brainiac conspiracy

Watch What We Say, Not What We Do

We've reserved the right to meddle in the affairs of every nation in our own hemisphere for 200 years now (just in case anyone's forgotten a guy named Monroe), but the minute some other country on the other side of the globe decides it wants to exert the same authority over a next-door neighbor, our reaction, generally, is OMG SOVIET AGGRESSION THEY MUST BE STOPPED OBAMA MUST LEAD, etc. Seriously, though, Ukraine is way outside our sphere of influence, and there is precious little we can---or should---do besides issuing sternly worded warnings and filing grievances with the UN. I know we've grown accustomed to bossing other nations around at will, a.k.a., American Exceptionalism, but the sooner we learn to moderate this behavior, the better off, and safer, we will be as a commonweal.

---Baron V

Today's Worst Person

Barack Obama.

Besides being another needless unilateral concession to the crazy people for which nothing in return will ever be offered, and beside the fact that it always has, and always will be, abused by the crazy people in Jesus' mighty name, we need to purge this religious crap out of our politics, not encourage more of it. All it does is degrade our discourse and polarize the citizenry, and no good ever has, or ever will, come from it---unless providing the crazy people with another fig leaf they can hide behind when they decide that rape victims should be denied access to contraception strikes you as a social good. Now, it might be one thing if every town council meeting were opened by remarks from a pastor, a rabbi, a mullah, a monk, and an atheist, but of course that's not what will happen, and when you consider how many guns these people own, anything that fuels their sense of self-righteousness any further is a dangerous game the President needs to stop playing. He has no obligation to be President to all Americans when a sizable plurality of white Christian Americans refuse to recognize his legitimacy to be President.

---Baron V

America's Job Creators

Resolved: to help them to stay competitive in the global marketplace, we need to lower their taxes:

A business group of top executives on Wednesday proposed reforms to Social Security and Medicare that would raise the enrollment age for both programs to 70 but not raise Social Security taxes paid by upper-income Americans.

The Business Roundtable, which represents more than 200 chief executives from some of the largest U.S. corporations, also urged Congress to add a "premium support" mechanism to Medicare, peg Social Security cost-of-living adjustments to a lower inflation gauge and raise Medicare charges for wealthier beneficiaries.

Considering that consigning the not-quite-elderly to early retirement has become baked into the corporate business model, a few additional years of sickness and impoverishment shouldn't make things much worse for them. Adversity builds character, whiners!

Outrageous? Yep. Offensive? Perhaps. But when we get good and ready to discuss entitlement reform, let's make sure all the stakeholders have a seat at the table. Meanwhile, I'm gonna be busy shopping around for the best one-way fare to Montevideo.

---Baron V

If You're Trapped in a Hole, Keep Digging

One of the things that's been most maddening---one might be tempted to say "comical," except for the fact that it has ruined millions of lives---is the incredulous nature of our leading economists and political leaders when imposing austerity regimes. I mean, when you implement policies that impoverish people by cutting their salaries, slashing their benefits, or reducing their access to needed social services, the newly impoverished have less money to buy things. In turn this shrinks their government's tax base, and their local economy contracts. Keep this up long enough, impoverishing millions and millions more people nationwide, and it starts to register as negative growth on your country's GDP charts. I don't see why you'd need a degree from the U of Chicago to understand this when even a boob like me can grasp the general outline, but even if you do, it doesn't seem to alter the reality that many of our economic policymaker/analyst types seem to genuinely be---how to say?---clueless:

Investec's chief economist, Philip Shaw, said of the manufacturing data: "These figures were horrible. It made sense to expect a rebound for manufacturers after a very weak October but we just didn't get it."

Vicky Redwood, the chief UK economist at Capital Economics, said: "The figures provide further evidence that the economy probably contracted in the fourth quarter... So a triple dip still seems to be looming."

To be charitable, perhaps it's simply due to naivete, of people not wishing to believe that their elected officials would be so cruel/mindless as to intentionally inflict suffering upon their subjects because, well, because they can. But it's hard to reach any other conclusion when known remedies are routinely ignored.

---Baron V

Crystal Balderdash

Hard to say definitively, but I am guessing that one of history's great take-aways from our shabby little era will be to marvel at the folly our leaders exhibited when they outsourced the debate over social-welfare policy to a bunch of rich and privileged people who think that nobody in this country really needs social welfare because they will never need any social welfare:

Gregory: You've got to talk tough to seniors...don't you about this? And say, something's got to give?

