Wow, what great guys. Walmart, aren’t you proud to be one of their biggest sponsors??

And then there’s that one about Rick Perry who had three major points to make about Federal agencies he would immediately eliminate, except he could only remember two of them. Yeah, Texans must be so proud of their guy. And that one makes me wonder whether it’s true that someone has invented a new game. Remember that one called, “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?” Well, the new game will be called, “Are you smarter than a republican presidential candidate?” The game has been designed for third-fifth grade reading levels.

But I digress . . . maybe a big pull on the flagon will make all the day's stories blend together into  some nice foggy short story - - - you know of the fiction variety . . . .
PS
Oh, but I neglected to include one of the biggest ones. You know how Pat Roberts and others of his ilk are always saying that God is displaying his displeasure at some part of America by tossing  hurricanes, or an earthquake at us?? Well, I'm thinking that God must be really pissed at Alaskans, because she has now tossed one of the biggest storms on memory at Alaska . . . just to send them a message about their support for Sarah Barbie . . . Wonder whether Juneau will just sink into the sea like one of their glaciers???

Awareness of Today

Yesterday, just before going off to the land of wink and nod, I thought about the day.  What kind of a day had it been? Well, we went to our usual very early workout at the Y, We had voted earlier, so we didn't need to go to the polls. We managed to place the net over our pond, in advance of the coming big leaf drop from our oak trees.  And I had printed a couple more artsy family calendars for the coming New Year of 2012. Not a bad day, I thought.
Increasingly, as I age a bit more each day, I have begun thinking more about each day, and how it is necessary to examine the day, to see whether it was in some way meaningful. I have become acutely aware, as part of the aging process, that life is just a sequence of days and that, if we rush through a day without paying attention, we are thereby not paying attention to our very life.
I don't really think we all need to do something big every day, just that we need to think about each day. Mostly, I observe people ignoring their days, perhaps always looking forward to something that will be happening later. But, since we are always in the present, it is now that we need to pay attention. Otherwise, we risk losing our lives to the future.
I often see a neighbor who seems to stand outside smoking, I guess because his partner does not allow him to smoke indoors. But I note also that he and his partner seem never to do anything. They seem to me to be "taking up space" on this planet, without ever contributing anything.  And that seems a shame, because someday they will cease taking up space, and then what? What would their lives have meant . . . to them or to anyone else?
I don't pretend to any knowledge about what life is all about. Unlike some of our counterfeit republican presidential candidates, God has chosen not to speak with me directly.  I guess I'm not special enough. So, on this big question of what life is all about, I plead ignorance.  But I do know that we each have a finite number of minutes on this planet, and it seems wise not to simply waste them.
So, each day, I will think ahead and behind a bit to decide what kind of a day I had and will have ahead of me. Because thinking about it will increase my awareness of life and how precious it is. We dare not waste it, because we may not be back this way again . . . unless you're a Hindu and still somewhere in the middle of finding Nirvana.

Banking & Gambling

See, it’s not so hard . . . MF Global has entered that hell called bankruptcy. And we the people are going to just let it be.  No bailouts. No rush to stabilize the firm.  Just let it go the way of all things. They were gamblers who gambled and lost. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Now, it we can only let the others go as well.

Assume for a start that any “trading firm” is akin to the Las Vegas gambling organizations . . . sort of like the Mafia, but not as skilled.  Force them to label themselves as gamblers—you know, like Morgan Stanley Gamblers, Inc. Then the public will know what they are doing when sending them money to “invest”.

Then establish rating agencies that rate the investment vehicles these firms try routinely to flog.  If the investment portfolios are too complex to rate, the rating agencies have to declare,  “We cannot untangle the mess they are trying to sell to the public, so  this investment portfolio belongs in the category called “Caveat Emptor”. “ The rating agencies and all auditing firms would be financed by contracts with the government, paid for by fees charged by the government to the firms being rated/audited. Both the rating agencies and the audit firms would have to be changed every, say, three years to avoid becoming corrupted by the gambling firms. It might also be a good idea to make it mandatory that the broker-gamblers (those trying to flog their deals to the public) would have to buy into these same portfolios.

Then take all “banks” out of the gambling business. We would, of course, have to define what is meant by “gambling”. Loaning money to a couple who wish to buy a first home would not be “gambling”, strictly speaking.  Also, loaning money to someone who wishes to start a business would not be classified as “gambling”.  I assume that smart people (people not working in the banking industry) could define the difference between gambling and investing.

