brainiac conspiracy

Monday Night Movie Blogging

Because the holidays are now officially over. Mangia bene, dude-bros!

---Baron V

Everybody Knows We Don't Torture People in America

Except for, you know, all those times we actually do:

The Fresno County Jail has been a place of terror and despair for mentally ill inmates who spiral deeper into madness because jail officials withhold their medication.

About one in six jail inmates is sick enough to need antipsychotic drugs to control schizophrenia, bipolar disorders and other psychiatric conditions, but many sit for weeks in cells without medication previously prescribed by private doctors, say family members, lawyers and psychiatrists. If the inmates do get medication, it’s often at a lower dose or is a cheaper generic substitute that doesn’t work as well, they say.

Six years ago, the jail drastically cut back on psychiatric drugs. A county official said the intent was to curb drug abuse by inmates faking mental illness. Critics say it was part of the county’s cost-cutting efforts.

But the drug policy has raised costs significantly in other areas. Taxpayers spend millions of dollars each year on the inmates---above and beyond the cost of caring for them in the jail. As their mental conditions deteriorate, many lose the ability to help in their own defense and must go to state mental hospitals for treatment. Fresno County has sent nearly 400 inmates since 2007 to state mental hospitals, more per capita than all of California’s largest counties except Kern.

For many, a hospital stay is a short reprieve from psychosis. Medicine prescribed by psychiatrists at state hospitals isn’t continued once inmates return to the jail, and their instability returns.

Am guessing that a great many of these people have no business being in jail at all when long-term hospitalization would be equally as effective as, and less costly than, incarceration. And yes, a place like Fresno County is the kind of place you'd expect to see this happen since it is primarily agricultural, with a predominantly low-wage labor force, high seasonal unemployment, and a tax base that likely can't sustain the levels of social services the county's residents need. In a nation that was run by thoughtful and compassionate people, you'd see generous support coming in the form of federal block grants to states to make up for local budget shortfalls. But we don't live in that kind of country, and we haven't for many years, because there's no money to be made from public mental-health delivery, so we have outsourced a great deal of it to our job creators instead.

But budget issues notwithstanding, withholding medicine from sick people is a form of torture.

---Baron V

There Used to Be a Time

When policymakers understood the social utility of providing universal services, i.e., that offering everyone the same basic levels of service---in roads, utilities, communications and the like---would be a democratizing influence on society that would promote a more inclusive and cohesive social order, even if those services didn't generate sufficient revenues to be self-sustaining. They were absolutely right, of course, but today's policymakers don't really care about democratization projects because Free Markets Solve Everything™, so what they're giving us instead is superhighways for rich people, and goat paths for everyone else:

Some policy experts say the old mandate of universal service may be obsolete in the new world of rapidly changing technology---that requiring that the best technologies go to everyone will stifle innovation. "If you require gigabit service everywhere, you will have gigabit service nowhere," says Blair Levin, a former official at the Federal Communications Commission who is now a communications and society fellow at the Aspen Institute.

---Baron V

Everything's Related

First, the happy news:

The world now plays host to a record 1,426 dollar billionaires, after 210 multimillionaires were propelled into the premier league of extreme wealth in the last 12 months, according to Forbes magazine.

This super-rich set together sit on wealth estimated at $5.4 trillion, equivalent to more than a third of the annual output of America, the world's largest economy. Last year the billionaires' club held combined wealth of $4.6 trillion (£2.6 billion).

Wow! Guess all that money had to come from somewhere:

Gloomy economic news from Spain this morning---the number of people registered as out of work has risen by 1.2% last month, breaking through the 5 million barrier.

The Labour ministry reported that the number of registered jobless in Spain rose by another 59,444, as the country's economy continued to contract.

The data doesn't include around 1 million people who are out of work, but not registered as such.

The austerity programme being implemented by the current government is widely blamed for stifling economic growth and driving people out of work.

Yes, it's not totally a zero-sum game, but this is the net effect of an economic policy regime of stimulus for banks and austerity for the masses: a Billionaires Bubble. We are now five years into this little experiment, and it's getting a little late in the game for our economists and central bankers to insist that no one could have possibly predicted this outcome, etc., and sooner or later, we are going to conclude that this is the entire object of the game. It's ultimately self-defeating, of course, inasmuch as minting a planet full of peons eventually guarantees the collapse of these great fortunes since, you know, people with no money can't afford to buy the goods and services these job creators produce. But by then one imagines they will have cashed in their chips, and left some other poor suckers, i.e., governments, to hold the bag. Nice work!

