Heres an interesting but not surprising article in NYT today on healthcare pricing.

“There’s very little transparency out there about what doctors and hospitals are charging for services,” Mr. Zirkelbach said. “Much of the public policy focus has been on health insurance premiums and has largely ignored what hospitals and doctors are charging.”

A lie is not the opposite of the truth, there being no clear standard for truth. To lie is simply to report information that is intended to deceive.

In the health care business everyone knows that prices do not reflect actual costs. They are merely a starting point for negotiations with high-stakes players like insurance companies, governments and large groups who pool their costs. Pity the individual not included among such bloc negotiators, who must pay directly and through ever-increasing levies based upon deceptive pricing.

What’s interesting about this is that our entire socio-economic system is based on lying, not just health care.

Consider the Mafioso accountant who keeps two sets of books. One set of books is a pack of lies and the other the “true” accounting. But since the “true” accounting relies on numbers produced by others who also keep two sets of books, the hidden set of books is just another pack of lies as well.

Since everyone involved in transactions seeks to gain an edge over others the information we report to one another is always skewed in deceptive ways. Since EVERYONE is playing the same game, the net effect is that NOBODY KNOWS. Nobody can possibly know what it really costs to achieve any desired end and we are hopelessly lost and off to the Milky Way.

Deming’s idea about win-win–everybody wins–is the only way to exit the kingdom of lies. Once we adopt a moral stance that our interests are always mutual in a very PRACTICAL sense, then we strive to share information in a manner that is, to the best of our ability, mutually advantageous. In other words, we seek to construct and participate in a shared information space rather than in multiple individuated universes.

In her New York Review of Books article, “Obama and the Myth of Arm-Twisting,” Elizabeth Drew correctly explains that those who have been criticizing President Obama’s  lack of political persuasive skills fail to understand that we are at a point in America’s history in which the arts and sciences of persuasion don’t work.

This is not the first time!

Have you seen the movie “Lincoln” yet? If not, you should! It’s very good!

It portrays Lincoln as a skillful convincer and sometimes coniving and ruthless master of political maneuver. Interestingly, I think Lincoln was fighting battles in the political arena in a war that persists today. But here’s the rub. For Lincoln, those with whom he most disagreed were excluded from the voting, having succeeded from the United States. So Lincoln only had to convince those who were–more or less and close enough–already on his side. Obama has no such luxury. The enemy who so vehemently eschews human rights in favor of property rights is on the inside.

In conflicts involving matters of fundamental belief, moral vision, a theory of nationhood, and deeply entrenched economic “ways of doing,” there’s little room for compromise. Who will prevail in such situations must be determined on the battle fields of WAR–call it what you will–and the fact is that wheeling, dealing and arm twisting will never do the trick. It always comes down to stronger measures, as the former events of this war we are still fighting, called the American “Civil War”, so amply demonstrated.

Regrettably, with the DOW near 15000, it looks today as if Capitalism is going strong. My sense is that, for now at least, the side that favors property rights (wealth) over human rights is winning the struggle for American hearts and minds,

The other evening at dinner a friend asked me if my prognosis for our economic system meant that I was actually hoping for bad news. He wondered how anyone could actually think bad news could be good.

The title of my recent post, “See You at the Barricades“, was my way of saying, only partially in jest, that my confidence is waning in our ability as a people to use reasonableness and persuasion as a means to turn the tide away from the unbridled profiteering that is fast despoiling our planet and polarizing our nation socially, economically and politically.

It seems to me that the big winners in the game of Capitalism, few though they are, have acquired so much power and influence that they are able to call all the shots. Nothing’s exempted: government, schools, scientific research, work and play. Every aspect of our daily lives is tainted with their propaganda that says we live in world in which it’s every man for himself and the best, namely themselves, naturally win.

The obvious fact, as history demonstrates, is that the winners of games like this will do all in their power–literally anything it takes–to stay the course that preserves and enhances their situation. They will never take actions in the interest of the planet or others, if they see those actions as threatening their wealth, power and influence. Indeed, human history itself throughout the ages is the story of small groups of winners doing anything it takes to preserve their privilege and losers who have had enough, trying to rectify injustices foisted upon them by the winners.

A nation is only a Nation when everyone experiences themselves as part of a whole that is pulling together to make a better word. For everyone! If what I am saying about history–specifically, American history–is correct, then there should be some actual numbers to that give credence to my story.

Here’s a chart that seems to do just that.

The Gini Index is designed to express the relative economic wellbeing of the members of a society. The higher the Gini index the greater the disparity between a wealthy few and a less wealthy many. In peaceful, non-militaristic Nordic “socialist” nations like Norway (25) and Sweden (.25), the Gini index runs very low, while in the proverbial “banana republics of Central America, in which rebellions and brutal repression have abounded, the Gini indexes have been very high (.50+). A similar story applies to the nations currently embroiled in the so-called “Arab Spring.”

We could say, that nations with a low Gini index are nations of people pulling together. And nations with a high Gini index are nations that are in constant internal conflict–nations of people who are pulling apart.

Looking at the Gini Index for America before 1929, our index (.49) was as high and even higher than many Banana Republics. In other words, self-interested greed ruled the day and we were a nation that was pulling apart. When the pyramid of shame collapsed in 1929, our Gini Index declined (.39). We became more like a Nation with common purpose pulling together to put people to work building infrastructure, creating a social security system for the elderly, unionizing workers and regulating greedy financiers and oligarchs. We strived together to create a better world for everyone. And when WWII broke out there was a little blip-up as war profiteers gained ground, but still far and away, we as a Nation, pulled together.

