Author: Mark Tokarski

Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.

Sharia Economics

The Muslim faith is widely scourged here in the land of the free, as people are inclined to be provincial and project their own evil onto others. (I’m way above that sort of thing myself, mind you.) But if you set aside the jihads and seven virgins waiting (just as Christians should set aside virgin births and Revelations), it has some appealing features.

Among these features are avoidance of alcohol, daily prayer rituals, and a severe mandate that those who accumulate wealth must share with those who are less fortunate.

They also have some weird stuff, just as other religions do, concerning diet, clothing and travel. Food restrictions probably came from a time when they made sense, as with Jews who avoided crustacean seafood, which could be deadly poisonous. And the pilgrimage to Mecca is a wasted vacation, as far as I am concerned. I’d much rather go to Arizona and watch spring training.

What set me off on this was some reading I did this morning by Loretta Napoleoni in her book Rogue Economics. I’ve just been triggered to learn more about it, and can’t begin to be useful here, but she was writing about Sharia Economics, which has its roots in the Qur’an.

The concept of “interest”, or money making money on money, is outlawed in Islamic societies, though in practice they cannot avoid it, since western economics sets the table for them.

The ideal behind the concept is that wealth is the product of labor, and that payment of money must be done in return for good or services, and not merely because someone holds financial investments. It is so foreign to Westerners that we automatically dismiss the idea as impractical. But events are leading many of the Islamic faith down a non-western path.

Napoleoni specifically writes about two events: The Asian collapse of 1996, and the aftermath of 9/11/2001.

The former was brought about by flight of capital from South Korea, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. (The latter two are heavily Muslim.) It is a classic example of too much power in too few hands, and the inability ot nation states to control the flow of capital. Those countries were devastated by the collapse, and are yet to recover. One country, Malaysia, decided to abandon Western economics, and turn to the Sharia form. It limped along for a while, and of course was shunned by the IMF, which waited for it to regain its senses. In recent years, it has attracted Muslim capital, and the country is performing quite well.

The other event was 9/11, and the ominous “War on Terror”, which many Muslims regarded as a mere witch hunt. It caused many wealthy Muslims to withdraw from the world scene, and seek to close the walls and build their own economies, free of Adam Smith, Alan Greenspan, and the IMF.

The brief chapter I read this morning was just a trigger, and it’s a whole new area for me – I invite readers here to spill their knowledge on us – if you can add some expertise to these ramblings, I can simply put up a post under your name and let you have at it.

Please add your two bits. In the meantime, it’s a whole new avenue for me.

The Old Left and the New Democrats and other tedium

I’ve had some rumblings that point to yet another awakening, meaning that it is time to move on.

We have a young relative who is in the advertising business, and who is currently faced with the choice of working for an agency in a new city, Chicago, or working for an old employer whom he has left twice for greener pastures, or venturing out and forming a new ad agency with some like-minded cohorts.

I don’t know what his future holds. But when we sit with him, he talks about it, pesters us with questions, asks for our input. We are careful not to offer advice. We only ask him to consider this or that, to ferret out his own thoughts.

His thought processes are intertwined around conversations with others. That’s how he processes information.

For others, it is a ruminative process. Thinking is hard work, but some can do it while sitting in a chair looking out the window. They organize thoughts, create strategies, and then act. It’s quite a gift, but doesn’t come about by accident. These people are usually highly educated and have worked very hard at learning how to think. While education for most of us is a tool of enslavement, for these people, it is a path to freedom.

For myself, I’m an odd duck. I think with my fingers. I sit down to write and most times do not know what awaits. Often it is a revelation to myself. That’s why I regard writing not as labor, but rather as recreation. Our old and departed friend Bob Garner had a blog for a while, and was tortured by the thought that he had to write something every day. He quickly gave it up. For me, it is a privilege, and even if I have 300 readers or sixty (which is where it currently sits), I love doing it.