Looking at the Eurozone mess that finally crashed MF Global, it might be smart to take private banks out of the business of financing other governments.  Maybe it should be the case that loans to foreign governments would be the province of governments. If Greece wants a loan of $50 billion, maybe that should be debated in Congress and then the US Treasury would be the lender of last resort. MF-Global Gamblers, Inc. should probably not be in that business.

Then finally, there’s the issue of banks “too big to fail.” We need to define that term carefully, Then we should divide the world of banking into two categories—“banks too big to fail” and “all other banks.” All banks in the first category should be “restructured”, i.e., broken up into, say, tenths. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about them failing—if they fail, well, they had a good run. Get me a beer hon . . .

And on exoplanet-Cain, we see that the current front runner must have been studying the Clarence Thomas hearings carefully.  And we know how well that has turned out for America.

Corporations as Persons

I keep thinking about our corrupted Supreme Court’s decision that corporations are now persons.  That decision was designed by the Supremes to allow corporations to donate unlimited cash to the republican fat cat candidates. Never mind that it remains an absurdity on its face. Justice Scalia cares not about such things as logic and sense. He cares only about electing republicans, as when he appointed a republican, George W. to the presidency.

But I keep wondering how we, the non-fat cats of the world, could use his inane decision to benefit non-fat cats. Then it came to me. If banks that commit patent fraud against the people, or their shareholders, or people buying investments designed by the bank to defraud, why can’t we bring such corporate-persons to justice? You know, convene a Grand Jury to indict, say Citigroup for its fraudulent one billion dollar investment deal that screwed a whole bunch of ordinary people. Yeah, I know, they have been fined $280 million for their dishonesty. But that means they’re still left with over $700 million in dollars that represent a fraud. Or how about the banks and other corporate entities that, by screwing with their retirement funds, have managed to rip off their retirees and future retirees, by taking money out of the retirement funds to pay very healthy payouts to their execs, while simultaneously claiming that their pension funds cannot pay out necessary retirement packages for ordinary folks? Their actions there may also be fraud.

Now, as I best understand it,  fraud can be a felony offense.  And yes, fraud is not easy to prove. Still, it would be healthy were we to indict, say, a Citigroup for fraud and force them to defend themselves against a local or Federal law enforcement agent. Now, it brings me to wonder about who we might commit to the slammer, were we to be able to indict and then convict, say, Citigroup of major fraud.  I would assume the agents of that “person” would have to stand-in, i.e., be incarcerated as the living incarnation of the Citigroup person. Otherwise, Citigroup could not be viewed officially as a “person” under any meaningful definition of person (not that Justice Scalia cares such things).

It is fun just to think about Citigroup facing time in prison.  I assume, incidentally that, being convicted of a major felony, the Citigroup person(s) would lose their licenses to continue in the banking business.  That in itself, might be useful outcome.

And on that other planet known as the Strange Land of Cain,  the Godfather of lousy pizza, Mr. Herman Cain has proposed a very basic tax structure, he calls the 9-9-9 plan. He boasts that it is simple. Of such plans, H.L. Mencken once said, “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."

Happy Birthday Bill

October 18^th – that was yesterday of course.  But October 18^th, 1931 . . . that was a while ago . . . 80 years to be exact. So, yesterday, my brother William would have reached 80 years. We always joked that he was 4 years older than me . . . on his birthday.  But he never made that big number, 80, for he is now gone.  But I think about him often.  He remains the most important man in my life, since he was always forging a path for me to follow. Arguably, we had no father to do so, and Bill picked up that mantle.

When I see our grandchildren being fathered properly, I smile, because whether they are girls or boys, a father’s influence will later be cherished, as a Mother’s.  So, William, I don’t know whether you are simply forging another path for me or that perhaps your energy has just been transformed into another form. We know that energy is always conserved, neither created, nor destroyed. So, your energy remains somewhere in our universe. And your life was full of your energy. That energy spurred me on, I continue to thank you daily William. While you were a man, you were a good man. Now, I hold you fast in my own mind.

So, thanks Wiiliam for all you were and are.

Happy Birthday.