I never thought there was a line between punditry and sadism, but the Dancin' Master crossed it with ease. And the president promptly answered this exercise in casual cruelty by bragging that he'd offered up the chained-CPI. The whole place has gone completely mad.

---Baron V

Also a Bad Idea

Dear Mr. President: Kindly shut up:

“Well but again, David as you know, one of the proposals we made was something called chain CPI, which sounds real technical, but basically makes an adjustment in terms of how inflation is calculated for Social Security,” Obama told host David Gregory on “Meet the Press.” “Highly unpopular among Democrats, not something supported by AARP, but in pursuit of strengthening Social Security for the long-term, I’m willing to make those decisions.”

You know, at this point I'm almost ready to impeach this guy if it means we can have four years of President Biden instead of this tiresome and self-defeating Sensible Centrist™ shit. Unless the President really believes his own rap, in which case he deserves to be given the boot. Because voters.

---Baron V

Fouling Our Own Nest

We really are no smarter than the furry feces-hurlers at your neighborhood zoo:

Federal officials have given energy and mining companies permission to pollute aquifers in more than 1,500 places across the country, releasing toxic material into underground reservoirs that help supply more than half of the nation's drinking water.

In many cases, the Environmental Protection Agency has granted these so-called aquifer exemptions in Western states now stricken by drought and increasingly desperate for water.

EPA records show that portions of at least 100 drinking water aquifers have been written off because exemptions have allowed them to be used as dumping grounds [...]

We found the EPA has not even kept track of exactly how many exemptions it has issued, where they are, or whom they might affect.

The way things are going, we won't need to worry about climate change after all because we're going to render our habitat uninhabitable well before nature gets around to doing it. Good thing we're in agreement that corporate income taxes should be lowered, though!

---Baron V

The Worst Person in The World

With no due respect, Senator Patrick Leahy:

A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans' e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law [...]

Leahy's rewritten bill . . .

Grants warrantless access to Americans' electronic correspondence to over 22 federal agencies. Only a subpoena is required, not a search warrant signed by a judge based on probable cause

Permits state and local law enforcement to warrantlessly access Americans' correspondence stored on systems not offered "to the public," including university networks.

Authorizes any law enforcement agency to access accounts without a warrant---or subsequent court review---if they claim "emergency" situations exist.

Says providers "shall notify" law enforcement in advance of any plans to tell their customers that they've been the target of a warrant, order, or subpoena.

Delays notification of customers whose accounts have been accessed from 3 days to "10 business days." This notification can be postponed by up to 360 days.

Don't know what's gotten to him---last time I checked, he used to be one of our most liberal Senators---but any member of Team Democrat who votes for this offensive shit deserves a primary challenge the next time they're up for re-election. Whoever their opponent may happen to be, I'm in for a donation. In the meantime, I guess this means our leaders have reached bipartisan consensus that the evidentiary/discovery phases of criminal investigations in this country need no longer be subject to judicial overview but are now free to operate under an honor system not unlike those found in countries that operate under the rule of Napoleonic Law. More depressing yet is the likelihood---or perhaps I should say certainty---that this subject will garner no attention whatsoever from the League of Serious Persons on next Sunday's TV talk shows.

---Baron V

Self-Correcting Wisdom

Have written many times before about our Republic's long slow decline to a state resembling Mexico-with-better-wireless-coverage, but what I've overlooked up to now is the fact that, well, most likely, we won't even have better wireless coverage:

After Hurricane Sandy, survivors needed, in addition to safety and power, the ability to communicate. Yet in parts of New York City, mobile communications services were knocked out for days.

The problem? The companies that provide them had successfully resisted Federal Communications Commission calls to make emergency preparations, leaving New Yorkers to rely on the carriers’ voluntary efforts [...]

Americans might assume that the U.S. government exercises enough authority over communications networks to ensure that they are responsibly run, reliable and available to all at reasonable rates. In reality, after a decade of steady deregulation, during which communications companies asserted that new wires required new rules, the companies are in charge of themselves.

What’s more, those that sell network connections in the U.S. are trying to claim a constitutional right to operate without any federal oversight.

And since speech is unregulated and they transmit speech, they should be free of government oversight because First Amendment! A generation ago, one would think such an argument would we laughed out of any federal courthouse in the land, but (sigh), we really don't live in those times anymore. Guess those of us out here in Earthquake Country had better start practicing smoke signals.

