The best tennis player ever

The late (and sorely missed) Mitch Hedberg said that he never met a tennis player who could beat a wall, the best player ever.

Here’s an anonymous poster named “Lizard” over at 4&20, saying something very important:

one thing’s clear, this is going to be one long summer.

this is Obama’s big chance, and Holder’s responsibility, to stand up to the 4th largest corporation in the world, and finally hold these blood suckers (sorry vampires) accountable for the negligent homicide and ecological plague their arrogance and greed has unleashed on the gulf.

but it’s hard when “the media” obsesses over the mood of the prez, analyzing his every gesture, and making his “ass-kick comment” the major feature of attention.

meanwhile, for those who can filter the bullshit, the story is out there: there was an on-deck showdown between trans-ocean and bp, and the greedy, shortsighted decision to replace the heavy drilling mud with salt water, combined with sloppy oversight of the blowout device (which had a broken seal that affected it’s ability to warn of changing pressure) caused this disaster to happen.

but that’s just the way the media rolls. same thing with Israel’s most recent murderous assault. i mean, imagine if this footage, got wide spread mainstream air time. and imagine if it was more widely known that the IDF had to admit it released edited video with doctored audio, inserting someone shouting “go back to Auschwitz”.

but no, it’s much more important for our slobbering propaganda blowhards to facilitate Ari Fleischer’s take out of Helen Thomas, because somehow her words are deemed more obscene than idf soldiers executing Turkish peace activists, journalists, and an American citizen in international waters.

watch the footage. Afterall, it’s your money that allows these atrocities to happen.

I’ve come to know Lizard a little but. He’s passionate, insightful, and seems well-read for his young age. Maybe he graduated in liberal arts; maybe he was a poor student in primary schools, as his mind is not tracked. And he thinks that in order to reach people it is important to say things in a nice way.

The thread that led to his comments was about the elections results. (They don’t matter at all.) And somehow it got sidetracked, and at some point the Israeli flotilla raid was injected.

Voting ≠ democracy. Israel ≠ a force for good. Palestinians ≠ evil. But this is a mindset that Lizard is dealing with, and understanding mindset is what matters.

The Republican mindset validates in the Israeli atrocity as a football fan watching a game. And they will try to pin the BP oil spill (now known in the media as the “Gulf” oil spill) on the Democrats. That’s easily understood. It doesn’t take much thought to be a Republican, as ignorance is far easier to grasp than denial.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have to somehow internalize all of this with the odd fact that there is a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic congress. Republicans “cause” bad things to happen, while bad things “happen to” Democrats.

The flotilla raid, therefore, is assigned in the mind of the Democrat to a sphere called “Neverland.” It happened, and is easily understood. It simply does not penetrate consciousness.

And the “BP” (not “Gulf”) spill … Ken Salazar doing a heckuva job … Obama feigning ass-kicking anger … all of that provides some refuge for the Democratic consciousness. Obama’s supposed anger reinforces the notion that there was “change” in November of 2008. If Bush were president and all of this had happened, as it would have, Democrats would be livid.

Neverland is a place of benign neglect. There are important issues all about – EFCA, single payer, Israeli barbarism, expanded wars and income and estate tax reform. These are the issues of our times. And yet when Democrats take power, the issues are no more addressed than with Republicans. They are merely acknowledged. There is a vague sense that they exist and that something positive should be done, and some effort among progressives to bring them to the surface. And then nothing.

Democrats are Hedberg’s tennis partner, that wall. His best shots coming bouncing back … the wall wins every time.

We will never beat the wall. The best thing to do is to stop playing the wall’s game.

Creep

Post-coital gratitude

I got a bit creeped out when I saw this photo. A right wing Democrat was being groped by a right wing Democrat – consensual incest. Later they will break out the cigars and celebrate Blanche Lincoln’s return to right wing politics after her brief and mandatory flirtation with progressivism during the primary challenge.

As with Howard Hughes or PeeWee Herman, the mind of the voting public should not be probed. It could be unsettling. I’ve been reading reactions to the election results here and there, and bloggers and pundits really do think that they can read votes and minds, as if there were some sort of cloud intellect out there pulling levers.

