CEO Salaries vs Value and Competence

A few weeks ago, I stumbled into a bizarre discussion about Apple CEO Tim Cook’s 2023 salary “cut” (from $83 million in stock awards, $12 million in incentives and $3 million in salary to $49 million in total compensation for 2023). I argued that it would be impossible for one person to be worth anything near Cook’s 2023 income, let alone the insane compensation he received in 2022. A couple of “CEOs” (“Chief Extortion Officers”) argued that Cook should be compensated based on Apple’s performance (Since “Cook took over as CEO in 2011, Apple stock has returned 1,212% versus 290% for the S&P 500”). One self-described CEO wrote, “When you look at how much his salary is compared to the worth of the company, he's being paid a small % of the worth of the company he's leading and his guidance and decisions are what drives the company and shares.”  Hilarious.  Anyone stupid enough to believe a CEO has ANYTHING at all to do with a company's performance deserves to be beaten to death with a handful of wadded-up preferred stock.  

Cook has been compensated with well over a billion dollars since 2011. I would argue that, mostly, the company’s performance represents how repressed the engineers and designers had been under Jobs’ deranged “leadership” and general megalomania. As for stock value, Apple stock is valued at 10X it’s 2011 price which is impressive but not anything close to exceptional for tech companies during that period. I’ve known and “worked with” (in quotes, because none of the CEOs I know ever did a moment of productive work) a solid dozen CEOs from $20-50M/year to $500,000,000/year corporations and I have yet to see any of them do anything that would positively effect the company’s bottom line.

I am entertained by the idea a CEO’s compensation should be based on the company’s performance or value. It’s pretty obvious that the flotsam and jetsam that bobs to the top in the sewers of corporate politics never make that argument when their companies’ stock tanks. This is just more of the Harvard MBA “pull credit up and push blame down” tactic. If there were a financial connection between CEO performance and income, there would be a bunch of ex-CEOs littering the nation’s homeless camps.

John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lines in a Silicon Valley Startup tells a different kind of story about the kind of halfwit who floats to the top of corporate toilet bowls. Assuming you don’t believe that Elizabeth Holmes exerted some kind of magical witchcraft on the susceptible minds of executives from Safeway, Walgreens, the US Army’s General James Mattis, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Jim Mattis, Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family, the DeVos family including Betsy DeVos, the Cox family of Cox Enterprises, Carlos Slim Helú, Larry Ellison and several dozen tech-venture capitalists, a passel of idle rich wannabes, and way too many technical employees who should have known better, it’s pretty obvious that most rich people got that way through luck. Holmes only “qualification” as a biotech entrepreneur was her physical attractiveness and some pretty shaky presentation skills.

50 years ago, I was a young, gullible electronics tech who fell for the promises of an employer who eventually ripped me off for several tens of thousands of dollars. For a couple of years I worked closely with this character, following him to trade shows, county and state fairs, and on-site watching him con all sorts of customers (all rich farmers and ranchers) into equipment they didn’t need and would never figure out how to use. Often, at the fairs, my boss would wander around the other vendor booths and he’d buy the dumbest shit. In the end, I realized that (like most salespeople) he believed his own bullshit and when he heard the same lines from someone else he’d fall for it every time. His main “skill” was being in the right place at the right time with a big pile of cash his father had handed him in hopes that he’d find his idle way in the world.

As I read Bad Blood, I saw my small town boss over and over again. Except now he was wearing handmade Italian suits, driving overpriced Eurotrash cars, and taking meetings where he’d hear presentations from other rich people who didn’t know what they were talking about.  But that wasn’t a problem for him because he never knew what he was talking about, either. Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed out of the hands of these rich farmboys (and girls) into the hands of a couple of con artists pretending to be sophisticated biotech engineers. Worse, they weren’t even doing a good job of pretending to be engineers or biologists.

George Santos is another example of how easily the so-called “sophisticated” crowd can be fooled. It wasn’t just the usual bimbo Republicans who fell for that bumbling con artist. The so-called, self-styled sophisticates of New York’s Long Island were easily duped by a dude who couldn’t sell watches in a Midwestern shopping mall. So if you are intelligent enough to realize that you were conned by Ronnie Reagan, G.W. Bush & Co, or Maralardo, don’t feel bad. You’re in the “good” company of the nation’s oldest, richest, and most educated “talent.”

An un-surprising postscript about the Theranos scam is that neither Holmes or her chubby Indian co-conspirator, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, have spent a day in jail, as yet. Supposedly, Holmes will surrender to prison authorities sometime in April for an 11 year sentence. In the meantime, she’s puking out her 2nd baby and living the high life at her $135 million Silicon Valley estate. She supposedly married William "Billy" Evans, an idle rich heir to the Evans Hotel Group, and they’ve spawned two pups. She used her 2nd spawning to put off her trip to prison after she and Evans failed to pull off a one-way trip to Mexico before sentencing.

Why Aren’t You An Activist?

