brainiac conspiracy

Sociopaths

You know you are around them whenever you hear some job creator bemoaning the lack of qualified workers for his company, or the pundit exhorting us to reinvent ourselves so we can provide greater value than a robot or a computer, or even a President who pledges to ensure that every young person gets the education they need for the jobs of the 21st Century. (Hospital orderly? Fast-food worker? Amazon parts-fetcher? What if we don't want those jobs?) They express the sentiment in different ways, but the underlying sentiment's the same: You. Don't. Matter.

---Baron V

Truth, Reconciliation, War Hawks, Etc.

Okay, it's likely to never happen, but yet another compelling reason to convene such a commission is to call out for public shaming all the serious persons in our national news media who bought into the bullshit and cheered on the slaughter of thousands. Not only were these sociopaths wrong about everything, but because they have never been publicly embarrassed, they are still pontificating on the awesomeness of war and the treachery of the hippies who happened to be right about Iraq.

Another good reason: It would make for great television! Just think of the prospect of Richard Cohen being forced to listen to his Fools & Frenchmen column being read aloud in open testimony, or Tommy Friedman forced to watch Suck On This under subpoena while video screens suspended overhead projected images of dead and disfigured Iraqis. A nonstop laff riot! Yeah, I know it'll never happen, but a cranky old lefty blogger can dream.

---Baron V

Anything That Isn't Nailed Down

Is fair game for our overlords. Even our fucking water:

For about a decade, Central Valley farmers there have been pumping groundwater much faster than it can naturally be replenished, to make up for reduced irrigation flows from the state's rivers and streams, researchers at the University of California Center for Hydrologic Modeling recently found. The trend has dramatically increased since the current drought's onset in 2011, the team says. The overpumping has gotten so bad that 1,200 square mile swath of the Central Valley---a landmass more than twice as large as Los Angeles---has been sinking by an average of 11 inches per year, a 2013 US Geological Survey study found. And here's the kicker: USGS hydrologist Michelle Sneed, who worked on the study, tells me that it's not on land owned by family farms that most of the water sucking in the part of the Central Valley is occurring; rather, she said, it's on land owned by large finance firms.

Years from now, when we are all working as sharecroppers on Goldman Farms, we will rue the day our leaders decided not to break up these syndicates when they had the votes to do it.

---Baron V

More Tales From The Recovery

Bet you won't see the White House waving this chart around:

To be fair, this could be a "glass half full" indicator, i.e., that a greater percentage of the labor force is college-educated. That's undoubtedly true, but given the preponderance in our economy of certain sectors that generally require higher education---finance, insurance, tech, medicine, administration---and the paucity of other sectors, such as government, that don't, you can make a pretty compelling argument that we have a surplus of overeducated workers and a shortage of positions for them, and that what we need going forward isn't so many more SQL coders and securities traders and college administrators but more bus drivers and park rangers and meat inspectors: You know, jobs that don't require a college degree but which still pay decent money. Perhaps the people who govern us would consider adjusting their educational policy priorities to reflect this new reality.

---Baron V

The SQL Coding of You

I know I harp on this subject a lot, but the fact remains that over the coming decades, a lot of work that has been traditionally be done by humans can, and will, be done by robots or computers. There's nothing intrinsically evil about this, but it will displace a lot of workers from their jobs, and something will need to be done about it. And no, a MyRA won't help any more than 401(k)s have, and another retraining program won't be adequate, either.

In other words, a lot of people will be permanently unemployed or underemployed in the Information Age, and we will need to take care of them one way or another. This is going to force us to rethink the concepts of labor and leisure, and how we compensate people for whom no work is available. Just telling everyone that they must provide their prospective employer with more value than a robot or a computer is pointless when robots and computers can perform their jobs faster and more efficiently than any human ever could. Not everyone will want to be an SQL coder or a derivatives trader or a Wal-Mart greeter or a hospital orderly---or any of the other "jobs of the future"---so we will need to liberate ourselves from many long-held capitalist conceits: For instance, if a person wants to seek a career as a marine biologist, she should be free to seek a career as a marine biologist regardless of whether there is any "market demand" for marine biologists. And further, she should be entitled to free higher education, and paid a decent wage that will allow her to provide for her family and save for her retirement. I know that the standard rejoinder to this is, well, if we give people this kind of freedom without the presence of markets to impose discipline, then everyone will want to be a poet or a musician, and nobody will perform any meaningful work, and everyone will just collect welfare checks without contributing anything to GDP, and the economy will collapse.