In 2006-08 there was a massive shift from Republicans to Democrats, and since that time hardly anything has changed. We’ve still got our wars, our fear, Guantanamo, corporate bailouts. Add to that the culmination of the Bush/Cheney offshore drilling program, carried forward by Obama, and maybe voters would like now to try something different … but this is the United States, and there are no real options.

So let’s just have some fun with it. Let’s elect Ron Paul and Jerry Brown and Joe Sestak. These guys do not seem to respect either wing of the corporate party. The only signal that I can read from candidates that indicates that they are not corporate-approved, other than being disliked by Rahm Emanuel, is unmanageable kinkiness.

Corporate money will allow Democrats to campaign as progressives when the wind blows that way, but they are not allowed to govern that way. I am not being scientific here, and I know about Rand Paul’s proclivity towards lunanomics, but I also suspect he is not being managed. He might not be dependable. He could be, like his Dad, a wild card.

Democrats tell us that we have to settle for getting a little of what we want with otherwise undesirable candidates. So they will take some comfort in the fact that Blanche Lincoln puts a “D” after her name. It means nothing – that groping hug in the picture above says it all. We’ll soon be screwed again by Democrats.

So have some fun with elections. Find the least likely candidate with the oddest ideas, the quirkiest intellect … and imagine. Virtually all D’s and R’s in the USA are C’s. Better run with the wild card crowd and be disappointed on election day than to invest in corporate “winners” and be disappointed for the following two, four or six years.

“God is a concept by which we measure our pain?” WTF?

I was sitting in a chair in the middle of our family room, half watching a football game, half listening to a conversation between my then-wife and mother-in-law when the words came out of the TV …”Dead on arrival.” John Lennon had been shot. Shocked, unable to control my emotions, I broke into tears, and mother-in-law was unable to comprehend. Why does that man matter?

In the many years since his death I have been able to put Lennon in his place. He was an incredibly gifted man who best spoke through music and words in music. The songs he wrote were not derivative or cute, not always even melodic. The word “shoot” interspersed between the lines of “Come Together” … who else would have even imagined such music? I think of my current wife when I hear the words “She’s not a girl who misses much…”.

Then last week I accidentally played “God” on the ITouch, and cannot get the words out of my mind … “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.” Context is everything. What the hell was he thinking?

I don’t know. Good song though. I’ve heard and read his interviews after the breakup of the Beatles. He wasn’t really very good outside of music. He was actually kind of muddle-headed, trying to explain how music speaks to our emotion by using the example of a chair, Yoko sideboard muttering incomprehensible half-sentences. Maybe it was the drugs. He was clear about that. He said that he and the other Beatles did a lot of drugs, but that he went way beyond them. They would stop. He could not.

So I have wondered what the future held for him had he not died? Would he have continued to be a cultural icon? Would his music still cut the edge while at the same time offering up sweetness and angst and base emotion? Would he even be interesting?

Yes, I think he would be interesting. He would have dumped Yoko, no doubt, formally. He had already tired of her, and moved on to May Pang who he would have dumped for who knows. His entanglements were legend. He would have continued to speak out on public issues. He would have joined marches, cut his hair, appeared on (Late Night) Letterman and SNL and Stern but never Leno. He never would have endorsed a product, might have written a catchy tune mocking Apple, the corporation and the label.

But the drugs, the cigarettes, the angst … the man was tortured. God forbid, he might have taken Prozac, calmed down a bit, became introspective in a too-serious kind of way, and become boring. And slap me for saying this, but I would rather remember him as the dream weaver, the Walrus, and not just John.

So perhaps his death came at the right time, before the anti-psychotic medicines took hold. Nature does not care about pain, and pain gave us John Lennon as he was, brilliant and flawed at once. Better that death took him from us than Zoloft.

Ipilimumab

We’ve had some experience with melanoma in relatives – it was caught early and hasn’t returned. It’s an especially dangerous type of cancer if it “metasicizes” – that is, penetrates the protective skin layers and enters the blood stream. The cancer will quickly spread and infect other organs. It usually overwhelms the body with death shortly following.

So I was glad to read of the development of a new drug that helps people in whom the cancer has spread. It’s called ipilimumab, and is being “developed” by Bristol Myers, whose stock has responded favorably to recently released findings of clinical studies that found the drug effective.

