Embrace Your Extremism!

Sean Fenley has an article on Dandelion Salad, a wonderful compilation of progressive views. He wrote about how values consistent with a civilization with a social contract would be considered extreme now. How even Jesus Christ preaching to help the sick, poor and vulnerable would be called "radical" and "Marxist".

We have to embrace (or stand up to the extremist label) and push the discourse further to the left. Or even the center, circa 1970. Nixon would be a radical in these times. My reply to his piece:

Sean, you are so right. Civilized values and the societal good are held to be extreme left-wing views in the MSM. During the health care reform debate, Bill Moyers of PBS’ Journal program (sadly canceled) had knowledgeable professionals speak about Medicare-for-all and single payer plans. Maureen Dowd called such discussion that of “the left wing fringe.”

Armed militia men marching on DC on the anniversary of Tim McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing are not referred to as extremists but merely as “exercising their first and second amendment rights.”

In certain states which allow the carrying of unconcealed weapons, armed people are testing their rights by entering such common areas as Starbucks stores. I should say, “armed white people” because I could not imagine any other race getting away with such privilege.

Propaganda by the corporate state is funding information now.

Today the NYT is running an op-ed piece written by Kris Kobach, one of the constructors of the Arizona “guilty until proven innocent” bill, who was an adviser to AG Ashcroft. There is no opposing view to pick apart the constitutional holes in his logic, unless you count Linda Greenhouse's article a few days before, "Breathing While Illegal"

I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon.

Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.

What would Arizona’s revered libertarian icon, Barry Goldwater, say about a law that requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made “any lawful contact” and about whom they have “reasonable suspicion” that “the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States?” Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa?

Greenhouse is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and has covered SCOTUS for years. She is afraid that the current court will not strike down such law as unconstitutional. With good reason. In 1982, a similar law in Texas was struck down. At that time, a young John Roberts was an assistant to Texas Attorney General William French Smith. He wrote that such an action was "judicial activism." He is now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Repugs Say to Dems-Hands Off!-Save Wall Street So It Can Kill Again

If you ever wondered whether the Wall Street Journal's news coverage had been slanted by Rupert Murdoch's grip on the paper (of course, the editorial pages were always virulently conservative but the news used to be untainted), all you have to do is look at the front page story , "Banks Falter In Rules Fight".

The story presents the banksters as poor elderly widows deprived of food and shelter by the evil Obama empire rather than as greedy pirates who almost brought the world economy down (and still might) then begged to be bailed out by the taxpayers. The story decries the Democrats' efforts to regulate the financial sector as a means of:

[S]queezing the banks' lucrative derivatives-trading business.

Derivatives (like mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps--CDS) are ways for traders to sell worthless paper then insure themselves against losses by having the taxpayer take the fall. That's what happened to your housing equity and 401K. Often the traders don't own the very bond or obligation that they're betting will fail. It's like betting that your neighbor's house will burn down and collecting if it does. There are legitimate uses for derivatives, to hedge against price and interest rate fluctuations, but those have paled next to the skyrocketing CDS casino.

AIG was the entity that took all these bets against the subprime mortgage market but had no money to pay out if the market tanked, which of course it did. The only rationale for CDS is to make gobs of money while producing nothing of value and maybe helping burn down your neighbor's house. But the story doesn't present regulation against these opaque contracts made in the dark as at all beneficial. Now that Obama appears to be succeeding in fighting against weakening regulation against CDS abuse:

That's drawing Republican complaints that the pending rewrite of the rules of finance will put the economy at risk.

If that isn't Orwellian, dunno what is. The derivatives put the economy at risk.

The funniest part of the story is the description of derivatives.

Derivatives are financial instruments that derive their value from the movement of something else--for instance, the price of wheat or other commodities, or the level of interest rates. In recent years, a strain of derivatives known as credit default swaps (in effect, a bet on a borrower's ability to repay a debt) has exploded. Derivatives figured in the global financial crisis, though their precise role is a subject of debate

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There ain't no debate. Goldman Sachs et al sold toxic instruments to pension funds then bet against them because they knew they would fail. Put someone in jail, folks. And if there's any socialism going on, it's socialism for the rich.

