Have you ever pondered how is it you can be confident your car insurance or your fire insurance or your health insurance will be there if you need it? The answer is simple: government regulation and a network of oversight agencies which audit insurance companies for compliance. If a company is not in compliance, it cannot sell insurance. In the event a particular company goes belly up, there is a super fund maintained by all member insurance companies to pay claims for that defunct firm. Thus secured loans are much cheaper, risk is managed, and consumers benefit along with everyone else.

But Teaparty Republicans and conservative libertarians have a better idea: magic! The magical free market will eliminate those companies that can’t pay claims because they won’t have customers. True, if an insurance company went around saying, “By the way, we plan on going bankrupt in 2008,” the free market approach would work great. The reality is quite the opposite, companies will smoothly assure customers and reporters everything is fine — right up until the day the company’s stock opens at zero.

Perhaps the Teaparty truly believes the average US consumer is capable of performing their own research on insurance companies and predicting the safe ones? Good fucking luck with that! Broker-dealers and rating agencies pay analysts big bucks to follow specific companies and issue recommendations for various stocks and bonds based on those findings. Even with decades of experience, the benefit of required disclosure for publicly traded companies, and advanced degrees from the best universities in the world, insurance analysts failed to predict which financial services companies would survive the mortgage meltdown of 2008 — in fact analysts as a group failed to predict when or if the meltdown would even happen. The idea that a young art teacher or a retired policeman would do better by orders of magnitude is utterly ludicrous.

Our entire capitalist system rests on a foundation of regulations and agencies empowered to enforce them. Without it there wouldn’t even be an insurance industry. The same applies to virtually every other modern industry whether it’s banking or farming or underwater basket weaving. The irony here is conservative billionaires are trying to destroy the system makes them billionaires by funding conservative groups and keeping them ignorant, the most recent incarnation being the Teaparty. That the conservative grass-roots is blissfully unaware of the part they play in smashing that wrecking ball into the nation is evidence of how powerful and dangerous a well managed campaign of ignorance can be.

An article by National Public Radio flips over some slimy rocks in Rick Perry country and finds the usual slithering political critters:

In his career as governor of Texas, a state where millionaires are plentiful and contribution limits are lax, Perry has raised about half his campaign cash from just 204 big donors, according to an analysis by the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice. And his administration has helped many of those donors, even when it comes to disposing of radioactive waste.

Guys like Simmons have been polluting politics as long as they’ve been messing with Texas. He was the biggest financial backer of Karl Rove’s Swift Boaters against John Kerry in 2004. True to hypocritical form he’s also the grateful beneficiary of the very government spending used to whip the wingnut foot soldiers into a frenzy. In 2003 a site owned by Simmons — located right next to a critical aquifer in West Texas — became the final resting place for radioactive waste produced all over the nation when the once public disposal program was privatized. And Simmons is happy to use his family to fuel his schemes. The New York Times reported that in 1993 that Simmons was found guilty and fined for using trust funds set up for his daughters’ to funnel illegal campaign contributions to conservative politicians.

Harold Simmons is a textbook example of Rick Perry’s pay-to-play political style alright. On the national stage that kind of unsavory association shouldn’t reflect well on anyone, especially someone running for President of the United States. But as long as Perry isn’t “palling around” with a college professor that may have said something radical back in the 60s, don’t expect to learn more about Simmons or any of Perry’s other crony donors watching Fox News or listening to Boss Limbaugh.

All through my recent medical odyssey one thing kept coming through loud and clear: I was damn glad I had comprehensive health insurance benefits. Without it I would now owe the doctors and hospitals something like $50,000 and that’s assuming I got the same level of care, and the same deeply discounted rates large insurance companies pay for medical services.  

In the Republican presidential debate this week, Wolf Blitzer posed a hypothetical question to Dr. Ron Paul. If someone chooses not to have health insurance and gets badly injured, who should pay for it? Dr. Paul answered in part, “What he should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself, … That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risk. This whole idea that you have to compare and take care of everybody…” ” Blitzer then asked if we should just “let the person die?” Several in the audience screamed out “YES!”.

Here’s a question: How about those of us who have paid for health insurance? Should we be allowed to “just die”?