But it is confusing. An article in Medical News Today reviews the findings of the study.

Early results of a trial found that a new drug that targets a genetic mutation found in over half of melanoma cases and some other cancers caused tumors to shrink and patients to live around 6 months longer without their disease getting worse, including those whose cancer had spread to the liver, lung and bone.

Current treatments can generally extend life expectancy around two months. Is this progress?

I suppose. And I don’t know how to read these studies. Perhaps the important point is that they have hit on an entry point into a new means of treating the cancer that will lead to an eventual cure.

Or maybe it is just hype. But it is fodder for those who tell us that large pharmaceutical companies are doing important research that is bringing real benefits to the human condition, and that this is what justifies the protection from competition that we grant them. Are we not seeing some return on investment here?

Not really. Bristol Myers did not invent the drug. A company called Medarex did. Bristol Myers merely bought Medarex.

And this is typical of the business model of large pharmaceutical companies. They take the research of others (most often, NIH) and leverage it into marketing bonanzas.

To illustrate: People often think of Nike as a shoe company. It is not. It is a marketing company. They know how to exploit sweatshop labor to make a shoe. That’s for sure. But their real talent is “adding value” to a $5.00 shoe, converting it to a $150 Air Jordan. That’s their specialty.

In the same manner, Bristol Myers markets drugs.

Take Avapro, for example, aka irbestaran. It’s a fairly modestly priced drug by PhRma standards – only about $120 a month. It is used to treat high blood pressure, and kidney problems in diabetics. It has an important side effect: It doesn’t work.

A large randomized trial following 4100+ men and women with heart failure and normal ejection fraction (>=45%) over 4+ years found no improvement in study outcomes or survival with irbesartan as compared to placebo test.*

Bristol Myers annual sales of Avapro: $1.3 billion.

Will ipilimumab be a life-saving drug for metastasized melanoma patients? Or, will it be a cash cow for Bristol Myers that buys some end-of-life time for Medicare patients? Is it yet another tap into the public health care coffers for big pharma?

The early bet appears to be marketing winning out over science. This hype around this drug, the purchase of Medivex by Bristol Myers, and the clinical trial that doesn’t seem to offer much hope beyond four month for people with a death sentence … all smells like another Pharma con game.

I hope I am wrong.
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* Massie BM, Carson PE, McMurray JJ, Komajda M, McKelvie R, Zile MR, Anderson S, Donovan M, Iverson E, Staiger C, Ptaszynska A (December 2008). “Irbesartan in patients with heart failure and preserved ejection fraction”. N. Engl. J. Med. 359 (23): 2456–67. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa0805450. PMID 19001508.

Fudds

A quick tour of the blogs this morning left a bad taste in my mouth. Some Democrats are pulling out the demon rum card due to some booze-related problems with Republican office holders. That’s politics – it’s a cage fight where one must use whatever weapon that lands in the cage. Do those who are doing this understand their own behavior? I sincerely hope so. Carrie Nation was not a wholesome person.

What caught by eye were comments by Rusty Shackleford and the anonymous entity calling itself “Pogo Possum”, to wit:

PP: Progressives love to rail against any Republican who they deem to cross the line when alcohol is involved. But one of their own steps out of line, regardless of the severity, and they are indignant that anyone would pass moral judgment on one of their own. … If Bryce Bennett and Pam Walzer had been Republicans, the liberals in this blog would have been screaming for their heads.

RS: Progressives trying to control others/telling others how they should live their lives, ya gotta love it!

There it is. Do you see it? The post they are railing on was written by a Democrat. Yet they are lumping Democrats, progressives, and liberals all together. It’s distressing that they don’t know the difference, even more so that I don’t.

But I will give it a shot.

Democrat: A member of the other corporate party. We are only allowed two. Democrats espouse and detest populism and democracy all at once. Basically, they have no governing philosophy.

Liberal: There is some inherited philosophy present this group, but mostly they have long-since detached from philosophical groundings. They are not Keynesian – and yet they are (just like Republicans). They are not pacifists, nor welfare statists, nor populists. However, as used in American parlance, a “liberal” is a welfare statist, a fuzzy do-gooder, an incoherent rambler that cannot grasp the importance of strength and militarism and paternal discipline. It’s confusing to be and not be all at once. But that is the question.

