Our Institutions Are Failing

Our institutional failure reminds me of the phantom legions of Rome's final days.

The mainstream media and its well-paid army of "authorities" / pundits would have us believe the decline in our collective trust in our institutions is the result of fake news, i.e. false narratives and data presented as factual.

If only we could rid ourselves of fake news, all would be well, as our institutions are working just fine.

This mainstream narrative is itself false: our institutions are failing, and the cause isn't fake news or Russian hacking--the cause is insider plundering and collusion, aided and abetted by a decline in transparency and accountability and the institutionalization of incompetence.

In other words, the citizenry's trust in institutions is declining because the failure of institutions is undeniably the fabric of everyday life in America.

When was the last time you heard the top management of a university system take responsibility for the unprecedented rise in the cost of tuition and textbooks? The short answer is "never." The insiders benefiting from the higher-education cartel's relentless exploitation of students and their families act as if the soaring costs are akin to cosmic radiation, a force of nature that they are powerless to control.

The same can be said of every other cartel plundering the nation: healthcare (i.e. sickcare, because profits swell from managing chronic illness, not from advancing health); the Big Pharma cartel; the military-industrial complex; banking; student loans; the governance-lobbying cartels; the war-on-drugs gulag, the FBI and so on in an endless profusion of insiders whose self-serving plunder and gross incompetence rarely generates consequences (such as being fired or indicted) due to an absence of accountability and transparency.

Incompetence has been institutionalized, and is now the accepted norm.Schools fail, municipal agencies fail, oversight agencies fail, state agencies fail, and the public feels powerless to effect any systemic change.

Changing the elected officials who are the citizens' representatives does nothing to rid the system of incompetence or enforce accountability and transparency; the insider elites have wired the system to avoid responsibility and maintain their institutionalized skims regardless of who is in elected office.

Budgets never decline, they only expand. The system is organized to punish frugality and reward incompetence, sweetheart contracts, overtime, and ever higher public spending.

Calls to trim waste are met by gestures of powerlessness: rising costs and institutional failure are presented as the equivalent of gravity: we can't change the system, it's unstoppable.

The general public has largely lost the experience of public-sector/institutional competence and accountability. As a result, resignation is now the response. So the public dutifully waits in line for hours to renew a drivers license, despite having made an appointment online, to take one common example in California, which likes to pat itself on the back as the tech / progressive capital of the galaxy, if not the universe.

How is it "progressive" to rob the working stiffs who pay all the taxes hours of their life for something that should be routine and quick? Where's the Big Data and high tech when it actually counts? If citizens had a choice to renew their drivers license at (say) Amazon or the DMV, do you reckon Amazon might not make everyone cool their heels for hours?

The list of gross institutional incompetence is truly endless in America:Universities that can't offer enough classes so students can graduate from college in four years (oops, you have to pay another rip-off tuition fee for another semester to get those last few classes you need for your worthless diploma); finance departments that can't track payments (so here's your bogus late fees that will take hours to challenge), and on and on.

As for sickcare--how about the evidence-free embrace of synthetic heroin as a "safe" and "non-addictive" pain treatment? Skeptics were bulldozed or marginalized, because there was simply too much money to be made by jumping on the Oxy et al. bandwagon.

As Scientific American reported in its June 2018 issue, "Powerful drug-marketing efforts had somehow swamped science." When a large study was finally done comparing the effectiveness of opioid and non-opioid drugs, "The results, published in March, were eye-opening. Patients given alternative drugs did just as well as those taking opioids in terms of how much pain interfered with their everyday life. In fact they reported slightly less pain and had fewer side effects."

Yes, many transactions are more complex now than they were 30 years ago.30 years ago it took less than a day to obtain a building permit for an entire house in the rural county I lived in. Now it takes 3 to 4 months in the same county to get a permit, which must now be stamped by a licensed architect or engineer (at great expense, of course).

OK, we get it-- things are more complex now. But how does a one-day process balloon into a 100-day process at best? We can understand a one-day process becoming a 3 day process, but did the complexity really rise 100-fold?

I think we all know the answer is "no." The vast majority of the wasted time, effort and cost is the result of unaccountable insider incompetence enabled by a complete lack of accountability and transparency.