Here are the rumblings:

I was down at Pearl Street Mall here in Boulder last week, and remembered a place I had long forgotten: Left Hand Book Store. It’s down a flight of stairs, nested away. I was there when we visited some years ago, and thought it would be a privilege to live in a town that had such a store. Back then, I walked out with an armload of books. Last week, I could not find one book that even remotely grabbed me. I have no use for the Buddha, am not interested in the slaughter of the Native American population. Michael Parenti is a pseudo if ever there was one. Left wing economics is Utopian nonsense. And Chomsky … well, I admire the man and thank him for his many volumes, but he is old and his time has passed.

(Chomsky’s most important work, that I beleive should be read and digested by all, is The Responsibility of Intellectuals. (I do not presume to be one. I offer that up because most of that breed spend their lives in service of power. Their efforts do not serve human freedom, which is the proper function of education.))

The other incident was some volunteer work I do. Bob McChesney hosts a program on public radio in Urbana, Illinois called Media Matters. He’s a well known author, and consequently gets the most incredible guests, from Chomsky to Richard Dawkins Glenn Greenwald to Naomi Klein to … Albert to Zinn, I guess. I transcribe the program that airs on the fourth Sunday of each month. I’ve been very lucky – I have gotten Wendell Potter and Gore Vidal and Chris Hedges, and each was fun.

Last time I got Michael Albert. He’s an old lefty, and went on and on about a new society he dreams about, with empowered workers and shared wealth, free minds and free bodies. I first ran into Albert in the early nineties, and found him boring then. Here he is, two decades later, no closer to fruition, and unchanged. He still thinks it’s gonna happen. He still doesn’t understand people.

How can so much life pass by without learning a thing or two?

I take some pride in knowing that my life has been movement … from nothing to right-winger-states-rights to Reagan Republican to nothing to Chomsky leftist to Naderite to what I am now: nothing. The list of things I do not believe in is long. I focus my attention on my latest romantic breakup. In relationships we do not go from love to friendship. We go from love to anger to hatred to disinterest.

I’ve been focused on Democrats for a long time. It’s time to treat them with the disinterest they so richly deserve. Things are going to change here at this blog. No more dwelling on the futility of two parties or imagining an enlightened populace. I choose to run in interesting circles, read interesting books, and write about things that fascinate me, learning with every peck of the keyboard.

And no more health care or election fraud or agitprop or body counts. Those battles are long lost (and election fraud itself is so pointless, as even clean elections give us shit). And there is so much more to explore. Life is so much more interesting than that.

I am thankful that I encountered Michael Albert, as he reminds me of how bad (and boring) it can be to be an idealist. There is so much more to life than trying to lift people out of the trenches. Leave them be. I plan from this day forward to do two things: Try to focus on new and interesting stuff while at the same time making fun of right wingers.

It’s my calling.

Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

After this, no more body counts. But I was startled not to feel the full impact of something in my own writings down below. It is an accounting summary of “terrorist” attacks against Western Civilization, 1970 to present. These are official numbers – there are people in our government whose job it is to count such things. Bean counters. I could do this. I could work for the Pentagon!

In total, “terrorists” have engaged in 2,953 incidents of violence resulting in 4,947 deaths. Remove on incident, 9/11, and you have 2,952 incidents resulting in 1,974 deaths.

The U.S. (under King George the First) killed that many people with one bomb in one incident in a barrio in Panama City in 1989.

The difference is, of course, that the 4,947 people are people that matter, people who count. And so we count them when they die. Ask the Pentagon bean counters how many people died in that Panama City barrio, and you’ll get a disinterested shrug. Those we do not count. Those people, working men and women with families who dance and sing and love one another just as we do – their removal from the planet elicits hardly a blink of the eye here in the civilized US of A.

This is all old news to me. I know what’s up. I know why certain people matter and others don’t. I know why we are menaced by one evil demon after another, from Hitler to Osama. For the Panama barrio, the justification for our murder spree was Manuel Noriega, and man who is currently rotting away in a jail in Florida, about as harmful as Fred Rogers. But he became the face of the enemy.

