The reason I put up these two images is not because I think Joe Lieberman is a bad guy, or that he is in any way scary. The point I want to make is that Health Care politics has a kinship with professional wrestling because it is scripted. Lieberman, like any of the “bad guys” in wrestling has a job to do – he has to move the story forward. To do so, he appears on stage at strategic intervals when the story is failing. He does eeeeeeevil things, now threatening to help filibuster the Medicare 55 option.

It’s scripted. He works very closely with the Democrats on all of this stuff, and appears when he should and says what he must. In the end, he will take the heat when the ‘desired’ legislation (which is doomed to fail anyway) goes down. Other Democrats feel less heat because of Lieberman.

So Joe is an actor on a stage, and I even like him, much as I like villains in any movie. (All time classic: Heath Ledger’s “The Joker.”)

Lieberman should paint his face.

But I much prefer professional wrestling, as the players aren’t so slimy. But please note: The mindless zombies who think wrestling is real cannot hold a candle to the party hacks who buy the “Bad-guy-Joe” narrative.

Is it just me? The Internet seems to be really degrading itself now. A tour through various websites is a light show, with flash ads jumping at you from every direction, text superimposing itself over the text you want to read, and what were once known as “obnoxious pop-ups” reappearing in the form of obnoxious boxes that swell up in our faces if the cursor accidentally hits a trigger word.

And Google, the search engine that distinguished itself from the others by offering true results based on popularity instead of back-door payments, is almost entirely given over to advertising results. You have to scroll deep down a page to get true results these days.

The real business of web pages, the content, is now a left-hand affair, taking up about half the screen. The rest of the page is devoted to ads and links to ads. A visit to most web sites for any kind of video content will deliver what is known as a “pre-runroll”, and ad that you must try to ignore before you are allowed to view the content you are after.

All of this comes to mind because Steve and I were looking for Glenn Greenwald’s Radio show. Click on that link, and you will first be subjected to an annoying full-page ad, and you have to find the button to close it. The page below flashes and annoys, in customary fashion. But then another ad appears, this one imposing itself over the text you want to read. This ad will not close. You have to guess what is behind it.

It was only a matter of time before the Internet, a taxpayer invention, was taken over by that thing they call the “free market” – carnival barkers, whores in dark alleys, snake oil salesmen and, everywhere you look, Google. But I repeat myself.

Enjoy the page your are now reading, free of flashdancing and pop-ups. Most places you go for content, and get hit with shit. Here we are more up front.

This has nothing to do with anything that has transpired before. I am curious about one thing. It’s not because of what I am reading of what I have read before – there’s no great philosopher behind it. It’s just my own observations.

A workman who uses tools keeps his tools in good operating condition. If he lets them fall in disrepair, he impairs the cash flow he gets from them. But if he needs a snow plow to clear walks, he’s not going to go out and buy plow that attaches to the front of a pickup. He wants minimum investment and maximum utility.

In the antebellum South, the cheapest way to plant, grow and harvest cotton was human labor using crude tools. In true free-market fashion, an entrepreneur discovered that Negro slaves could be brought in, kept in involuntary servitude, and forced to do the work. It was a dynamic breakthrough, and anyone else who wanted to compete in the cotton market faced the dilemma of investing in labor at prices that free people might demand, or buying slaves. The South became a slave-driven economy, and slave ownership was so common as to be thought normal. Even the finest egalitarian minds of the age, such as Jefferson, owned slaves, whom he also boinked. The market gave him not much choice – if he invested in free labor, his cash reserves would soon be depleted, as the whole of the wealth of the South was based on slave labor.

But slave ownership was not without costs. In order to keep slaves in good working order, they had to be fed and housed. Replacement slaves had to be bred, so that aging ones could be replaced by newer machinery. There had to be a regular flow of machinery through the marketplace to keep it all functioning smoothly.

Laws enacted by the slave owners who controlled government enforced the rules of the slave system. If a slave escaped, local officials would assist in the hunt-down. If a slave had to be killed to teach a lesson, it was not considered a crime. Government was the servant of wealth.

Other maintenance matters were cultural – that is, understood to be necessary but not necessarily requiring cash investment. It was understood that slaves of one plantation should not be free to mingle with slaves of another, as secret alliances might form that might lead to escape plans or revolts. Slaves had to be kept illiterate, as education leads to desire for freedom. Religious indoctrination taught them to expect rewards in some other world. And even though on the surface it appears that a machine necessary for production of wealth was being abused, slaves had to be regularly beaten to demonstrate the futility of rebellion. It served a greater good.