---Baron V

Insult to Injury

If you didn't lose your home to a hurricane, you can still lose it to the bank:

Foreclosure filings surged in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut last month, even before those three states bore the brunt of superstorm Sandy that now has homeowners digging through the debris.

Default, auction and repossession notices increased 140 percent in New Jersey, 123 percent in New York and 41 percent in Connecticut from a year earlier, the biggest annual gains among U.S. states in October, RealtyTrac Inc. said today in a report. Foreclosed properties in counties affected by the storm were valued at $41 billion, the company said.

This will probably decelerate the process in the short term since banks can't flip trashed properties, but the ensuing cash crunch will likely spur them to foreclose more quickly on non-trashed houses. We could have avoided this mess a long time ago with, oh I dunno, some sensible mortgage cram-down legislation, but I guess that would have placed too great of a burden on Tim Geithner's tennis partners, so it couldn't be done.

---Baron V

It's All True

Yes, compared to Europe at present, say, or even compared to our own history of systemic financial crises, our current economic recovery is relatively brisk. Yes, GDP is up, productivity is up, profits are up, and unemployment is (very slowly) edging downward. What's being left unsaid, of course, is the equally salient fact that these gains aren't being equally shared---or even shared at all---amongst the majority of the populace. Only the sacrifice is, and that's why so many people (rightly) see their economic condition as little changed, or worse, than it was four years ago---because for most of them, it is.

How to fix? There are a number of potential policy solutions, some of which have been tried and some of which have not, but outsourcing economic policy team to loyal guardians of the moneyed elite that caused the crisis in the first place has not, repeat not, been one of them. As a suggestion, maybe someone would announce a new policy direction tonight? Might prove more helpful than simply pleading with voters to "stay the course" because "staying the course", for too many people, means financing the recovery with ten more years of low wages, underemployment, union-busting and foreclosures. Just trying to be helpful here.

---Baron V

Bait And Switch

This is why your parents warned you not to accept candy from strangers:

Analysts say lenders appear to be have taken a “shock and awe” approach to the talks, insisting on reforms as well as cuts before approving the next tranche of aid the Greek economy so desperately needs to keep afloat. “There is a feeling that everything should be put on the table and tackled now that the government is relatively fresh,” said one official. “But a lot of the demands are bordering on the absurd” [...]

The troika, which also wants to see more civil servants fired, is determined to further slash pensions, pay packets and benefits if the conservative-led alliance cannot come up with convincing evidence that up to €1.5bn can be shaved from operational costs of ministries overseeing health, defense and local authorities. “They are insisting on the minimum wage and pensions being reduced, totally ignoring the climate we live in here,” another insider told me.

If this were a one-off, I don't suppose there'd be much cause for concern: "Those lazy Greeks were just being irresponsible, need to live within their means, etc." But I am guessing their country is more like a guinea pig in a lab experiment, which, if successful, will be replicated elsewhere---Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and who knows, maybe one day even here! By "successful", of course, I mean the wholesale privatization of government services (and the elimination of the unions that represent their workers), not the overall well-being of the populace because, obviously, that's the last thing the financiers of our new global order genuinely care about.

---Vitelius

Forget $5 Gas, Enjoy $5 Bread

Because supply and demand:

A federal judge today threw out the Dodd-Frank provision that empowered the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to set position limits on commodity trading. Judge Robert Wilkins said in his ruling that the CFTC did not prove the necessity of position limits to curb runaway speculation, and that the law itself did not “constitute a clear and unambiguous mandate to set position limits, as the Commission argues.”

Here’s the punchline: Judge Wilkins was appointed by President Obama in 2010.

Now, "position limits" are limits to the amount of any deliverable commodity that any one trader or speculator can hold within a given time frame. The rationale behind this is to prevent any one party from either "cornering the market" which would allow them to rig prices that restrain trade and gouge consumers, and/or to prevent parties that never intend to take delivery of the commodities they've purchased to manipulate the futures markets. While these are certainly legitimate concerns, the problem is that they've never actually happened before in our history, so the judge's decision was clearly a fair and wise one.

---Vitelius

Feature, Not Bug

There are any number of ways a nation's political leadership class can tackle an economic crisis. One approach, practiced by our own government in the 1930s and '40s, is to borrow/spend/print lots of money to create social-relief and/or jobs programs for people, even if they're only make-work jobs, to keep them occupied, to boost their feelings of self-worth, to provide them with the means to feed themselves and their families, and generally to minimize the risks of spreading social unrest by maintaining essential services. Given our own history, this approach has quite a lot to to recommend it.