But our economy has already proven itself capable of collapsing on its own without the aid of poets and musicians, thank you, and in the bigger scheme of things, GDP is meaningless if most of the people producing it are poor and miserable, and if they have to destroy their habitat in order to keep it growing. We simply can't survive for very long if we don't replace our extractive form of consumptive capitalism with another model that recognizes the limits our environment places upon us, and which respects the rights of every human being to a decent standard of living and a comfortable old age. The Koch Brothers' right to amass $70 billion in wealth stops at my right to have a roof over my head and health care I can afford. If that makes me a communist, okay, sign me up.

---Baron V

Today's Worst Person

Ron Brownstein:

[I]n a relentlessly globalizing world, most jobs that moved to Mexico since NAFTA would likely have shifted to some lower-wage country. "We are a global economy whether we like it or not," says Los Angeles lawyer Mickey Kantor, who served Clinton as U.S. trade representative when Congress approved NAFTA. "Businesses, capital, and jobs are going to move back and forth."

Bullshit. Career grifters like Mickey Kantor aside, it's like this: Jobs and capital don't move around from country to country because they have some mystic powers of their own, they move around because policymakers incentivize capital flight and outsourcing. Globalization wasn't/isn't some inevitable act of God, it's an outgrowth of policy that rewards busting unions, driving wages downward, evading taxes and offshoring assets. If we agree that these are undesirable things, we can rewrite policy to put a stop to the worst abuses of the market, but either way, economies don't change and evolve like living organisms because they're manmade constructs. This isn't at all difficult to figure out.

---Baron V

People Are Smarter

Than the people who would lead us. Well, not everyone, obviously, but a significant---and growing?---number of people who realize that the grifters will be coming after our money for as long as there's a Democrat in the White House because that's the only time when deficits really matter. The folks who actually, like, work at the White House would do well to listen to them.

---Baron V

Caste System

Used to be it was a characteristic of a backwards social order that visited the sins of the fathers upon all subsequent generations. But that was before we entered the exciting new hyper-connected era of robots, computers, and Bangladeshi garment workers all competing for a piece of an ever-shrinking global pie, because today in America, we too have our Brahmins, and our untouchables. It's a feature, not a bug, of our emerging economic order.

---Baron V

The Student-Loan Default of You

One of the things that's most maddening about the current debate over jobs, wages, income inequality, etc., is the sentiment, echoed so often by serious persons far and wide, that unless we possess some specialized skill (doctor, lawyer, job creator), we simply have to accept a future that offers us only two possible employment outcomes: (1) Invent something awesome and make millions off it, or (2) work for the same wages as a Bangladeshi garment worker. What's maddening about it is that the argument is predicated on the conviction that markets always operate according to some inexorable laws of nature, and if those good-paying, blue-collar, middle-class jobs are vanishing, well, it can't be prevented any more than the moon can stop influencing the tides, and if you're mired in abject poverty, it's because you haven't made yourself more valuable to your employer than a robot or a computer. It's all bullshit, of course, since our markets are rigged and there is no end of policy fixes that could be implemented to "bring back" those good-paying jobs. So why do they keep making this bogus argument? Two reasons: (1) Either the serious persons aren't very bright, or (2) likelier yet, they're a bunch of greedy little shits.