The open market further required that family ties be broken – it was harsh, and there was no cultural or control reason to do so, but for sake of maximization of profits, families had to be broken up, children sold off if their labor was not needed, old men and women whose value had diminished sold at clearance prices too less wealthy or non-landed gentry who could use them for other purposes. (William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame, had a slave, York, who accompanied him on the great expedition. York’s mingling with natives encountered on the trip taught him about how free men lived, and created an uppity attitude. Clark wrote of having to beat York on occasion, as his attitude was becoming insolent.)

All in all, it was an efficient marketplace, and as such, would not naturally dislodge itself. It took a great war to undo the system, and the aftermath of the war was devastation of the southern economy. Slavery became illegal in the United States, but investors, manufacturers and landowners adapted to the new economy, and soon followed the Industrial Revolution, where machines could to the work formerly done by slaves.

But market pressures would still exist to minimize the cost of labor, and due to the advance of machines, a surplus labor force was always available. So the same market forces that produced slavery still existed. On the surface it appeared as though free men and women were negotiating for fair wages in an open marketplace. The fact was that cheaper labor was always available, so that wages were eventually reduced to the point where they would provide enough for a worker to have food and crude housing – enough to make him serviceable to employers.

The Progressive Movement of the early twentieth century, which is no longer taught about in schools, fought long and bloody battles for the right of workers to form unions, a forty-hour work week, the end of child labor, and eventually, a minimum wage. Later battles would bring about unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, and workplace safety laws. Still later laws would try to enforce standards to minimize environmental degradation, discrimination based on color or gender, access to buildings for handicapped people … the list goes on.

All of that, from outlawing of slavery to ramps leading into public libraries, was the work of evil government, which a certain commenter here repeatedly tells me does nothing but visit “violence” on people.

Markets are powerful engines for good, as they maximize efficiency for wealth creation and general good. Without them I would not be typing on this computer, which I depend on for my living as well. But markets have negative side effects, among them, slavery, pauper-wages, humans as chattel, and externalities such as environmental degradation. Markets do not provide remedies for these problems, as remedies do not generate immediate and visible profits.

Market pressures also demand that that investors would go elsewhere to avoid U.S. laws protecting workers, the old and disadvantaged, and the environment. So it is that most of our goods are made in other countries like China, Vietnam, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, where democratic impulses do not exist, where the environment and workplace are not a huge concern, and where labor is cheap. Very cheap.

In those countries, workers subsist on lousy wages and live in hovels. It’s almost like being a slave, except that workers are free to go starve somewhere if they don’t want to submit to market pressures.

Slavery never left. It’s a natural byproduct of free markets. It still exists in its true form (prostitute slaves are common throughout the world), and in the form of sweatshops. In an article in Scientific American from 2002 (behind a subscription wall), Kevin Bales argued that there were as many as 18 million slaves among us, including in the United States. (Going on memory here.)

Markets work, but without governments, they don’t work as well as some would have us believe. In fact, they can really hurt us. Free markets gave us slavery. Government freed them.

In a post down below, I asked for opinions on why we are in Afghanistan. I got four responses: Wars always come in pairs (rightsaidfred); domestic politics and some pipeline geopolitics (ladybug); destruction of the Obama presidency (Charliecarp); and finally, encirclement of Iran in preparation for a three-pronged invasion (Blackflag).

In 1989 Iran and Iraq had one thing in common – both had independent foreign policies. Surrounded by U.S. puppets and collaborators, each was seen by the U.S. as poison. As soon as it was clear that the Soviets were no longer a threat, the U.S. attacked Iraq (1991), and then over the following twelve years strangled it, eventually invading and installing a puppet government in 2003.

Iran is a much larger and more powerful nation, and has been a tougher nut to crack. The U.S. tried to undermine its elections this year, without success. The Iraq bases are a real threat to Iran, and Israel can always be used to attack – the question is, does Iran have a credible deterrent? They appear to – the U.S. has not attacked, nor has Israel.

And an Iran with a nuclear bomb would be unassailable, hence the multi-pronged offensive to keep them from developing such a weapon. It’s not about our security or Europe’s – it’s about their ability to deter an attack by having the ability to inflict meaningful countermeasures.

