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Don’t Use The ‘Free Market’ As An Excuse

March 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Illustration courtesy of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

This week, AT&T announced its plans to buy their competitor T-Mobile. Now it’s up to regulators to approve the merger.

Politicians pandering to the Tea Party love to talk about a free market. It sounds sexy. It sounds like wealth and freedom got married and had a perfect concept. If capitalism is a religion – free market is the savior. This free market will punish bad behavior and reward virtue. The free market knows all and endows accordingly. We don’t need to worry because the free market will figure it all out.

What is never mentioned when propping up the immaculate free market is the defining characteristic of the idea – honesty. It’s transparency and allowing shareholders and consumers access to real information, good or bad. A free market is essentially crowdsourcing or democratizing business. And you can’t make informed decisions without accurate information. That’s a tenet lawmakers and business tycoons tend to glaze over when touting their “principles.”

Deregulation is also a tenet of free market economics – it’s keeping the government out of business. Deregulation has proven to be much more popular than its “honesty” counterpart.

And if the word “deregulation” brings to mind Gulf seagulls suffocating in crude oil and rows of tract homes in foreclosure, then you have the gist of it. The housing bust crashing on bundles of what became toxic assets was not technically the “free market.” It was a horribly mutated half-breed hybrid of the venerated free market.

And the free market can fix it just like Sasquatch can fix it. Meaning: they can’t. Because no matter how much they’re talked about neither exist.

The housing crash was a semi-legal, giant and complex Ponzi scheme. Yes, the Ponzi scheme, named after 19th century-born fraudster Charles Ponzi who fittingly didn’t use the name Ponzi while doing his namesake scheme.

The truth is we don’t have a “free market.” Never have and probably never will. So when politicians like representatives Paul Ryan and Michele Bachmann talk about how this savior-in-theory can deliver us – it can’t. Using this super sexy sounding concept of “the free market” is exactly what got us demonstrably bad policy. Just like the inadequate regulation and insufficient honesty, which caused our current gigantic recession.

The debate over regulations is always “less vs. more.” Instead, how about better regulations and more of those?

So AT&T, a huge cell phone provider, wants to become even bigger. The first thing you need to know is, according to OpenSecrets.org, AT&T is the number two “heavy hitter” of the last 20 years. The company has given to both parties a total of $46,292,670. The top single recipient was Speaker of the House John Boehner – a politician who loves talking about the illusory free market, occasionally with a dry eye. Second, AT&T was already broken up after an anti-trust case in the 1980s. AT&T regrouped and started growing bigger in 2005.

In the next 12 months there will be debate over whether regulators should allow this giant merger. One of the arguments for the merger will be: “This is the free market at work.” How rewarding a giant company for being a giant is a good thing and the government (i.e., the people who’ve been receiving campaign donations from said giant company) should stay out of it. It’s akin to saying we should feed horses what we feed unicorns – because look how great unicorns are.

The bottom line is: Lack of competition hurts consumers. The cell phone companies are already unique in that if their service is awful (as an iPhone user I can testify that with AT&T there’s no “if”) – you have to PAY to leave them. It’s like if a restaurant gave you food poisoning, and you had to pay them $200 to let you stop eating there. Congress could have outlawed this practice – but they didn’t.

Already, all cell phone companies except T-Mobile were compliant in George W. Bush’s NSA warrantless wiretapping – so much for the government staying out of business.

Now if regulators approve of this purchase, a company which already doesn’t have to work that hard for our business will have to work even less. While this is great for AT&T – it’s not great for us. AT&T should not be allowed to buy T-Mobile.

And politicians shouldn’t be allowed to say this anti-competition, secret, virtual monopoly is somehow their mythical “free market.”

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Business Casual for Blind Justice

March 9, 2011 By 1 Comment

I consider myself to be a decent citizen. I vote. I recycle. I don’t litter. I yield to most pedestrian traffic.

But when I received notice I was selected for jury service, I did what every red-blooded American does – I wondered if I should pretend it got lost in the mail.

“Notice? What notice? I’ve never seen any notice. Maybe this notice you speak of, maybe it had a little …accident?”

