Al Gore, Sex Machine

Speaking of sanctimonious pricks, how about Al Gore? The National Enquirer reported last week that Gore jumped the bones of a 54 year old masseuse in Portland, Oregon. She's claiming sexual assault, albeit a few years after the alleged incident. Now this is just too rich. Remember how Gore distanced himself from Clinton during his 2000 presidential campaign because he didn't want to get soiled by the latter's philandering slime? (What a great way to show gratitude to the guy who had brung him to the dance.) The details of the incident provide one of the funniest reads that I've had in a long time. Gore comes across as just what exactly he is, a real doofus. I think the Yiddish equivalent is schlemiel.

The masseuse, who refers to herself as "Grandma," describes how she got a call for a late-night appointment at the fancy hotel where Gore was staying. Gore, a beer in one hand, met her at the door with a big welcoming hug. Grandma thought that Gore, whom she describes as "rotund," held the hug just a little too long. She noted, "I try to keep an open, professional mind and a sense of the 'benefit of the doubt...' I assumed he must be engaging in something like 'the new ages politician casual mode'...a kind of beneficent patriarch thing going on it seemed." Grandma masseuse might not be too articulate, but already she's evincing real comic understatement.

Grandma perfectly describes the essence of Gore: "He had a dramatic display of violent temper as well as extremely dictatorial commanding attitude besides his Mr. Smiley Global Warming concern persona." How perfect. No only is this guy an asshole, he's a phony to boot.

Grandma continues, "While he was face down, he suddenly asked me, 'What has become clear to you lately?'...I asked him what he had become clear lately about himself and he said, 'Letting go of results.'" What the hell was he talking about? Could he still be crying over the 2000 election? What has become clear to you lately...that has to rank up there with other enigmatic queries such as when that guy beat up Dan Rather on the streets of New York and kept saying, "What's the frequency, Kenneth?"

Gore evidently at this point felt that he had established enough of an emotional connection with Grandma that he could command her to massage down from the "safe, non-sexual area of the abdomen" to where his manhood dangled.

Grandma figured that this would be a good time to mention Tipper to him as a way to tamp down his rising prurience. Then, "I started backpeddling with something well, about well, everybody's relationship or marriage is a private affair. No one really knows with absolute certainty what is the true arrangement that was private with Bill and Hillary for example...I really stepped in it because talk about Bill and Hillary is like a real sore point with this guy. And I didn't know so he's just like roar..." Gore, lying on a massage table, roaring over Billary. Heheheh...

What followed after the "roar" was one of the most mangled seduction attempts of all times. Gore lured Grandma into the bedroom to listen to a "song about the current president that would shock me. The song was 'Dear Mr. President' by Pink...As soon as he had it playing, he turned to me and immediately flipped me flat on my back and threw his whole body face down over atop me, pinning me down and outweighing me by quite a bit. Get off me, you big lummox! I loudly yelled protested to him...We lay on our sides a couple of feet apart, looking at each other as he played the song, him singing along with it as if he were revealing deep feeling like some bizarre karaoke and me stuck there. He prevailed upon me to listen to just this one other song about women's feeling and their inner self and trust that he said his wife introduced him to, which is about a woman choosing to let a man into her deeper self or some such thing."

Wow! If Grandma is making this stuff up, then it would be a downright tragedy if she didn't put such a fertile imagination to good use as a novelist or sit-com writer. Grandam does say that since the encounter with her pal Al, she has had trouble sleeping and has been terrified to make any more out-calls. Furthermore, the big lummox managed to unsettle the core of her political beliefs: "That is what's been really hard with this. Um, because I, I, you know, live in the 'Birkenstock Tribe,' and it's like being the ultimate traitor. And, by the by, there are people, um...one who was basically just asking me to suck it up, otherwise the world's going to be destroyed by global warming."

Grandma, in her own inimitably inarticulate, stammering way concludes, "The mind trip with this thing is it's just like instead of swallowing a pill, it's like trying to swallow one the size of a globe. And having to carry a mantle for if the world falls apart, according to people's belief system, it's all on me. And I'm, like, that's so crazy-making."

So what's up with Al? Is he going through a mid-life crisis of some sort, although at the age of 60-something one would think that he's a bit old for that. Is he having some slow-mo nervous breakdown? Nah, I just think the guy has been reading his own press and thinks that his own shit doesn't stink anymore since he got his Academy Award and Nobel Prize. Like Grandma, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and grant that he probably has been mostly faithful to Tipper, notwithstanding that DC is a hedonist swamp and there seems to be no dearth of wannabes and climbers who are willing to give a geezer congressman a blow job if it means getting that coveted slot as an aide on the House Ways and Means Committee. Now that he's the Cock of the Walk in Hollywood and various other bastions of brainless liberalism, he thinks he's invincible, too cool to care...just like Slick Willie, Tiger Woods and a host of other Viagra-fueled, celebrity middle-aged juveniles. Sycophants and hanger-ons have told these guys that they are "rock stars" and they finally come to believe it.

But Clinton, Gore's erstwhile mentor and nemesis, at least had some suaveness to his debauchery. Like What's-her-name, bimbo eruption five, said the guy was really good at munching her rug. That won points with a Southern buddy of mine who said, "Hey, how can you not like a guy who likes eating greasy fried chicken and pussy." Okay, I might be able to buy into that. But Gore can't even manage to swing it with a 54 year old massage hag. And can you imagine any of Slick Willie's "paramours" describing him a "crazed sex poodle" as Grandma with such devastation described Gore? Clinton would have had the panties off Grandma in no time.

This episode only confirms what I've always thought about Al, namely that he's a bit nutso, missing a few bars in his cellphone, so to speak. For example, his trouble with the truth, like his claim to have invented the internet, may be more than a moral deficiency but something more pathological. And when three completely different Al Gores showed up in the debates with W., the "Twilight Zone" theme music sounded across the nation. The fact that a verbally challenged, half-wit like W. could best Gore in all three debates totally negated any talk about how "brilliant" Al is. By the way, why does the media always characterise Republican candidates as dumb and all Democratic candidates as "brilliant"? The only Republican in modern history that the media and academia didn't declare stupid was Richard Nixon; of course, he was smart like Satan is smart in their book, assuming the liberal media believe in Satan.

Anyway, all I can say is Thank the Lord that jackass didn't become president. Say what you will about W., he isn't a big fat doofus.

JOE BIDEN'S HOOF-IN-MOUTH DISEASE STRIKES AGAIN

Joe Biden is the gift that keeps on giving. He's such an amusing fellow, especially when he's not trying to be. Vanity is the root of his comedy. I mean, just look at him. He was one of the trailblazers who got hair plugs back in the early 80's. And his face has that smiling pig look from too much cosmetic surgery around the eyes (see Greta Van Sustern). His capped teeth throw off such an obnoxious glare that one has to avert one's eyes from his smarmy smile. Such vanity engenders his self-delusion that he is smarter than everyone else when obviously he's not. The only thing worse than being dumb is being dumb and loud. The guy's a classic blowhard. That he's become a national joke for statements that are inappropriate, inaccurate, idiotic doesn't deter him from blowing hard on his little kuzu.

Joe was at it again this weekend while campaigning in Wisconsin for Russ Feingold. (I guess only sure-thing candidates like Feingold are willing to take the risk of Joe stumping for them.) While on the trail, Joe and Russ with entourage strolled into Kopp's Frozen Custard Shop. That the place serves only frozen custard didn't stop Joe from ordering an ice cream. Anyway, after getting a cone, Joe asked the manager what he owed him. You know Joe, being a notorious cheapskate, fully expected the cones for him and his convoy would be freebies. The store manager said that the cones were gratis but with a proviso that Biden lower taxes. This, as the pedantic Obama likes to say, turned out to be a "teachable moment."