The Internet Is Gozar the Destructor (tip o' the hat to Ghostbusters)

Internet communication, so often driven by emotion, lasts forever. You get an email, you fire back. No analysis, no time for reflection, no time for deep thought.

“News” pours out in real time without any assurance that it’s “true” or “factual”, and the response is instantaneous. At the same time it stands there as an unchangeable record and people take umbrage, cut you out of their lives, blacklist you, hate you, excommunicate you without the possibility of parole. There is no appeal to reason possible because they, too, are in the grip of emotion, staring at those black markings against whiteboard, devoid of context.

Laws are passed, people fired, reputations ruined, a body of work down the drain with one click of the mouse. An emotionally-driven technology demolishes culture, wit and hard work like a chain saw through butter. Fact free nation. Whoever screams loudest is the victor.

"You Are Not A Gadget"--Jaron Lanier Seeks to Restore Humans To the Top of the Food Chain

What happens when we humans bestow agency, personhood and infallibility upon computers and doubt ourselves? That’s one of the questions Jaron Lanier explores in his fabulous and alarming new book, “You Are Not A Gadget.”

He was one of the original Silicon Valley warriors. The term “virtual reality” is often attributed to him. He believed in democratization of the internet, the wisdom of the cloud/crowd, the ideology that “information wants to be free”, that the voice and creativity of the individual has nothing on the “hive mind” of billions of anonymous bits working in unison. In this book which he calls a “manifesto”, he’s made a 180. I haven’t read the entire thing but I certainly will and report back.

He talks about the Turing test. Alan Turing, a mathematician who used computers to crack the Nazi Enigma code during World War II, was a true hero but flawed, as we all are.

Lanier describes the Turing Test as a thought experiment, a Victorian parlor game:

A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth.

Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can a judge tell which is the man?

From the elegance and brevity of Lanier's definition to Wikipedia, a true example of confusing the "hive mind" of millions of anonymous netizens with wisdom (particularly since Wikipedia editors seem to be almost exclusively male and under 30; that fact may disturb the idea of "objectivity"):

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence. It proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated locations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. In order to test the machine's intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen.

Of course, Wikipedia disdains the idea of individual expertise. That's so last century. I know because I wrote an entry about Raymond Chandler, who I can quote by heart, and some anonymous shithead edited it out without a trace. When I sought out this supposed "expert" (why was his 'individual expertise' greater than mine?), he claimed I wrote opinion instead of fact. Yet within the entry, the writer claimed Chandler was the template for hard-boiled detective fiction. If that isn't opinion (what about Hammett, to whom Chandler bowed down), I don't know what is.

Maybe Wikipedia is trying to mimic the Turing test. We're supposed to think all those anonymous male youngsters glued to the machine are actually the machine: infallible, remote, untouchable.

I guess the idea behind the Turing test is that the mind can be reproduced physically, therefore if you can construct a computer duplicating the physical representation of a mind, then a computer can think.

I do not have a PhD from MIT in mathematics. I am, however, a writer , reader and social animal. If a human is the one determining whether or not a computer is intelligent by matching its written answers to a MALE’s written answers to the same questions, then the determination is human. Why not have a computer decide what is human intelligence?

Lanier describes Kasparov losing a chess game to a computer he had won against previously because he was psyched out by the machine. He viewed it anthropomorphically. Kasparov attributed stone-faced implacability and infallibility to a giant machine. He bluffed himself. You might as well imagine that your dishwasher is determined to scrub your dishes clean and crestfallen when crumbs cling to them as opposed to simply operating in a mechanical way like a souped-up vacuum cleaner.

Humans are rational and emotional. To quote from Lanier’s book, “[Turing] commited suicide by lacing an apple with cyanide in his lab and eating it.” Turing was gay when it was a crime. British authorities convinced him to go to a quack and get treated with massive doses of female hormones. He developed breasts and became extremely depressed. No wonder he replaced the woman with a machine in his test. And he paid homage to Eve in his method of dying.