---Baron V

Serious Persons

We use the term loosely to define the conventional wisdom-peddlers amongst our Washington political and media elites, and it's true that they share many commonly held beliefs. One, universally held, is that the poor, sick and elderly need to be punished for their laziness and sloth. Second, there is no problem in the world that a robot, a computer, or a telemarketing guy in Jaipur can't solve, so we all need to learn to live on subsistence wages because the world is so doggone hyper-connected. Also too, that partisan gridlock is crippling America, with both sides equally polarized, which is why the President needs to give the Republicans in Congress anything they want. But most of all, they cherish the idea of using America's money and military to boss other people around in the name of improving foreign relations. Because nothing says "diplomacy" like making generous entreaties to foreign leaders, then threatening to beat them up if they don't accept them on our terms.

---Baron V

Just Like Wrestling

In our post-milennial economy, everything is rigged:

Dispatches found one boss in Bangladesh who boasted of being "king of Facebook" for his ability to create accounts and then use them to create hundreds or thousands of fake likes.

Click farms have become a growing challenge for companies which rely on social media measurements---meant to indicate approval by real users---to estimate the popularity of their products.

For the workers, though, it is miserable work, sitting at screens in dingy rooms facing a blank wall, with windows covered by bars, and sometimes working through the night. For that, they could have to generate 1,000 likes or follow 1,000 people on Twitter to earn a single US dollar.

Sam DeSilva, a lawyer specialising in IT and outsourcing law at Manches LLP in Oxford, says of the fake clicks: "Potentially, a number of laws are being breached---the consumer protection and unfair trading regulations. Effectively it's misleading the individual consumers."

This is the exciting hyper-connnected world of commerce and communication that people like Tom Friedman sprout major wood over at places like the Aspen Ideas Festival. Of course, a few disgruntled leftists might note that the business model of this emerging global economy is based entirely on defrauding clients and impoverishing workers, but fortunately, we have the serious persons to remind us that it's just a naturally occurring extension of human evolution, and that we need to reinvent ourselves so that we provide greater value to employers than a robot, a computer, or a Bangladeshi click farmer. Promising future we have to look forward to, no?

---Baron V

The Chapter 7 Liquidation of You

We live in exciting times. Thanks to the explosion of user-friendly online technologies, the global population is ever more hyper-connected, with goods and services being exchanged over the Internet at warp speed. What once took weeks to transport on horseback or frigate ship can now be moved in a matter of nanoseconds. This revolution in the way we communicate and exchange information may seem bewildering to some, but a few basic rules of the road can be enlightening.

Take young people who are just entering the labor force. For them, mushrooming social networks present challenges, but also boundless opportunities. While they're waiting to leverage that degree in Humanities or Marine Biology into a rewarding career, they're inventing new ways to create wealth by connecting online and offering to clean their friends' homes, wash their cars, or walk their pets. While they're struggling to pay off that $75,000 student loan debt that will severely impact their earning potential for the remainder of their lives, they're selling their clothes, furniture and kitchen utensils---all online. And after they've been evicted from their apartment for non-payment of rent because they've been unemployed for two years, they're making new connections and forging new lifestyles by sharing living spaces with peers who have an air mattress in the garage to spare.

Mastering this new mode of living, naturally, requires getting it right as well as getting there first. But make no mistake---we are on the ground floor of a new era in communications, and ascending the ladder of mobility to the penthouse suite---or conversely, stumbling backwards into the basement, where at least a sleeping bag awaits---is the pivotal challenge of our time. Many things are still up in the air, but one thing that's certain is that a new generation of Internet pioneers is blazing new trails in the ways we live, eat and work, and creating the template for a new type of commerce that generates wealth by keeping young people in a permanent state of impoverishment.

---Baron V

The Animal Kingdom

One thing we've learned about it is that if a particular species of critter comes to dominate a given ecosystem, and it has no known predators to control its numbers, it will reproduce to a point where it literally eats its way out of its habitat, which will trigger a mass die-off due to starvation and disease, and this condition will persist until the critter's population can again be sustained by its habitat. Nature self-corrects, in other words, and we're about to see once again how this scientific principle works in actual practice---this time, with us.