July 17, 2014

I’m writing this in 2014, after reading Doug Fine’s excellent book, Too High to Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution.  Many of my friends are pot smokers and some of my family use cannabis for medicine and I have nothing against the weed. I have, in my past, smoked (and inhaled, you giant douchebag Willy Clinton), eaten, and ingested marijuana and I know the stuff is a more powerful and effective “medicine” than a good percentage of the crap doctors and druggists peddle legally. I have given money to California's grower co-ops’ defense funds and to a few pro-legalization candidates. All that said, I don’t have a dog in this hunt.

I don’t really care if marijuana becomes easily available. If it does, it won’t matter to me. I probably will still look at pot as the route to being a lazy stoner. Not that I have a problem with lazy stoners. Many of my friends are exactly that. The fact is, nobody is easier to manipulate, arrest, scare, intimidate, or move from one place to another than stoners. That’s why the phony War on Drugs is so popular with cops. It’s easy, safe, and usually uncomplicated “work.” It’s also why there is overwhelming evidence that the country can afford to downsize its police force at least as much as the military. When it comes to “fighting crime,” cops are mostly issuing parking tickets. Criminals scare the crap out of the typical cop.

All of that brings up the problem in decriminalizing most drugs; the drug “criminals” are too helpless and lazy to do the work. The people doing the work, mostly, have good intent and the people opposing them are motivated by greed, corruption, and cowardice. The current police state incarceration system, the grossly profit-driven enforcement system, and the monopoly the drug companies have on healthcare profits are the greed portion of the opposition. Corruption starts at the local levels and works it way to the top of our government, corporations, and other institutions that have a stranglehold on profits and power due to the phony “War on Drugs (and poor people).” The cowardice is obvious to anyone who has met or read about the people involved in the marijuana legalization movement. From the growers to the distributors to the users of all sorts (recreational, medicinal, psychological, etc) these people are as harmless as butterflies in comparison to real criminals. Any cop who has the arrogance to pretend to be protecting and serving the public in a marijuana bust while ignoring real criminals from street hoodlums to Wall Street bankers is deluded, dangerous, and corrupt.

The majority of US citizens know this is true. An overwhelming percentage of US citizens expect marijuana legalization (75% to 15%) in the next decade. How they expect these large profitable, corrupt, and powerful opposition forces to be overcome is unclear. With a public that is overwhelmingly apathetic, uneducated, uninvolved, and timidly conservative, the instrument of change is likely to be explosive. "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” John Kennedy

A Better Story Than A Pretty Good One

As good a movie as “Catch Me If You Can” was, the real story is far, far better. Being a parent is one of those things that our fractured, disloyal, unappreciative, corrupt, and uneducated society either devalues or corrupts out of superstition. The real story of Frank Abagnale's father and his relationship with his father to the moment of his parents’ divorce is amazing. The real story of how Abagnale became the criminal that he was well-punished for being is incredibly funny, sad, and amazing. His recommendations for how you protect yourself from cybercrime are insightful and valuable and I am going to stop using my debit card for ANYTHING once my nitwit credit union figures out how to quit screwing up their website.

What American Medicine Does and Doesn’t Do

A recent article in a terrific reoccurring physician’s column in the Duluth Reader titled, “14 Lies that Big Pharma and Their Academic Psychiatrists Teach Medical Students” that details the many fables and fairy tales Americans believe about what the FDA does and doesn’t do. (Hint: What it doesn’t do is insure drugs and devices are safe for use.) This particular article is about the delusions Americans regarding the safety and effectiveness of the drugs and devices approved by the FDA. Americans are weird in that they distrust their government for the easy stuff and are as gullible as newborn babies about the hard stuff. Dr. Gary Kohls article in the Duluth Reader bursts some bubbles about the FDA’s part in the mental health drug business and that is a pretty important story. He describes the lack of sophistication in the actual drug development, testing, and application while pointing out how much better Big Pharma’s marketing and politics are than their science. "The so-called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors have been deceptively mis-named by Big Pharma because those amphetamine molecule-based SSRI drugs do NOT mess only with serotonin neurotransmitter systems! In fact, they do not actually raise total brain serotonin levels as advertised. Actually, SSRI drugs deplete serotonin long-term while only “goosing” the release of serotonin at the synapse level while at the same time interfering with the storage, reuse and re-cycling functions of the serotonin synapses that, by the way, are far more abundant in the human intestinal tract than in the central nervous system." You wouldn’t get that from any of their ads, would you?

I have a mixed history with the FDA; the old and the current. When I worked for a pacemaker/implantable cardio-defibrillator (ICD) company in Colorado, Telectronics Pacing Systems, that was eventually closed down by the FDA and bad publicity for a variety of awful Class 1 recalls. While all that was going on, with FDA inspectors and manufacturing experts roaming the halls of our company, many of the company’s engineers were saying, “Thank God there is an FDA,” because the British Pacific Dunlop executives would have been willing to carve the company’s patients up for meals if it meant they’d get a bigger quarterly bonus. As it was, Telectronics had pacemakers and ICDs with defective connector block seals that leaded body fluids into the electronics and caused sudden and unpredictable device failures and leads that included a “forming wire” that would poke through the leads’ insulation and carve chunks out of patients’ atrium walls. Yes, that would often kill them.