The scowl that Joe gave at such an insolent suggestion was priceless. You could see him thinking, What nerve this plebe has to ask that his taxes be lowered. Later on Joe said to the guy, "Hey, can't you say something nice instead of being a smart ass all the time?" There you have it, folks, the attitude that people like Obama and Joe have towards "the little guys" who might want to have some tax relief: "What, you got to be kidding me! What are you, some kind of smart ass?" Thank God for the Internet so that we can see these unscripted, spontaneous moments when politicians for once speak the truth, albeit accidentally. Just like Obama's "we wanna spread it around" comment to Joe the Plumber, Biden's comment at Kopp's Custard Shop reveals much more than any hour long speech delivered by teleprompter ever will.

CHINA, A PAPER TIGER?

I've heard people compare the 1980's to this past decade. Ok, maybe Lady Gaga is a techno-pop version of Madonna circa 1988 when she pranced around wearing those cone tits. And true, conspicuous consumption became the reigning zeitgeist just as it had when the sitcoms, excuse me, TV dramas like Dallas and Dynasty were cultural epitomes. Up until recently, everybody was making a lot of money, and greed was cool again. Instead of corporate raiders like Gordon Gecko, we've witnessed the rise of the Hedge Fund Man, whose basic value system isn't that much different from Gecko's.

Both decades did begin and end with recessions. Both the end recessions had as their root causes a real estate bust that lead to a banking crisis (remember the Savings and Loans?). Although the late 80's/early 90's downturn was not nearly as severe as the 2008 Great Recession, both economic lapses caused Americans to feel much less secure about the standing and role of the US in the world. A sort of fin de siecle gloom descended over the end of the 80's as well as the end of the 00's. Both the late 80's and 2010 were filled with much talk that hailed or mourned the decline of the US, with left wingers doing the hailing and conservatives the mourning.

Of course one nation's descent presupposes another nation's ascent. Back in the 80's the nation on the ascent was Japan. The sun certainly seemed to be rising over Japan back then. People like Lester Thurow and Paul Kennedy declared that the Japanese would be the world's greatest economic power by 2010, supplanting the US; and the only way the US could even stay in the race would be to put the economy in the capable hands of Washington politicians/bureaucrats and smart people like Lester Thurow and Paul Kennedy. Japan did indeed seem formidable at the time, with a booming economy driven by exports, a genius for manufacturing and the best educated and motivated work force in the world. America's insecurity vis-a-vis Japan was aggravated by the insatiable appetite Japanese seemed to have for American trophy properties. They were buying up Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach and just about anything worth buying in between. Goofy numbers were bandied about, like how the square mile around the Japanese Royal Palace was worth more than all the real estate in LA. The Japanese were on their way to taking over the world not with ships, planes and tanks as during WWII, but with economic superiority. The Nikkei moved above 36,000. Hirohito was having his revenge.

But suddenly all that changed, reversed. Japan fell into a slump in the late 80's that persists in some respects even today. Japan's economic decline has sowed a deflation that won't reflate away despite massive government deficit spending which has take public debt to 200% of GDP. Notwithstanding two or three recessions, including the Mother of All Recessions, over the past two decades the US is still the great economic power, without a close second. We managed to get through a couple of busts and still initiate the age of the Internet. We have the most productive work force in the world. We continue to dominate in Nobel Prize winners. Manufacturing has taken a hit over the past 20 years, but US manufacturing is still 67% higher than it was in 1967, inflation adjusted. Be prepared to be shocked, but the US is still number one in terms of manufacturing output.

Why were people like Thurow and Kennedy so wrong? Americans are acutely conscious of the US's place in the world and therefore insecure about any challenges to its top ranking in terms of the economy, military, global leadership. We're always looking over our shoulder to see who's gaining. Consequently, we emphasize a potential rival's strengths without taking due consideration of its weaknesses. With hindsight, we now see that Japan had glaring weaknesses that would hinder it's move to the top, i.e. a dysfunctional political system; incestuous "horizontal" relationships between industrial companies and banks; a deep and culturally ingrained inability to recognize problems, like bad loans, leaving "zombie" banks to haunt the economic landscape; flatline growth in population due to an innate zenophobia; a housing market so unsophisticated financially that the average Japanese has to save a lifetime in order to buy a home, which leads to high savings and low consumption. The sun rises, but it also sets, even over the exporting juggernaut, Japan.

One could take all the headlines from the late 80's trumpeting the triumph of Japan and insert China for Japan and get similar headlines today touting the rise of China as the successor to the US as the world's great power. Just like Japan, China is a manufacturing, exporting dynamo. Thanks to its ability to harness its teeming, billion plus population to the yoke of low wage manufacturing, China has become the place to make things. And with a currency, the yuan, artificially cheapened through government actions and relatively open trade borders in the US and Europe, China has managed to create enormous reserves of dollars and euros. China is more than happy to lend some of those reserves back to the USA, the country from whence most of those reserves were generated.

With a 1.2 billion population and over $2 trillion in reserves, China certainly seems destined to be a great power, maybe even the greatest power two or three decades down the road. And with the US being the largest debtor nation in the world and owing so much money to China, some would say that we are already second rate. Isn't every lender in a superior position to its borrowers?

But are we once again overlooking weaknesses that a potential rival, in ths case China, must overcome to ever reach the level of dominance that the US currently has? People forget that over half China's population live in the countryside as barely subsistence farmers, peasants really. China must maintain a GDP growth rate of at least 8% to take care of the millions yearly moving from the farms to the cities. The possibility of social upheaval if such jobs aren't provided certainly must motivate China's leaders to keep the foot on the pedal and do whatever it takes to keep growing. Given the doomsday possibility of social revolution, manipulating the currency is a venial matter in the eyes of China's leaders.

Moreover, this peasant population provides very little in the way of domestic demand for goods relative to the export market. Like Japan, China's power comes from exports. Ironically, like Japan, that strength is also its weakness. China is so levered to demand abroad that a global slowdown could result in a wave of factory closing and massive job losses. China has been fortunate that most of Asia kept growing while the US and Europe were in the throes of recession. But even though the US is slowly crawling back, much of the world seems to be slipping back into a synchronized slowing. Maybe a serious slump causes unemployment in China to rise only few percentage points, but when you are talking about over a billion people, that's a huge number. Japan has been able to muddle through its deflation, but China can't afford to, given the less developed state of its economy and its gargantuan size. Japan also has a social safety net, while China, with all its wealth, doesn't.

Which raises a question: What is China doing with its 2 plus trillion in reserves? Why isn't it using that to develop local demand? Instead, some of those reserves are being used to purchase resources like oil, iron ore, cooper all across the globe, and some to buy dollars to keep the yuan cheap.

Besides the basic structural problems with China's economy, the same type of problems that kept Japan down, there is a even more fundamental reason why I think China will never be the great power that the US is. To attain the level of the US, China will have to become a technological innovator, be an incubator for companies like Intel, Microsoft, Apple. American technology is what propelled the US from being the last man standing after WWII to still the dominant global power 50 years later. Maybe centuries ago the Chinese were creative, innovative, technologically superior, but the only technology that the Chinese have today is what they stole or copied from the West, particularly the US.

But with such huge population producing waves of engineers and scientists and with such a hoard of funds, why can't China become a technological powerhouse?
The answer to that can be found in photo I saw on the front page of the Wall Street Journal showing the ten dudes who run the country. I forgot what they called themselves but they all looked almost like carbon copies of each other, with the glasses, blue suits, red ties. No matter how much economic freedom has been loosened in China the past twenty-five years, its is still politically and culturally repressed. It may not be Communist any longer, but it's still a totalitarian state. Tiannem Square massacre occurred only twenty years ago and guys of the same ilk are still running the show.

The recent spat about Google not willing to censor certain websites in China illustrates the point. How can a nation that is hellbent on controlling everything from the media to education, in short, the thoughts and expressions of its people, produce a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates. Such a stifling, repressive milieu is not conducive to ingenuity and creativity, outside-the-box thinking. Mavericks don't make it in China; conformists do.