---Baron V

The Private Sector

As we all know, it's more flexible and adaptable to changing conditions than the public sector, what with its layers of bureaucracy, its cumbersome civil-service rules, and its greedy public-employee unions. And that's one reason (among many) why the private sector excels at delivering goods and services more efficiently than government. So long as you can afford them:

The U.S. private security industry is expected to grow 6.3% a year to $19.9 billion by 2016, according to a study by security research group Freedonia Group Inc. Even some in the public sector are trying to tap into the industry to save money; one Tennessee power department laid off security officers last year and replaced them with security technology and private contractors.

In California, where many cash-strapped cities cut police budgets during the recession, residents are turning to detectives, security firms and even the Internet.

Of course, not everyone can afford private police help [...]

It's another facet of how income inequality is playing out in America---as cities are forced to cut their budgets, even police protection is more accessible to those with cash.

"Wealthy neighborhoods are buying themselves more police protection than poor neighborhoods," said Samuel Walker, emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the author of 13 books on policing.

At the rate we are going, it will be nothing short of amazing if there are going to be any public-sector jobs in this country, outside of the military and homeland security, a generation from now. And even a lot of those jobs will probably be contracted out because, well, they already are. Yes, rich people have always been able to afford private security, and always will. But it's one thing to hire rent-a-cops as a matter of personal choice, and another matter altogether to essentially force people into hiring them as a matter of necessity because their local law-enforcement agencies are underfunded. Which begs the bigger question of whether or not our political leadership will ever agree to raise the kinds of revenues deserving of a nation with exceptional living standards, or whether they'll just keep telling us we're "exceptional" as we continue our inevitable slide toward Tier II nation status, a slightly-upstyled version of Mexico with more cable TV channels.

(Via.)

---Baron V

Empowering America's Job Creators

I am guessing we can predict the eventual outcome here with a 100-percent degree of certainty:

A little more than three years after its Citizens United ruling opened the door to super PACs and $90 million donors like Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, the Supreme Court is entertaining another challenge to campaign finance laws. This time the same lawyer behind the Citizens United case is questioning the cap on the amount of campaign contributions an individual can contribute to candidates and parties. If successful, the case could allow well-heeled donors to pour millions more into federal elections.

Then again, considering the corporatist leanings of the Roberts Court, it wouldn't surprise me if they decide that corporate persons enjoy special free-speech rights that us non-corporate persons don't. No amount of contorted legal reasoning from that gang would really surprise me anymore. Either way, that thriving liberal democracy sure was fun while it lasted, no?

---Baron V

Liberal Democracy

It's sometimes easy to forget---especially for those of us who were born after World War II---that this form of government, which we take for granted as part of the Natural Order of Things, is the exception to the way we have typically been ruled, i.e., by despots, kings, juntas, et al, and that it very well not represent some evolutionary development in collective political consciousness but merely an accident of history, which can be just as easily reversed as advanced. Of course, a good way to ensure that liberal democracy continues to thrive is for us to choose our leaders wisely based (at least in part) on their vocal support for democratic traditions and institutions because the authoritarian alternative will always hold a strong appeal to those who would govern us.

Why is this? Because most people who vie for positions of political leadership are drawn to to the profession the lure of power, and authoritarian political structures confer much greater power upon them than decentralized democracies do. Think of the differences in political potency as similar to the differences in potency between powder and crack, and it will start to make sense why so many authoritarian types often sound and behave like, well, crackheads.

---Baron V

Not Rocket Surgery

But if you're a manufacturer that makes, oh, let's say rat zappers, it's in your economic best interest for your government to ensure---via fiscal policy, primarily---that your customers possess the wherewithal to buy your rat zappers because if they don't, you can't make money. And when that happens, you cease production of rat zappers, lay off your workforce, etc., which places further downward pressure on the economy and weakens demand as increasing numbers of people have less and less money to spend on rat zappers. You'd think this line of reasoning to be elemental, since you don't really need to be an economist to figure it out, but for some reason, many of our best and brightest leaders don't seem to have a clue about how the way things work. Because if they did, stuff like this wouldn't be happening. Instead, the rats have won the day.

---Baron V

Baby Jesus Punished Them

For messing with His divine power to make people sick:

[Y]ears of scientific research---and thousands of mice---at New York University Hospital's Smilow building on E. 32nd St. have been lost.