Attributing agency to computers can lead to tragedy. Walt Bogdanich of the New York Times authored a series of articles where medical personnel assumed the computer software regulating radiation therapy was infallible. Never dreamed it was faulty and human intelligence was required to judge whether or not people were being given massive doses incorrectly. And often the machine was operating badly, killing sick people faster. If humans unthinkingly assume the computer acts on its own as opposed to being programmed and run by people, we’ve got cognitive dissonance. Isn't that what happened to Robbie the Robot on Forbidden Planet? He was programmed to kill yet told not to kill. Cognitive dissonance!

For 99% of Americans, Germany Is Better

In America, workers are an overpriced commodity destroying shareholder value. In Germany, workers are an integral part of thriving business.

In the American version of predatory capitalism, economists and financial types say that the European model is stagnant because it prizes cohesion over innovation. Even though Germany was also impacted by the ongoing economic crisis, its unemployment rate of 7.5% is actually down from two years ago. The U.S.'s unemployment rate has doubled since then and there's no end in sight.

Despite the made-in-America financial disaster, we still believe that our version of unfettered free market capitalism is the best. That it raises all boats. This flies in the face of the rubble strewn about us, the ruined landscapes of shuttered homes and picked through garbage. The American worker is the victim of this belief, dying before his time, helpless in the face of the hopeless.

German culture emphasizes long-term thinking and sustainability:

Keep experienced people, keep their knowledge in-house. Develop a high sense of loyalty and trust so they feel like they’re part of a family, not just doing a job.

During this crisis, German businesses tolerated lower productivity, anathema to American business. American companies fired all the people they could and made the rest do more.

We hide behind our economic indicators without acknowledging their political agenda. Our official unemployment rate doesn’t count the long-term unemployed or the underemployed; counting the number of those receiving unemployment insurance doesn’t count the people getting extended unemployment, the main federal jobs program. And as of Friday, February 26, there is no more unemployment insurance.

As Mark Twain once said, “There are 3 kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Here are some (perhaps) irrefutable facts: 25% of the 8.4 million jobs lost in America during the Great Recession (since August 2007) are permanently gone. They will not be coming back.

The country needs to create 100,000 jobs a month simply for the new entrants in the marketplace. For an uptick in the current 9.7% unemployment rate, we will need more than 200,000 new jobs a month.

Economic analysts note things dryly without any context, “Companies automate and shift jobs overseas or move whole assembly lines to China to cut costs.” But Germany didn’t do that. They tried to save the businesses and jobs at the same time because they believe that workers are not interchangeable commodities like soybeans or lumps of coal. They believe that good workers contribute a lot to the bottom line. “Much of the attention on saving jobs has focused on the government’s short-work program, in which taxpayers and companies share the cost of furloughing workers. But Mr. Kramer said the government-financed program of shorter workers was responsible for saving only about 20% of jobs.” In other words, in Germany 80% of jobs were saved through workers helping grow businesses out of the crisis.

The American corporate viewpoint is radically different:

“Companies, in the name of making money, substitute against labor through outsourcing or technology,” said Allen Sinai of Decision Economics. Wages and benefits make workers “so expensive that who wants to hire them? As a result, the displaced workers won’t be rehired unless we have double the growth rate we’re expecting.”

That’s not only cold, it isn’t true.

Germany has an entirely different mind set than America. The emphasis is not merely on earnings and creating shareholder value; it is also on preventing joblessness and the despair that comes with it. People truly are at their breaking point.

Can an unemployed person pay taxes?

So What’s The Diff?

For one thing, Germany did not discard its manufacturing sector. During the economic downturn Germany emphasized both returning the profitability and saving jobs. Siemens, the big manufacturer, retooled through capital investment, betting on powerful turbines, each one of which could light up a city of 3 million.

Behind the curtain of corporate propaganda underlying everything, what’s going on in America?

• Because of an estimated loss of 40% since 2007 in household equity and retirement savings, people cannot retire. Therefore the natural cycle of retirement, making way for the younger generation, is unnaturally stunted.

• 25% of homeowners are substantially underwater and cannot sell their homes. The vaunted mobility of Americans to go where the jobs are is constricted.

• People are living on extended unemployment benefits, if anything.

• 1 out of 8 Americans are on food stamps.

• Many have run out of unemployment and cash, subsisting on food stamps alone.