And so I don't buy the possibility that China one day will rule the world, at least China as it presently is, a mercantilist, totalitarian state. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if China sometime over the next five years takes a serious fall, whether it's from some economic disaster, like an implosion of the bubble real estate market there (we've heard that one before), an out-of-control inflation that forces the monetary authorities to induce the Chinese version of the Great Recession. More likely is some eruption of the social distress that seems to be always burbling just beneath the surface there. Maybe the masses there who want the middle class standard of living that they see in Taiwan and South Korea (despite the past best efforts of the government to keep them from seeing), will finally lose patience and revolt. I've read reports that the wealthy in China are looking for other countries to move to in the case of such an event. Such class resentment is not surprising in a nation that for most of its modern history has been communist.

I am less confident that I used to be about the future of the US, given that we are currently speeding down the wrong track. It's amazing how forgetful we are, about the things that pulled us out of the last truly nasty recession, that of 1982. Lower taxes, less regulation, strong dollar, tight monetary policy; in other words, the exact opposite of all the things Obama is doing.

Notwithstanding my uncertainty regarding the future of the US, I am confident that we are not at the dawning of the Sino Century.

GOLDEN GEESE

America has been blessed with a gaggle of geese that lay golden eggs. But we seem intent on wringing the neck of these geese one by one.

Take natural resources. No place on earth has more natural resources than the United States of America. For example, we have billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas off our coastlines. Unfortunately, this huge oil spill in the deepwater Gulf will nip in the bud the growing recognition among even erstwhile environmental whole earth, holy do-gooders like Obama that we urgently need to tap that energy. What terrible timing. Even though this spill is the first significant one since the one off Santa Barbara over 40 years ago, our national energy policy will likely remain strait-jacketed so that we can not touch one drop of that oil or one cubic foot of that gas. We would rather sends tens of billions of dollars every year to people like Putin, Chavez and Islamic fundamentalists who hate our guts. Meanwhile, Brazil recently discovered a huge oil find in the Gulf adjacent to US territory. Only God knows how much energy resources lie within our grasp. What do you think China, Japan or the EU would give to have what we have and do not use? Lunacy!!!

Another goose laying golden eggs is the US drug industry. The US is basically the pharmacy to the rest of the world. No better example exists of American know-how and ingenuity than our pharmaceutical and biotech companies. We have produced one miracle drug after another over the past hundred years. The rest of the world owes us a great debt of gratitude. Yet listening to the healthcare debate over the past year, one would think that our drug industry is some vast criminal enterprise. These dumb as dirt congresspeople seem to have no clue what the risks and costs are every time a drug or biotech company launches an effort to develop a new drug. The companies ask for and deserve a high reward for this risk and huge capital investment. But Obamacare may strangle these companies to such an extent that the risks are no longer worth taking.

Another golden goose whose neck we have recently wrapped our hands around is the capital markets. Our capital markets have been the envy of the world. Over the past twenty-five years, the US Capital Markets have been able to perform the magic trick of financing a nation of spendthrifts so that it can have the highest standard of living in the world, bar none. We have a major funding gap between what we produce and earn and what we spend and consume. Despite this, our efficient and sophisticated money raising machine has managed to keep the US Dollar as the reserve currency of the world even though our fearless leaders have created one huge fiscal fuck up. I'm not out to defend Goldman Sucks or deny the need to reform, but just like energy and drug companies, financial firms are being vilified and caricatured to such a degree that one has to wonder why anyone would want to work for those firms. People forget that capital is fungible, mobile; it can go anywhere. One reason that investors overseas are willing to put their money here, money that we need to support our enormous "funding gap," is that our capital markets have been the most efficient anywhere. If this financial "reform" ends up damaging our markets to the extent that they no longer have the elasticity and efficiency as before, then capital will go elsewhere.

China, Europe and other places like Singapore are rubbing their hands in glee as we seem intent on trashing our markets. They appreciate that a country can't be a great power unless it can easily raise the funds it takes to support a great power military and the capital investment necessary for a great power economy.

Imagine twenty years from now sitting in some dingy rental house that you can't afford to buy because that great mortgage machine of the 90's and 2000's was basically shut down in 2010. The house is dark and dank because the energy that was supposed to be supplied by all those wind farms somehow didn't turn out to be as great as promised; besides, the cost of wind energy turns out to be way beyond the means of the average person to pay for it without government subsidies, which ended in 2015 when the US credit rating got downgraded to junk. Meantime the price of natural gas and heating fuel has gone up ten times. And oh yeah, you're probably dead anyway by then since the drug companies quit producing all those "miracle drugs" that extended everyone's lifespans because laws and regulations essentially killed any return on the huge investment necessary to create such drugs. But hey, you never have to worry about a once-every-fifty years oil spill ruining the beaches, where you can sit and gaze at all those giant wind turbines as they daily massacre thousands of ocean birds. And since Wall Street got shut down and moved to Shanghai, you won't have those greedy bankers thinking of new ways to fund a lifestyle beyond your means. And those rapacious drug companies?...Who needs them since you get all the generic drugs you need from India anyway. And if closing down the drug companies means you don't live as long, who cares if this is what living in 2030 comes down to...

NEW STUDY BLAMES HUMANS FOR INCREASE IN EARTHQUAKES

(AP) APRIL 15. The renowned Center for Human Cupablility (CHC)today released a study that implicates human activity as a primary cause for the recent spate of earthquakes. Derek Hoaks, professor of Gaia Studies at East Anglia University and current president of CHC, held a conference in Geneva today at which he presented what some called stark evidence in support of CHC's claim. More specifically, the CHC attributes the growing frequency and strength of earthquakes to the unchecked growth of urban areas across the globe and the concomitant increase in buildings and infrasturture.

"Trillions of tons of concrete and steel have been pressed down upon the earth's mantle over the past hundred years," Professor Hoaks pointed out. "The increase in pressure on the unprotected earth would be the equivalent of 450 pounds of bricks placed on the average person's head. Who in their right mind would think that the earth would not respond in a negative way to this burden?"

The CHC's presentation included a slide which showed a dramatic increase in earthquake intensity over the past two hundred years. The next slide that Prof. Hoaks presented charted over that same period an equally dramatic tonnage increase in human building activity. Many at the press conference literally gasped at the obvious overlap. Some in the media dubbed the correlation as "eerie" and "alarming." Gerhard Sturmdrang with The Union of Concerned Scientists called attention to the 45 degree up slope of both graphs at the beginning of the 20th century. "A hockey stick if I've seen one!" he exclaimed. Gabriele Sandlewood, a reporter with the Guardian, wiped tears from her eyes as she declared, "How many more earthqukes will it take to wake people up?"

One or two reporters did express some skepticism that the striking correlation proved that human activity causes earthquakes. One reporter, planted at the conference by The Wall Street Journal, caused a slight disruption when he raised the possibility that the increase in earthquakes perhaps reflects our greater ability to monitor them. Prof. Hoaks sublimely answered, "And so I guess that means that if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, then the tree didn't really fall? Tell that to the squirrel that the tree fell on." When the reporter noisily protested that the Professor had not answered his question, he was quickly ushered out of the press room.

The CHC proposed an "Immediate Action Agenda," which called for local governments everywhere to enact moratoriums on new construction until a specially designated UN commission had time to develop a more comprehensive global program to mitigate the pressure that humans are imposing on the earth's surface. Such a comprehensive program, Prof. Hoaks said, must at the very least require that any new building or construction must be offset with an equal amount of tonnage destruction so that the net amount of additional "mantle pressure" stays the same. The CHC believes that the ultimate solution to this worldwide problem will mean that humans must drastically downsize the amount of living and working space that they require. "Why does anyone need more than 200 square feet of space to sleep and eat in?" Prof. Hoaks rhetorically asked. The CHC also advocates the use of material other than "carbon derivatives" such as steel be used in building construction. He cites Japanese "paper houses" as a model to be followed. Prof. Hoaks ended by asserting, "The age of the skyscrapper--that phallic symbol of the industrial age-- is most certainly over."