Iran has fully absorbed the lesson of Iraq: Weakness induces attack. After twelve years of strangulation and disarmament, Iraq lacked a meaningful deterrent. The invasion followed like Mary’s lamb. Iran sees this, and knows it must arm itself in everyway possible to maintain it’s independence.

So what’s up with Afghanistan? Iran sits atop massive natural gas fields – it has far more gas than oil, the second largest supply in the world. On May 24, 2009, Iran and Pakistan signed a 25-year deal for Iran to supply gas to Pakistan with a $7 billion pipeline to be built across Afghanistan into Pakistan. This is the blue-dashed line below – the “IPI” Pipeline.

The implications are staggering – an alliance of Sunni and Shiites with potential future pipeline spurs to energy-starved India, and even China. And Russia strongly supports the deal – the alternative market for Iranian gas is Western Europe, which is currently supplied by the Russians. Iranian gas going to Asia is beneficial to the Russians in preserving their existing market.

Remember the acronym “TAPI”, or the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline, aka “TAP”, or Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline. This pipeline has been in the works, and was the reason why the U.S. military (allegedly) threatened the Taliban prior to 9/11 to bury them either under a “carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs”. TAPI is the red/yellow line on the map above.

Hindu India does not want to depend on Muslim Pakistan for energy, and so favors the TAPI line over the Iran-Pakistan line. And the U.S., of course, does not want Iran to have any options until it can install a puppet government there. (1979 was the year Iran gained its independence, and the U.S. has never forgiven them.)

So why are we in Afghanistan? There are many reasons – geopolitics, the Great Game, to clear the way for TAPI, to isolate Iran, to keep India from becoming dependent on Pakistan, to have a strong military presence in a critical area close to energy supplies critical to the region.

The reasons given for being there: To overthrow the Taliban, a security threat to us, “terrorists” in the hills of Pakistan, concern for human rights, nation building … these reasons are all smoke. All are false.

Obama has not changed one facet or detail in U.S. policy in that area of the world, and is forced to stand behind a podium and lie through his teeth now, just as Bush did before him.

It’s business as usual. Democrats are now carrying forward with the policy handed them by Bush, who inherited it from Clinton. For all I know, it could go back as far as 1979, when the U.S. first enticed the Russians to invade Afghanistan.

—–

Good reading on the subject here, from whence I stole the map above.

Years ago, in the early 90’s and while still single, I briefly dated a former Baucus staffer. (It didn’t work out – we were never that close, and when she said “Stop following me or I’ll call the cops!”, I sensed that it was time to move on.) Even as a ex-staffer, she was extremely devoted to Max. (That’s part of why we didn’t harmonize.)

Anyway, we were at the Labor Temple one day because Max was going to make an appearance, and in walked the star for professional mingling. Eventually he came over to his former staffer and was most annoyingly and insincerely ingratiating and paternal. I remember thinking “These people were once an item.”

I’ve always thought of Max since that time as man who uses his power of office as a means of vaginal penetration. So I’ve not been surprised at former staffers who accuse him of misdeeds, or of the wife who left in utter unvanquished anger. A man such as Max can create great resentment because he’s kind of a dick and has great power.

And now we learn that he appointed a former girlfriend to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. (They will only admit he mixed with this staffer after his divorce. That could be strategic retreat.)

Keep in mind that most of us get screwed by Max as part of the normal course of business, and that no lucrative appointments await us.

I leave this space for any passer-by to fill us in on what the f*** we are doing in Afghanistan.

(*From a cartoon by Marc Murphy, Courier-Journal of Louisville, KY)

Thank you.

I enjoy both “Blackflag” and “rightsaidfred” – they are the types who eventually make their own blogs and join the futility frivolity.

This post is a continuation of a debate down below which went so far down the page that it got annoying to have to scroll down.

Black Flag: If private power is more powerful than government, why do they need government?

MT: Access to the commons, freedom from regulation and taxation.

Black Flag: So, to you private power is a set that includes
(1) those that resist theft; (2) those that initiation violence.

You can’t differentiate more clearly?

Power grows naturally where there are human interactions. Because of our various makeups, each of us tends to specialize and do those things that please us. But there is a small percentage of us for whom that self-pleasing involves collection of wealth and domination of others. These are our sociopaths – the barons of industry, the Mafia dons. They preside over a system of domination – you might call it choice, but the drug runner at the bottom of the pipeline doesn’t have much choice. He merely carves out space for himself to exist in the system.