---Baron V

It's a 10-56 World

And an exciting world it is, with dazzling new technologies unveiling every second that have created a hyper-connected cyber-civilization where more people can start stuff, make stuff, steal stuff, embezzle stuff, and swindle stuff than ever before. What’s exciting is that this brave new world empowers tomorrow's entrepreneurs to find a job, engage in commerce, rig interest rates, invest in worthless shit, manipulate commodities prices, starve millions of people because of it, and steal pension savings and homes from millions more---all of it online. Did I mention this an exciting world we live in?

On the other hand, this exciting new world is also, well, killing us:

The suicide rate among middle-aged Americans climbed a startling 28 percent in a decade, a period that included the recession and the mortgage crisis, the government reported Thursday.

It never fails to amaze me that the serious persons of our political and media leadership class never seem to realize that the vision of the future that tickles their fancy---a world without government, without unions, without pensions, without any rules that they need to obey, without borders or boundaries of any kind, without the sense of purpose and place that a community provides---strikes the rest of us as a fucking dystopic nightmare.

---Baron V

Its a LIBOR World

We live in interesting times. Our Western economy has quickly transitioned from one based on manufacturing, exports and hard currency to one based on finance, insurance, real estate, and synthetic debt instruments. People no longer converse anymore in taxi cabs or in hotel bars, on the phone or via e-mail. They don't even text anymore, they Tweet! The flow of information moving at hyper-warp speeds over the Interwebs is accelerating at an ever-rapid pace, and it is up to each one of us to equip and empower ourselves to master these rapidly evolving technologies before they master us.

Of course, what this really means is that Western governments have allowed our system of global finance to be hopelessly rigged against workers and small investors, that the value of labor has been decimated by the free flow of capital and lax regulation, and that a few thousand billionaires have managed to leverage these exciting new advancements to make obscene loads of cash while billions of people on the planet go hungry. But since there is some sort of immutable law of nature that has caused this to happen, you'd better resign yourself to it or starve to death. Robots, computers, and all that.

---Baron V

A Bangladeshi Garment Worker & a Blogger in WashingtonAre Equally Interconnected to The Global Sewer System

For those times when TED Talks simply aren't enough:

[W]hile we were focused on 9/11 and the subprime crisis, something really big happened in the plumbing of the world . . . I would argue that in the last ten years, while you were sleeping, the world went from connected to hyperconnected, from interconnected to interdependent. And my view is that this is changing every job, every workplace, every industry, every job. and we’re not talking about it. Yet we’re all living it and feeling it. If you don’t start every day asking, ‘What world am I living in?’ you’re going to get in a lot of trouble.

It really is amazing just how much of our serious persons' marketing rap is built around the model of extracting money from gullible affluent Third Way/No Limits types in exchange for the policy equivalent of helium. Particularly so when anyone who's read Friedman's work can distill down Friedmanism to its foundational principle: in the emerging global economy, there are going to be winners and losers, and you want to play for the winners because the winners get to fuck with the losers.

---Baron V

Things Are Different Now Because Everything Has Changed

And America has lost her innocence and we can't rely on oceans to insulate us from the world's problems anymore, and the framers never envisioned the threats we face because everything has changed and things are different now. Taken in the aggregate, it's a nonsensical line of logic that's devoid of any real meaning, but it sounds dramatic enough---hey, we all like to think we're bending the arc of history in our own time---and because of that, it's a line that our political leaders like to advance whenever some law-enforcement issue garners national notice as a way to draw attention to themselves. But no matter which hoary bromides they chose to employ, what they're basically saying is that because they failed at their jobs of protecting the public, the plebes now need to accustom themselves to living under authoritarian rule:

“The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a press conference in Midtown. “But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”

---Baron V

Wealth Creation Strategies

I am guessing that this qualifies as a big fucking deal:

A study by James S. Henry, former chief economist at McKinsey & Company, estimates that wealthy individuals have $21 trillion to $32 trillion in private financial wealth tucked away in offshore havens---roughly equivalent to the size of the U.S. and Japanese economies combined.