The draft has been gone for over 30 years. Today if you’re like me, you consider “compulsory service” to be putting down a book to listen to a flight attendant go over the safety announcements.

Plus, I suspected the phrase “No good deed ever goes unpunished,” was written by a juror. But that still didn’t stop me. No proverb was going to deter me. This was my chance to participate in a justice system of the people, by the people, for the people. I didn’t even ask for a deferment. I was going against my instincts.

I was stepping up to my civic duty enthusiastically…even if it was 7:30 AM…across town…during road construction. No prob.

The notice stated jurors should dress “business casual.” I’ve always considered business casual to be something ironed worn with uncomfortable shoes. Maybe it depends on your vocation. From the looks of some of the other jurors plodding along the halls of the courthouse their “business” was either a Crocs model, a lifeguard or an adult industry professional.

It’s justice who’s blind…as for the rest of us – we see you!

It was like their outfits were trying to increase their chances of being dismissed. “You’re looking for someone who is impartial and has common sense. As you can see from my corduroy cut offs and Megadeth t-shirt – clearly that’s not me.”

I felt like some dingbat on a reality show who just realized the other housemates have a STRATEGY!

When we reported for jury service, we were asked to sit in a large waiting room. We were given our badges. We were asked to fill out paperwork and turn it in. Then they called out a list of everyone who filled out their paperwork wrong or incomplete. Out of 80 people, about a third weren’t able to fill out the paperwork on the first try. No butterfly ballots or anything. Just a straightforward – fill in the bubble and sign here questionnaire of eligibility. At first I thought this was a good argument against the death penalty – obviously these folks shouldn’t be able to dole out any punishment you can’t go back and correct later. But afterwards, I think it was another attempt – feeble of course – to get out of serving. “If I don’t know my zip code, how am I gonna know ‘reasonable doubt?’”

But there I was: dressed appropriately, on time, paperwork correctly completed in black ink. Just a sitting duck, vulnerable with no exit strategy. I felt like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. Not even a Koch brother could save me.

We were told to wait for our names to be called. I read a couple of magazines. More names were called. I scrolled Twitter. More names were called. I played iPhone Scrabble and listened to the kvetching of the others without a strategy. You’d think they had been forced to stack marbles in Siberia by the whining. Hours went by. My name was never called. Finally at four in the afternoon, the announcement was made – I had fulfilled my duty and could go home. That was it. I was done.

Maybe I was over qualified. Maybe it’s random. Maybe I should be happy about it.

I literally sat around, did nothing and it was performing my civic duty. It made me feel like a member of Congress.

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Government Workers are the New Illegal Aliens?

January 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Did you know the government can’t create jobs? Nearly two years ago on CNN, former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said, “Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created jobs.” And then, “Trust me.”

When Steele said those words, he was widely panned. It was dismissed on the right as a gaffe and debunked on the left as grossly inaccurate.

It was laughable…when Steele said it.

Cut to: Meet the Press last Sunday. CNBC‘s Squawk on the Street host Erin Burnett said, “Government can’t create jobs.” It was left unchallenged by any of the other panelists and host David Gregory.

Karen Hughes, who worked in the Bush administration (her government j-o-b) added, “Well…the president seems to have had a revelation that it’s actually business that creates jobs.”

Then to top it all off the Democratic Congressman James Clyburn – agreed. “No, we can’t create jobs, and we shouldn’t. We want them created in the private sector. “

Over 16.5% of Americans are employed by the government, about 22 million of the 135 million payroll jobs. And they’re not just pencil-pushing, useless cushy benefit collectors – but scientists. There are no private sector astronauts. None. Firefighters are government employees, as are police. “More cops on the streets” means more government trained and compensated people in your community. The district attorneys, judges and bailiffs draw an Uncle Sam signed paycheck. The government? Law and order.

The second largest employer in the country is the United States Postal Service. Try telling the lady raising her family by delivering your overdue notices that the government can’t create jobs.

According to the Department of Labor, the private sector has been steadily adding jobs and the PUBLIC sector has been cutting jobs at the fastest rate in 30 years. Especially local government jobs: teachers, sanitation workers and librarians.