This is natural and necessary to a degree, as we cannot accomplish large projects without large organizations. So we need an Exxon to supply our oil. But we do not need Exxon to dominate our climate change debate. Wal-Mart comes into being by slim-lining retailing practices, but we should not allow Wal-Mart to set labor standards or trade policies.

To overcome these natural concentrations of power, we need democratic input – that is, each system of domination must be voluntary and must justify itself. But there is no power in the land strong enough to overcome power once it has grown so concentrated as Wal-Mart of Exxon. We need a government that is more powerful than those entities.

Black Flag: So what do these entities exhibit that makes you include them into your definition?

They are victorious in the marketplace, and in an odd corruption of Darwin, should therefore be allowed to prosper unimpeded, or so goes the unspoken logic. In fact, such growth and concentration of wealth and power is a threat to democracy, and needs to be subordinated to democratic governance.

rightsaidfred: I fear that adding a comment to this long and winding thread would be aiding the commission of a crime. That is what underlies climate change denial – fear that growth cannot be unlimited. I haven’t heard anyone claim that growth can be unlimited. Some on the Left want to actively discourage growth, and if we cede too much of the debate, they will pull out their Kim Jong Il playbook and have us all sitting in the dark.

A pox on both houses, and on with real life. (It kind of scares me when you start claiming to have a handle on real life.)

The Kim Jong comment is illustrative of the Randian world-view. Ms. Rand came from Bolshevik Russia, and witnessed the brutal aftermath of that revolution where the desire to be free of monarchy led to oppression by a different set of rulers. She naturally concluded from that that the struggle for human freedom was against government oppression and for the private self.

However, the Western experience has been quite different. Democratic governments, such as they are, tend to be reined in at various stages when they become excessive. The key is that there is a mechanism in place for popular will to be translated into public policy.

However, in a Randian world, the state ceases to interfere with the sociopaths who naturally set about centralizing power and dominating others. So her rules naturally lead us to a different kind of oppression, where we live under the thumbs of social misfits, such as John Galt. In such a system, there is no mechanism to overcome the oppression other than voluntary organizations such as vigilantes or informal unions. Violence is the only effective counter force.

rightsaidfred: Interesting, but I don’t know too many governments that stand down from their relentless interference.

You perhaps missed, then, the last twenty years of the twentieth century?

rigthsaidfred: I will agree there is a “winner take all” component to some aspects of economic life. He with the best operating system gets to install it on all new computers… I’m a bit more concerned about the increased economic power flowing through the few hands in Washington DC. Obama increased the fed budget from a bloated $2.6 trillion to $3.9 trillion. Who’s going to save us from that?

The numbers are indeed daunting, but the entire issue is much more so. The economy spun out of control due to failure of government to regulate business practices and to tax at a high enough rate to remove excess capital from the markets. In addition, we have virtually destroyed our manufacturing base, transferring it to China, so there is not much in the way of physical investment opportunities here in the land of the free.

It’s all kind of a perfect storm. Obama is now carrying out the will of the sociopaths by helping them rebuild the palace that fell.

I sense in your comment that aged nonsense about there being meaningful differences between Democrats and Republicans. In fact, due to changes in policies initiated after the election of Reagan in 1980, wealth has naturally concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and democratic governance has effectively been thwarted. We now live in what Citibank referred to in a private memo as a “plutonomy“. So criticism of Obama is fine, but do understand that he is but a player in a theatrical system where various actors take turns playing the lead role.

rightsaidfred: …if we controlled our border to keep out illegal immigrants, we would have a labor shortage of blue collar workers and thus higher wages. The wage stagnation of this class in the US leads directly from the entry of unskilled immigrants. Why push for unions, which is an expensive and long term unsuccessful way to raise wages, when border control offers a more natural way to raise wages?

Exactly the point. We do not enforce border control mechanism because unregulated concentrated power wants those borders left open too allow them to avoid labor laws.

Two things caught my eye in today’s Denver Post:

One, a front page headline about how area libraries are in financial bind, and how they are ignoring “millions of dollars in tantalizing revenue” by not going after past-due fines.

I have a free market solution: run the libraries like a credit card company. When someone has an overdue book, don’t just charge a small fine. Charge a large fine – $25-$50. When the big fines go unpaid, impose even more fines on the fines. Charge 29% interest. When politicians complain that you are abusing their constituents, bribe them. And then send out the dogs – the collection agencies. They will set up repayment schedules that will assure a nice revenue stream for the libraries. What started out as a pittance ends up as a very large financial obligation.