Telectronics’ product failures were eventually exposed when an autopsy of a young woman who died from the atrial carving revealed a piece of wire sticking out of the atrial “J” wire’s insulation. The pathologist, a friend of the cardiologist who performed the pacemaker implant, described the wire to the cardiologist; assuming his friend had accidentally left a guiding stylet in the atrial wire. The cardiologist was absolutely certain that wasn’t the case and asked for further investigation, risking his own reputation in the process. The resulting investigation eventually involved the FDA investigators and the discovery that several similar incidents had occurred in the past, with no certain knowledge of how many such failures had resulted in patient mortality and morbidity. That knowledge and the discovery that the company had covered up the knowledge of both types of failure brought the full attention of the FDA. At that time, Dr. David Kessler was the commissioner of the FDA and he took the job very seriously. Appointed by Bush I and replaced in 1997 by Clinton, with practically nothing of substance from then on, Dr. Kessler ran an FDA that was both active and patient-oriented. After Kessler’s FDA, American patients have been pretty much on their own as far as anything resembling federal regulation of food and drugs.

One of the experiences I had with Telectronics was in a team of folks who were writing the clinical trial plan for the company’s ICD products. I got to study chemotherapy and cardiac therapy drug trials and their methods and results. The results were every bit as interesting as the methods, since the results were so ambiguous that I don’t know how anyone could conclude either of those drugs worked worth a damn. Statistically, every clinical trial we looked at demonstrated that the state-of-the-art drugs were inconsistently the equivalent of placebos. Sometimes, the drugs were slightly worse. As Dr. Kohls explained with his, “Myth # 3: ‘FDA approval means that a psychotropic drug is safe long-term’” In fact, FDA approval means nothing. Drugs and devices "are usually only tested in human clinical trials for a couple of months before being granted marketing approval by the Big Pharma-conflicted FDA. " FDA approval is just a stamp applied to practically anything the medical industry wants to foist off on patients and medical providers.

The next train wreck, I mean medical devices company, was CPI/Guidant. When I first applied, it was still CPI, the company that invented the ICD. CPI had a reputation for being “conservative,” in the real definition of that word. Their devices (pacemakers and ICDs) weren’t tricky, but they were reliable, had long battery lives, and had only the features necessary to do the job well. CPI was acquired by Eli Lilly corporation in 1978 and Lilly added a pile of medical devices company to its portfolio until 1994 when it spun those companies off into Guidant/CRM and the rest of the mess that became Guidant. I interviewed  in 1995 and early 1996 and by the time I started work in March of 1996, Lilly had separated itself from Guidant and the retirement and pension package I’d been promised vanished without anyone bothering to tell me about it. Since Telectronics was being pulled to pieces for the patents and valuable employees, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference, but it would have been nice to know what I was getting into.

What I was getting into was a carbon copy of the situation I’d just left. Guidant eventually collapsed under its own avarice and incompetence. To make a long, painful story short, one “Quality Committee” meeting illustrated the company’s philosophy perfectly. When a team of quality assurance engineers presented their analysis of a defective device that needed to be notified on, the executives in the committee asked, “How will that affect our bonuses this quarter?” Since the device failure was a life-threatening malfunction, no one had done the necessary research to determine how that would affect executive compensation. Imagine that.

Eventually, and after hundreds of patient injuries and a few deaths, a few doctors began to suspect their corporate beneficiary was less than benevolent. Even weirder, a couple of those doctors did the minimal research necessary to discover that even their own small group of patients had been affected multiple times by Guidant product failures. I had collected more than 600 such failures for one of the products I monitored and I waited for more than a year for one patient-oriented cardiologist to ask me, “Have you ever seen this before.” Never happened.

When Guidant died, 95% of the company’s products were under FDA Class 1 recall, but the FDA deserves little-to-no credit for uncovering the company’s many problems. Like the physicians profiting from selling these defective products, the FDA’s attitude was summed up by something an “investigator” said to me not long before I quit medical devices, “We don’t care what kind of product problems you have or how many patients you kill as long as we don’t read about it in the paper first.” As long as the FDA wasn’t embarrassed by being shown up by a media investigation, they will let Pharma and Devices do whatever the hell they want with patient safety and therapy effectiveness. To them, patients are nothing more than “lab rats who clean their own cages.”