In Pursuit of Efficiency in the Private Sector

I’ve been thinking a lot about this great debate going on in our nation about Capitalism vs. Socialism, and about the ostensibly greater efficiencies achieved in having the private sector do stuff vs. the government doing that same stuff.  I should first note that the TeaBaggers and others of that ilk, who keep yelling that Obama is a Socialist really need to get a grip. I assume they keep yelling stuff like that because, well they’re just not very smart.  Most of them don’t really know what Socialism is in any meaningful sense.  Socialism basically means that the “means of production” are centrally owned, i.e., by a central government.  In only a very few countries has socialism been tried in a pure sense, e.g. the Soviet State and a few others of that ilk. Generally, they have not been notably successful. A lot of the problems seem to stem from that old Russian adage, “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

In India, a mixed economic system operated. That is, India employed a “public sector” in which the government owned the plants—generally this sector had the heavy industrials within it. They had a private sector, in which the companies were privately owned, and they also had a mixed sector, in which both types of ownership existed. A number of European nations use a modified socialist model in which many types of services are government owned and operated, but the majority of commercial products and services remain private.

In the United States, we clearly use this mixed model, since  much of our infrastructure, e.g., our highways, have been built by the government, some of our health care is financed by the government, much of our education is financed by the government, and many other services are government financed, or run.  But the vast majority of economic activity in this country is privately owned and operated. Given that Obama has not made any effort to dismantle that system, it is at best inane to label him a socialist.  

In economic systems, we often employ two concepts to assess how well we are doing. One is “efficiency” and the other is “effectiveness”.  Efficiency refers to the input-output ratio, or unit cost. We measure how much labor and material cost we employ to produce a unit of output, and then we can use that measure to compare like economic entities on their relative efficiency.  We need always to be careful when employing such comparative measures to be comparing like output products. That is, we should not compare the unit cost of production of, say a Mercedes Benz sedan, with a Chrysler PT Cruiser. One is clearly a luxury vehicle, the other an annoying little knockoff of a 1939 auto design. We could of course compare two Mercedes plants, or even two plants producing PT Cruisers and measure their relative efficiency.  The Republican advocates of capitalism argue that the private sector is invariably more efficient than the public sector at doing really anything. Yet, in a number of cases, for example, health insurance, the public sector in the form of Medicare can be seen to operate at a lower cost, i.e., at a greater level of efficiency. Mainly the difference here seems to be in the form of relatively lower overhead in Medicare, because the upper levels of private insurance providers pay exorbitant salaries and bonuses to their executives relative to the government.

We can also see cost disadvantages in other forms of “privatization” of formerly government services, e.g., the military. When Shrub and his gang “privatized” parts of our military by giving very large contracts to firms such as Blackwater and Halliburton, the overall cost of providing the services increased dramatically over what they would have been if run by the government itself.  Again, the relative salary structures explain the differences.  So, although it remains arguably true that the private sector may well be more efficient at producing many types of goods and services than the government, it is not axiomatic.

The second type of measure is effectiveness. By “effectiveness” is meant the relative achievement of the main purpose of an activity.  For example, an immunization program might be measured on the extent to which it limits or eliminates the incidence and prevalence of specific diseases, e.g. measles.  Measures of effectiveness are not always so relatively straightforward, because the presumed cause and effect relationships are not always so clear.  In education, for example, the “No Child Left behind” program  has been translated into an increasingly simplistic model in which teachers are viewed as the sole determinant of our children’s education achievement as measured by standardized achievement tests.  The entire program is aimed at test gains, and so the educational system itself is slowly being redesigned into a model in which we teach kids how to take the standardized tests.  There are many obvious things wrong with such an enterprise. First, “education” should be as much about critical thinking skills as test-taking skills, but our current approach largely ignores this issue.  Second, our teachers are but one element in the learning process. Kids’ status on entering school, their home environment, their parental interest and oversight, are all equal factors in determining how well and how much kids actually learn. Teacher skills are but one factor.

On effectiveness measurement, because we have become intellectually lazy, we mostly choose not to do the hard work of forging usable and theoretically defensible measures. We tend toward the lowest possible denominator, often electing to measure that which is easily measurable rather than that which is important.

In many private enterprises, we used to compete on two bases, efficiency and effectiveness.  Efficiency is relatively straightforward—unit cost.  Effectiveness would be more complex and used to include the functional performance of the item, as well as its reliability over time, i.e., its “quality”. For example, my McIntosh stereo system (made in New York and not related to Apple-crap) that I purchased in 1968 still produces superb music  and has experienced no “hiccups” over its 40+ years of performance.  Compare that system with most of today’s electronics which are dead within three years.

It would be interesting to compare relative effectiveness of services produced both by the private sector and the public sector. For example, we could compare the provision of services by Blackwater as against similar services by the US military. Many would argue that, not only is Blackwater (now Xe) more expensive, i.e., less efficient, but that they are less effective at what they do—ergo, it would be better overall were the US military (the Government) to provide these services directly.