Let the moneychangers show you how to run a temple.

The other article was an op-ed by the mayors of Boulder, Golden, Superior, and a Boulder County Commissioner, “A better highway, not a new toll road.” Toll roads are the private market’s answer to the problem of paying for roads – those who use them pay for them. It makes sense until one realizes that the benefits of good infrastructure are so widespread that its various elements ought too be a public burden … taxes.

There is a lot of economic activity going on the the foothills of Denver/Golden/Boulder, and the area is served by a hodgepodge of linked arteries in various stages of development. A toll road through the area would naturally force drivers to seek alternative routes. So the people who are proposing the toll road want to lower speed limits on alternative routes to ‘encourage’ drivers to use their toll road. In addition, they figure that many people will move over to Highway 93, an alternative route, increasing road wear and congestion there. They offer no remedy for that problem.

That’s private market logic in a nutshell: Force people to use your product and pay your freight, and refuse to pay for externalities.

Which reminds me of another adventure in free markets – there is a toll road between Denver and Denver International Airport, a very nice road and usually uncrowded because there is a non-toll alternative. In order to speed things up a bit, the managers of the road went to electronic enforcement of the tolls. They take your picture at various points, and send you a bill. It is a great idea.

However, there is a problem with rental cars, common on an airport route. The toll road people send a bill to the rental car agencies, who should simply pass it on to their customers.

Enter the free market – the rental car agencies saw a pivot point for a new revenue stream, and decided to impose additional fees on customers who used toll roads – usually in the area of $8.95 a day in addition to the tolls. Further, for those customers who don’t read the fine print, who don’t agree to the $8.95 fee and then use toll roads, are fined as much as $25 a day in addition to the tolls. So now a $100 car rental deal costs people $250-$300. Care to complain? They sort of have you by the balls, which is where any sociopathic business person strives and plots, day and night, to grab us.

Real competition would mean that one company would see the light, and treat tolls as a mere pass-through cost. But what we learn is that there are not so many rental car agencies as appears – there are but two or three and they go by many names. These two or three companies naturally revert to monopoly behavior, and have all agreed to go by the same rules and not undercut or underprice one another.

It is a microcosm of the the vaunted “free market”. Companies hate competition, and buy each other up to avoid it. Then they masquerade as competitors, fix prices, and agree to play by the same rules.

Which reminds me of another adventure. The American market for cell phones is in a primitive state compared to other countries. The companies that operate here all have the same business plan – they want a revenue stream and therefore demand that you use a phone they supply without any innovations by outsiders. They tie these phones to two-year contracts. It is just like Internet service, where the U.S. is behind the rest of the world because large companies are more interested in divvying up the market to protect revenue streams rather than innovate.

I was thinking about an IPhone, but found that the monthly cost was too high and allotment of monthly minutes too small – $69.99 is the advertised price, but there is also a $30 “data” charge, meaning they want $100 a month to rent their phone. That is their business plan – they want $100 a month from you, and no matter how you slice it, if you want their product, it is $100 per month.

I looked at a new product offered through Verizon called the “Droid” – basically an IPhone with a manual keyboard. Verizon advertised the product for $149.99 with a two year contract, and $59.99 per month for usage. I looked through the website for a data charge, and it was not there. This, I thought, is a viable alternative to the IPhone – we could have one portable phone/internet device for the same price that we currently pay for two cell phones.

We went to the Verizon store yesterday, and here is what we learned: The phone costs $259.99 with a two year contract, and the monthly charge is $69.99, and there is a $30 data charge. The monthly cost is ……. $100. Just like Apple. Same product, same price. “Competition” is fiction as companies hire various ad agencies to differentiate their identical products in the minds of users.

Anyway, when we left Verizon, we had turned off one of our cell phones. We are now $25 per month richer.

Thus endeth today’s lesson in the wonders of the free market.

This more or less recaps a conversation between my wife and I as we ate breakfast this morning while looking though a window at the Court House lawn in Boulder:

H: That must be a homeless guy over there. I wonder where he stays at night.

M: Is that a sleeping bag?

H: I wonder how these people can afford to be homeless in Boulder? It’s pretty expensive here.

M: Maybe they take the bus in from Louisville every day.

H: So they ride a bus here to panhandle during the day, and then go back to Louisville at night?

M: Lotta wealthy people here.

H: Yeah – I suppose they could make more money in Boulder.

M: Yeah. Lotta liberal guilt here.