Check out, however, those in politics who might actually identify with the term. Liberals started the Vietnam War, for instance, and Bill Clinton was anything but incoherent, fuzzy, or a do-gooder. Self-identified liberals fit in very nicely with our corporate-run culture in that they can seamlessly merge what appears to be common-man ideology with corporate solutions to problems. Hence, liberals give us health care “reform”, that protects the health insurance industry, and parade it as a progress.

So perhaps it is better simply to call liberals “Democratic corporatists.” Better yet, a liberal is a “clever corporatist”, or a “dishonest Republican”. After all, many liberals, like Max Baucus, Michael Bennet, Ken Salazar and Diane Feinstein could easily be “conservative” or “Republicans”, since those terms are also so muddled as to be meaningless.

This leaves Progressives: It’s kind of a catch-all for anything left over. Pwoggies don’t want to be Democrats, as it is so vapid a state as to be insulting. They don’t want to be “liberal” as they cannot identify with the behavior of those who self-identify as such.

So they go back in history to a time when “populism” was at the fore, and “progressives” fought for change in the wake of the abuses brought about by the huge concentrations of wealth spawned by industrialism. Progressives sought to break up monopolies, institute an income tax, direct-elect senators, and get us into foreign wars and rule us by sophisticated and of subtle persuasion, trickery and imagery ….

Hold it! What’s that about foreign wars, tricks and images? Sad, but true. George Creel, Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays were all self-identified “progressives.” They also gave us American entry into World War One, the idea of “manufactured” consent, and public relations as a substitute for political discourse. In that sense, we are still in the Progressive Era.

Why the trouble with labels? It is like struggling to get out of a straight jacket under water. The jacket is the two-party system that melds all competing philosophies into mere a mere publicity contest between two corporate factions. It is underwater because it is really hard to breathe free in the two-party system.

In the end, words mean nothing and everything. “Conservatism” is long dead, “liberalism” is a mushy bowl, and “progressive” is an ever-so-meek way of saying “fuck you” to Democrats.

So my suggestion for a new label for those of us who yearn for a means by which popular and justifiable yearnings, such as public health care and education and anti-militarism, can coalesce and have a meaningful presence in the public mind … we should call ourselves something else.

My suggestion is the “Fuck the Democrats” Party. Maybe a little blunt, but it does drive home the point that Democrats are the barrier to liberal progress. Anyone got something better?
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Eureka!!! We can be the “Fudds”, meaning what I said above, but printable.

When perceptions cannot be managed …

Little of what is in the news is real news. Most of it are staged events and stage management of actual events. Those who present us with news on TV and in newspapers have many options before them, and decide to focus on some events and ignore the vast majority. That has to be, as media is small and the world is big.

But there are real events that cannot be ignored. There are people in business and government whose job is to monitor real events, and to the degree possible, manage perceptions of those events. When perceptions cannot be managed, they go into “damage control” mode, and if they cannot control damage, the event is said to be “out of hand.”

Out-of-hand events have the power to change public perceptions. With the oil spill in the Gulf, damage control has been, at best, only marginally effective. The Obama people are in the pocket of the oil industry, just as the Bush people before them. Consequently, they are mere spectators. Yet they must appear to be in charge. That calls for on-scene photos, staged confrontations, angry press conferences with oily sand as a backdrop. A staged hug with a fisherman’s wife would be good, as would a little girl and an oily turtle. Little girls really work well.

The best that they have done to date is this:

Obama finds cigarette butt

Is that the best they can do? Together with the occasional press report that Obama is “outraged!” his people appear to be rank amateurs.

This could be his Katrina – a PR nightmare. The underlying event is a large national catastrophe, but all of that aside, he has to appear tough and in charge. Fortunately for him, he was not off celebrating someone’s birthday. Still, his people have failed him miserably.

Maybe it is time for a staged distraction event. When 400 marines were killed in Lebanon, Reagan’s people invaded Granada. But the Gulf spill is so big that only a war or new terrorist attack could divert attention. But those things take time – that is, the Pentagon is always ready to go to war anywhere, but the public has to be prepped, and summer is the worst time to launch an advertising campaign.