Then, there is another way:

Greece's far-right Golden Dawn party is increasingly assuming the role of law enforcement officers on the streets of the bankrupt country, with mounting evidence that Athenians are being openly directed by police to seek help from the neo-Nazi group, analysts, activists and lawyers say.

In return, a growing number of Greek crime victims have come to see the party, whose symbol bears an uncanny resemblance to the swastika, as a "protector".

One victim of crime, an eloquent US-trained civil servant, told the Guardian of her family's shock at being referred to the party when her mother recently called the police following an incident involving Albanian immigrants in their downtown apartment block.

"They immediately said if it's an issue with immigrants go to Golden Dawn," said the 38-year-old, who fearing for her job and safety, spoke only on condition of anonymity. "We don't condone Golden Dawn but there is an acute social problem that has come with the breakdown of feeling of security among lower and middle class people in the urban centre," she said. "If the police and official mechanism can't deliver and there is no recourse to justice, then you have to turn to other maverick solutions."

---Vitelius

Coming Attractions

Really looking forward to that second term:

Behind the scenes, Obama and his top aides made clear that they were willing to swallow serious changes to Medicare in exchange for deficit reduction.

As Woodward’s new book lays out, there was agreement between the White House and congressional Republicans on raising the eligibility age for Medicare — the only question was on how fast to phase it in.

Obama officials initially proposed raising the age from 65 to 67 “by one month a year, meaning the full two-year increase wouldn’t be complete until 2046,” Woodward wrote.

After House Speaker John Boehner balked at such a slow phase-in, the White House gave some on the issue.

“They still wanted to raise it at the slower rate of one month per year, but would agree to start the process four or five years earlier,” wrote Woodward [...]

Obama, in an interview with Woodward, acknowledged he was open to nudging reluctant liberals on Medicare and Social Security if Republicans were willing to deal on taxes.

“’I am willing to move on entitlement reform — even if my own party is resisting, and I will bring them along — as long as we have significant revenues so that people feel like there’s a fairly shared burden when it comes to deficit reduction,’” Obama recalled telling Boehner.

Realize I could write this same post practically every day, but I think it bears repeating as long as I come across well-meaning posts at liberal sites like this one, asking how cranky progressives like me and Greenwald and all the other antisocial grumblers on the Professional Left could possibly object to the Obama method of governance once you get past the targeted assassinations and drone strikes and that other kinda-yucky stuff. Well, sacrificing the foundational programs of the New Deal/Great Society in the name of achieving an unwise and counterproductive short-term policy goal would certainly qualify in my book, and that's why those of us who still give a shit about these programs---and who are depending on them still being around in ten years or so, when we become eligible for them---find it a moral imperative to continue agitating for more progressive policy solutions than trading in the Democratic Party's legislative legacy of the last hundred years for a 50-pound bag of Senior Bits.

Make no mistake, I will hold my nose if need be and cast a vote for Team Democrat this fall, simply because there are no viable alternatives (no, Greens, Justice Party et al don't count; a truly viable party is built from the ground up, not nationally on down) and because the alternative is simply too horrible to contemplate. But those of us who've worked and lobbied for decades to bring about a more enlightened and egalitarian government than what previous generations endured owe it to ourselves---and to the future---not to relent on these issues without a fight. The President hinted at this four years ago, when on the trail, paraphrasing Gandhi, he reminded us that power never cedes without struggle. So struggle we must---what other choice do we have? Unless we decide to simply check out, of course.

---Vitelius

Wealth Creation Strategies

As every regular reader at this site knows, they begin by making the painful but necessary acknowledgment that the world is flat, that our entrepreneurial class most adopt flexible management and marketing strategies that reflect the lightning-fast pace of change in our ever-evolving world, and that workers acquire new job skills to make themselves more attractive to employers than a robot or a computer. How to accomplish? First, by liberating ourselves from the outdated and inefficient business model of our brick-and-mortar welfare state, and looking for inspiration to the emerging economic dynamos of the Far East:

We have reached the entrance of the production floor with a warning sign that says: “TOP SECURITY AREA”. We are told that if anyone enters or exits the metal detector door and found carrying any metallic stuff on your body such as belt buckle, earrings, cameras, handset, MP3 players, the alarm will sound and you will be fired on the spot. One of my roommates told me that his friend has been fired because he carried a USB charging cable. When I walked into the production floor after passing through the metal detector door, I heard loud sounds of machinery engines and a very dense plastic smell. Our supervisor warned us: “Once you sit down, you only do what you are told”. The supervisor finally presents us the back of the iPhone 5 and shows it to all of us and said: “This is the new unleashed iPhone 5 back plate, you should be honored having the chance to produce it.”