Calls to action immediately followed the press conference. Greepeace proposed that a mulitnational conference be convened to address the issue of human responsibilty for the rise in earthquakes. Susan Sarandon, who attended the press conference, afterwards held her own press conference at which she announced that she would be producing a documentary entitled, "The Heavy Human Load."

As people exited the room, bets were already being wagered as to how soon Prof. Hoaks would get his Nobel Peace Prize.

YouTube - When Vultures Dance by Michael Goodwin.mht

MASS AMNESIA

The market has a mind. It is, after all, a collection of minds. Like any mind, the market mind is capable of losing itself. It becomes deranged by pathologies, such as manias, depressions, irrational exuberances. Three years ago, the securities markets, whether the global stock markets, the high yield bond market, the emerging markets, the derivatives markets, were as cocksure and bloated with a megalomaniac sense of invincibility as Tiger Woods was before he ran his Esplanade into that fire hydrant. We had it all figured out. We had achieved The Great Moderation, a new age of low inflation, low interest rates, steady growth. The globe was deluged by a tsunami of Greenspan liquidity, and we were all getting drunk on it. Banks and bond investors were tripping out, tripping all over themselves to shovel money at borrowers, whether the borrower be some LBO fund or an aspiring homeowner. Forget about a chicken in every pot or a new car in every garage; how about a brand new house with no money down and three percent interest rate. And we didn't even have to prove that we really made $200,000 a year as a dog walker or house painter. All the possible bad events had been hedged away. Dow 36,000! Eureka! Euphoria!

But then reality hit us right between the eyes like a two-by-four lifted from that abandoned, half finished condominium project down the street. (Allow me to pat myself on the back and say that I called for market upheaval on my Jan 16, 2006 post entitled "Post Holiday Hangover.") The Great Recession was upon us. Dow down 5oo points one day, then 600 points, then 700 points...and that was a typical week. The market mind lost all its marbles. We had to acknowledge that inescapable truth that always seems to escape us: prosperity fueled by easy credit is the economic equivalent of the hyperactive buzz fueled by crystal meth. Any meth head can clean his trailer five times over in one night, but before long the twenty pound weight loss and facial lesions set in.

Over the past two years, we have been collectively working our way through the five stages of grief. First denial: Oh, this is just a few hedge funds who got too deep into subprime paper blowing up. Then anger: Hang those Goldman Sach bastards! Then the third stage, bargaining: Look, what if you give me a two year grace period on making my mortgage payments, and then I pay you half of my normal payments for the next ten years? Next, depression: The government is now allowing Prozac to be purchased with food stamps. But before we reached the final stage of grief, which is acceptance, something weird happened. We all went under the spell of mass amnesia.

I should clarify what I mean by "we"; I'm mainly speaking of the denizens of what is called Wall Street, that tribe of investment bankers, traders and salespeople who inhabit the priciest zip codes of the the New York City and LA metropolitan areas. The first tell-tale sign of memory loss was the 70% or greater rally in the domestic stock markets over the past year. Granted there were certainly some fundamentals backing up that big move, but the giddiness that accompanied it certainly reminded me of pre-Armageddon times. Party like it's 2006!

The high yield bond market is what first really got me spooked. In case you didn't know, the high yield bond market was up something like 60% in 2009. Before long, high yield investors were returning to their old bad habits. By the end of 09, deals were getting done that allowed the issuer to put off paying interest in cash and allowed him to pay instead a PIK, i.e, payment-in-kind, which simply added the interest onto the principal amount (albeit at a higher rate than a cash interest payment). The insanity got zanier with the issuance of "dividend"bonds. Dividend bonds allow the owner of the issuer, typically an LBO or private equity firm, to use the bond proceeds to pay itself a nice big fat dividend. One would think that after the hell high yield bond investors went through in 07 and 08, PIK's and dividend bonds would be anathema. But so much money had flowed into the high yield markets that money managers felt a lot of heat from all that money burning holes in their pockets. And besides, it's so easy to slip under the spell of amnesia...forget, relax, forget, all that bad stuff never really happened.

The most blatant, grossest symptom of this mass amnesia is what Wall Street decided to pay itself this year. My alter ego, Nick Goreman, with his usual effrontery gave his thoughts on this two posts previous to this one. But who can blame people for getting pissed when they read that 09 will be a record year for bonuses paid by high finance banks and investment banks. Goldman's bonus pool amounts to something like $365,000 per employee! And Goldman's CEO, Mr. Lloyd Blankfien, has the nerve to publicly state that his firm never really needed government help, our help. And this after Goldman skinned taxpayer owned AIG more ways than a cat. Goldman and the other banks want us to believe that they made all this dough because they are so brilliant and not because they have been able to borrow at close to zero thanks to the Fed's programs along with an assortment basket of other goodies that amount to billions and billions in support. But how brilliant can you be when you evince such tone deafness as to pay yourself that kind of mula less than a year after the citizens bail your ass out, citizens who now suffering through record unemployment. I'm a Reagan Republican but after this display of greed and arrogance, I'm thinking maybe the proposed special tax on big bank/investment bank profits would fix these assholes' wagon just fine. The proceeds from this tax should be set aside in a rainy day fund to protect us from the next category 5 global disaster these geniuses get us into.

Maybe I'm being too harsh in attributing these actions to greed and arrogance; maybe, as I said at the beginning, this is all just a case of collective amnesia. And maybe mass amnesia also explains why our Great Leaders in DC still haven't come up with any reforms of our financial system to prevent this economic hurricane from ever happening again. Even a regulation as sensible and simple as preventing federally-insured bank deposits from being used for speculative investments--the so called "Volker" rule--can't get traction. A lot of this inaction results from a weakling in the White House. But again, maybe it's just the side effect of a lovely, peaceful amnesia.

Forget, relax, forget that it all ever really happened....

BLINDSIDED BY THE TRUTH

I saw the movie "Blindside" last week. A pretty good movie, although sometimes corny and borderline didactic. Aside from its artistic merits, I found it interesting, even bold in the way it unabashedly bashes certain Hollywood cliches and nostrums. First of all, the movie takes a positive stance towards fundamentalist Christians. How often do you see that in movies or on television? Usually these people are portrayed as backward, close-minded, hate-filled lunatic yahoos who are bent on turning this country into a Christian theocracy. So called journalists on the mainstream networks like CNN don't think twice about comparing evangelical Christians to the Taliban, notwithstanding that the incidents of Christians strapping a bomb belts on and pushing the ignition button in a crowded restaurant numbers zero. You have to wonder if these people have ever met a fundamentalist Christian. There is no more sheltered, parochial group than New York/LA based journalists.

I grew up a Southern Baptist and know these people first hand. The portrayal in the movie is accurate. These people say grace at meals and have strict moral standards even when it comes to "cussing." A basic tenet of their faith is the requirement to help those in need. As extraordinary as it was that a white family in Memphis would take a black guy off the street and into their home, such an act is certainly not unbelievable if you understand how fundamental "outreach" is to fundamentalist Christians.

Leigh Anne Touhy, the Sandra Bullock character, is out of the Sarah Palin mold. She informs a thug lording over the project where Michael Oher lives that she is a proud member of the NRA and packs heat in her purse. The scene is far-fetched in more ways than one, but that has to be the first time ever a female character in a major motion picture proudly declared her membership in the NRA.

It's amazing that a movie like this ever got produced, given its political/religious undertones. Thank Phil Anshutz for that. A billionaire listed as number 6 on the Forbes 400, he also happens to be an arch conservative who has backed similar, culturally conservative movies such as "The Narnia Chronicles."

The move has also garnered a bit of controversy by the way it depicts race relations. Although the movie has been a huge box office success and has as its main character an African-American football star, word is that many blacks have shunned the movie. I can understand how they might find the movie patronizing in the way it shows a wealthy white family turning around the life of a hapless negro. I'm sure some blacks are turned off by the way the movie unstintingly depicts the chaotic, crime-ridden, mostly black inner city. The movie rises almost to preachiness in contrasting the stable family of the Tuohy's versus the fatherless, disintegrated families that inhabit the project where Michael Oher lives. The implicit message of the movie and the shining example of the Tuohy's is that the problems that Michael Oher and other children of the inner city face can not be laid at the feet of whites. There are plenty of blacks who would like to think that all whites are fundamentally racist and that a story like the one portrayed in "Blindside" is just a White American fantasy. There's only one problem with this attitude: "Blindside" is a true story.