Sweet Dreams

I recently connected to an old friend who I haven’t seen or talked to in at least 30 years. He spent his entire life, outside of vacation travel, in Nebraska and most of that in small town Nebraska. I could have easily led that life at one time, but economics, chance, opportunity, and restlessness ended up sending me to a lot of places I would have never expected to see and experience. In one of many conversations with my friend and his wife, we touched on the dreams we’ve had that carried emotion, meaning, and resonance to our lives. My friend and his wife are religious and the dreams they described had to do with that subject. My dream was very different and their perspective and ideals reminded me of that near-spiritual dream that I still occasionally have.

After my decade in medical devices, I was a mental train wreck. Being asked to help the richest people I’ve ever known cover-up device failures that had killed patients, tortured even more patients, and bankrupted many others caused me to lose the ability to read for almost half of a year. In retrospect, I realize that some part of my brain decided that if my consciousness wasn’t going to do the right thing the next best thing was to incapacitate my ability to do the wrong thing. Many people imagine that becoming a whistle-blower is either some form of treason or is as easy as going with the flow and doing what the higher-ups demand. It isn’t and if you have never had the skills or talent to be in a position to be pressed to consider having moral backbone to blow the whistle on corruption and evil in high places you have no basis with which to compare your situation to that miserable place. This essay isn’t about that dilemma, but if it were it would be longer, sadder, and more revealing that I am likely to ever be in this blog. This essay is about the dream that signaled my release from that situation.

About three months after I quit Guidant, a St. Paul medical devices company and my last corporate employer, I had the dream that turned out to be an important part of my release from the hell that had become my employment “contract.” I was mostly unemployed, living on savings and some meager self-employment and contract tech work, the economy was in free fall because of the 9/11 attacks, and my future as a 52-year-old mid-tech technical writer and engineer was totally in doubt. I still could not, yet, read and comprehend the captions below pictures in newspapers. My sole dependable income was teaching motorcycle safety classes on weekends and, occasionally, weekdays. That particular early morning, I would be teaching my first classroom in this new career. To that day, studying the materials I had to absorb to become an MSF instructor had required that I read a list of 132 questions and memorize the course-accepted answers. Because of my reading disability I had spent hundreds of hours staring at the study guides and instructors’ manuals to get to the point that I had the gist of those documents memorized. The chance that I might have a clear moment and would be able to read the test questions to my students was too much to risk, so I memorized the test. That evening I had spent six hours just going over the test questions and I could spout “What is important to know about a convex mirror?” and when #19’s time came or when I heard “#39” my kneejerk response was “List the three-step process to shift to a higher gear.”

The last thing that I remember from the fleeting moments of sleep the morning of the day I regained my ability to read again was an incredible feeling of well-being as I rode my motorcycle from my garage into the street and in every direction I saw “suits” hanging from every telephone pole down my Little Canada street, along Little Canada Road to the I35E freeway entrance and all along the freeway to the Century Avenue exit on I694. Then I woke up. I don’t remember what led to that image, if there was a story that precluded the sight of so many corporate executives getting their just deserts. The dream was more a release from the self-torture I’d subjected myself to as a consequence of working for one of the many entirely self-serving, psychopathic, and outright evil corporations this greed-loving country has spawned. There wasn’t much of a story behind that grand sight, as I remember it. It was just a beatific scene from a world gone wrong that had self-corrected.

I had that wonderful dream repeatedly for about a month and intermittently for the next year or so. Then it stopped. The part of the dream I remember always woke me up about the time I needed to be getting out of bed. The feeling it left me with was always a great sense of peace because “truth, justice, and the American way” had been restored in my world. Sometimes, I suspect that there is a lot of French in my English and German heritage because the revolution I most empathize with is the French Revolution. Being a savage US citizen, I see the 1% being hanged from telephone poles rather than guillotined, but the end result is the same.

Of course, none of that will ever happen here. We’re a nation of serfs who love to serve and obey our masters while they misdirect our anger and violence toward other members of the 99%. The chances that Americans will rise up and throw off the shackles of failed and corrupt capitalism and its bedfellow, fascism, are about as good as are the odds that we’ll figure out space travel before the next ecological catastrophe wipes us from the earth: zero-to-none. But . . . damn! That was one sweet dream and I go to bed every night hoping I’ll get to experience it again.

Making 'Merica Great "Again"

Aside from the Trumpetes’ foolish jabber about turning back the clock on technology, trade, energy and natural resources, employment and management skills, and reality, I think an examination of what it would take to return our economy from a deficit to a surplus system is an interesting idea. Of course, Republicans deserve massive credit for driving the economy deep into deficit spending: Reagan and Bush II were both huge deficit spending believers. In spite of their big talk about the terror of deficit spending, Republicans absolutely rebelled when Obama told them he expected future spending bills to be on a “pay as you go basis.” The Party of Stupid is also the party of “borrow and spend” and nothing is going to change that in any foreseeable future.