We are but sheep given knives and led to slaughter other sheep. The game is old, and interestingly, has come full circle now. The U.S. is in Afghanistan – Central Asia, where the original “Great Game” was played.

Can’t do anything about it. People are as they are. Israelis are murdering and enslaving Palestinians, but if the tables were turned, if the U.S. had armed the Palestinians instead, then Palestinians would be murdering and enslaving Jews (and dropping white prosperous on them).

Life goes on. Only a few of us ever get our heads out of the trenches to see the game at play and understand the rules. That’s all we can hope for – some understanding. Imagine being a football fan for life and yet never knowing the rules of the game. That is what it is like for the ordinary American citizen.

I feel lucky. I escaped from the trench, found the rule book, and now have a sense of empowerment that comes from knowledge. I think this is what it means to be free.

How about you? Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

The pending Jesus-sponsored holocaust

A statistical abstract of the absurd notion that we are somehow threatened by people with plastic explosives in the soles of shoes or nitroglycerin in shampoo bottles:

    Number of airline hijackings, Europe and North America, during 1970’s: 31

      Number of deaths resulting from said hijackings: 29
    Number of airline hijackings, Europe and North America, during 1980’s: 13

      Number of deaths resulting from said hijackings: 61
    Number of airline hijackings, Europe and North America, during 1990’s: 6

      Number of deaths resulting from said hijackings: 0
    Number of airline hijackings, Europe and North America, during 2000’s: 7

      Number of deaths resulting from said hijackings: 2,973
    International terrorist attacks**, 1970’s: 920 (deaths: 287)
    International terrorist attacks, 1980’s: 1,219 (deaths: 990)
    International terrorist attacks, 1990’s: 626 (deaths: 367)
    International terrorist attacks, 2000’s: 188 (deaths: 3,303)
    Number of Vietnamese war casualties, Vietnamese side (Government of Vietnam): 3,100,000
    Number of children starved to death by Bill Clinton in 1990s (UNICEF): 500,000

    Number of civilian casualties in Iraq since U.S. invasion, March, 2003:

      Iraq Body Count: 94,000-102,574
      Johns Hopkins (2006): 655,000
      ORB (Opinion Research Bureau of London (2007): 1.2 million
      United States Government (Washington) DKDC*
    Number of Jews in the world (Jewish People Policy Planning Institute): 13.2 million
    Number of Jews that will survive in end times (Revelations): 144,000
    Number of Jews that Jesus intends to kill if the end of the world is today: 13,056,000
    Number of Jews killed in Holocaust: 6,000,000
    High end estimates of dead in U.S. attacks on Vietnam and Iraq (sanctions and war): 4,800,000

Summary: The U.S. is getting there, approaching Holocaust numbers, but in the end, Jesus is the best damned killer of all.

*Doesn’t know, doesn’t care

**U.S. defines a “terrorist” attack as an act of violence committed against civilians by a non-military person or group, thereby exempting state-sponsored terrorism (its own activities) from consideration. So, for instance, during the 1980’s, 180 “terrorist” attacks in Colombia were actually insurgent attacks on a U.S.-owned oil pipeline that is at the center of that country’s civil war. U.S. acts of retaliation (“counterinsurgency”), also part of that war, are not considered.

An insider talks about health insurance costs

This was refreshing – a letter in today’s Denver Post from Jandel T. Allen-Davis, M.D., Denver, vice president of government and external relations for Kaiser Permanente Colorado. It concerns Colorado legislation, rather than national, but that is beside the point.

Not all health insurance companies are opposed to House Bill 1355 [which passed the Colorado legislature in 2007], which prohibits rate hikes for businesses that have sicker employees. Kaiser Permanente Colorado supported that bill and many previous legislative attempts to encourage greater access to insurance. We believe that the rules of the game must change so that insurance carriers are encouraged to expand the pool of insured and take on their fair share of risk.