"Blindside" is a unique movie in that it offers two things that usually don't go together: big box office numbers and a willingness to speak truths that a lot of people don't wish to hear.

FAT CATS

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SLUTS

A couple of guys sitting with me at the trading desk posed a question the other day: are girls sluttier today than they were ten to twenty years ago? Duh. They obviously hadn't watched MTV, VH1 or BET lately. The sluts on those channels aren't just naughty, they're nasty; you can't help but imagine that their privates are petrie dishes teeming with all sorts of STD's. Reality shows and talk-gawk shows like Jerry Springer revel in today's Slut Cult. "I'm just seventeen years old, Jerry, and I'm not a bit ashamed of having a threesome with my step daddy and that guy what's-his-name who lives in the next trailer over." Every prime time sitcom has a teenage chick who would make Lolita blush. I bet even wholesome Miley Cyrus is under pressure to get a pair of fake tits and to start showing some skin now that she's at the ripe age of sixteen. Our present day culture gives the impression that if you are a sixteen year old dude and you're not at least getting regular bj's from your girlfriend, then you must be getting them from your boyfriend.

Have you been to the mall on a Saturday afternoon? It's a passing parade of bare midriffs showing some tacky navel jewelry, and jeans so tight and low that you can see the girl's thong and ass crack. And the tattoos. I don't get the tattoos that I see young women adorn themselves with today. When I was a youngster, sluts wouldn't have countenanced the thought of putting a tramp stamp across their lower back. The only people who had tattoos back then were sailors, bikers and carnival freaks.

So why are girls sluttier today? I suppose the easiest answer is that this is all just a natural consequence of the 1960's Sexual Revolution. Of course, the hippies back then never imagined themselves having children, so it was easy to espouse "If it feels good, then do it" as a moral code. I know a few former hippies who are now middle-aged parents and I love to watch them cringe when somebody mentions how blow jobs parties are the big thing among middle schoolers nowadays. Reap what you sow, man. Blow jobs do feel good, right? Then why shouldn't kids do it?

The Age of Feminism also did a lot to encourage women to at least display as much horniness as men, even if they weren't as horny. Thanks to the Women's Lib credo that women have as much right as men to behave badly, you can draw a straight line from Gloria Steinham to Brittany Spears, a straight line on a decidedly declining angle. The message, everywhere and all the time, is "You go, girl. Hooking up is fun to do!" (For those of you not in-the-know, "hooking up" is a euphemism for casual, no holds barred, no questions asked sex.) It gets even more flagrant in college with condom machines and co-ed bathrooms in the dorms; college administrators are going out of their way to tempt their students to get it on.

The irony is that Feminism would seem to argue against women being sexual objects. Wasn't that one of the original guiding principles behind the movement? I guess these later libbers like to think that women should be as sexually aggressive as men, be an equal partner. But let's be honest here, ladies, excuse me, women (the term "lady" is a relic from a patriarchal past), the sexual act itself is inherently one that presupposes dominant and passive roles, a subject and an object. One person is entering while the other is being entered. There's the penetrator and the penetratee; the screwdriver and the hole that the screw is being screwed into. We can tweak the rules of the game a bit, like who's on top, but it's still a matter of who's pitching and who's catching. The pitcher is always the dominant player.

Bill Clinton also helped to slutify the zietgeist. His revolutionary claim that getting a blow job from a nineteen year old intern did not constitute a sexual act gave the green light to teenage girls across the nation that "giving a Lewinsky" was ok, even kind of cool. Teenage boys everywhere owe a great debt to their President for that contribution to the onward march of youthful lasciviousness.

Ah, to be a teenage boy in this day and age. I'll admit that when I was that age all I thought about was "getting some action." As Meatloaf sang about in Paradise by the Dashboard Lights, rounding the bases was the goal every guy had in high school. Doesn't "getting on base" sound quaint nowadays? Getting a hand underneath a bra, or getting on second base, seemed about as hard as getting a double off Roger Clemens. Nowadays it seems like all the young dudes hit a grand slam every time they get at bat. I kept my virginity up to the 12th grade when I lost it at some Halloween party to a lady ten years older than me at one of those "adults only" apartment complexes that were the fad back in the seventies. I stayed a virgin up until then but it sure wasn't from lack of trying to lose it every which way I could.

And think of the porn that kids today have access to. The Internet offers a full menu of free porn and the only hurdle that a teenager has to get over is the pop up question asking the user to certify that he or she is at least 18 years or older before entering the site. What a difficult moral conundrum this must present to Johnny Hardon. When I was in middle school the only stimulus I had to get off on were the bra advertisements in the newspaper. Later on, I'd pop a woody at the scent of a newly purchase magazine because it reminded me of the newly purchased Playboy that my older brother always managed to procure each month.

I have a nine year old daughter and I have already prepared the speech that I plan on giving her when she gets to middle school. "Sweetie, believe it or not, I was once a 13 year old boy. And there was only one thing I thought about and that was taking advantage of a sweet, innocent girl like you. Not that that's necessarily bad, that's just the way boys are. You know those nice porter house steaks that I grill every Sunday evening for dinner? Well, that's how those boys are going to be looking at you, like nice thick steak to be devoured. Now, you don't want to be devoured like a piece of meat, do you, sweetie?"

I'm hoping the answer she gives me is, No. But nowadays, God help me, you never know...

LET THE FAT MAN SING

With two days to go before the NJ governor's election and the race basically a dead heat between Corzine and Christie, I'll go out on a limb and make a prediction: Christie will lose. My prediction is based not on the pusillanimous campaign that he has run, or the votes that Daggett is sure to steal from him, or the fact that NJ has traditionally been a Demo state. Christie has the ability to overcome these negatives. Remember, a couple of months ago he had a comfortable lead over the unpopular Wall Streeter, Corzine. How can anyone really get excited about Corzine, who comes across as an smug, aloof college professor who inherited a substantial trust fund. The race has always been Christie's to lose.

The reason that Christie will lose is that he's fat.

Fat people evoke mixed feelings, positive and negative. Jolly is a positive word that we usually apply to fat people, i.e. jolly old St. Nick. We often think of fat people as fun, funny, rambunctious, like Falstaff, Fatty Arbuckle, John Candy, John Beluschi. We all have that fat friend whom we tend to call when we want to have a few beers and a slab of baby-backs while catching a game at the local sports bar. Yet, this stereotype of a fat person has at the same time a negative connotation of being undisciplined, slightly out-of-control, liable to hurt himself and others. Again, think John Candy, John Beluschi, Chris Farley, all three of whom died young from insatiable appetites that led to self-destruction. Fatty Arbuckle was America's favorite clown until he got charged with raping a young starlet. Lack of self-control can sometime be laughable, but also scary, pitiful. And that seems to be the common denominator that underlies our perceptions, both positive and negative, of fat people; namely, they are undisciplined slobs.

History shows that we rarely elect a fat person to office. Reports claim that a third or more of Americans are obese, but how many obese congressmen can you think of? We haven't elected a fat President since Howard Taft, who was mediocre in everything but his prodigious capacity to eat. Al Gore dropped thirty something pounds when he decided to run for President because he knew that a triple chin would turn voters off. After losing to W., he evidently ate his sorrows away, his face taking on porcine features like squinty eyes and fulsome cheeks.

Maybe the reason that we don't elect fat people to office is that we see in them too much of ourselves, or at least too much of what we don't like about ourselves. As much as we hate to admit it, we know that Europeans are on to something when they accuse us of being self-indulgent, spoiled, conspicous consumers. The Pursuit of Happiness has it darker outcomes, among which are those extra twenty pounds around the mid-drift.