An iPhone 5 back-plate run through in front of me almost every 3 seconds. I have to pick up the back-plate and marked 4 position points using the oil-based paint pen and put it back on the running belt swiftly within 3 seconds with no errors. After such repeat action for several hours, I have terrible neck ache and muscle pain on my arm. A new worker who sat opposite of me gone exhausted and laid down for a short while. The supervisor has noticed him and punished him by asking him to stand at one corner for 10 minutes like the old school days. We worked non-stop from midnight to the next morning 6 a.m. but were still asked to keep on working as the production line is based on a running belt and no one is allowed to stop. I’m so starving and fully exhausted.

By my own calculations, I have to mark five iPhone plates every minute, at least. For every 10 hours, I have to accomplish 3,000 iPhone 5 back plates. There are total 4 production lines in charge of this process, 12 workers in every line. Each line can produce 36,000 iPhone 5 back plates in half a day, this is scary . . . I finally stopped working at 7 a.m. We were asked to gather again after work. The supervisor shouted out loud in front of us: “Who wants to rest early at 5 a.m.? We are all here to earn money! Let’s work harder!” I was thinking who on earth wants to work two extra hours overtime for only mere 27 yuan (USD$4)!?

(Via.)

---Vitelius

Tenement Chic

Conceding the point that much of our current economic malaise was brought about by too many Americans wanting to live in wasteful, oversized housing (suburban McMansions, sold subprime), you have to be amazed at the way self-imposed austerity is now being pitched to a generation of people who didn't cause the housing crisis as the kewl, hip and groovy wave of the future:

In July, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced his competition to create a building of residential “micro-units” in Manhattan, each ranging from 275 to 300 square feet, the plan ignited the imagination of countless architects and developers.

It also gave many New Yorkers a joltingly fresh perspective. For those who already consider themselves space-starved, quarters that are even more cramped seemed inconceivable. Yet to others, an apartment of that size sounded crazy-huge.

Consider Gab Stolarski, who happily renewed the lease for her West Village studio apartment---all 170 square feet of it.

As she welcomes a visitor to her fourth-floor walk-up, Ms. Stolarski, a manager in the digital sales group at Condé Nast, recites the stock reaction to her pinkie toehold in Manhattan: “ ‘Oh! Ohhh. It’s ... cute! And you have a bathroom, too!’ ” [...]

Although her charming aerie has a working fireplace and a courtyard view, here is what Ms. Stolarski’s apartment does not have: a couch; tchotchkes; specks of dirt; paperwork (“I’m 25,” she shrugs. “I’m a digital girl.”); food.

Yet the studio, which was represented by Prudential Douglas Elliman, perfectly matches her priorities. A clotheshorse who doesn’t cook, she stores sweaters, not soy sauce, in her kitchen cabinets. She covers her stove burners with a cutting board---not for serving cheese and crackers, but as a counter area to dump sunglasses and her purse du jour. More important, she lives in her favorite neighborhood, near transportation, and for a rent that is almost bearable: $1,745 a month (Manhattan one-bedroom rents have inched over $3,300).

Let that sink in for a moment: $1,700 for 170 square feet. That's not a cause for celebration, it's cause for rent strikes and rioting.

Yes, I know that living in a place like lower Manhattan has always been expensive. And yes, many Americans will be better off in the long run for "downsizing" their lifestyles. But please! Living in a fucking tenement is still living in a fucking tenement, even with dayglo paint on the walls and some modular Ikea furniture. Besides not being able to host and entertain in such tiny spaces, you can also pretty much forget about, oh, getting married or starting a family unless you want to ditch the city and move to the suburbs. Which is exactly what's going to happen.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if Mikey Bloomberg is really serious about promoting thriving urban communities with a stable tax base, he'd be better off in the long term by rewarding developers who offer affordable living space that can actually accommodate more than one person and a passel of possessions. Otherwise you're simply underwriting development that (a) places a premium on squeezing every available dollar out of tenants, which will likely result in (b) a permanent transient population that will trade in its groovy Zip code for more livable spaces elsewhere after a few short years.

