Another way to achieve your goal is to create a legitimate business that so insinuates itself into people’s lives that they feel they can’t live without it, and then charge them enough to buy deregulation for yourself, so you can basically get away with murder, price-fixing, repossession of property, and slave-like labor practices. This would be the health and insurance, telecom, mortgage, and mobile device industries, respectively. The health and insurance industries get a special Goodfellas bonus for somehow maintaining their reputations as wonderful, life-saving services, in spite of the fact that the latter drives you to bankruptcy by weaseling out of paying when you most need them, and the former is often everything BUT healthy. As Walter Cronkite observed decades ago, “America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.”

But if you REALLY want to carve out your name in history as a master criminal – and never spend a single day in jail – you need to do BOTH of the above, by going  into banking or economics. Banking is the field for you if you like shopping for $87,000 rugs while your company is going under, or if you enjoy contriving elaborate schemes to strip the average working stiff of his self-esteem and home while telling him he can’t live without what you have, even though it was never yours to begin with. Economics, on the other hand, is a great field if you admire the basic methodology of the TV weatherperson, palm reader, or astrologer, but prefer hanging out with politicians and bankers.

The scary thing about all this apparent hyperbole is that it really isn’t hyperbole at all. Since 2008, we’ve witnessed the most massive financial crimes in history, seen very little in the way of punishment, and in fact seen the very perpetrators of the crimes elevated to the highest levels of government. Often in the very agency that is intended to regulate the industry in question. Even scarier is that these people are either blithering idiots who have no idea whatsoever how markets work, or they made this all happen on purpose.

If you’re a student of economics, there’s no hope of persuading you to think differently than you already do, because you’re almost certainly already indoctrinated into one of the two main schools. If you’re a Keynesian, you’re probably smugly saying “I told you so” and selling lots of books. If you’re a neo-classicist, maybe you’re still running around gazing at the world with 20/20 hindsight, constructing logical fallacies to explain the catastrophes after the fact. Or maybe there’s another secret frat house within the neo-classical school. Maybe this whole global economic shift is intentional. Maybe it’s just a variation of the kind of scorched earth policy suggested by the Starve the Beast strategy. We will never know, since so many things are either veiled in secrecy, or buried in the mind-numbing avalanche of data.

At the end of the day, there’s not much middle ground. Those responsible for guiding the markets over the past few decades were either dead wrong about their theories (operating sort of  like a Shaman doing a raindance while it’s raining), or they were intentionally engineering a world-changing shift in how governments work in relation to banking and finance. How could it be anywhere in between? Take the arrogant, floppy eared, squinty-eyed Ayn Rand sycophant Alan Greenspan. Wrong at almost every turn in his career, but rooms would fall silent when he spoke, eagerly awaiting his pronouncement about the new prime lending rate. Or his banal twaddle about irrational exuberance or whatever. At least he finally admitted to 30% of his ignorance. And more recently, two of the people who – if they really knew what they were doing – were best positioned to see catastrophe coming and failed to do so. And to fix the problems they failed to see coming, resorted to the exact opposite of what their own theories would recommend. They used the Invisible Hand as a big bitch slap to the world in general, basically telling us that if the government didn’t pay for the mess, the world would end. And then these guys not only kept their jobs, they either got bonuses or government appointments to boot.

The question of criminality is not a matter of opinion; in the aftermath of the financial crises of the last several years, the SEC has filed hundreds of actions. Over 700 in fiscal year 2011 alone. The scale of misdeeds by the financial services industry is literally mind-boggling. Even trying to list the most egregious here would be absurd; information in quantities like this literally requires databasing.

The most disturbing thing of all though is that little is likely to ever be done; no significant players have gone to jail, and when cases ARE successfully prosecuted, the banks pay fines in the millions against offenses in the billions. It becomes merely the “cost of doing business”. And you and I don’t seem to care, we still stick our hard-earned money in the same bank that we bailed out while we argue about Mitt Romney’s dog transport methods and Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

And any seemingly organized civil reaction has turned out to be a joke. While the Tea Party is far from the band of PBR-swilling yahoos that most smartypants liberals like to frame them as, they have largely either (quite successfully and intelligently) folded themselves into the conventional political process, or on the fringes, are obsessed with looney ideas about sovereign citizenship and other misinterpretations of constitutional law. And the Occupy Movement? NICE JOB. Call yourselves “Occupy Wall Street”, get the world’s attention, and then spend the next six months arguing about everything BUT Wall Street. Christ, even HIPPIES were more effective in fomenting social change.

So while we will probably continue to see these quiet wrist slaps by the SEC, most bankers can sleep well tonight in their five hundred dollar jammies, because the Department of Justice isn’t going to actually put anyone in jail. Why? It’s too hard, they say. These cats are just Too Big to Jail.