Corzine's campaign ads sublty take advantage of Christie's "portly" physique by displaying full length photos of him in all his slovenly glory. One ad accuses Christie of "throwing his weight around."

The great irony of this campagin will be that Christie lost because he didn't have the guts to trim down his gut. Okay, that pun was too thin by any measure.

GESUNDHEIT!

Why do people say "God bless you" when you sneeze within their hearing distant (not to mention within spray distance). No matter where you might be, like on a train for instance, some total stranger two rows back happily asks God to bless you just because you go a-schwew. The sneezer is blessed even when he fails to cover his mouth and risks infecting the whole bus.

Why would God give a damn that I sneeze? I read once that this practise goes back to Medieval times when people thought that every time a person sneezed, a little bit of that person's soul escaped his body. Okay, that's a quaint notion but last time I checked we are living in the 21st century.

Why would a person bless a total stranger? What if the sneezer was an atheist who might be offended by the proffered blessing. What if the sneezer was evil, like a child molester or murderer? Would you bless Bernie Madoff if you heard him sneezing in the cell next to you? Conversely, why should I accept your blessing? For all I know, you too could be a child molester or murderer whose blessing isn't worth the expenditure of breath. In my book, strangers shouldn't bless strangers nor should strangers accept blessings from strangers. It's a wicked world out there, so you have to be judicious about throwing blessings around or accepting them willy-nilly.

I'm further annoyed that this elevation of sneezing to a religious matter puts pressure on me to bless someone who sneezes in my vicinity. I usually don't offer my blessings, but I can't help feel a slight twinge of guilt from breaking a social custom; and I don't like feeling guilty over a sniffle.

Okay, I admit that I'm coming across as some sourpuss Andy Rooney curmudgeon. The sociologist in me recognizes that little acts of civility, kindness, graciousness are the glue that keeps our frenetic, borderline schizofrenic society intact. As Guiliani proved in bringing down NYC's crime rate, it's those little acts of incivility, petty crimes, blatant disrespect for the law that create a culture of complacency which accepts more serious crimes as just part of the landscape. On the flip side, displays of politeness and consideration for others help create a milieu of social amity.

For example, have you noticed how more often than not, men allow women to enter and exit elevators first? This little remnant of chivalry exists despite the Age of Feminism which sneered upon such patronizing, "patriarchial" behavior. Every once in a while, you'll even see a gentleman give up his seat to a lady on the subway or bus. (It's a shame how even the words "gentleman" and "lady" seem to be relics of a bygone era.) Along the same lines, in certain parts of the country, particularly the South, it's customary to wave at people for no particular reason, even if they are total strangers.

I guess this Gesundheit tradition is part of the same effort, sometimes desperate, to just get along with one another, to paraphrase that famous humanitarian, Rodney King. For that reason I'm willing to bear with it and not say to the person who happens to bless me when I sneeze, "Mind your own business, bud."

SUICIDE IS PAINLESS

Remember that sappy MASH theme song? Not only is suicide painless, but it can even be funny in a mordant sort of way. If you think that I'm being insensitive, then read THE WALL STREET JOURNAL article dated September 15 about workers at France Telecom. The company has been afflicted by a rash of suicides among its workers, numbering 23 over the past 18 months. The unions were quick to jump on this stat as evidence that the company's restructuring efforts caused these employees to jump out windows, slash their wrists, fall in front of trains, etc. The company, being chicken shit like most major corporations nowadays, accepted the union's claims and said that it will train all its managers to identify staffers showing signs of depression or erratic behavior. The company accepted these union assertions notwithstanding the fact that the incidence of suicide among the 100,000 France Telecom employees is less than the national average. But in a country like France, ruled by unions, facts don't really matter if it they somehow force it to acknowledge the real global economy, which France seems to think that it can serenely float above like a bloated dirigible.


Recent suicides among France Telecom workers include a 53-year-old employee who tried to end her life by overdosing on barbiturates and another worker who stabbed himself in the stomach during a staff meeting (that's a sure-fire way to wake everybody up). These workers had recently been informed that their jobs were about to change. Let me emphasize: They were not losing their jobs, they were not being fired; their jobs were being changed as a result of a long overdue effort by French Telecom to become at least as efficient as Telecom Italia.


These unsuccessful suicide attempts were enough for the country's labor minister, Xavier Dacros, to summon the CEO of France Telecom for a meeting as he was "extremely preoccupied by the situation" there. Unions called for Parliment to take action.


At France Telecom, 65% of its 100,000 employees have "civil-servant contracts," which basically means that they can't be fired even if they were caught embezzling company coffers or having sex with farm animals in the boardroom. As a result, the company can't fire dead-beat employees and instead has been asking them to change their traditional jobs repairing and installing fixed-line networks, for example, to working in call centers. Call centers? Scare le bleu! Such workers might have to even sell products such as cellphone contracts. Evidently some France Telecom workers would rather play Russian Roulette with a fully loaded handgun than accept such a fate.

"It has not been easy on the staff," a spokeswoman for France Telecom said. "We have asked them to enter a competitive market which is evolving very quickly." Poor precious darlings. We are not talking the Spartan 300 here, folks.

Since the company can't fire anyone and has nudged as many of its workers as it can into a cushy retirement paid mostly by the government, the company has tried to entice more workers to leave by helping them start their own businesses. The company is subsidizing everything from employee owned pizzerias to clothing boutiques. After the start-up fails, which most are likely to do, the employee ex-entrepreneur can rejoin the company at any time with a guaranteed job. And yet the union would have us believe that some workers would rather committ suicide than take this option.

According to a union spokesperson, the stress of learning a new trade, sometimes even in a new city (God forbid!), has proved too difficult for some of these delicate souls. Many workers, according to the union, don't have the necessary skills to work in call centers. Here again, I had to laugh out loud. And what skills might those be? How to operate a phone? Good phone etiquette? Some poor coolie in India can do it, but a Frog making ten times the amount that the Indian fellow does somehow just can't figure out how to do phone duty.

The union representative summed the issue up by saying, "Of course our company needs to restructure to function. But a business without compassion simply doesn't work."

Is this what the famous French joie de vivre has been reduced to, hanging yourself because you might have work in a call center? Maybe we shouldn't be so surprised by this French reaction to "workplace hardship;" we are talking, afterall, about a nation whose entire army deserted in the middle of WWI and that was a welcome mat for the German army in WWII.

Of course, this "issue" in all likelihood is just another piece of propaganda propagated by a union angling for more perks and benefits. Still, it says a lot about the French that the government and corporate establishment accept this claim so readily. No wonder the French economy has grown over the past 25 years at 50% less rate than the US economy. No wonder the French unemployment rate during that span has consistently been almost twice the US rate. Why would anyone want to hire such expensive crybabies?

France will alway be a lovely place to visit, but I sure wouldn't want to hire there.

OBAMACARE FOR DUMMIES

First off, let me confess that I'm mostly going through this exercise of deconstructing the Great Healthcare Debate for my own good. For months I have read and listened to all the arguments and commentary but have never felt that I have a complete lock on what it's all about. So bear with me as I think out loud and wander through the policy labyrinth. Let me also let you know up front that I'm a Republican who thinks the federal government is the most inefficient, incompetent, wasteful, lame brain institution that this nation has had the misfortune of being saddled with. I never cease to be amazed by the abiding faith that liberals put in an organization that makes decisions based not on what is rational and right but on political expediency. Moreover, how much can one expect from an institution that can fire a egregiously bad employee only after going through an obstacle course that requires the destruction of a ten acre forest in paperwork and can take so long that the bad employee will probably have retired on his cushy government pension by the time the dismissal papers are stamped.

With that said, here goes:

From what I gather, there are three main issues that Congress and the President are trying to address: 1) what to do about the uninsured 2) how to keep overall healthcare costs down 3) how to make insurance policies more user friendly in the way of being portable (i.e., can be carried from job to job) and open to all regardless of a person's particular health condition. This third issue is really not an issue because the insurance companies have basically agreed to make insurance portable and open to all, subject to an overall plan being passed that requires everyone to have insurance. The latter requirement is a boon to insurance companies as more people sign up for their plans, thus enabling insurance companies to be more generous with the terms of their policies.