 

However, if we did suddenly become responsible and decide to put on our big boy pants and do the dirty work of turning around the economy, what would we do? This is my list, in order of importance:

1. Money and politics has to go. Not only does Citizens United need to be overturned, but we need a Constitutional Amendment banning private money (corporate and individual) from our political campaigns. That law needs teeth, as in “you get caught, you hang.” We won’t seriously look at any real solutions until our government is not bought and sold on a daily basis.
2. The tax system has to be fixed. We’ve been at “war” since 2003 and the only way to pay for wars is to progressively tax income until the war debt is gone. I can see how eliminating the corporate tax could be incentive for business in the US, but that has to be coupled with doubling-down on unearned income taxation, inheritance taxes, and upper-income tax rates. Continuing to encourage rock stars and athletes, banksters and money laundering, and Trump-like con artists with tax incentives to do unproductive money-shuffling has cost the country at least two generations of scientists, engineers, and people who could be doing actual work. Incentives are everything and our current tax system provides incentives for exactly the wrong things; including activities that endanger national security.
3. The world is on the metric system and the longer we put off moving to modern weights and measurements the less competitive American companies and workers become. Face it, nobody but us cares about the length of the King’s fuckin’ foot. If you think that is an exaggeration, the only non-metric countries in the world are: Burma, Liberia, and the USA. Talk about being late to the party! Thomas Jefferson was the first President to recommend the metric system and we still can’t figure it out. Not being comfortable with the world’s weights and measurements puts a serious crimp in the abilities of American workers, technicians, and engineers. It makes many of our manufactured products useless to the rest of the world. Constantly doing mental or paper/computer conversions slows us down, creates errors, and makes Americans look backward and foolish to the rest of the world.
4. The current slow death of religion has to speed up. Currently, about 18% of people 60 and younger attend church and fewer than 50% believe in God. That's an improvement over the past 50 years of superstition, but not enough and not nearly quick enough. Every thing from science, energy production, employability, democracy, to national security is being damaged by our national proclivity toward superstition and fantasy. To keep up, we’ll have to grow up.
5. The war machine and military-industrial complex have to go. Not only do we have to quit pretending we're the world's policeman, we have to admit we suck at the job. We can't tell national security from corporate interests and until we can we need to put our weapons back on the shelf. The US loves war, but we can't afford it. As a peace-keeper, we’re not that talented.
6. Our public education system needs to be overhauled. First, private education needs to die. When the wealthy can abandon public education and do everything in their power to contaminate the discussion about how to educate the whole country to benefit their class, the whole country gets screwed. Finland provides us with a terrific example and, since our own experiment has been a disaster, we need to look to someone who has built a wheel that actually turns and supports weight. As Jeff Beck said, “Amateurs borrow, professionals steal.” We need to rip the pages out of Finland’s education reform book and paste them into our own system.
7. We have to go back into space. The brief moment when 'Merica was great by almost everyone's standards was when we were in the Space Race and were focused on a big accomplishment. The scientific and industrial spin-offs from NASA were incredible. We owe much of what we know today about climate change to NASA's research. As crippled as our industrial and scientific power is today, without the space race we'd be 3rd world. This is a no-brainer.
8. Every “for profit” industry in the country needs to be re-evaluated to see if it is working better than when those activities were performed by non-profits and government. Personally, I think deregulation and privatization has been a disaster, but I have not made a scientific study of every area where it has been applied. I have been upfront and close to education, health care, energy, and infrastructure and I am unimpressed with the performance of the private sector.
9. Our legal system needs to get over its power tripping and empire building and develop a sense of proportion. Police need to go after big crime and quit screwing around with the easy and safe stuff. Victimless crimes do not belong at the top of the priority list. The War on Drugs was a fraud and it’s long past time to admit it. The big money and long-term damage to society is in white collar crime and that’s where the main enforcement and prosecution focus needs to be: cybercrime, financial fraud, corporate environmental and consumer abuse, and the government contracting corruption and bribery that risks national security. Our prison system needs to be refocused on rehabilitation rather than punishment and revenge. We can not be the country that leads in citizens incarcerated and hope to be anything resembling “great.” National, state, and local police departments are over-staffed with unskilled goons who are great at beating up protestors, jailing small-time criminals, and protecting corporate criminals, but they are helpless when it comes to tracking down the lowest-level hacker who has ripped off a few thousand retirees bank accounts. Our law enforcement system needs to be updated and technological to get the right job done. Use the Pareto principle to identify the most effective places to spend time and money and quit knee-jerk reacting to squeaky wheels.

That’s my list. What have you got?

Nothing Changes, Nothing to See Here

Forty-three years ago, in 1972, Democratic Presidential nominee George McGovern selected Thomas Francis Eagleton to be his vice-presidential partner. By August, McGovern had abandoned Eagleton because of his history of depression treatment. Supposedly, a poll found that 77% of prospective Democratic voters said "Eagleton's medical record would not affect their vote." I’d find that hard to believe, but Americans wanted to imagine themselves to be more civilized than they do today. Eagleton returned to the Senate, won two more elections, and retired after a weird blackmailing affair with a niece, a local lawyer, and the Scientology organization. Eagleton was a key player in the Senate's foreign relations, intelligence, defense, education, health care, and environmental legislation. He was an important Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act sponsor. He and Frank Church sponsored the amendment that halted the bombing in Cambodia and effectively ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. Still, to most conservative Americans (the majority of Americans), Eagleton was the “crazy McGovern VP.”