More importantly, the debate over HB 1355 is all about how we shift premium costs around and not at all about how we keep premium costs down. Americans spend more money on health care than any other country, yet the country is No. 37 in quality of care. We should be talking about how to get our money’s worth.

We should be talking about effective treatments, coordinated care, and electronic medical records — the kind of health care delivery innovations that enable Kaiser Permanente to keep rates 20 percent lower for small businesses, compared to other insurers.

I encourage readers to become familiar with Kaiser Permanente’s health reform proposals, detailed at http://www.kaiserpermanente.org/reform. Unless we address the fundamental delivery inefficiencies in our system, America’s health care spending will continue to skyrocket.

Kaiser Permanente is a non-profit health insurance provider. The part in bold I emphasized above is a plea to for-profit insurance companies to change the rules, take a little more risk. Kaiser has no choice but to play by for-profit rules when for-profits dominate the marketplace. Otherwise, they end of with for-profit rejects, and go under.

For-profit health insurance companies exist for the sole purpose of skimming money off the health care system, and therefore do everything in their power to maximize profits by minimizing payouts for medical losses. Kaiser is, oddly, different. Why?

Anyway, nice to hear a reaosnable voice from inside the business.

A bailout under a blue cross

Upon hearing of the passage of H.R. 3962, the so-called “reform” bill, the voice I wanted to hear above all others was that of Rep. Dennis Kucinich. He has been the one true reformer among the Democrats.

It was Kucinich who offered up an amendment to the bill that would have allowed individual states to enact their own single-payer plans if they so desired. That amendment passed committee with bipartisan support, but was stripped from the final bill by the Democratic leadership under pressure from the White House.

In Canada, single-payer first passed in the Saskatchewan Province, and proved so successful that the private insurance system eventually collapsed. American insurance companies, working through the Obama Administration, stripped us of that weapon.

Here’s Kucinich on the overall thrust of the bill:

We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. … When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system.

This is why it was futile, from the beginning, to fight for anything other than single payer. It’s like trying to fight a cancer by applying a salve to some unaffected region of the body.

[Insurance companies] are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care.

That 31% is an outrageous number, and it is the height of corruption to allow it to go on. It is imposed on us by sheer force of power – the power of private finance over politicians, the power of insurance companies over doctors and hospitals and other providers. The fact that the Democrats have done nothing about it speaks to their ineptitude and corruption.

In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies—a bailout under a blue cross.

This is how Democrats work. They took all of the good energy for real reform, and turned it against us, and into another subsidy for business. This is what Bush and Baucus did with “Medicare D” – prescription coverage for seniors … isn’t it interesting that Medicare still cannot negotiate prices with Pharma even after Democrats took power?

Bloomberg reports that Curtis Lane, a prominent health industry investor, predicted a few weeks ago that “money will start flowing in again” to health insurance stocks after passage of the legislation.

This is anecdotal, but I was watching several health care stocks yesterday in the wake of passage of 3962 on Friday. They were all up, not dramatically, but the interesting thing was that they all spiked early in the day – that is, there was an influx of money into those stocks as the session opened. Someone or some institution saw some reason to stake out a position. If 3962 was any kind of threat at all to private insurance, the flow would have gone the other way.

The “robust public option” which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million….This health care bill continues the redistribution of wealth to Wall Street at the expense of America’s manufacturing and service economies which suffer from costs other countries do not have to bear, especially the cost of health care….Notwithstanding the fate of H.R. 3962, America will someday come to recognize the broad social and economic benefits of a not-for-profit, single-payer health care system, which is good for the American people and good for America’s businesses, with of course the notable exceptions being insurance and pharmaceuticals.

The key words there are, of course, “not-for-profit”. It is the profit motive that undermines our health care system, and makes it the most expensive and inefficient among the world’s industrial democracies.

Oh Conrad where art thou?