It’s a perfect storm for Obama – a large and photo-friendly event that cannot be contained … in summer. This is his moment. Either he appears to take charge, or he appears not to be in charge. The cameras wait.

The oil industry in an ongoing development program of deep-water drilling off our coasts. The activity has been mostly unregulated. It was officially sanctioned by the Bush people, and later the Obama people carried on as if the election had changed nothing. Obama himself spread the illusion that he opposed such activity during the campaign, but that was just for perception sake.

That program will be set back a few years. That’s the worst that will happen to the oil industry. British Petroleum’s financial liabilities are limited by law. So is just a matter of riding out the storm before they go back to business as usual.

For the Obama Administration? They might be wishing for a terrorist attack. They are pretty much tapped out on wars at this time.

More adventures in marketing …

I must offer an apology to the lowly minimum wage clerk I encountered last week at the Häagen-Dazs shop at Pearl Street Mall.

For those who do not know Boulder, Colorado, Pearl Street is a magical place. It used to be just a street, but cars are no longer allowed. It is a mall. I have experienced magic when we go there. We park our car on Walnut Street, which is regular pavement, and then walk a block to Pearl. The color of the pavement changes from gray to a pinkish hue, and bricks replace asphalt. I lift my foot from pavement to brick and back, and chant “prices go up, prices go down.”

It works. It is magic.

Anyway, I was looking for something sweet, actually wasting a little time before heading off to endure the grandparently torture of a baseball game among eight-year-old boys. (The best pitchers get hit hardest, as they actually land the ball in the vicinity of the plate.) I found myself on Pearl Street Mall. The Häagen-Dazs store beckoned, and I entered. Right away I was offered a taste of the new almond something-or-other flavor ice cream. It was OK, and the array of flavors was confusing, so I said just give me a little cup of that to go.

And I got a little three ounce up and headed to the register, and the clerk said $5.40 please, and I blurted out “Holy shit!” It just came out, and I was embarrassed, but added “I won’t be darkening these doors again.”

Which is true. But I must apologize to the poor clerk at the Häagen-Dazs store whose job it is to announce to customers that they’ve been seduced by forty-cent ice cream in a $5.00 cup. I imagine that goes on all day, though others probably have an expanded vocabularies and can put it better than me. But she did not flinch as the “holy shit!” left my lips, and I suspect under the veneer she learned to put forward in her two-day training seminar she thought to herself “Got that right.”

Adventures in Marketing …

On a quest for a salty snack the other day, I came across some “Kettle-cooked hand-rubbed spice chips” by Lays. Since I know that anything mass produced will neither be kettle-cooked nor hand-rubbed, I knew that the only true word on the label was “chips.”

In 1981, a bartender bet a customer that he could change the behavior of everyone in the bar by putting a lime in his beer. He won the bet. To this day, thirty years later, people assume that Corona beer is meant to be imbibed with a lime by some ancient tradition or Hispanic ritual. In my experience, Corona without the lime is pretty bad. It’s just a good marketing strategy to move a bad product off them shelves.

I have long been fascinated by how our attitudes and ideas are influenced by marketing. Some time in my twenties, I stopped using deodorant. I don’t smell bad, no one has ever complained. I simply came to realize that the people who made deodorant were selling a false sense of security. And it seemed unnatural to clog up my pores with aluminum chlorohydrate.

As a runner, I often had problems with athlete’s foot and, ahem, fungus in other areas. I spent a lot of money over time on creams, but if I stopped using them, the fungus immediately returned. A kindly doctor gave me the remedy – a hair dryer applied to infected areas daily after showering. It’s free, and effective.

The point is that we have so much that we have to be cajoled and seduced into buying things we don’t need. We have long conquered hunger. We have machines to do most everything except those lowly tasks that we have exported to slave labor in places like China, the Philippines and Vietnam. We produce far more stuff than we need. The marketing dynamics involved in luring us to pay $50 for a branded shirt that can be had for a couple of bucks at the dollar store are intense, imbued in us as youngsters and carried through life.

I get all of that. We’re churning the pot, trying to redirect our hard-earned cash into corporates coffers. We’re consumers, not citizens. Our labor is for one purpose: To buy stuff. So the question I ask is redundant: Why don’t we just relax? We would do just as well working half as hard, and devoting the rest of our time to better pursuits, like reading and volunteer activity, exercise and just hanging out.

