Tag: wealth

I’m morphing into a radicalized commie by the minute anymore.  The mentality of our public officials regarding their responsibilities to society shows a utterly staggering disregard for the lower classes.  The editor of the SF Bay Guardian, Tim Redmond, is equally incredulous at the world view of our ruling elites in the barking-mad basket case that is California:

The absolute most stunning statement of how messed up the state of California is emerged last week from the state director of finance, explaining why the proposed budget cuts fall so heavily on services for the poor. Let me quote directly from The New York Times:

“Government doesn’t provide services to rich people,” Mike Genest, the state’s finance director, said on a conference call with reporters on Friday. “It doesn’t even really provide services to the middle class.

“You have to cut where the money is,” he added.

Um … government doesn’t provide services to rich people? What about, say, the roads they drive on, and the airports they fly in and out of? What about the vast sums the state spends putting out fires that threaten wealthy enclaves in Southern California? What about the public education system, which trains workers for businesses? What about the entire criminal justice system, which exists to a significant extent to prevent poor people from taking rich people’s money?

Do you think Sergey Brin and Larry Page would have become Google billionaires if the Internet – developed and paid for by the government – didn’t exist?

(Emphasis supplied)

This is another short reaction to Joseph Romm’s piece in Alternet: “Why the Global Economy Is a Ponzi Scheme and We Are All Bernie Madoffs”.  Much as I’d like to agree with Romm (as he is one of the most authoritative voices out there on the topic of abrupt climate change), no, we are not all Bernie Madoffs.  The global capitalist economy marginalizes most of the world’s population while granting the status of “Bernie Madoff” to, well, Bernie Madoff — really, even granting Romm’s metaphor, the few who are privileged to take real advantage of the economy.  And, perhaps, even for them, “playing the Ponzi scheme” means “just getting by.”  Still, Romm’s use of metaphor is creative and interesting.

(crossposted at Big Orange)

What if there were a secret store of wealth that America could use to pay down its debts and restore prosperity? What if we could free hundreds of billions of dollars to reinvigorate our society and restore confidence to industry and financial markets? Such a reserve does in fact exist. It is our accumulated store of institutionalized stupidity.

Readers of “Dilbert” who have worked in large organizations must constantly explain to children and other innocents that the pervasive stupidity depicted in Scott Adams’ comic strip is only slightly exaggerated. It exists in every corner of our “efficient” quasi-capitalistic marketplace. In prosperous times, institutionalized stupidity is annoying, but in times of extreme economic difficulty, this huge reservoir of dysfunctional behavior is inevitably tapped as desperate necessity becomes, temporarily, powerful enough to overcome the general human tendency toward stupid institutional behavior.

Whence institutional stupidity? The best answer I can come up with is that our species is designed by evolution to adopt destructive simplifications of behavior. The eagerness of individuals to substitute obedience to simple rules for independent development of specific solutions is the foundation of institutional decay. Fixed rules substitute for context-based decisions and dogmas crowd out considered judgments until schools produce dropouts, prisons incubate criminals, food plants ship toxic peanut butter, and Vista bogs down your computer. As every institution ages, the accumulation of irrationality in its growing mass of rules, dogmas, and habits raises the level of dysfunction and stupidity, until some final crisis sweeps away the accumulated mountain of folly.

A year ago, I began using the FIOS high-speed Internet service provided by Verizon, a huge telecommunications corporation. Ever since I began using FIOS, Verizon marketing personnel have contacted me, on average about twice a month, asking me to sign up for the FIOS service. Each time they call me, I carefully explain to them that I am already a FIOS customer, and they reply that they will not solicit me again. Then, a few weeks later, the phone rings again with another FIOS solicitation. Verizon has probably spent more money on re-marketing FIOS to me than they did on the initial installation of the service. This is not an isolated anecdote. Such stupidity accounts for hundreds of billions of dollars of waste. Let’s look at the big examples.