Most of the power that drives the research laboratories in that building next to the FDR Drive, including emergency power, was lost at 8:30 p.m. Monday. Many precious reagents---special enzymes, antibodies, DNA strands---generated by scientists and stored at -80 degrees and -20 degrees were likely destroyed, a researcher tells the Daily News [...]

Even more alarming, thousands of mice that are used by scientists for cancer research and other experiments, drowned during a flood. It is unclear how the mice died, but the source told the News that many of these mice are genetically modified for certain research and took years to produce. It will likely set back several scientists' work by years, the source said.

"This does not equate to a loss of life, but it is extremely disheartening to see years of research go down the drain," the source said.

This hurricane is just a gigantic global cluster. Maybe our leaders would consider talking to us about climate change at this point? There's still a few days to go before the election, you know.

---Baron V

Market-Based Solutions

It's gonna be awesome when diptheria and smallpox make a comeback, too:

Global health bodies have issued warnings to travellers to the worst hit region in the south of the country, with fears that Athens could soon be affected.

Austerity budgets have resulted in drastic cutbacks in municipal spraying schemes to combat mosquito borne diseases.

In what is believed to be a first for Western Europe, Greece has experienced the first domestic cases of malaria since 1974.

As mentioned yesterday, most of us who were born in the midst of the postwar economic boom would never have thought it possible that our civilization would ever become so ethically and morally impoverished that we would find it desirable, even necessary, to revert to the more savage and brutish socioeconomic models of our not-so-distant past. But that's exactly what's happening----now in Europe, perhaps later to us---under the rubrics of "market recapitalization" and "entitlement reform." Oh well, a peaceful and prosperous Europe was fun while it lasted.

---Vitelius

Our Liberal Democracy Was Fun While it Lasted

If there's a epitaph to be written for what increasingly looks like a one-term presidency, this probably fits the bill as well as anything else I've found:

There was a moment right there at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 when the nation could have radically reassessed the power of corporations and the power of their money in our politics. The way that American corporations did business was laid bare in all its magnificent avarice and mendacity for all the world to see. The damage that an unaccountable and deregulated corporate elite could do to the rest of the country was just standing there in the open with a huge spotlight on it. It became possible for the country to see how the game had been rigged and for whose benefit, and for the country to see the complicity of the political elites in building the crooked casino that was our national economy.

And then the moment passed.

We need not cast blame again as to why the moment passed. Suffice it to say, it passed because those same forces that brought on the crisis---and, therefore, that brief, glimmering opportunity---were able to make it pass.

This is partly true. Those "forces that brought on the crisis" were successful in making it pass, but they could not have pulled it off without the complicity of a political leadership class that was more concerned with "foaming the runways" for the wrongdoers than it was in taking stern measures to prevent such a crisis from ever happening again, or providing relief for those who'd been hardest hit by it. It was not ever thus in this country---as we are sadly reminded today, there was once a large and thriving political party in this country that saw the utility in championing labor over capital, the moral imperative in promoting equality of opportunity over inherited privilege, and the wisdom of investing in infrastructure as well as in battleships.

Unfortunately, that party doesn't exist in practical terms at the national level anymore, so what we are left to choose from on Election Day is a corporatist/militarist party with a neoliberal social conscience, and a corporatist/militarist party with no social conscience. So the little people bicker and argue over abortion and gay rights and prayer in schools while the bankrollers of government laugh all the way to their Cayman redoubts, secure in the knowledge that their interests are protected by a captured regulatory authority at home, and by a military/surveillance/security complex that primarily exists to safeguard their investments abroad. Whoever wins on Election Day won't alter that equation---the only thing that will change is the degree of austerity we'll be expected to endure to sustain a decaying system of crony capital that earns its quarterly dividends off the exploitation and suffering of millions of people. Not pleasant to contemplate, but it is what it is.

---Vitelius

Comic Relief

When the zingers start flying, hilarity ensues:

Samaras promised to enact the changes---which include opening up “closed-shop” professions, overhauling health care, merging state-run organisations and reforming local administration---by the end of the month. Privatizations will also have to be accelerated.

“The country is going down and down. It has lost 25% of its national outlay since the crisis began,” the minister of development, Kostis Hadzidakis, who is in charge of privatizations, told me. “There is a way forward if we ensure that we change. Because the decline has been so steep, the rebound can be spectacular.”