I ask because it happens that, in addition to the employer-sponsored insurance that probably saved my life this week, I have been paying premiums into another comprehensive plan that is statistically likely to save my life many times over in the years ahead. I started paying in 35 years ago, when I was 14 years-old, and because I’ve paid in so faithfully for so long, I could collect now if unable to work. But odds are I’ll stay healthy and pay in many thousands of dollars more between now and the day I start using the insurance. After what happened last week, especially in the light of the Republican just-let-em-die attitude, it feels good knowing I’m paid up and covered. 

That medical insurance plan is called Medicare. And what’s alarming is many of those same right-wing libertarians, who insist paying for insurance be a prerequisite for getting treatment, are hell bent on taking away my bought and paid for Medicare insurance, after I have covered my part of the bargain for more than three decades.

It’s ugly that some Teaparty wingnuts are so proud of letting the uninsured “just die” that they’ll shout it out in public — what impressive Christian family values they have! But those sickos are eclipsed by a second brand of Teaparty clowns so vile, so evil, so perversely twisted that they’re fine with letting people like me who have paid for medical insurance “just die.”

OK, there probably were no rumors. But I did feel close to death over the last few days, and for a while there I would have welcomed the Grim Reaper. On this last post on Saturday afternoon I had just been back from the ER after treatment for a fracture between the right floating rib and a lower vertebrae. I thought the worst of the ordeal was over then. W-R-O-N-G.

Just a couple of hours after that post, breathing became very difficult. Which was one of the signs the ER staff had warned me about. So, back to the local ER, back through a CAT scan machine, and by the time they had read the new data I was writhing in agony despite more than a milligram of Dilaudid. I remember the painful main events of being put on a cold, hard gurney locked in the back of an ambulance, then riding with the lights and sirens going full blast. I recall being wheeled in to another, larger ER and having my clothes cut off while a team worked on me. After that it gets hazy for a couple of days.

But one strange experience I wish could be forgotten: I was delirious with pain, sobbing like a little kid as an ER nurse was swabbing down my back with antiseptic for a chest tube procedure. I was begging her to give me more painkiller, knock me unconscious, induce a coma, or just kill me. It was that bad (I’m just astonished at how much pain the human body can produce, intelligent design my ass). And then a freaky thing happened then. She put her hand on my shoulder and said “Jesus HEAL this man.” And then crossed her self or whatever they do.

The reason that was horrifying was in part because it didn’t do a damn bit of good, no surprise there. But also because it hit me: there I was, surrounded by enough drugs to knock down a herd of charging elephants at the nexxus of all the medical technology a level 1 trauma center can offer, and the best immediate option that poor gal had on hand to shut me up was amateur faith healing. A cynical little smile managed to part my bone dry lips for a split second, before the grimacing took over again.

Later I found out the lung had almost totally collapsed and some other, savage complications were starting to crop up. It’s probably a  good thing I decided to head in and get it checked out. Hopefully, the worst really is over now and things will get back to normal around here.

Ten years ago this morning? We all remember. It seems so long ago, and yet paradoxically it feels like yesterday. Hard to believe that in 2016, there will be people voting for a President who do not remember 9-11. Because of the location and scope of the buildings it was intensely personal for the rest of us, something we’ll surely never forget. 

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in my local office, one branch of hundreds for a large Wall Street firm that leased over a million square feet in 2 World Trade Center, also known as the south tower. That building was our corporate headquarters. I knew it well, I’ll always remember it as it once was, two silver towers sprouting out of the tangle of lower Manhattan. In 1991, as part of my initial training, I had spent a month living in what was then called the Vista Hotel in between the two towers. By 2001 I knew hundreds of fellow employees who worked in the second tower. It was lucky for most of them that the first plane hit the other building and hit high.

That wasn’t the only stroke of luck. Back in 1993, when powerful explosions rocked the basement of the south tower, my new junior partner was finishing up the last day of his month-long training in the worst place possible, eating lunch at the Windows on the World restaurant at the tippy top. He and everyone else with him got out safely from the 107th floor that day. They had walked down a hundred flights of stairs, with cloth napkins held over their mouths. Later he told me it took over an hour to get down, with his hand stretched out touching the shoulder of the person in front for guidance, step, wait, then step again, in the dim emergency lights as smoke hung thicker with every floor.

In a way that earlier terrorist strike would be a life saver. As a direct result all companies with offices inside the buildings, both the South and North Tower developed and drilled on evacuating the massive structures. As my coworkers sat silent in our local office on Sep 11, we each hoped, and soon learned, that those drills initiated in 1993 would indeed save thousands of lives in 2001. Estimates of the loss of life in the towers alone ranged as high as 25,000 people. Due in large part to the preparations made after the 1993 attack, less than a tenth of that would perish. It will never seem like a miracle to the friends and family of those who fell, but a miracle it was: in less than one-hour tens of thousands would walk to safety, among them dozens of personal friends of mine who got out with minutes to spare.

