Big Whoop

If you’ve spent more than 15 minutes on the internet in the last month, you’ve probably seen this idiotic ad. Don’t waste your time, the “Trump Prophet” is a wingnut hedge fund gangster who is using his once-in-a-lifetime guess that Republican Russians would scam the election and force Trump on the American public and the world. Big whoop.

A friend provided the best analysis I ever heard regarding why Trump would win, way back in August. “Half of every population has below average intelligence. Half of every population has below average education. Trump will win all of those votes. The only hope Clinton has is that one of Trump’s halves wil decide not to vote.” They all voted.

Of course this hedge fund crook is counting on our Congresscritters to be as stupid as possible and train wreak the economy in record time, with no real balance-of-power controls to stop Republican Russians and their plutocratic owners from having a drunken frat party with the economy and the shriveled remains of American democracy. It’s not impressive to realize that Republicans have crashed the economy every time they’ve been in power since 1968. What would be impressive would be finding a stone to hide your savings under until the economic tornado is done wreaking society. Good luck with that.

#24 Watching the Doc Stocks (1999)

All Rights Reserved © 1999 Thomas W. Day

Medicine and it's associated hardware are the aerospace industry of the 90's. Don't believe me? Just look at the relationship. The government is the primary customer (52% of all "insurance" coverage issued as of the 1997 census), through Medicare and Medicaid, military, and government benefits. The national health costs are expected projected to total $1.3 trillion and reach 14.3 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by Y2k. $594 billion of this cost will be paid directly by public financing. $723 billion will be paid for by private sources, but a substantial percentage of the "private" funds are actually purchased with public funding, via military and government employee insurance coverage.

The only portion of the country's medical costs that is absolutely privately financed is $222 billion of out-of-pocket payments. The government never pays for anything out-of-pocket. Since cosmetic surgery gets wrapped into "medical" cost statistics, it's probably not hard to figure out where most of that $222 billion gets spent.

So, it's a fairly safe bet that either the government is paying the bill or it's plastic surgery for rich geeks. Sounds like the military-industrial complex, doesn't it? Either the government is buying their products or it's gangbangers, terrorists, or drug cartels. I wonder how many of the second group needs cosmetic surgery?

Whatever. The real deal is, the medical industry has its hands into the same ultimate deep pockets as their aerospace predecessors. Boeing, Harris, McDonald-Douglas, Fairchild, GE, General Dynamics, and the rest of those now-burnt-toast companies gorged on public funding until they popped. Popped they did, though. When that brand of corporate welfare ran out, so did the gangsters who profited from it. It would be interesting to see how many of the escapees, who didn't take the bank with them, ended up in medical device and drug companies.

As investors, this is the reason we all have to closely monitor these investments. If you think have found a medical device company that is running efficiently and producing products that sell for something resembling a real-world price, you need to look again. From the incredibly fat cats at the top to the field personnel, these companies don't spend a penny where a dollar will do. This is the home of limos for every excuse, thousand dollar lunch meetings, expensive booze on every occasion, expensive cars, multi-million dollar stock options and golden parachutes for the totally incompetent, and money spent like Y2k (or the next three-day weekend) is the end of time.

Just like the bomb manufacturers, the differential between the haves and the have-nothings, power-wise, is as wide as the spectrum of what Danny Quayle doesn't know. The execs are packing their pockets and golden-parachuting their way into mansions on the cliffs of Mendocino and the beaches of Hawaii. All the while, folks on the assembly lines might as well be knitting labels on sweatshirts or picking cotton, since corporate affluence only trickles down when it slips through the executives' fingers. This is always a sign that no one's building a business that's expected to last long enough for the cement to dry.

A short attention span is the shape of the industry. These aren't companies that spend time worrying about the distant (more than six months') future. The "big picture" is being painted today and tomorrow may require digging a whole new gold mine. The little companies are hoping to slither through their clinical trials and get bought up by a big company. The gangsters who run the big companies hope to get through the next couple of quarters with their stock options and bonuses intact. Once they bank their payoff, who cares if the business swirls down the drain? If the check didn't bounce, the millions the executives rake off of the top will set them up for a lifetime of luxury. Did you expect them to go job hunting afterwards?