Wow. Just when I had stopped worrying about how the collapse of Ireland’s economy might trigger the broader collapse of the global economy (it turns out Ireland’s economy isn’t dead, it’s just resting ), now I have to worry about the collapse of India’s economy. After watching America’s banking system get gutted by smart rich guys loaning tons of money to people to buy houses they couldn’t afford, SOMEONE should have noticed the potential for the same to happen with the massive microcredit industry in India. The parallels are actually rather remarkable, except the consequences are much more dramatic. This Globe And Mail piece politely refers to how the poorly-regulated microloan industry in India has resorted to “usurious interest rates and coercive means” to operate. Meaning they’ve apparently been operating much like the local loan sharks everyone was happy to see them replace. This has led to suicides by microcredit-bankrupted individuals who are now being urged by Indian legislators to “strategically default”. Which then gives the banks a fright, because they’re exposed to the tune of $4 billion on all of this lending. The tragic thing on the human end of this scenario? The worst of these overextended borrowers who are choosing suicide as a solution may only owe as little as $2,000. Too bad the Gates Foundation and others didn’t speak up sooner about how the microcredit model was so flawed. For a refresher on how this sort of crisis can play out, see the graphic below.

For the full story, see The Subprime Primer.

Yesterday a friend asked me if I voted last week. I calmly said “nope”, to find myself on the receiving end of a laser-like liberal glare that screamed “how could you abandon us at this crucial juncture in history?“, but then out loud they said “Why the f— NOT? Are you RETARDED or something???” I then reminded my liberal friend that it’s not nice to say “retarded”, and went on to explain that my decision not to vote was part of my plan to accelerate my collapsitarian vision for a shiny new apocalypse. You see, what liberal, conservative, and especially that other bunch of voters seemed not to notice last week was the fact that Ben Bernanke had instructed Washington to print a bunch of money in a quantitative easing effort. For those of you not familiar with sophisticated economic terminology, 1 bunch=$600,000,000, and according to many, quantitative easing = bank bailout. To me the best part of this all is that since everyone’s calling it “QE2″, we no longer have to resort to that hackneyed “polishing the brass on the Titanic” line. The QE2, as you may recall, was the last of the great steam-powered luxury liners, whose only satisfied customers were probably the British soldiers that she ferried to the Falkland War. The debate will rage about this economic strategy until the results manifest themselves, but for one of the more balanced views of what’s going on (even if you do think he’s full of shibboleth) Paul Krugman sums things up here. And there’s one likely side effect of this cash injection that I find hilarious: in spite of the fact that if teabaggers had any idea what’s going on in the real world, they would be in a psychotic rage about the government printing a bunch of money at a time like this. But in their inexplicable ignorance, they’ll support it with every bone in their little heads, because clearly, if the rest of the world thinks an idea is stupid, it must be the patriotic thing to do. By the way, if you want to print your own money at will just like Ben, HowStuffWorks has excellent step-by-step instructions.

When I’m in a hospital room, I usually have a
hard time telling which way the blood is flowing.

I feel sorry for Barack Obama. Not only will history likely blame him for the long tail of the bank failures and bailouts for which the Bush administration was actually responsible, it will also likely blame him (because of the passage of the health care bill that has divided the country recently) for the continued malignancy that is our decrepit, bloated, and corrupt “health care system”. I put that phrase in quotes because I believe that – as the late Walter Cronkite once said – “America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system“. While a bunch of Democratic congressmen who have nothing to worry about regarding their health care plans sit around patting themselves on the back for passing a health care bill that has supposedly been the dream of generations of Democratic politicians, the fact is that things won’t change for many, and we’ll still be left saddled with the most expensive and least effective health care in the developed world. The bill does NOTHING to fix what any intelligent person sees as the fundamental problem; it might in fact worsen it. Whether you describe the problem as being a result of government meddling and insurance, or as patient overuse of treatment because insurance will pay for it, or as a result of doctors requiring malpractice insurance, you will notice the word “insurance” keeps popping up. The fact is that the mind-boggling arrangements for billing and payment that exist today would be IMPOSSIBLE without the insurance industry supporting its piece of what really is an incredibly elaborate and blatant ponzi scheme being pulled off by an industry and a profession that operates under the ultimate smokescreen: an illusion of benevolence which implies that they are only here to help you, and perhaps save your very life. And what price can be put on that, right? Well, when you can float enough paper, a pretty high one, apparently. How about seven bags of saline solution for $1,757? Or $12 for a “mucus recovery system”, i.e., a box of tissues that retails for about two dollars? Or $57 for a “fog elimination device”, which is a 2×2 piece of gauze used to wipe down surgical equipment? This kind of billing is so rampant that there is another industry that feeds off the system; “medical billing advocates”. These are companies that will take your insane hospital bill, itemize and contest the bloat that typically contributes to a significant portion of the total, and then bill you for the service of correcting the amount with the health care provider. The entire health system is rife with over-billing, whether because of intentional fraud or the errors inherent in the complexity of how the billing is distributed amongst insurance providers, which all negotiate different deals. Apparently 8 out of 10 hospital statements contain multiple mistakes, overcharging consumers an estimated $10 billion a year. With a system built entirely on such a foundation, how could I possibly care if I have insurance? Someone will pay for it. Maybe me, maybe the government, or – if I receive care as shoddy as what I’ve seen family and friends receive over the past few years – maybe a lawsuit. Below is a quick list of some of the more absurd charges found in routine hospital billing. Have any stories of your own you’d care to share?