When the second plane burned in, to our building, that’s when it crystalized, that’s when we all knew this was an attack. One veteran broker, an ex-military officer, turned and said “That looks like Osama bin Laden.” I had heard of the name, knew vaguely he was some sort of terrorist asshole hell-bent on killing Americans. I remembered a TV news magazine piece, perhaps 60 Minutes, where a terrorist expert had mentioned rumors that terrorists had considered hitting the World Trade Centers with hijacked airplanes. It seemed obvious now that those schemes had come to fruition.

Then it happened. The second tower to get hit would be the first to topple. The shock of what we were watching transformed from horror to apocalyptic. The scene of utter destruction, which is now etched into the national psyche like a diamond lithograph in hard glass.

Looking back on the whole horrible decade that followed, with the rare successes and serial blunders that ensued, I must confess, the one thing that gives me some grim satisfaction is the thought that Osama bin Laden was shot down by US Navy SEALS in the middle the night, in his own bedroom tucked away safely, he believed, in a yuppie military suburb of Pakistan. Call me shallow, call me vindictive. But as events unfold this anniversery, there is a new, final element in the tragedy that wasn’t there in years past. The thought of the terror in bin Laden’s eyes is my sole source of comfort when reflecting on that terrible dark day that changed America forever.

 

… for not posting today. Yesterday morning I was wakeboarding with some friends on a gorgeous, empty lake, planted the nose on a 180 like a noob, and planted my face into the water an instant later. It happened so fast there wasn’t time to blink. any wake-boarder has done their share of face-plants, eye baths, etc., and I’m no different, gallons of water have been pasted on my face. But this particular fall was different.

By a freakish accident of physics the fall was unusually symmetrical, and instead of partly slicing into the water with one shoulder or another, the perfect belly-buster hyper-extended my back violently for a split second and SNAP, I felt something give in my lower spine.  I didn’t know what had happened for sure at the time, but it seemed prudent to assume the worst. Later I learned the bottom right rib cracked where it articulates with the spine at the lumbar-thoracic symphysis, plus tore some muscles including part of the diaphragm.

It knocked the breath clean out of me and for an instant I saw jagged shooting-stars. Right away even before surfacing, I carefully wiggled my fingers and toes, feet and hands, fortunately there was no tingling or numbness. I remember floating there face-down in agony and thinking, of all things, I have really good insurance. It’s a real-world nasty observation on the US healthcare system that that’s what came to mind. But getting back into the boat and then crawling up a very long flight of stairs chased that comforting thought away with intense pain. I thought that would be the worst part, that after getting up away from the lake and into a comfy car seat the rest would be downhill.

Wrong! The one hour drive to the emergency room was the longest one hour of my life. It was like a string of red-hot coals were shoved deep inside the lower flank. Breathing became progressively more difficult.

Because another thing I didn’t know at the time was my chest was filling up with blood and the lung was collapsing. By the time I managed to get checked in, get a CAT scan and X-rays, and have them read, there was half a liter of fluid between my right lung and the pleura. At which point the ER staff at the smaller facility did call an ambulance and whisked me off to the trauma center at Brackenridge hospital in downtown Austin (Where the nickname for myc ase quickly became “The Wakeboarder,” which I was kinda proud of). By then it was clear there was no damage to the spinal canal, plus I was chock full of Dilaudid, so I wasn’t nearly as worried about permanent injury. But even with IV narcotics coursing through the veins it hurt so bad I kept hoping I would just pass out.

One cool thing, they gave me the CD ROM of the CAT scan, so as soon as I can figure out how to get it on video it will be posted and any of you medical guys and gals can have a look. In the meantime, even with 20 mg of Oxycontin in me, it hurts like a mother fucker. Posting may be light for the next day or two.

My friend Sheril Kirshenbaum has a newish blog, Culture of Science, and she captured this exchange from the GOP debate:

HARRIS to HUNTSMAN: You yourself have said the party is in danger of becoming anti- science. Who on this stage is anti-science?

HUNTSMAN: Listen, when you make comments that fly in the face of what 98 out of 100 climate scientists have said, when you call into question the science of evolution, all I’m saying is that, in order for the Republican Party to win, we can’t run from science. We can’t run from mainstream conservative philosophy. We’ve got to win voters.