We can’t, however. We don’t get to keep the fruits of our labor. Worse than that, we bargain away future labor to 26.99% credit card interest to satisfy immediate impulses. I am so ashamed of us. We allow bankers to elbow their way into our paychecks now and for years to come so that we can have a new shirt, computer, shoes, all incredibly overpriced.

The people who work hardest are our convenience store clerks and gardeners, retail clerks and janitors. We hate our illegals, but do not like paying decent wages. Conservatives love to complain about the leaching class, not knowing that it is much further up the production line than they imagine.

The ultimate expression of the power of that elite leaching class is the slave – these days he is the factory worker who barely subsists on long tortuous hours. Vacation? Benefits? Get real. Slavery by any other name is still slavery, and the people who make our shoes and shirts, computers and baseballs are that – our slaves.

Slavery is the natural byproduct of unregulated markets. But this is 2010, and not 1860. We keep our slaves hidden from view. And call them employees or workers and talk about things like rungs on ladders and stuff. That’s nonsense, but seems to salve our consciences as we go about the business of consuming.

Why only two parties?

In the United States we are locked in to two political parties, and the way we talk about it, one might think that it was ‘designed’ that way. But there is no designer. Our parties – the right wing one and the weak opposing party – are all that we have left after meaningful opposition to corporate power is drowned out, demonized and marginalized.

Most other ‘democratic’ countries (the term only loosely applies to us) have developed at least three powerful factions, sometimes more, and governance is a matter of negotiation where minority parties have a voice because they are often needed to form majorities. If we had a public media and if more voices were allowed to penetrate public consciousness, something similar would happen here.

I imagine that our disaffected non-voters, our progressives and trade unionists would form a powerful coalition resembling the British Labor Party. (A third minority faction would also form, and what we call “Democrats,” stripped of progressives and labor, would be our equivalent of the British Liberal party.)

So we are left to Democrats and Republicans because of opinion management, but it is corporate media that “manages” our ideas. They decide which candidates are “viable,” ignoring any who might threaten entrenched power. They are the image makers, the ones who decide which ideas have traction. They own our TV’s, and TV acts as a gatekeeper for power.

Health care, for instance, was on the public mind for decades, but was only allowed into the political sphere in 2008, and was then used to protect and enhance the power of the health insurance companies. Why then? Why not 2004 or 1956 or 1974? If we had a third party, we would have a public health care system.

Interesting indeed, as those progressives and trade unionists and disaffected voters were fighting for single payer, and then for a public option, but they never seemed to get a voice – they were demonized and marginalized and never got tracked. We got a corporate solution to health care. Weird, eh?

It’s not that we only have two parties. We have at least three. We only recognize two. When there is a movement from the grassroots to get that third party moving, the Democrats step in and work to stop it. Republicans are, oddly, comfortable with third parties. Democrats, on the other hand, have hissy fits and vomit blood at the thought of a Nader stealing their votes.

In the end, as in 2008, the Democrats absorb anything left of them, and render it moot. Democrats crushed single payer. Democrats give us Clinton and then Obama, and all of the right wing accomplishments of the administrations before Democrats are frozen in place. Assisted by corporate media, Democrats prevent the boomerang effect. They seal Republican victories, and act as caretakers until the next Republican Administration takes power.

They also prevent the ascendancy of our Labor Party.

So if at times it appears that I argue from consequence – that I imagine that our system was designed to be as it is – I do not. I merely assert that it is as it is because power does not allow it to be anything else. It is, in the end, all that is left after popular movements are removed from politics.

Settle your tax debt for pennies on the dollar!

As a tax guy I sometimes encounter people on the edges of civilization who want to rejoin us. They are deeply in tax debt. They hide away as the debt builds up. Tax debt is almost as bad as credit card interest, but unlike the credit card companies, the government does offer a way out. It’s called “offer in compromise,” or “OIC.”

I’ve done a few of those, but I don’t seek them out. The process is long and hard, and if the taxpayers are young and have income potential, the IRS OIC people will indeed behave like credit card companies. They can be assholes, and will lock them into installment arrangements where interest and penalties continue to accrue while payments just barely eat away at the underlying burden. They are better off in the underground economy.