Conscientious public servants and institutional insiders are thwarted by incompetent managers, lazy co-workers and institutional bloat designed to increase costs and inefficiencies because higher budgets and inefficiencies boost payrolls and thus power. Organizations within the failing institutions are loathe to surrender their gravy trains, so they resist any change, even those which might have saved the institution from its inevitable collapse.

Our institutional failure reminds me of the phantom legions of Rome's final days. Legions existed in the bureaucracy, and payrolls were sent to the pay masters, but the Legions were mere fictions--there were no soldiers, and no fighting force; there were only a few insiders skimming their take, confident that accountability and transparency had been irrevocably lost.

Systems fail one institution at a time. No wonder the super-wealthy are building bunkers.


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Big Pharma and the Rise of Gangster Capitalism

$8 per vial in competing developed-world nations and $38,892 in the U.S. That says it all.

Thanks to decades of gangster films, we all know how gangster capitalism works: the cost of "protection" goes up whenever the gangster wants to increase revenues, any competition is snuffed out, and "customer demand" is jacked up by any means available-- addiction, for example.

This perfectly describes the pharmaceutical industry and every other cartel in America. You might have read about the price increase in Acthar gel, a medication to treat Infantile Spasms. (via J.F., M.D., who alerted me to the repricing of this medication from $40 in 2001 to the current price of $38,892.)

The compound first received approval in 1950, and various branded versions have been approved in recent years. Let's be clear: this medication did not require billions of dollars in research and development, or decades of testing to obtain FDA approval; it's been approved for use for the past 68 years.

Yes, you read that correctly: a medication that's been in use for 68 years went from $40 a dose in 2001 to $38,892 today. Don't you love the pricing? Not a round 38 grand, but $38,892. You gotta love these gangsters!

There's another related term to describe this form of capitalism: racketeering.That's what mobsters do--operate rackets.

The Big Pharma racket enriches a number of gangs practicing gangster capitalism: the drug companies themselves, of course, but some doctors are profiting from the racket, and so are pharmaceutical lobbyists:

Study highlights role of doctor conflicts of interest in Medicare spending on Mallinckrodt drug Acthar Study published in JAMA indicates nearly 90 percent of doctors prescribing HP Acthar Gel took payments from drug's manufacturer.

Here are the money quotes:

In 2014 Mallinckrodt raised the price of Acthar further to $34,000. The Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general from five states sued Mallinckrodt for anti-competitive behavior with regard to the acquisition of Synacthen Depot and the monopolistic pricing of Acthar, and in January 2017 the company settled, agreeing to pay $100 million and to license Synacthen Depot to a competitor. According to Kaiser Health News, Mallinckrodt responded by increasing its Congressional lobbying to $610,000, and its contributions to Congress members to $44,000, in the first quarter of 2017.

As an off-patent pharmaceutical, a similar drug, differing in formulation, available in Europe, made by a different manufacturer, sells for $8 per vial.

So a medication to treat infants costs $8 per vial in Europe and $38,892 in the U.S. Don't you just love gangster capitalism to death? Because death and suffering is the gangsters' ultimate threat: pay up or die.

Here's another example of Big Pharma gangster capitalism at work: Insulin Drug Price Inflation: Racketeering or Perverse Competition?

Don't you wish you had a racket where you could raise prices by 10% a year like clockwork, or triple the price of your "product" every decade?

Pfizer just raised prices on 100 medications:

The increases are effective as of July 1. In most cases, the increases are just over 9%, which is in line with the annual 10% price hikes adopted by most drug companies. Putting that number in context, core inflation printed at 2% last week.

Here's a chart of the net result of gangster capitalism:

Gangster capitalism is the new model of "growth" in America, the model used by every cartel from higher education to Pentagon contractors. Eliminate actual competition, raise prices in lockstep with other cartel members, lobby the government to pay your extortionist prices, and threaten any resisters with severe consequences.

Try resisting your local government's property tax increases to cover insiders' pensions and healthcare benefits: it's always "for the children," of course, and if you don't pay up, we'll just auction off your house.

There's no difference between that and being told you're gonna be wearing concrete overshoes if you don't comply.