So the government does, in fact, create jobs. It also slashes them. Cities and states have been balancing their budgets by cutting back on everything. Most infamously Camden, New Jersey is eliminating half of their police force.

To those who work for a living, a job is a job. To those who sloganeer for a living, cutting jobs means magically creating them.

It seems government workers are the new illegal immigrants. They are the new group who are treated like parasites on the system; their jobs are illegitimate and disposable. Lawmakers gleefully talk about eliminating government employees’ livelihoods. The rhetoric would have us believe those aren’t even jobs.

It’s not the banksters and hucksters on Wall Street who wrecked our economy. No, now they’re the only ones who can save us! It’s not a general revenue slow down tied to a collapse after the Saturnalia of liar loans and real estate cheats. It’s those comfortable public servants who are bleeding us dry!

We’re told we’re bankrupt because of well-paid government employees with “Cadillac health insurance plans.” Yes, we still refer to posh things as an American made car from a company, GM, which the U.S. government saved and made profitable again.

So everyone who makes an actual Cadillac can thank the government for their job.

Out of our $3.5 trillion annual budget we dole out around $1.5 trillions on “defense” spending. It really should be considered “offense” spending these days, but I digress. There are some accounting tricks with mandatory and discretionary spending. But added up: it’s $1.5 trillion.

What is the military? Jobs. Careers too. Plus a retirement plan and socialized medicine. It’s a jobs program the government created. It’s also a big wasteful unaccountable sieve for tax dollars. If the GOP-controlled House is really looking to weed out pork (which they arguably are not) they would check out the bacon haven we call the Pentagon.

But, better to stick with the empty and symbolic than tackle the difficult.

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Has the American Dream Drifted North?

January 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Imagine a handsome young family complete with kids living in a stylish two-story home in a quiet neighborhood. The parents work quiet middle-class jobs. Dad is a city bus driver. Mom is a secretary. Their house is brimming with consumer goods: a couple of mammoth-sized televisions, a drum set for the kids and high-end furniture. Mom’s closet is bursting with her ample wardrobe. Dad has a motorcycle. Combined they make just under $90,000 a year.

They are being featured on a show running on CNBC, now in its ninth season called Til Debt Do We Part. And like most people on television shows, they have a problem and they need to go on television to fix it. Apparently Mom and Dad have been heavy-handed with their credit cards. They owe $60,000. The matronly host Gail Vaz-Oxlade gently lays down the law: They have to live within their means. Pay down credit cards. Pay into a savings account. Save for their children’s education. The message this self-proclaimed Dollar Diva has for the couple is they are drifting apart and debt is the culprit.

Gail puts up on the screen the family’s budget, what they spend on whatnot a month. Their housing expenses for their posh suburban home are a reasonable sum. Their transportation costs are relatively low. Dad has to sell the motorcycle. Mom has to spend less on clothes. The parents need to spend more time with each other. All problems are then solved.

While watching this program I was amazed at the lack of grit for a reality show. This is no Hoarders airing dirty laundry and years worth of neglect and filth. This is a couple with a standard of living far better than any I’ve ever seen for what they do for a living. It’s like they’re Alice and I’m the one Through the Looking Glass.

Then Gail handed the couple a wad of bills to illustrate they were going to be paying for things in cash from now on. The money? Canadian. These are Canadians. Their budget is manageable for one because they’ve chosen to not buy supplemental insurance and rely on the government to provide all of their health care.

This couple and most of the couples on the show don’t pay for health care out of their family budgets. The average family in America spends around $15,000 a year or around 22% of their income on health care. That amount will apparently pay most of a mortgage on an enviable home in the greater Toronto area.

Most notable, the show doesn’t delve into any sob stories about getting diseases and therefore having debt. There are no staples of the only-in-America saga of losing your health, then your health care and then your house (there’s a fix to this in the Affordable Care Act AKA Obamacare that has yet to go into effect). The debt is all from spending money on things they want. Simply because they want them. Which makes these spendthrift Canadians seem more American than Americans.