$90 charged for a 70¢ I.V.
$129 for a “mucous recovery system”, i.e.: a box of Kleenex
$251 for a bag of saline
$57 for a “fog elimination device”, i.e.: a 2×2 piece of gauze used to wipe down surgical equipment
$1,082 for two bags of intravenous electrolytes, each available online for $5
$1,269 for nine doses of the pain medication Demerol, a markup of 14 times above retail

I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been conned in the biggest pigeon drop in history. While it’s nice to see the FBI go after a few greedy billionaires for insider trading, I’m tired of wealthy capitalist guys in suits that cost more than my housing for a year first telling us that we need a socialist banking system, then that they need 23 trillion of our imaginary future tax dollars to save capitalism, then that it’s none of our business where the money goes, even when we sue and win to find out, then that in spite of the fact that they deceived us at the outset that these same rich banker capitalist guys will be happy to loan the government banks money  to save them. Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this picture? In a similar era in US history, Franklin D. Roosevelt said “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics“. This idea is highlighted by the points made in the NYT piece Bailout Helps Fuel a New Era of Wall Street Wealth, in which they quote Gary Richardson, a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research as saying (in reference to the banks that have been bailed out): “we have just shown them that they can have the most frightening things happen to them, and we will throw trillions of dollars to protect them. I have big concerns about that.” So do I. How about you?

Viagra

A friend of mine (who happens to be black) made the joke years ago that “you can bet it weren’t no black man invented viagra“. Probably true; I always picture some lonely balding white man with a PhD in pharmacology who had never even gotten to put his “manhood” to its intended use, and was rapidly entering the age where he might never be able to. The multiple levels of irony and tragedy here are overwhelming – youth is wasted on the young, wealth is wasted on the bald and aging, etc. – but the bottom line is, how, as a man, do you pitch a product that’s intended to give you an erection to a bunch of other men? I can imagine a few awkward moments with the pitch, like “Well, it’s not something I’d use, of course” or “And you see, that’s why we want a bunch of balding old men running around with erections, and Viagra will get the job done.”

The Handkerchief

“I’ve gathered you all together today to tell you about a great (ah-choo!) new product idea”. The presenter, who has a glob of mucous hanging from his nose, reaches into his pocket and pulls out a square of high-quality silk. “This, gentleman, is the ‘HANDKERCHIEF’. Never again will we be forced to wipe the disgusting fruits of our proboscises”, he proclaims, as the mucous jiggles at the end of his nose, “on our expensively tailored French Cuffs. No, my friends, this finest-quality silk is attractive, gentle on the nose, and best of all”, he continues, as he blows the glob of mucous laboriously into the kerchief, vigorously wiping nose and nostrils, “it fits right in your pocket!”

Skydiving

Okay, so mankind spends thousands of years marvelling at other creatures’ ability to soar through the air, and eventually a hundred years discovering and perfecting a method of transporting himself aloft safely. Imagine pitching this one to a bunch of martini-swilling, business-class-addicted, acrophobic executives. “So you see, you get in the airplane, fly to a dizzying and lethal height, and then you….jump out“. This has to rate right up there with bungee jumping and Russian Roulette. As in so many cases, this wasn’t all that original an idea, by the way. Da Vinci thought of it before there was even a plane to jump out of (see image).

Banks, Credit Cards & Mortgages

This one is actually sheer genius. I mean, you and I fall for it on a daily basis; it’s called CAPITALISM. But imagine pitching the idea before we all got suckered in: “Here’s how it works, gentleman. We take a bunch of little pieces of paper, and say to our customers ‘Here’s a piece of paper that’s worth ten million dollars. I’ll loan it to you, so you can buy a house with it. But I get to keep the piece of paper. If you don’t work your ass off and pay me back with other pieces of paper so that I can collect ALL THE IMAGINARY MONEY IN THE WORLD, we’ll just stop by and repossess your VERY REAL HOUSE’. And then, get this, my friends…we’ll charge them a percentage just to let them owe us!”

I want you to just walk through that again and think about it.

Coming in Part II:

Web TV, Cigarettes, Bottled Water, Condoms, and more!