On the edges of this fray are sociopaths, the predators who dominate our society. These are the people who slap us around with their invisible hands. These are the “entrepreneurs” that right wing economists deeply admire. If you listen to talk radio at all, you will hear ads for companies that will settle your tax debt for “pennies on the dollar.” IRS warns people to stay away from these Shylocks, but when people are scared and overwhelmed, the promises have far more appeal than common sense should allow.

Imagine that you are walking in the woods, enjoying the smells and plants and solitude, and then suddenly you realize you are being watched, and see a set of cold eyes. The hair on your neck stands up, a shiver goes up your spine, and fight or flight sets in. You have been stalked, and are in grave danger. You may soon die.

These predators are many of our “entrepreneurs”. They are not inventors or innovators, basement scientists or garage mechanics. They are sociopaths – people without consciences, people whose only joy in life is the hunt. They stalk us. Their greatest joy, maybe their only joy, is fresh kill.

In the business world they are legion. We admire the hell out of them. Donald Trump is an icon who even pitches his cold-bloodedness on a TV show where he delights in firing people. We’re supposed to admire the coldness, the brutality of that world. But we’re not like that, 96% of us. We like to read about Trump (and Ted Bundy), but we don’t want to be them.

With tax outlaws who want to rejoin society, the predators came up with the “pennies on the dollar” radio pitch. They urge people in tax debt to call them. What they really want is $5,000. They promise nothing. Usually, when they are done, the poor schmuck who answered the ad is 1) still in tax debt, and 2) $5,000 deeper in other debt.

Because I knew someone in Montana who knew someone in a small Colorado town who knew someone who had not filed a tax return in four years, I am dealing now with an OIC client. We have filed all his returns, and attempted to isolate all of his tax debt in his corporation to give him the “fold-the-tent” option, leaving his family free and clear. It’s taken many hours, many long phone conversations. But we are nearly there.

Public liens have been filed against his corporation, and predators watch these filings closely, looking for prey. He started getting the phone calls. The sales pitches start, and they seek to undermine me, telling him that I am going about it all wrong and that they have the key to his salvation, the end to his worries and early-morning awakenings.

All they want is $5,000 on the OIC end, and another $10,000 in legal fees. They want it up front. They want him to sell assets or borrow on a credit card or get a loan from a family member – figure out some way to pay them.

I have warned him to stay away from these people, that they only want that one-time cash hit, and will in fact only make his problems worse.

He’s gone into hiding now. I am afraid he is going to swallow the hook and will soon be fresh kill. The only thing that might save him is that he might not be able to get that up-front money. That’s my hope.

I’m not a saint. I do bad things, but unlike sociopaths, I feel bad when I do bad things. I work for money. Like the guy who fixes my car or the one who just fixed our front doorway, I take pride in offering value for pay. We are not geniuses, none of us who do these things, accounting and mechanics and carpentry. We just learned to specialize as a means of paying our way.

But I get frustrated with it all at the same time. It is outrageous that H&R Block charges $160 for a 1040EZ. It is outrageous that people have to pay $20 to “e-file”a return, as IRS ought to make this free and accessible to everyone. It is outrageous that IRS does not offer a means by which ordinary people can approach them have have their tax returns prepared for them … at “taxpayer” expense. The whole notion that professional tax advice and service is roped off and reserved for private sector business models is perverse.

And it is outrageous that IRS does not remove the predators from the OIC process. They ought to draw people in by offering free help to get them caught up, waiving penalties and forgiving tax when it is apparent that, no matter the human failing involved, the tax will simply overwhelm the taxpayer.

Enough. Prey become dinner when they are not cautious, and have no one to blame. But I refuse to buy into the meme that predators are serving some useful purpose in interdependent human society. They only prosper because they pretend to be like regular people – they mimic us. But they are not like regular people, and a society that glorifies them is a sick society.

We are a sick society. We are unique that way. We breed sociopaths with our Atlas Shrugged mentality. I was not surprised to learn that 4% of us are like that. But I was surprised to learn that it is not so in other countries – usually less than 1%.

We are a unique country.