The U.S. economy is nothing more than an exploitive jumble of rackets, insider plundering and gangster capitalism. $8 per vial competing developed-world nations and $38,892 in the U.S. That says it all.


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Will AI "Change the World" Or Simply Boost Profits?

The real battle isn't between a cartoonish vision or a dystopian nightmare--it's between decentralized ownership and control of these technologies and centralized ownership and control.

The hype about artificial intelligence (AI) and its cousins Big Data and Machine Learning is ubiquitous, and largely unexamined. AI is going to change the world by freeing humankind from most of its labors, etc. etc. etc.

Let's start by asking: who owns all this AI? This raises two other questions:who benefits as "software eats the world" (to use Marc Andreesen's pithy phrase), and to what purpose is all this technology being applied?

The answers are painfully obvious: large global corporations, many of which function as quasi-monopolies (Facebook, Google et al.), are the owners of these new technologies, and the purpose being pursued is to maximize profits and secure a monopoly that insures high profits into the future.

The hype takes two predictable pathways, one Jetson-cartoonish euphoria and the other dystopian ruin. Self-driving vehicles will change the world in wonderful ways by eliminating the source of accidents: human error.

And that's a nightmarish prospect because what will those millions of people currently driving vehicles do for a living?

Few people ask: who will profit from all this? Obviously, the manufacturers of self-driving vehicles and the owners of services which replace private vehicles.

The real race in AI is to secure profitable franchises and eliminate competitors by scaling up faster than other corporations.

This is why the market cheers Netflix burning billions of dollars every year: if they're burning billions, they must be scaling up faster than competitors, and thus they will be the ultimate "winner" in the race to create and distribute mediocre content globally.

Consider the uses which corporate-owned AI has already been used to maximize profits: Facebook's manipulation of its users' data and content feeds and its selling of their data.

After a brief downturn due to fears of regulation, the market is back in love with Facebook's immense profits, and Facebook's stock is once again at record highs.

AI and Big Data collection is the profitable heart of Surveillance Capitalism, which includes Amazon's gargantuan contracts with the National Security agencies and similar work being performed by many other lower-profile contractors (SAIC, et al.)

Rather than a Jetson-cartoonish world of intelligent robots doing all the work so we can all become poets and watch mediocre films all day long, what AI is doing in the real world is extracting profits from data collected from the populace either to market something more effectively or to control the populace more effectively.

The AI-robotics enthusiasts never seem to actually work in the AI-robotics industries. They are media types who extrapolate extrapolations without asking the key questions:who will own this technology, and to what purpose will it be applied?

We know the answers: global corporations and maximizing profits.

To dismantle just one part of the Jetson-cartoonish worldview of robots and AI becoming essentially free to everyone: fabricating a robot will never be free because robots require large quantities of energy and resources for their manufacture and maintenance. Even if human labor has been completely eliminated, the costs of extracting, refining and transporting resources remain, along with the costs of extracting the energy to do all this work as well as manufacture and assemble all the parts.

Eliminating human labor removes very little of the cost structure.

As for AI software being "free"-- it will be free like the Android operating system and the Apple iOS: free to those developing profitable uses of corporately owned franchises.

In my worldview, AI has one purpose: eliminating bias and privilege. Properly programmed software won't keep track of skin color or other sources of human bias.

The danger is corporately owned software tracks everything that can be used to market or control the populace, and this includes every nuance of bias and privilege.

The real battle isn't between a cartoonish vision or a dystopian nightmare--it's between decentralized ownership and control of these technologies and centralized ownership and control.

The CLIME system (as described in my book A Radically Beneficial World) is in effect a decentralized, distributed AI system that organizes a network of independently, democratically operated community groups that pay members to perform needed work in their communities.

Will AI be harnessed to maximize profits for the wealthy few, or will some thin, decentralized slice of these technologies actually serve unprofitable human needs?

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The USA Is Now a 3rd World Nation

I know it hurts, but the reality is painfully obvious: the USA is now a 3rd World nation.

Dividing the Earth's nations into 1st, 2nd and 3rd world has fallen out of favor;apparently it offended sensibilities. It has been replaced by the politically correct developed and developing nations, a terminology which suggests all developing nations are on the pathway to developed-nation status.