A better answer would have been, they’re all antiscience, by necessity. Mittens of Romney perhaps less so at one time, but now he’s got to chase the crazy vote like everyone else, and Tricky Rick Perry is giving him a run for the money. It’s rapidly becoming a sort of cold war of crazy to see who can sounds the nuttiest.

The other day I overheard a couple of people joking about who was crazier, Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry. The answer of course is neither, they’re just cynical. But some of the voters they’re going after are indeed crazy and it’s not easy to say which group wins the contest. It’s like trying to choose between a half-naked gibbering lunatic standing on the street corner screaming at the sky or a quiet loner scanning cereal boxes at the grocery store for secret messages. They’re both nuts in their own way.

The James Webb Telescope is an ambitious piece of space engineering which could greatly extend our understanding of the cosmos. In the current budgetary environment of slash and burn, it’s also a financial black hole threatening other valuable science missions at NASA. Now, a group of high-profile space scientists and engineers have published a letter saying so:

When JWST was ranked as the top major initiative for NASA astrophysics in the 2001 NRC Astronomy Decadal Survey, it was estimated to cost $1B and launch by 2011. NASA has now spent $3.5B on JWST and it is now projected to cost a minimum of $8.7B for a launch no earlier than late 2018. As a result, JWST’s cost increases have outstripped the resources of the NASA Science Mission Directorate’s Astrophysics Division, and NASA leadership has now declared JWST an “agency priority.” Resources of other NASA programs, including the Agency’s Planetary Sciences Division within the Science Mission Directorate, are now threatened to cover current and future JWST cost overruns.

There are people high up in NASA who are behind the JWST no matter what the cost for one primary reason: public relations. The Hubble Space Telescope was more than a smashing scientific success, once the focusing issue was fixed, it was a public relations bonanza. Ask anyone to name a telescope at random and odds are good they’ll say Hubble.

Understandably, NASA planners see the JWST as the next big thing that will appeal to the masses. And there’s nothing wrong with that, NASA is funded by politicians making it a political agency in part which has to fight for every scrap like any other bureaucracy. But without significantly more funding, the JWST could easily swallow entire NASA departments, a dozen promising missions to other planets and moons would have to be put on hold indefinitely or scrapped altogether. If we as a nation want this device, we as a nation will have to pay for it.

While the neo-clowns position and parry like a swarm of sharks high on chum fumes, President Obama unveiled an ambitious jobs program in front of a joint session of congress last night:

He used a 33-minute address to describe a collection of tax cuts, subsidies, government benefits and incentives that he said would help to grow the economy, bolster the recovery and create jobs. At times he talked tough to Congress. At times he cajoled. And at times he ridiculed. “The question is whether, in the face of an ongoing national crisis, we can stop the political circus and actually do something to help the economy,” the president said. He is calling his proposal, simply, the American Jobs Act. With the unemployment rate lodged for a 2nd month at 9.1%, and with job gains zeroed out by job losses in August, Mr. Obama called this “an urgent time for our country.”

I haven’t read the proposal yet, but the $450 billion plan reportedly includes tax incentives for hiring new workers, a payroll tax holiday for the middle-class, and loads of infrastructure spending.

It’s too early to say for sure, but so far Republicans seem split over the idea, similar to their split between jostling front-runners for the GOP presidential nomination Mittens and Tricky Rick. They’ll probably have to wait until Boss Limbaugh and Granny Fox weigh in on which way they should go.

Multiple news sources are reporting the bankrupt solar energy company Solyndra has been subject to a comprehensive search by federal officials:

Two days after the now-defunct, high-profile solar company filed for bankruptcy protection, federal agents swarmed around Solyndra’s campus in Fremont to execute a search warrant and interview laid-off employees. Dozens of FBI agents and investigators from the Department of Energy Office of the Inspector General descended on the four buildings along Kato Road and Page Avenue, which run alongside Interstate 880 as early as 7 a.m.

Despite receiving half a billion in low interest federal loans, the firm closed its doors abruptly last week and sent over a thousand employees home with no explanation or severance pay.
But I’ll wager a guess what happened: the same kind of usual scumbags who ripped off the banking sector for billions got inside this company and promptly worked their magic there too. The bankstas who wrecked the US economy got off scot free, hopefully these crooks will be caught and locked up for life.