• One person in that position is Jean Eisen from Southern California. She lost her job selling beauty supplies to salons over two years ago and hasn't been able to find a new job. She hasn't had a paycheck or unemployment insurance for several months, and is surviving on foodstamps.

She has become effusively religious — an unexpected turn for this onetime standup comic with X-rated material — finding in Christianity her only form of health insurance.

"I pray for healing,” says Ms. Eisen, 57. “When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got to go with what you know.”

UPDATE on Layoffs Kill: Great Comment/Solution

UPDATE: Great comment from AnnSMI February 25th, 20102:52 am posted on the NYT story featured in the previous post, "At Closing Plant, Ordeal Included Heart Attacks":

Now we know.

We know that corporate greed for more and more profits and higher and higher stock values which have led to the shipping of American jobs abroad kills.

We know that treating workers as a disposable commodity kills.

We know that the pyshing the middle class to the wall with job losses and pay cuts kills.

We know that leaving former middle class workers with a bleak future of low wage jobs at McDonalds and as Walmaart greeters kills.

We know that globalization - the darling of pie-in-the-sky economists from Krugman to the Univ of Chicago- while great for third world countries and the upper 1%, isn't working for the US middle class who see their jobs and their futures disappearing and are faced with poverty after a lifetime of work, and it kills them.

Between greed of the health insurance companies who would rather see the population die before they pay for treatments and the greed of Wall St for higher and higher profits and stock values, the US middle and working classes are being stressed - quite literally - to death.

BTW, here is a very short answer for the pretenitious and officious Prof William T. Gallo with his psycho-babble of "“We want to find out how we can intervene so we can lessen the effects of job loss, or eliminate them.”
The answer is quite simply: MONEY.

Pay these abandoned workers enough MONEY so they will not be in poverty for the rest of their lives due to the loss of their jobs in middle age and late middle age when they are too old or have too many family responsiblities to go get PhDs in some esoteric field for which they will never be hired because then they will be near 50 or 60 years old.

Pay these displaced workers enough money so they can afford to keep and use health insurance.

Forget all your psycho-nonsense of counseling, support, and magic happy pills. The answer is MONEY because such workers see poverty and healthcare bills staring them in the face.

American Tragedy: Layoffs Kill People

Today's front page of the NYT offers a horrifying story that layoffs can kill. 3 relatively young men died of sudden heart attacks within weeks of one another after learning that their employer, the steel mills in Lackawanna, NY, was closing.

Studies show that anxiety about the prospect of being laid off might even be more damaging than actually being laid off. Life expectancy is shortened significantly.

It disgusts me that all we hear about in America is "maximizing shareholder value" and "higher productivity." There are so few stories about the psychological and physical torment of the worker in these horrible times where hiring is nowhere in sight. The only place I ever see a story like this is in the New York Times. At least I can look forward to a world where investigative reporting is no longer done so I can simply concern myself with iPhone Apps and "Jersey Shore" and not the plight of my fellow human beings. Enough ranting. Here are the studies cited in the article:

A growing body of research suggests that layoffs can have profound health consequences. One 2006 study by a group of epidemiologists at Yale found that layoffs more than doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke among older workers. Another paper, published last year by Kate W. Strully, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Albany, found that a person who lost a job had an 83 percent greater chance of developing a stress-related health problem, like diabetes, arthritis or psychiatric issues.

In perhaps the most sobering finding, a study published last year found that layoffs can affect life expectancy. The paper, by Till von Wachter, a Columbia University economist, and Daniel G. Sullivan, director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, examined death records and earnings data in Pennsylvania during the recession of the early 1980s and concluded that death rates among high-seniority male workers jumped by 50 percent to 100 percent in the year after a job loss, depending on the worker’s age. Even 20 years later, deaths were 10 percent to 15 percent higher. That meant a worker who lost his job at age 40 had his life expectancy cut by a year to a year and half.

A 2009 study led by Sarah A. Burgard, a professor of sociology and epidemiology at the University of Michigan, found that “persistent perceived job insecurity” was itself a powerful predictor of poor health and might even be more damaging than actual job loss.

By the time health care reform is passed, everyone will be dead.