The first two issues are somewhat connected in this way: those without health insurance do get health care, only they get it in the most expensive way, namely through the hospital emergency room. And because the uninsured are not able to afford preventive healthcare, their maladies often get acute before they make the visit to the hospital and thus require more expensive treatment. Ergo, getting more of the uninsured insured will help bring down the cost of our nation's aggregate cost of healthcare.

The notion of supposedly 45 million uninsured in the US demands clarification. First, of that number there are many millions who are eligible for Medicaid/Medicare but for whatever reason do not enroll. Second, there are many millions who can afford health insurance but elect not to buy it, like kids in their twenties who think they are invincible and don't want to spend beer money on health insurance. Finally, a significant portion of the uninsured are illegal immigrants, who will supposedly be excluded from any plan that gets signed into law. (The exclusion of illegals doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Okay, so taxpayer dollars will not be spent on providing insurance for this group. Great, so now private hospital dollars will be spent on this group's expensive use of emergency rooms. Are we as a society better off with the latter situation?) Some estimate that after deducting all the above subgroups from the 45 million, roughly 9 million are left who are legal citizens, who are not eligible for Medicaid/Medicare and who would like insurance but can't afford it.

Some argue cogently that providing insurance to the uninsured is about more than numbers and cost savings. We as a nation, they argue, have a moral imperative to provide health insurance for the needy. For those 9 million, I would agree. Nevertheless, those other 36 million uninsured present a economic/fiscal problem that can't just be waved away.

The bills floating around in Congress address the issue of the uninsured by mandating that everyone get health insurance, except the illegals. Those who can not afford insurance will receive subsidies from the federal government to buy insurance. These subsidies constitute most of the costs behind the $900 billion to trillion dollar estimates that number crunchers bandy about as the overall cost of universal health care. Lower the subsidies and you lower the overall cost but raise the number of people who will remain uninsured.

So there you have it, the financial logic of universal healthcare, the connection between issues one and two: universal insurance means that healthcare costs will go down. Yes, universal healthcare will cost the government as much as a trillion dollars over ten years, but once everyone is on a health plan and out of the emergency rooms, then overall health care costs will decrease.

Alas, there is a problem with this logic: No one believes that the above-mentioned putative savings will significantly offset the costs of the subsidies as no real evidence exists to support that presupposition. Consequently, Democrats have been scrambling to devise various tax/spending cut schemes to cover the cost of the program. Taxes could be raised on the wealthy. Taxes could be raised on "gold plated" health plans (unions have a problem with this since most of their health plans are super-deluxe). Fraud and abuse--eveyone's favorite twin bete noir--could be cut out of Medicare. Of course, one might wonder if fraud and abuse are so easy to cut, then why haven't government overseers done it already.

What most conservatives expect is that a plan will be enacted with no real means of paying for it and twenty years from now we will have another exploding entitlement to add to exploding Medicare and exploding Social Security and our government will be bankrupt in a way that not even the scariest scaremonger envisioned. The federal government has never been up to the task of inflicting the cost necessary to pay for its goodies. The federal budget deficit over the next ten years is expected increase by $9 trillion, even before taking into account the cost of Obamacare. Analysis show that both Medicare and Social Security are bankrupt by tens and tens of trillion of dollars.

But back to the story. So now the uninsured person has, thanks to federal government subsidy, the wherewithal to buy insurance. So where does he buy his insurance since either he's unemployed or his employer doesn't offer an insurance plan? The prevailing idea is that he will go to some sort of exchange where insurance companies will compete against each other to provide the uninsured with insurance. This is where the real fight is being fought, where the Gettysburg of the healthcare civil war is being waged. Liberals are insisting that along with the dozens of insurance companies participating in the exchange and offering plans, the federal government should have a plan of its own to put before the uninsured. This government plan has been dubbed the "public option."

President Obama's rationale for the public option is that it will make sure there is real competition to provide the best plan at the least cost and to "keep the insurance companies honest." Come again? At last count there was something like 1300 insurance companies in the US. Is that not competition enough? And since when is the federal government the repository of all that is "honest"? Conservatives suspect, and rightly so, that the public option that liberals are so adamant about is nothing more than the camel sticking its nose under the tent, the camel in this case a healthcare system totally run by the feds.

How will private insurance companies be able to compete with the federal government? Private companies will compete viciously with each other to offer the most popular plan at the least cost in the most efficient way so as to generate the most optimal profit. Liberals think of profit as a dirty word. But bottom line, profit is a measure of efficiency. The government has no concern about being efficient or cost sensitive. The government will be in position to offer the best plan at the cheapest cost because it doesn't have to worry about making a profit. It will generate huge losses in order to drive private companies out of the market. And who pays for the huge losses? Taxpayers of course. Obama knows the game and is being disingenuous, which is a Washington euphemism for dishonest, when he doesn't level with the American people that a government run plan is ultimate goal and the public option is a means to that end.

The real fun starts after the government has taken complete control of healthcare and we have a nationalized medical industry. Realizing that they can not keep running huge deficits from healthcare and can't keep soaking people in fees and taxes to pay for it, then government officials will have no choice but to either drastically raise the cost of healthcare in order to cut demand or resort to rationing. One other option would be to increase supply of healthcare, ie pay providers such as doctors and hospitals more so that more people would choose to become doctors and more hospitals would be built. But one only has to look at how Medicare operates to realize that this would never happen. Medicare underpays providers even below the providers' cost. Providers make up for this buy charging customers on private plans more than they normally would have in order to make up for the Medicare stinginess. It's a dirty little secret that one reason private health insurance premiums have run up over the past 25 years is Medicare's starvation of providers.

So back to issue 2, or healthcare costs. Obama hardly ever speaks about tort reform, even though anyone involved in healthcare will tell you that frivolous lawsuits have been a significant factor in the run up of costs. Malpractice lawsuits represent around 2% in direct costs from payouts but have an even bigger, indirect impact in forcing medical providers to practise "defensive medicine," which means ordering tests and procedures not because they are necessary but just to cover the provider's ass from some predatory lawyer.

Costs are also high because Americans, when it comes to healthcare, want high cost services and products. We want CAT Scans and MRI's. We want the best drugs available, even if they cost more. We want our 80 year old grandmother to get that operation even if it extends her life only by a year. Our demands are not cost-conscious and consequently our healtchare is expensive. HMO's a decade ago tried to put some limitations on demand but got lambasted to the point that Congress almost outlawed them. To me, no matter whether it's a private or public solution, the real knot is this whole debate is how to get Americans to accept less than the most expensive treatment and products and settle for what a cost-benefit analysis would show is the "optimal" treatment or product. Government doesn't have the balls to do it, and every time private companies a la HMO's have tried the hue and cry has been such that politicians rush in and abrogate any sane effort at cost effective healthcare.

One could argue that the private market does address the cost issue through pricing. Higher quality means higher pricing. Normally, the price mechanism works in the marketplace by tamping down demand. But our healthcare system is based on third parties paying the bill, so that a disconnect exists between the end user of the product and the price of that product. Republicans have provided different proposals to tie the end user of healthcare and the cost of that healthcare together so that price elasticity exists in the medical marketplace. But these ideas, such as medical savings accounts, have never moved from the fringes of the debate.