With passage in the House last night of the Health Care “Reform” bill, I thought well, we’re f*****. Democrats have done it again – they’ve taken all of this healthy energy for reform that existed, and turned it against us. Industry has a new revenue stream, health care costs will continue to rise, the problem of the uninsured will continue to haunt us, and that creeping problem known as under-insurance will continue to grow. Medical bankruptcies will continue to climb, access to care will still be denied to millions of us.

Everywhere premiums, deductibles and co-pays are going up, coverages diminishing. The health insurers have us by the balls. What happened last night was a naked exercise of power. Insurers are sticking it to us, teabagging us in a battlefield victory dance. We will now be forced to buy their crappy and expensive products.

It’s humiliating.

But oddly, Democrats don’t seem to mind humiliation. I should say “liberals”, I suppose, rather than Democrats. But I don’t know. The terminology is confusing. Am I a “progressive”? A “Naderite”? A “radical”, “malcontent”? Terminology, like liberals, can be mushy. Maybe I am just a guy with two eyes and a brain. I only know this – the people in the room last night that passed this bill are not reformers, and are not our friends.

Saul Alinski said (in the 1940’s) that the difference between the liberal and the radical is that the liberal leaves the room when an argument turns into a fight. Oddly, he’s wrong. Liberals owned the room on health care, kicked the radicals out at the beginning. But it is true that they avoided the fight. They simply did not want us watching as they laid a wet and sloppy fellatio on the health insurance companies.

Baucus should have said what he meant when he had the single-payer doctors arrested: “No voyeurs!”

If any conservatives or right wingers are reading this – I want to give you a feeling of what it is like to be a Democrat, reformer, a radical – whatever you want to call us: The House Progressive Caucus issued a statement some months ago saying that they would not vote for any bill that did not contain a “strong” public option. Their numbers are up around eighty, and that is enough for force Pelosi’s hand.

They caved. The didn’t stick together. Pelosi, working with Rahm Emmanuel and Obama, worked behind the scenes to undermine them. Much pressure was brought to bear. They were told that funding for district projects would be cut off, that there would be no help from Obama in their reelection campaigns, and in the worst cases, that a well-financed primary opponent would emerge. They caved.

How do I know this? Oh, I don’t know. I just know things. Unlike liberals, I have an understanding of the nature of power.

Anyway, right wing friends, here is what it’s like to be a progressive, to rely on Democrats to achieve your ends. It’s like being drunk – too drunk to move, but conscious enough to be looking up through a haze at your friends as they stand in a circle around you pissing in your face. It’s a warm feeling, but not a good one.

There will be cheering and backslapping as this monstrosity makes its way through the Senate. Maybe we can kill it still. But I’m having a laugh – a good and hearty laugh as I realize that we would be so much better off right now if Conrad Burns were our senator instead of Jon Tester.

So, right wing enemies and detractors, if you read this, when you get a chance, raise a glass to me and to my comrades on the left, because we have on thing in common, if only one thing: Contempt for liberals.

Minnesota shines

Several studies here:

Aiming Higher: Results from a State Scorecard on Health System Performance, 2009 (Separate chart from this study here).

America’s Health Rankings, 2008 Edition

Kaiser Family State Health Facts, 2009 Rankings of Deaths per 100,000

There are scads of charts and comparisons. My curiosity was driven by one anomaly that turns up time and time again. Minnesota consistently ranks at or near the top in virtually all health care categories, along with Vermont and Hawaii and sometimes Delaware.

It could be many things … climate, ethnicity, occupations and industries. The reason, however, that I picked on Minnesota is this: For-profit health insurance in that state is illegal.

You might say that’s irrelevant, that the lofty scorecards for the state are dependent on many factors. You might be right.

I only draw this conclusion: Getting rid of for-profit insurers will not hurt us, might even help us.

Manager wonders why computer model is not selling

COSTCO has on display many computers of various prices, all PC’s. I was looking at the one priced at $999.99 this morning, and there was one of those electronic sticky notes up in the corner that said

Check out this sticky note. It’s really cool. Bet it makes you want to spend $1,000 on a crappy computer.

Had to be an Apple guy -they are kind of cultish.