The Greek father of medicine, modern or otherwise, Hippocrates described “melancholia” as a disease with both mental and physical aspects. "fears and despondencies, if they last a long time"¹ as the earliest and not yet improved upon description of depression. Freud discovered or pronounced nothing new about depression and not much of value has come about since. So, a couple thousand years of avoidance and denial has led us to where we are today with a minimum of 7% of the US population suffering from a well known, totally misunderstood mental disease that offers largely unsuccessful therapies and the joy of social stigma. The modern approach is to bury the patient in side-effect-laden but ineffective and dangerous drugs (“Why Are More than One in Ten Americans at Risk for Suicide?”). While these drugs are barely or rarely as effective as placebos,  they are a big money-maker for the dope peddlers. In 2013, the dope dealers made $11B on antidepressants alone. No wonder these assholes are spending so much money fighting marijuana legalization. They are just fighting off the competition.

Since 1974 a lot of noise has been made about improvements in mental healthcare but there is no reality behind that noise. The stigma that existed 100 years ago remains, largely, unchanged today. In 2013, 41,149 US citizens committed suicide. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death for Americans.  And that is with the unmentioned understanding that suicides are dramatically underreported due to . . . yep, the stigma of mental illness. Even the survivors are unable to admit their loved one was ill. As an illustration of that national reality-avoidance, no accurate national suicide attempt statistics are kept. However, in 2013 494,169 people were hospitalized for “self-harm behavior.” There is a sexual component to US suicides, too. Men are 4 times more likely to kill themselves, but women try to kill themselves 3 times as often. You could argue that women are more likely to make a “cry for help,” but you could also argue that men are just more mechanically competent in their attempts. Men are a lot more inclined to use guns for this purpose and firearms account for 51.4% suicide deaths.

The first requirement to fixing a problem is to admit you have a problem. The only admission allowed to mental illness is suicide or at least a fairly serious attempt, which in 1-out-of-12 examples doesn’t do much to fix the problem for the person making that admission. The effectiveness of further attempts is depressingly high. The medical profession ridicules poorly executed attempts as “a cry for help.” If that were true, it’s pretty obvious that crying for help in the direction of American medicine is misguided. You might as well ask a tiger to care for a baby lamb. If US doctors don’t see a dollar sign swirling around your head, they’re not interested.

Outside of the drug profits, all of this self-destruction is socially expensive, too. The estimated US suicide death expense was more than $44 billion in 2010. Even the failures are far from cheap, costing about $2 billion for medical care plus $4.3 billion in lost wages and productivity and other costs. In a so-called capitalist society, you’d think the shear expense of suicide—successful and unsuccessful—would make us do something about all of this self-destruction. Don’t get me wrong. We’re not the worst, most suicidal, country in the world. In fact, we’re #30 behind such wonderful places as Greenland (#1), Lithuania, South Korea, Kazakhstan, Croatia, Russia, Poland, and South Africa. Also, we’re slightly less self-destructive than Japan, Belgium, Finland, Austria, and France. The top ten suicidal countries have some pretty amazing rates of self-destruction from 83/100,000 down to 20/100,000. From there on, though, the next 50 slowly decline in self-annihilation from 20/100,000 to 10/100,000. The USofA is pretty much in the same territory as Bulgaria, Germany, Sweden, Czech Republic, Cuba, Romania, and the UK. Apparently, political and economy systems are disconnected from suicide rates. Neither capitalism, monarchies, fascism, communism, socialism, dictatorships, democracies, anarchy, order, rich, poor, middle class, rural, urban, suburban, and every other description I can use with which to describe a society seems to produce relatively the same rate of self-hate.

Greenland, for some reason, is a standout with 1-in-4 Greenlanders attempting to kill themselves every year and with the world’s highest rate of self-destruction. Greenland’s streets are decorate with signs advertising suicide prevention hot lines, “The call is free. No one is alone. Don't be alone with your dark thoughts. Call." So far, that tactic has been ineffective. People, especially teenagers call the hot line and discover that they are, in fact, alone. We are all alone in ourselves. I suspect that, once they hear the usual perfunctory “we are all in this together” drivel they are even more inspired to put an end to their misery.

In the last couple of decades, I’ve lost three friends to suicide. For a while, back in the 80’s, it seemed like everyone I knew was contemplating—out loud—suicide and taking a shot at it. Supposedly, suicide is “catching” and I’ll admit that knowing people who have checked out for a variety of non-medical motivations makes considering the option a little easier. Malcolm Gladwell calls that a “contagious idea.” That’s possible, but I doubt nearby suicides are the cause of following events.