On the fringes of corporate maneuvering, the FDA looms over everyone and those dreams of massive independent wealth. One significant product recall and the whole show goes down the tubes. Stock analysts are totally incapable of knowing anything about this aspect of a stock's value. In fact, the most important criteria for a medical product company CEO is how well he can lie about rumors of product problems. The second most important ability is hiring an idiot who will take the fall if the inspectors with the handcuffs show up looking for someone to blame for the latest homicidal product screw-up. The only way to get advance notice of this sort of impending disaster is to work in the bowels of the company's Reliability Assurance Department. Is your financial security worth that kind of sacrifice? Even the FDA's inspectors rarely go into those dark and depressing places.

Even if the company isn't run by a pack of Mike Milkin and Charley Keating clones, the future is beating hard on the door of this industry. Someday, a manipulated strand of DNA will put all kinds of implantable devices out of business. Pacemakers, ICDs, stents, catheters, and all of the cardiac paraphernalia could become ancient history with one good breakthrough. The same goes for dialysis equipment, transplant technology, cochlear implants, and, even, drugs. What's gold today could be dust tomorrow. And tomorrow could, literally, be tomorrow.

These are the reasons that knowledgeable analysts (if they still exist) consider medical device companies "high risk." The bubble could break, for a half dozen very good reasons, on any company at any point in the near and far future. This may be the ultimate in "buyer beware" in the stock market.

August 1999

Who Are the Job Creators?

Wingnuts want us to think the idle rich, corporate executives, military-industrial companies and the rest of the elite corporate welfare crowd are the "job creators." I don't think so. I came up with a game to test who is really economically important in the country and world. It's called "Who Can We Live Without."

First, let's play this game with the right wing crowd. If some blessed biological catastrophe were to happen to the caviar-eating crowd, everyone Romney and Bush have ever known for instance, what effect would that have on the nation's economy? All of the little rich kids who life on Daddy, Granpa, and Great-Great-Great-Granpa's money come down with a case of the mother-of-all diarrhea. The clowns to inhabit the top floors of the nation's corporate headquarters spend their last hours in the executive bathroom, emptying their money makers. The entire investment banking circus vanishes in a bubble of oily excrement. Most of the entertainment industry does what Hollywood usually does, makes shit, but this time no careers rebound from the disaster and we're left with independent artists for out diversions. Everyone who has eaten caviar (or some other rich asshole staple) in the last month is gone in a few weeks. How does that effect the nation's gross national product?

It's not like it's hard to find another CEO, so the loss of the executive class would result in a momentary burst of business productivity, until the usual assholes filtered to the top of the corporate toilet bowl and everything businesslike returned to "normal." Nobody but the people who serve the idle rich would know the rich douchebags were missing and those servants would probably find something useful to do fairly soon. The South's slaves ended up on the Detroit production lines after a few years of assimilation. George and Ann's butlers, maids, and gardeners can probably find productive work in time. Bankers just beg cheap (free today) money from the public and sell it back to us with interest. We can live without them. The difference between major stars and everyone else who plays an instrument, pretends to be someone else, or chases a ball in clown costumes is . . . not much. They will be replaced faster than we can forget their last performance.

If the right wing elite isn't mission critical to the country, who is?

How about scientists and mathematicians? If exposure to calculus and statistics caused aneurysms, how would that effect the economy? First, all of the rich people in the previous paragraph would be broke overnight if someone didn't manage their money, do their taxes, create tricky investment portfolios to maximize profits and minimize effort, and invent the products  and services that keep the 1% in control of 95% of the country's income. Without scientists and mathematicians, the idle rich would starve and have to find work asking if we "want fries with that?" The rest of us would be in trouble, too; especially if the US was the only country to have lost its scientists and mathematicians. We would go from being a shriveling first world economy to a third world disaster zone in a few months. Most of our productive industries would have seen their last new product and many wouldn't be able to continue producing their current products. The only competent federal government agency, the General Accounting Office, would become as stupid as the military and the military would be in capable of targeting anyone but Canada and Mexico and we'd have to drive the bombs to those places. Anyone but a wingnut can see scientists and mathematicians are job creators.