It’s the way Americans want to see ourselves; careless, reckless, Wild West, rogue spenders buying everything because we can. Buying is our birthright. It’s freedom. Freedom of a free market – which makes even a 33% APR sound liberating. Of course we’re more along the lines of Wal-Mart sharecroppers, completely at the mercy of colossal businesses with fewer choices and even less power muttering to ourselves that at least we aren’t slaves. It’s the land of the free. Someone told us so.

Are Canadians living the American Dream?

When did Canadians out Norman Rockwell us? From the perspective of my couch they seem to be living very well with the evils of socialism. Canada consistently outranks us in quality of care and that impacts our quality of life. They have lots of guns and low gun violence. Their banks didn’t cause a housing bust so their economy is comparatively doing fine.

Plus, call me paranoid, but I think they’re looking down on us.

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Arctic Turkey: My New Year’s Resolution

January 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The latest numbers show only 40% of Americans actually make New Year’s resolutions.

Sure, I did it once – five years ago this week I reluctantly quit smoking. If you listen to anecdotes about people who quit smoking, they always “smoked three packs a day.” I only smoked two. Two packs. Everyday since junior high. I was thin, grey and phlegmy. I’d get winded playing Scrabble.

But I liked smoking. I had romanticized smoking. A cigarette was my steady companion. I didn’t see smoking as a vice – I saw it as an extension of my personality. If you knew me you knew a cloud of tobacco exhaust was my wingman.

People come and go. Pets die. Cars die. Years go by. But smoking cigarettes was my constant. Besides, I was so precocious when it came to nicotine, I had been a smoker the majority of my life. I couldn’t imagine anything different.

The end came shortly after I drove cross-country. At a truck stop in Arizona I wasn’t allowed to smoke inside the restaurant. Yes, truckers, who as part of their vocation are known to urinate in soda bottles and toss them onto the side of America’s highways, were collectively stating, “Smoking offends us.” Government ordinance after ballot initiative interrupted my smoking pleasure. Being a smoker these days is agreeing to be quarantined from the general smelling population. My “friend” was making me a pariah.

So five years ago for New Years…I quit. How did I quit? Arctic turkey. I simply didn’t smoke. I watched the clock and eventually it added up to time away from nicotine. People who have never smoked think this is the moment of triumph: time without smoking. But I can’t even remember my first three months of not smoking. I know afterwards I had fewer friends. I know I started a dark anonymous blog about every neurotic incongruous fear which popped up. (One was being afraid I’d start to like neutral colors. Another was being afraid I’d become a “morning person.”) I do remember I couldn’t sleep and drank bedtime tea all day long.

A side effect I didn’t expect was a yearning for schmaltz. I had a sudden appetite for all things “inspirational.” I’d secretly read websites about life transformations. The more maudlin the better. I’d watch shows like BBC’s You Are What You Eat and NBC’s Biggest Loser to get some joy out of seeing others struggle, too. And I’d cry. I went from heavy smoking to heavy sobbing.

It was horrible.

Before I quit smoking I had never been inside a gym. I never had a reason to go. But now I had to DO something. So I went to a gym with a guest pass and then swiftly fell off the treadmill. I stopped walking. The treadmill didn’t. Treadmill won. I was on the floor. I got up. Got back on. Stayed on. I ran my first marathon when I was 13 months off-cigarettes.

People warned me about lung cancer, emphysema and my teeth falling out, but no one cautioned me that quitting would turn me into a sap-craving below-average athlete. By my second marathon I discovered I do my best work in the morning and had acquired a beige couch. Pretty much all my fears manifested.

On the plus side, all the money I spent on cigarettes was just enough to purchase health insurance -which has come in handy for all my new sports injuries.

There were plenty of lowlights in 2010, but I would like to relay a high point: Rescued Chilean miner, Edison Peña participated in the 2010 New York Marathon. After the cave in, while trapped half a mile underground Peña ran up to six miles every day in the dark in 90 degree heat.

When asked why he did such a thing he said, “I wanted god to see that I really wanted to live.”

Which is the definitive mantra for personal resolve. But really, it’s perhaps the most articulate thing ever said about self-imposed exercise.

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