The fact that the sacrifice needed for any hope of a cure for depression is to suffer the slings and arrows of exposure, stigma, ridicule, followed by even more isolation looks more suspiciously causal to me. Asking for help when the brain doing the asking is the source of the disease is not much different than requiring a cancer victim to administer his own radiation therapy. That is, of course, unacceptable. Because if we admit we need help, we’re weak. If we can’t fix ourselves, all by ourselves, we’re just like that “crazy McGovern VP.” Americans can forgive drunks, drug addicts, cowards, liars, criminals, draft evaders, traitors, National Guard A.O.W.L. rich kids on a bender, complete idiots, greedy bastards, adulterers, and every sort of low life. But our society is incapable of forgiving people for mental illness. In fact, we’re going backwards. The general distain for a “mental illness defense” is evidence that our societal tolerance and compassion for the mentally ill is going backward. Texas and Florida appear to revel in executing the mentally ill and a few other states are showing signs of jealousy.

I don’t think any of this bodes well for any honest attempt at attempting to contain our suicide epidemic. And, if we were capable of honesty, it’s pretty obvious that any physical disease, product, or activity that caused this kind of death, destruction, and expense would be front page news and Fox Views and the other panic generators would be freaking out.

¹ Hippocrates, Aphorisms, Section 6.23

#10 Revenge and Clear Blue Skies (1998)

All Rights Reserved © 1998 Thomas W. Day

Here in Minnesota, a lot of math-impaired citizens are celebrating Hubbie Humphrey's kid's defeat of Big Tobacco in one of our state's famous kangaroo courts. The numbers, at least, are impressive. Right away, a whole bunch of lawyers are getting a half billion dollars for winning this suit. Twenty years from now, when a billion dollars will buy a nice, slightly used, Nissan minivan, the citizens of Minnesota will finally have had the pleasure of seeing all of their share of the tobacco settlement sucked up and blown away by the usual state government incompetence and corruption. Whatshisname Humphrey is crowing about how this is a "blow for public health" and waving that flag in his bid for the Minnesota governor job.

I want to make sure you aren't being fooled. It's my job.

First and most important, nobody really cares about public health. That's a universal, unless you count the people who are already sick and stuck in hospitals where they can't vote. Since they can't vote . . . draw your own conclusions. If the public health were an issue, these government goofs would have made smoking against the law as soon as doctors and scientists told them smoking caused fatal diseases, thirty years ago. Instead of using tobacco sales to produce billions in "sin tax" revenues, tobacco would have just joined the long list of illegal drugs and its users would have gone underground. That didn't, and hasn't, happened.

The tobacco lawsuits aren't about reimbursing the public savings accounts for the medical costs of tobacco addiction. If they were, state and federal governments would have saved all the tax money they were collecting on tobacco to use for those costs. As usual, for the last fifty years, the government has been throwing a party for itself with that extra "revenue" (a bureaucratic word for money stolen from the public).

The public bans of smoking aren't about protecting public health from second-hand smoke, either. The fumes spewed by internal combustion engines, factories, and the smoke blown by the media and government officials has be at least as toxic as tobacco smoke. Nobody's getting sued for that. Non-smokers have been choking on second-hand smoke for a couple hundred years and, until there was money to be made, no one gave a damn about our discomfort or asthma attacks.

Get it straight. The lawsuits are about money. The militant anti-smoking activity is about revenge.

For almost 100 years, smokers have had the upper hand. I can remember going to concerts where the smoke was so thick that the stage lighting only showed you where you would see the band, if the air wasn't opaque. Smokers have probably cured more alcoholics than AAA, keeping non-smokers from being able to taste beer or mixed drinks weaker than Everclear. Smokers have driven non-smokers from political conventions, bars, public bathrooms, business offices, and their own homes. When you think about it that way, it's possible that smoking created independent politics, bottled beer, pissing in the alley, home businesses, and outdoor recreation. Anyway, non-smokers have been looking for a way to get even since the invention of the match.

It isn't easy to find a way to get even with a smoker. They're obviously suicidal, so most threats are empty. They were clearly born in a smoke-filled, carpet-burnt barn, so threatening to tell their mothers isn't going to carry a lot of weight. Anyone who smiles and says "excuse me" after burning a hole in your knee with stray ashes won't be affected by Ms. Manners' quotes. If you aren't afraid of being beat up by a revolting smoker, you have to be afraid of their revolting mouth odor. Personally, I'd rather lose teeth than inhale smokers' breath. There's nothing left for non-smokers to do but to bring out the heavy weapons: lawyers.

In my young, impressionable, dumb as a rock days, I believed that lawyers were "a bad thing." Not anymore. A year ago, a real estate lawyer saved me from having to live under a rock. Without lawyers, comedy would be dead. The only way to hear a politically incorrect joke, these days, is to make the victim a lawyer. In the medical business, no one listen to patients unless they talk through a lawyer. But best of all, my wimpy asthmatic lungs are being saved from premature mechanical replacement by a pack of multi-millionaire Minnesota lawyers with nothing but good intentions and God on their side. I've changed, see? Now I'm old, impressionable, and dumb as a rock. Change is good.