If we drop down the social ladder to the fastest vanishing career in the United States, farming, how does that play out if farmers and their support industries get Mad Cow and Corn disease and spend their last hours clawing at their skulls? The US food reserves are already lower than they have been for decades and fuel costs are likely to drive them lower. Doing stupid things like converting farm land to energy production (ethanol) will push this safety margin even closer to disaster. Even without killing off farmers and the ag industry, we might see the effect of these producers going away in the near future. Disregarding reality, if the food producers of the country vanished, so would most of us. With food reserves in the near-non-existent territory, most Americans would starve in a week. Grocery stores would empty on the first day and we'd eat our way through our personal reserves in a few days, those of us who have any. The streets would be on fire and the rioting would make the Civil War look like a block party. Obviously, farmers are job creators and life sustainers.

You can, hopefully, think of a few other occupations that are actually important to the country; medical providers, fire departments (especially forestry fire fighters), teachers, and the list of underpaid, overworked, unappreciated economy-critical jobs goes on. The ruling elite are not among that group. We can get along without them under any conditions.

Thieves with Fountain Pens

"They remind us that where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost. They remind us that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. You and I must protect and preserve freedom here or it will not be passed on to our children and it would disappear everywhere in the world. Today the workers in Poland are showing a new generation how high is the price of freedom but also how much it is worth that price." Ronald Reagan

"Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

"And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home." Pretty Boy Floyd, Woody Guthrie

"The thieves who rob you with a fountain pen, they take it all." Elvy Day, 2011

We're right back in the corporate welfare mode. Wisconsin's corporate shill government is stripping away middle class protection, Minnesota's Republican majority is working toward the same ends, the country is being prepped for whichever hopeless idiot the Republicans will foist off as their 2012 presidential fodder, the US Congress is focusing on completely useless crap, and the specter of "socialism" is being hyped by the nation's right wing press as the worst thing that could happen to the country. 

Meanwhile, the "too big to fail," under-talented, perfectly corrupt financial institutions are sailing along as if they hadn't bankrupted the nation and a good bit of the world with their shenanigans. While they are dipping into the nation's credit, free of interest (thanks to their boy Bernanke and Obama's collection of financial idiots - particularly Geithner and Larry Summers), the new Mob is charging consumers nearly 30% interest on credit cards, stifling anything that resembles liberal and rational reform and regulation of banking, speculation, insider trading, derivative roulette games, or any of the giant money-stealing scams that pass for "financial services" in this demented place and time. 

It's long past obvious that the solution to the nation's pressing problems is to refocus criminal prosecution from the bottom of the social ladder to the very top. The Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, the basis for RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) states that "a person who is a member of an enterprise that has committed any two of 35 crimes—27 federal crimes and 8 state crimes—within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering." Among that collection of RICO crimes is embezzlement, fraud, gambling, money laundering, obstruction of justice, bankruptcy fraud, securities fraud, bribery, and theft. If you don't haven't noticed at least five of those crimes committed by every one of the major banks in this country in the last five years, you are both a Republican and a fool (redundant, I know). You could educate yourself here or here or here or here or here or here or here or any number of places that accurately recorded the catastrophe we call "finance" or "banking." 

[Of course, one of the beauties of being "conservative" is not having to read, think, or investigate the truth; conservatives just chant "two legs better than four" until they are unable to babble. As Mr. Cobert wisely warned, "reality has a liberal bias." Better to keep what's left of one's head deeply buried in the shit.]

As long as the FBI remains incapable of investigating and prosecuting these worst-of-all-criminals, they are a useless and feeble arm of law enforcement and deserve to have their funding cut to levels insufficient to maintain a secretarial staff. In fact, I recommend that we follow the libertarians' idiotic advice and eliminate all regulation, including regulation of the airwaves and, when what's left of this once great and democratic nation is reduced to rubble and chaos, the rest of the world will have a fair warning of everything to avoid.