Over time, I would argue that the private sector has changed the nature of its game dramatically in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. Beginning in the early part of the 20^th century, one could see the private sector, in pursuit of efficiency gains, trying to reduce its unit cost of production so as to become more efficient and, therefore, more competitive. Thus we saw a shift in production from the North to the South because of the low labor cost in the South.  That shift never really stopped as our business executives, always in pursuit of higher profits kept moving the locus of production in the direction of lower labor costs, eventually moving their enterprise production plants to other countries.  Over time, less and less of our commercial production of goods and services is carried out within the United States—which explains in part our unemployment dilemma.  If we do not produce anything here, why would we need a labor force?  When, for example, housing collapsed, that was the last bastion of employment, leading to the continued high unemployment rates, despite the theoretic end of the recession.  There are no jobs because our productive capacity has been moved out of the country in order to gain low unit costs of production.

I would also argue that over the last 20-30 years, not only has our executive workforce been focused on efficiency, it has largely eliminated the other measure—effectiveness. In pursuit of greater profits, efficiency has replaced all other measures. Seemingly, we no longer compete on quality.

Now, if that be true, I am wondering whether we still have one more shift needed in pursuit of greater efficiency.  Why not begin “offshoring” our executive class? Since they represent the last really large pool of cost to reduce, we should think about ridding our companies of that executive staffing and moving those functions to India, China, et al. Think of the savings we could achieve and think of how happy that would make our stockholders.  We could shift all boards of directors, all senior executives—say the top three tiers of every US Company. Wouldn’t that be great?

Another great example of “Be Careful What You Wish For, Guys.”

Just thinking . . .

Our First Naive President

If St. Ronald gave us a first brush with an intellectually challenged president, we can say with confidence that George W. Bush was our first truly stupid president. Unquestionably, Ric Perry would make Shrub fade into the background of stupidheadland, since Perry seems to be intent on demonstrating that Bush wasn’t so bad after all.

In olden times, Republicans might have had scary guys as President, for example,  Richard Milhouse Nixon, but they never seemed terminally stupid. Now, for whatever reasons, Republicans seem to prefer their candidates either really stupid, really crazy, or both (see Michelle Bachman).

But Democrats have come up with an entirely new category -- naivete. Who would have ever considered a naïve president? Well, it would seem in President Obama, we have our very first naïve president.

Naïveté or naïve can be defined as:
Lacking worldly experience and understanding, especially, a. simple and guileless; artless as in a child with a naive charm; or perhaps, b. Unsuspecting or credulous.

How else should we characterize our current Democratic President? Somehow, he keeps thinking, "if I give them something nice, then perhaps they’ll play nice." Then they kick him in the nuts. Presidents such as Lyndon Johnson would smile just before he hit his opponents across the forehead with his ever-handy 2 x 4. Then, having gotten their attention, he would help them up, smile and tell them how things were.

Barack Obama, after having been kicked in the nuts, smiles, gets himself up and then asks what else he can do to help his opponents. Jon Stewart showed an interesting clip of a talk by The NRA’s chief sociopath, Wayne LaPierre. His talk took place after the Feds gave up some more goodies to the gun lobby. But, not appeased, Mr. laPierre instead spoke about how the President was trying to sucker them into believing he would play nice, but he was really all about taking their guns away and imposing his own nightmarish police state on all the nice gunners in the country. Talk about paranoia.

But the NRA rant was really just one small part of the larger republican strategy whereby they will never "play nice", regardless of what our president says or does. And our president doesn’t seem to get that. He keeps thinking that he is dealing with rational people who have the good of the country at heart and so will act accordingly. Instead, he has the equivalent of terrorists who no longer care whether their actions damage the country -- they don’t care Barack!! They might as well have dynamite strapped to their middle.
But our president keeps on, thinking, or maybe just pretending, that good will is just around the corner.

I guess this first term has been instructive to our president, and to the nation in general. It is now clear to one and all that republicans who created that house of cards and then brought it down, now wish to return to their glory days of the George W. Bush era, when War was on, and corporations could do anything they wished. Or maybe they just wish to return us all to that late great era when robber barons roamed the earth and we had just two classes the very rich and everyone else.

So, President Naïve, maybe it’s time to awaken to our real world. We need help. Republicans are out and about trying desperately to crush everything that is/was good about this nation. Wake up, man, and smell the roses, before they’re all dead. And, by the way, how about this? So long as the republicans plan to say no to anything and everything you say or propose, then why not begin saying and proposing what you really think is right? Quit trying to play nice. Perhaps they (and we) might grow to respect you more.