Even as the world economy has stumbled, the offshore world has continued to grow, said Henry, who is a board member of the Tax Justice Network, an international research and advocacy group that is critical of offshore havens. His research shows, for example, that assets managed by the world’s 50 largest “private banks”---which often use offshore havens to serve their “high net worth” customers---grew from $5.4 trillion in 2005 to more than $12 trillion in 2010.

As you might expect, America's job creators are well represented:

Among nearly 4,000 American names is Denise Rich, a Grammy-nominated songwriter whose ex-husband was at the center of an American pardon scandal that erupted as President Bill Clinton left office.

A Congressional investigation found that Rich, who raised millions of dollars for Democratic politicians, played a key role in the campaign that persuaded Clinton to pardon her ex-spouse, Marc Rich, an oil trader who had been wanted in the U.S. on tax evasion and racketeering charges.

Records obtained by ICIJ show she had $144 million in April 2006 in a trust in the Cook Islands, a chain of coral atolls and volcanic outcroppings nearly 7,000 miles from her home at the time in Manhattan.

Since there's likely no way this problem ever gets rectified in full---it would take a multinational treaty, and even then there'd probably be ways to cheat it---I really hope they publish the names of every single person in those leaked e-mails. If we can't repatriate their money, we can at least shame them publicly. Small consolation, obviously, but it's about all we can realistically expect in our time.

---Baron V

New Normals

It certainly speaks volumes about the state of our discourse, of our political leadership class, that the Most Pressing Issue of our time is how we can drive prosperity by spending less money on stuff because, presumably, public-sector spending crowds out private-sector spending, so if government reduces its level of spending, the private sector will rush in to make up for the decreased demand. It's a novel theory---heck, it might even be true!---but an obvious problem arises when one realizes that for the theory to hold water, people in the private sector must have more money to spend than they did in years past. Unfortunately, at present, the opposite is true.

They had the opportunity to resolve many of our economy's structural imbalances four years ago, when the wind was in their sails, their approval ratings were in the 70s, and talk of "change" was in the air. They started in the right direction, then stopped abruptly. At the time they told us that they'd reached the desired destination, that the Recovery Act was all that was needed to kick-start the economy again, that now it was time for all of the serious persons to turn their attention to deficit reduction. But anyone who was paying attention could see that they were many miles short of the ultimate policy goal. It's really a shame, because they were advised at the time not to let a good crisis go to waste. But that's pretty much what they did.

---Baron V

Non-Fake Looming Crisis

Not only non-fake, but designed from the start to end in crisis:

Americans also know the great 401k experiment of the past 30 years has been a disaster. It is now apparent that 401ks will not provide the retirement security promised to workers. As a former mutual fund legal counsel, when I recall some of the outrageous sales materials the industry came up with to peddle funds to workers, particularly in the 1980s, it’s almost laughable---if the results weren’t so tragic.

There was the “Dial Your Own Return” cardboard wheel of fortune that showed investors which mutual funds they should select for any given level of return. Looking for 12%? Load up on our government plus or option income funds! It was that easy to get the level of income needed in retirement, investors were told.

Of course they knew it was bullshit, that most people would never be able to invest as much money as they would need to fully fund their retirements, or that the funds they peddled would ever return sufficient long-term yields. And either way, they didn't care because they could keep collecting their annual management fees. Now that they've helped create a senor solvency crisis by relieving us of our money on quack investment schemes, they're deploying the second stage of their wealth-creation strategy by relieving us of the money that we paid into our meager government pensions. Now, I'm one of the lucky ones out there since I can continue to work into old age (so long as I don't lose my mind; it could happen!) because I work in a creative profession that doesn't require any real physical exertion. But expecting someone who's been a machinist or a meat cutter or a heavy-equipment operator to keep laboring after age 70 is asking for all kinds of trouble in higher health-care costs, for starters. Plus, having all these old and infirm workers in the labor force is not going to make the economy more efficient and productive. Plus, it's going to reduce the number of job opportunities for young people. Plus, it's needlessly cruel.

---Baron V