So, shrinking the size of the government hasn't worked up to now. The answer, then, is----drum roll, please---keep shrinking the size of the government. Take my ministry, please!

You know, this stand-up routine would almost be funny if millions of people weren't getting sick and going hungry because of it. Then again, perhaps that's the point of it in the first place.

---Vitelius

Future, Now

Not happening by accident, either:

Greece's prime minister has warned that the economic crisis in Greece is now so severe that society risks collapse, and urged its international lenders to agree its desperately-needed aid trance soon [...]

He cited the rise of the fascist Golden Dawn party (which won parliamentary seats in the last election) as proof that Greece is staring into the abyss.

There is a real risk of the social order collapsing, he said, thanks to "the rise of a right-wing extremist, one might say fascist, neo-Nazi party."

Actually, a pretty good argument could be made that the social order has already collapsed. Only the daily food riots haven't broken out quite yet:

What's really most distressing about this is the fact that all around the world, from Berlin to Brussels to our own nation's capital, there are thousands of wealthy, powerful and influential men (a few women, too!) who earnestly believe that what's happening over there is not only a necessary but a desirable corrective for a society they perceive as gone haywire because, well, greedy unions and the welfare stare and market-based solutions. The only differences among them are the degrees to which they feel their own constituents must be punished for their indolence and sloth. The thought that their own bad decisions might have caused the collapse in the first place seems continually to elude them. That's best-case, actually, because if that's not the case, then they're sadists who enjoy using their money and connections to abuse their fellow citizens. Don't really think this is what the authors of the Magna Carta had in mind!

---Vitelius

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

One Step Forward

Means one step back:

U.S. President Barack Obama issued a new executive order last week to fight human trafficking, touting his administration's handling of the issue.

"When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed---that's slavery," Obama said in a speech at the Clinton Global Initiative. "It is barbaric, and it is evil, and it has no place in a civilized world. Now, as a nation, we've long rejected such cruelty."

But for the third year in a row, Obama has waived almost all U.S. sanctions that would punish certain countries that use child soldiers, upsetting many in the human rights community.

Because it's not child trafficking if you're one of our certified Friends in Freedom™:

Late Friday afternoon, Obama issued a presidential memorandum waiving penalties under the Child Soldiers Protection Act of 2008 for Libya, South Sudan, and Yemen, penalties that Congress put in place to prevent U.S. arms sales to countries determined by the State Department to be the worst abusers of child soldiers in their militaries. The president also partially waived sanctions against the Democratic Republic of the Congo to allow some military training and arms sales to that country.

---Vitelius

Steering The Narrative

Fully expect to be debating this soon:

[W]e must elect public officials who say they will vote for Biblical laws. First and foremost, this means voting to prohibit abortion. While few Christians are willing to go this far, the longterm goal should be the execution of abortionists and parents who hire them. If we argue that abortion is murder, then we must call for the death penalty.

But let's see if we can't work across the aisle with them. Because maybe, just maybe, we can reach bipartisan consensus for life in prison without the possibility of parole.

---Vitelus

Maybe They'll Bring Back Prohibition, Too

Twenty bucks for the first Serious Person in the Village press corps to acknowledge this for the bold, courageous and intellectually driven policy proposal that it obviously is:

The gold standard has returned to mainstream US politics for the first time in 30 years, with a “gold commission” set to become part of official Republican party policy.

Drafts of the party platform, which it will adopt at a convention in Tampa Bay, Florida, next week, call for an audit of Federal Reserve monetary policy and a commission to look at restoring the link between the dollar and gold.

Reality check, from the comments:

Now they have gone stark-raving, barking mad. Medieval ideas about rape and primeval views about evolution meet gold bug insanity. Give me a reason to vote for these crackpots. Obama has been deeply disappointing but at least he's not completely insane.

---Vitelius

Not Seeing The Logic Here

Specifically, how we arrive at a bipartisan budget resolution when Team Democrat has repeatedly offered one and Team Republican consistently rejects it, and when the Concerned CEOs of America™ who are clamoring for a bipartisan budget resolution are giving most of their money to the people who reject one. Unless the game is actually to peel off a few members of Team Democrat to give Team Republican and Team CEO the votes they need for the budget resolution they want, and slap a "bipartisan" label on the process. Am I missing something here, or are we all just being conditioned to accept the inevitability of the death of the New Deal and the triumph of New Feudalism? Can't come up with any other explanation.

---Vitelius