And after thinking this issue through out loud, I have circled back to the ultimate, underlying problem, which is that US healthcare costs are too high. A ramification of that is that too many people go without insurance because they can't afford it. But to really understand the problem, one has to ask why are US costs so high compared to other developed nations' costs. The simple reason is that Americans are spoiled. We want everything, we want the best, but we don't want to pay for it. We want the best brand drug, even though a generic is available at a much lower cost. We want a CAT scan even when a CAT scan is really not necessary; but we want it just to be extra sure. We want our 80 year old grandmother to get that expensive treatment even though it might extend her life for at most another year. We want pharmaceutical companies to keep coming up with those miracle drugs that cost billions to develop but we bitch about the high price of drugs. We want to be able to sue our doctor at the drop of a hat with the same hope we have when we buy a lottery ticket, a big payoff to send us into premature retirement. We want these things despite the expense because, thanks to our third party pay system, we don't directly suffer the expense. When's the last time you asked a doctor the cost of a procedure or prescription that he was proposing. We eventually come to recognize the expense when insurance premiums go up; insurance companies are the ones after all who have to pay the bill. Rather than connecting the rise in premiums to our expensive demands, we blame the mean ole insurance companies who are just out to make a profit, when in reality the insurance industry's profit margins are in the middle of the range compared to other industries.

So who's going to tell the American people that they can't always get what they want? The HMO's tried to and look how far they got. The federal government? Yeah, right. And single payer, federally run plan doesn't address this basic problem; instead of hundreds of payers, you have one. Other government run systems, like the UK's, do in fact address the problem by rationing. Get ready for the Second Revolutionary War if the politicians have enough spine to try that here.

Americans have high cost healthcare because that's what Americans want. When politicians try to bring costs down by taking away what Americans want, they find that the majority prefer rising costs and millions of uninsured to losing the prerogatives mentioned above. Bill and Hilary learned that in 1994 and Obama is about to learn the same leason.

WOODSTOCK REVISITED

Once again, we've had to suffer through another Woodstock redux. Ever since that epic party, the media, made up mostly by people who came of age during that time, forces us every ten years to stop thinking about less important matters such as war, famine, recession, and relive the Age of Aquarius. This past week's 4oth anniversary paeans were even more over-the-top than past mass recollections. As the collective Baby Boomer memory grows dimmer (all that adolescent drug use certainly adds to the fog), the apotheosis of Woodstock into some major turning point in history becomes even more rapturous. We are led to believe that for those three days humankind achieved some sort of spiritual zenith when love and peace reigned supreme. The USA was never the same since, Brian Williams tells us, with a straight face. Joni Mitchell's song, Woodstock, sums it up best: By the time we got to Woodstock/We were half a million strong/And everywhere there was a song and a celebration/And I dreamed I saw the bombers/Riding shotgun in the sky/And they were turning into butterflies/Above our nation. Yeah, right. How ironic that Joni didn't even attend the event, having decided that an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show would give her more exposure.

The sanctimonious, hyperbolic depiction of the "Woodstock Music Festival and Arts Fair" as a major historic event is an embarrassment to my generation. Who do we think we are or were? Woodstock was a party, nothing more, nothing less. True, it was a gargantuan party, maybe the biggest ever. When it came to open sex, acid dropping, pot smoking and great music, it was second to none. But did it really change the course of history? Gimme a break. A bunch of mostly pampered, privileged middle class white kids wallowing in the mud and getting monkeyed up didn't do anything but trash some nice farmland. Who doesn't feel peace and love when you're high as a kite and got your hand up some hippie chick's peasant dress? These kids were liberated alright, liberated from their parent's telling them to pick up their bedroom and be home by midnight.

We Baby Boomers are living up to the stereotype as narcissistic and full of self-importance. We are the greatest generation when it comes to megalomania. Woodstock was an orgiastic, modern day bacchanalia that had significance only in its size and hedonism. When youths tore down the Berlin Wall, that was a big deal. What college kids did in Iran this spring was a big deal. The civil rights Freedom Riders is a case of Baby Boomers showing enough courage to stand against the tide of history. What courage was displayed at Woodstock? Lying passed out in the pouring rain while Joe Cocker sang A Little Help From My Friends?

Woodstock only became a big deal when some savvy marketing guys decided to make it a big deal. Millions were made from licensing rights, movie and album deals. If it weren't for some shrewd hucksters, Woodstock would have gone done as just another music festival like Montreau or Altamont, only bigger and muddier.

If we Baby Boomers want to see a more accurate legacy of the the 1960's credo "If it feels good, do it," then we should look to our progeny's attempt to restage Woodstock at its 30th anniversary in 1999. Woodstock II had to close early due to mobs setting one of the stages on fire, numerous rapes and plenty of violence and mayhem. We reaped what we sowed. Despite all the nostalgic tripping, no wonder no one came up with the idea of Woodstock III.

HEY, DID YOU HEAR THE ONE ABOUT MICHAEL JACKSON?

The poor freak's body is still warm and already the utterly tasteless, hilarious jokes have started. "Michael Jackson hasn't been this stiff since Macaulay Culkin slept over."

Ground zero for this beyond-the-pale, over-the-line humor are trading floors in New York. Within a matter of minutes after a celebrity's death comes across the tape, the jokes pop up like Jack-in-the-boxes.

"Hey, news flash: they just found out that Michael Jackson died from food poisoning," a trader shouts over to the sales pit.

"No shit," one of the more gullible sales guys replies.

"Yeah, they say he was eating too many twelve year old nuts."

Guffaws mixed with groans rise across the trading floor. I do have to say that one was a bit below the belt, no pun intended, or a low blow, again no pun intended.

I've often wondered who thinks up these jokes. Are they just spontaneous eruptions or are the jokes prepared ahead of time the way some news organizations have obituaries in the can, ready to be released the minute somebody famous dies?

The latter explanation is supported by the fact that most trading floors do have their "death watch lists," which rank the top two or three celebrities most likely to next kick the bucket. The death watch list often inspires feverish betting, especially when you have a double whammy like two celebs crapping out on the same day, as we had with Farah and Jacko. And Ed McMahon going down just a few days before really scrambles the leader board. As of Friday at the close of business, the odds-on-favorite on my trading floor was Patrick Swayze. I laid some bucks down on Nancy Reagan.

Did you hear about how Farah Fawcett went to heaven and met God? God told her that now that she was in heaven, she could have anything that she wished for.

Farah thought a minute and then said, "I wish for all the young children in the world to be safe from sexual exploitation."

And so God killed Michael Jackson.

Okay, I give that one style points for tackiness but have to penalize it for borderline blasphemy.

McDonald's is coming out with a new burger in honor of Michael Jackson...an all meat patty in a ten year old bun.

I know that some will find these kind of jokes abhorrent; but I can attest that the people making them up and passing them around are not insensitive creeps or morally obtuse jerks. These guys are for the most part decent, upstanding citizens. I attribute these celebrity death jokes to a defense mechanism of sorts. These jesters have the same initial reaction that most do when they hear that someone like Michael Jackson suddenly dies, which is shock, followed by dismay and a tinge of sadness. We have intimations of mortality as we realize that if the rich and famous can so suddenly and unexpectedly keel over, then most assuredly the same thing could happen to us. But we really can't function as working, productive human beings if we constantly ruminate upon our own possibly imminent demise. So what do we do? We makes jokes about death. And trading floors, given that they are the locus of several dozen mostly males who are mostly vigorous and jocular "frat" types, are the perfect breeding ground for this type of gallows, or rather post-mortem, humor.

Michael Jackson reaches the pearly gates and the first person he meets is Elvis Presley. Wow, how perfect, Michael thinks, the King of Pop meets the King of Rock 'n Roll!

But all Elvis can think is, What carnival did this this freakazoid escape from? Is it black or white, a dude or a dudette? Man, how did he last ten minutes on earth without some good-ole-boys tying him to a rope attached to a trailer hitch and taking him for a cross-country fun ride? Whatever this thing is, it must be lucky.

Michael extends his hand to Elvis and says in his nine year old girl voice, "Oh Elvis, I've been dying to meet you. "

"Well, you're dead alright," Elvis snickers with his signature upturned lip as he ponders for a few seconds whether to shake this creature's hand on which it is wearing a glove sparkling with rhinestones. What happened to its other glove, he wonders.

As Elvis finally deigns to shake his hand, Michael says to him, "My name is Michael Jackson and guess what?"

"What?" Elvis replies warily.

"I married your daughter."

So don't be afraid to laugh death in the face, at least as long as the Grim Reaper is not pointing his scythe directly at you.