A few short decades ago, Libertarians, Republicans, and teams of business interests and personal freedom fanatics would have shouted down the anti-tobacco campaign. Not anymore. It's payback time. Smokers are outnumbered, almost 5 to 1, and non-smokers are taking back the air we breathe. We're saying, "To hell with your free choice. I want to go anywhere I want to go, without having to breathe burning tobacco. You are banished to the smoking section of the darkest alley in town." By the time this is over with, tobacco company execs will be moon shining Virginia hillbillies, hand-rolling cigarettes in back of tarpaper shacks. Smokers will have to find a way to spontaneously combust, seconds after stuffing a fag into their mouths, to keep from being arrested. Even then, the ashes will get a littering citation.

That's the way I see it. Change is good. Smoking is bad. It's a simple world. This is a "personal space issue" that has nothing to do with building a safer, kinder, gentler world. It's a good thing most lawyers are also fat people. Otherwise, I'd worry about being their next target. Ever sit next to a sweaty, fat guy on an airplane?

May 1998

How to Know if Your Lawyer Will Work for You

A while back, I wrote a bit about using the existence of non-existence of Unitarian-Universalists congregations in a neighborhood/city/state to determine from a distance if the place has a decent quality of life (How to Know if your State Is an Armpit). A recent experience in one of the nation's hellholes, Texas, taught me another and similar simple stereotyping trick. Stereotyping is about as politically incorrect as a modern American can get, but it's still a natural and useful tactic for making general assumptions about almost anything related to human behavior. Exceptions don't prove rules, but exceptions are rare because many stereotypes are generally accurate.

In my case, I was tasked with finding a lawyer for an estate settlement that was guaranteed to become a stereotypical family battle. The "family" was my wife's father's second-marriage catastrophe and I would have bet the will, if he'd bothered to write one, would be a clusterfuck directed by his pack of inbred hillbilly step-children under duress from his constantly complaining and rapidly declining wife. When the hospital called us to tell us that Bob was dead and that my daughter and my wife were listed as his emergency contact, we traveled to Texas to deal with his mess of an "estate." We knew the step-brats had tried to corral Bob in a care facility in Arkansas a year ago and had conned the old man into signing over power of attorney in an attempt to imprison him in that facility so they could control his expenses and burn through his savings as rapidly as possible. My wife and the manager of that facility worked together to help him escape Arkansas and return to the retirement apartments he'd lived in before the highjacking. Other than a surprise visit, that required the step-brats slipping past the Texas apartment security, that scared the crap out of Bob and sent him into a paranoid panic for a couple of weeks, he managed to avoid contact with the step-family for three-quarters of a year. Knowing his history of delusion, racism, sexism, and retired military sense of entitlement, I figured he had avoided rewriting his will as an act of self-delusion and avoidance. However, after searching his apartment, talking with the complex manager and the lazy fools the Wichita Falls Air Farce Base calls their "Legal Services" deadzone, and contacting his three godawful bank account managers (Wells Fargo and two different disasters with Chase Bank), we determined that no one knew of a will. Still, I expected crap to appear out of Arkansas (isn't that the only thing that ever comes from Arkansas?) and tried to search out a lawyer for my wife.

I had some good advice from Minnesota legal friends, "find an old lawyer with a private practice near the county court house," but after calling a dozen Wichita Falls lawyers and getting a callback from only one in the week we were in Texas, I settled for a young guy "with a private practice near the county court house." He's been ok, but passive and mostly acts as a conduit for information between my wife and her step-siblings.

A few weeks after coming back home, I realized that a straight-forward simple question would have extracted everything I needed to know about a Texas lawyer, "Are you Republican or Democrat?" From Minnesota, that might seem irrelevant, but in Texas it would explain a lot and fast. Texas Republicans are as common as fire ants and about as useful. Years of Karl Rove, G.W. Bush, and Rick Perry and the kind of carpetbagging and corporate-ass-kissing that produced those vicious scumbags has polarized Texas into assholes and people who surrounded by assholes and are either trying to put their shit together so they can escape Asshole Land or who are making a last stand to remind the inbred morons that Texas used to be a place that produced liberal or progressive politicians like Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, Senator Ralph Yarborough, Governor Ann Richards, and big-balled characters like Jim Hightower. There are a few progressive Texans left, but they are overwhelmingly in the minority.

Finally, I come to my point. When you are looking for a lawyer, you want someone who will stand up for you in the face of overwhelming odds. Obviously, that won't be a Texas Republican. So, the first step in the decision process has to be finding someone who is independent, courageous, and willing to piss into the winds of a grossly corrupt political and legal system; a Texas Democrat.