What's been lost in jettisoning the 1st, 2nd and 3rd world categories is the distinction between developing (2nd world) and dysfunctional states (3rd world), states we now label "failed states."

But 3rd World implied something quite different from "failed state": failed state refers to a failed government of a nation-state, i.e. a government which no longer fulfills the minimum duties of a functional state: basic security, rule of law, etc.

3rd World referred to a nation-state which was dysfunctional and parasitic for the vast majority of its residents but that worked extremely well for entrenched elites who controlled most of the wealth and political power. Unlike failed states, which by definition are unstable, 3rd World nations are stable, for the reason that they work just fine for the elites who dominate the wealth, power and machinery of governance.

Here are the core characteristics of dysfunctional but stable states that benefit the entrenched few at the expense of the many, i.e. 3rd World nations:

1. Ownership of stocks and other assets is highly concentrated in entrenched elites. The average household is disconnected from the stock market and other measures of wealth; only a thin sliver of households own enough financial/speculative wealth to make an actual difference in their lives.

2. The infrastructure of the nation used by the many is poorly maintained and costly to operate as entrenched elites plunder the funding to pad their payrolls, pensions and sweetheart/insider contracts.

3. The financial/political elites have exclusive access to parallel systems of transport, healthcare, education, etc. The elites avoid trains, subways, lenders, coach-class air transport, standard healthcare and the rest of the decaying, dysfunctional systems they own that extract wealth from the debt-serfs.

They fly on private aircraft, have their own healthcare and legal services, use their privileges to get their offspring into elite universities and institutions and have access to elite banking and lending services that are unavailable to their technocrat lackeys and enforcers.

4. The elites fund lavish monuments to their own glory disguised as "civic or national pride." These monuments take the form of stadiums, palatial art museums, immense government buildings, etc. Meanwhile the rest of the day-to-day infrastructure decays in various states of dysfunction.

5. There are two classes that only interact in strictly controlled ways: the wealthy, who live in gated, guarded communities and who rule all the institutions, public and private, and the debt-serfs, who are divided into well-paid factotums, technocrat lackeys and enforcers who serve the interests of the entrenched elites and rest of the populace who own virtually nothing and have zero power.

The elites make a PR show of being a commoner only to burnish the absurd illusion that debt-serf votes actually matter. (They don't.)

6. Cartels and quasi-monopolies are parasitically extracting the wealth of the nation for their elite owners and managers. Google: quasi-monopoly. Facebook: quasi-monopoly. Healthcare: cartel. Banking: cartel. National defense: cartel. National Security: cartel. Corporate mainstream media: cartel. Higher education: cartel. Student loans: cartel. I think you get the point: every key institution or function is controlled by cartels or quasi-monopolies that serve the interests of the few via parasitic exploitation of the powerless.

7. The elites use the extreme violence and repressive powers of the government to suppress, marginalize and/or destroy any dissent. There are two systems of "law": one for the elites ($10 million penalties for ripping off the public for $10 billion, no personal liability for outright fraud) and one for the unprotected-unprivileged: "tenners" (10-year prison sentences) for minor drug infractions, renditions or assassinations (all "legal," of course) and institutional forces of violence (bust down your door on the rumor you've got drugs, confiscate your car because we caught you with cash, so you must be a drug dealer, and so on, in sickening profusion).

8. Dysfunctional institutions with unlimited power to extract money via junk fees, licensing fees, parking tickets, penalties, late fees, etc., all without recourse. Mess with the extractive, parasitic bureaucracy and you'll regret it: there's no recourse other than another layer of well-paid self-serving functionaries that would make Kafka weep.

9. The well-paid factotums, bureaucrats, technocrat lackeys and enforcers who fatten their own skims and pensions at the expense of the public and slavishly serve the interests of the entrenched elites embrace the delusion that they're "wealthy" and "the system is working great." These deluded servants of the elites will defend the dysfunctional system because it serves their interests to do so.

The more dysfunctional the institution, the greater their power, so they actively increase the dysfunction at every opportunity.

The USA is definitively a 3rd World nation. Read the list above and then try to argue the USA is not a 3rd World nation. Try arguing against the facts displayed in this chart:

I know it hurts, but the reality is painfully obvious: the USA is now a 3rd World nation.


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