Of course, perhaps the desired outcome is not the creation of thriving urban communities at all but simply leveraging residential zoning laws to extract even more money out of Manhattan residents. Can't speak for anyone else, but I'd move to New Jersey and take the train to work every day if my only other housing choice was a broom closet in the West Village.

---Vitelius

Modest Proposals

Another great reason to defund public education for the poor, funnel government resources into private charter schools that serve the children of rich people, raise the eligibility age for Medicare and Social Security, and outsource Medicaid to the states is because . . . well, because an entire generation of undereducated Americans will be less of a drain on the treasury when they get older:

Researchers have found a disturbing trend while examining life expectancy in the United States, as the least educated white Americans have actually seen a massive drop in number of years that they live. The most shocking decline was in white women without a high school diploma, who "lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, an almost unheard-of decline.

---Vitelius

Idiots

Heaven forbid our leaders should think about conserving the planet's dwindling natural resources instead of threatening to go to war over them:

Nuuk, Greenland --- With Arctic ice melting at record pace, the world’s superpowers are increasingly jockeying for political influence and economic position in outposts like this one, previously regarded as barren wastelands.

At stake are the Arctic’s abundant supplies of oil, gas and minerals that are, thanks to climate change, becoming newly accessible along with increasingly navigable polar shipping shortcuts. This year, China has become a far more aggressive player in this frigid field, experts say, provoking alarm among Western powers.

Meanwhile, Easter Island:

One of the world's leading ice experts has predicted the final collapse of Arctic sea ice in summer months within four years.

In what he calls a "global disaster" now unfolding in northern latitudes as the sea area that freezes and melts each year shrinks to its lowest extent ever recorded, Prof Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University calls for "urgent" consideration of new ideas to reduce global temperatures [...]

"As the sea ice retreats in summer the ocean warms up (to 7C in 2011) and this warms the seabed too. The continental shelves of the Arctic are composed of offshore permafrost, frozen sediment left over from the last ice age. As the water warms the permafrost melts and releases huge quantities of trapped methane, a very powerful greenhouse gas so this will give a big boost to global warming."

---Vitelius

Used to Call This "Fraud"

But in job creator-speak, it is now simply known as upcoding:

In 2008, nearly 500 hospitals, or roughly 10 percent of the nation’s total, used the two most-expensive codes to bill for 60 percent or more of their ER claims for Medicare patients, according to the center’s analysis. Some went well beyond that. In 2008, Baylor Medical Center in Irving, Tex., billed the government at the two highest-paying codes for 80 percent of the patients it treated and released from its ER.

Baylor Irving’s president, Cindy Schamp, said in a written response to questions that the hospital’s billing “did not align with industry trends,” but added that the hospital voluntarily reined in its charges in 2009. Schamp said the Medicare agency never questioned the hospital’s billing and the hospital concluded that it did not overcharge.

By 2001, members of a government panel were so fed up with the payment codes because of billing mistakes and other factors that they recommended junking them. Two years later, Congress passed legislation that called for studies to consider alternatives. But Medicare officials could not get an agreement with medical professionals on how to improve them, so they stuck with the existing codes.

Today, high rates of billing mistakes persist, according to Medicare audits. Medicare contractor Trailblazer, which audited office visits in early 2010 in Virginia, found mistakes in half the records it reviewed. A similar audit in Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas reported errors in 91 percent of the billings sampled.

In a critical review of Texas and Oklahoma hospital ERs in March, Medicare auditors concluded that $45.14 of every $100 billed “was paid in error.”

Medicare officials don’t appear to have an aggressive strategy for cutting down on medical coding abuses.

I really don't care what sector of the economy we are talking about: Until people start getting marched off to prison for defrauding their investors, their patients, or their government, nothing is going to fucking change in this country, no matter how many Dodd-Franks or Affordable Care Acts we enact into law with whatever best intentions. Bottom line, people who commit crimes deserve to be treated as well, criminals, and until our leaders are willing to treat them as such, we should consider their efforts at "reform" as little more than wallpaper being thrown up to cover the rot and mildew that undergirds the structural foundation of American-style corporate capitalism. Honestly, at this point in our history we are really not much different than Zaire under Mobutu. You can drink the water, sure, but we are run by a kleptocracy all the same.

---Vitelius