On the heels of WWII, we were convinced, sometimes wrongly, that we were still at war, this time with the “Commies”. Also the legacy of our pulling together in the Depression and real war, kept us pulling together, though less and less. But gradually the pyramid of shame began reasserting itself itself –unions were busted, regulations eased, roads and bridges fell into disrepair and the ethos of every-man-for-himself greed was foisted upon us with redoubled effort–back to stage center.

Today our Gini Index number (.47)  is returning to Banana Republic status and if my explanation is correct, we are pulling apart again. Since it is unlikely that the winners in the game of greed will give up their positions of privilege willingly, the best hope we have for coming together again to confront the inevitable challenges that the future will bring, is bad news.

When it comes to using probabilities to commit people to years of imprisonment, and in some cases, death, it all comes down to the thorny question of the lesser of two evils: Are a few wrongful convictions an acceptable price to pay for exacting revenge and deterring future wrong-doing or is even one innocent life destroyed too high a price to pay?

Although absolute certainty is unachievable, it seems that our prosecutorial and punishment system has tended to favor of the former. Ambiguity and doubt are an anathema when it comes to fear, loathing and social control.

“Suffering and evil are nature’s admonitions; they cannot be got rid of; and the impatient efforts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation, before benevolence has learned their object and their end, have always been more productive of evil than good.”

Nature’s admonitions?

In a capitalist society a few people have obtained by means of hard work, good luck and connections, or through inheritance from family, the ownership and control of the means for producing wealth, called “capital”.  These Capitalists describe themselves as  ”job creators.” But most people, by far, are workers. They are the people employed by the job creators, and presumably paid a living wage for their time and labor.

So far so good.

Now suppose after many years of experience, study and careful consideration you, a worker, decide that a socialist society, one in which its one for all and all for one, would be an real improvement over a capitalist society in which it’s every man for himself?

In a free and democratic society, you are entitled to your opinion. More importantly, in a democracy you are expected to participate in the political process by which your government is constituted and run. You are expected to act in the role of a citizen. But if you give voice to your belief and lobby your fellows to adopt your carefully considered views, you will find yourself afoul of the capitalists and excluded from gainful employment.

Unless you are an academic, protected by the wisely conceived rules of tenure, that assure you the right to give voice to your views, or you are independently wealthy and have no need of employment as a means to earn a living wage, you don’t dare express your political ideas, much less exercise your democratic right to act in public ways, lest you alert those who hire and fire to your desire to undo their monopoly on wealth, power and influence.

This is the Catch 22 built into capitalist society. Although Capitalists say they believe in freedom and democracy, it is only they who are free to deny you the means to make a living. You, in turn, are free to hold whatever political belief you feel right but if you express your views publicly or act politically, you will make yourself unemployable by those who do the hiring and firing.

Freedom and democracy are impossible in a capitalist society because Capitalists are free to hire and fire whomever they like while wage earning workers are free to toe the Capitalist’s line or live their lives in destitution.

This film is quite good, though maybe a bit disjointed. The difficulty with stories like this is that the story tellers try to explain how Capitalism has gone wrong, but the real problem I have come to think, is that Capitalism is not a system that can ever be made right. It is, simply put, WRONG–wrong in its assertions about the nature of human relationships, interactions and motivations, as well as plain wrong in a moral sense. Capitalism is for Capitalists and not for the billions of commoditized human beings who are forced on pain of destitution to sell their labor for whatever they can get and are employed at the whim of the Capitalists who control the means for producing wealth and have the wealth to make the rules.

The weakest part of the film is the discussion of education. The idea that educating more people can fix Capitalism is pernicious nonsense. Educating every American, by whatever measures you want to apply, will not change the underlying dynamics of Capitalism. Left to their own devices, Capitalists’ pyramid of shame is self-reinforcing.

Unless you mean that by more educating more people that more will be able to see and understand that they are being gamed, and that the game is being rigged, in which case we might hope for sufficient numbers with the will to overthrow the Capitalist’s corrupt regime. Should that become the case, I’ll see you at the barricades with torch and pitchfork in hands.

Today’s headline in the NYT reads “Dow Average Surpasses Record High as Market Opens.”

The DOW is today, higher than it was before the Great Recession began in 2008, which is to say, that stocks are trading at prices higher today than they were when the U.S. economy was bubbled-up and ready to burst–KAPOW!

Isn’t it great to know that Capitalism works! It continues to make fewer and fewer people richer and more and more folks poor. It’s a surefire scorched-earth method for increasing wealth inequality at an ever increasing rate.

Imagine if you will, a huge casino to which millions of Americans who earn their keep by producing somethings of value, come to risk their hard earned money in a game of chance. They have been told again and again that earning a wage for labor is a game for saps and that the real winners in the game are those who are willing to take risks. The doors of opportunity open only to those willing to take a chance.

“Hurry up, hurry up, before the wheel is spun, place your bets. You can’t be a winner if you don’t play the game.”

But as is the case in all casinos, the odds always favor the house. Who is the house you ask? The house is the people with tons of money, the game-makers who are in a position to cover all bets.

When the wheel is spun–KAPOW!. There are always a few winners, but as with all games of chance, there are more losers. This must be so or there would be no game, and the difference between the many losers and few winners–the vig–gets pocketed by the house.

The players who are all played out–broke, indebted and out of work–are told to leave the keys to their cars and houses at the front desk on their way out door, never to be seen nor heard from again. The winners, now  flush with their gains, are encouraged to stay in the game. To the risk takers go the spoils, that’s the entrepreneurial spirit. Ante up folks!

Says one of the money managers it the NYT report, “I just don’t understand why people don’t want to play,” He means of course,  those who still have their car, house, a job and credit, should belly up to the table for the next spin of the wheel. KAPOW!

Meanwhile the house pockets the vig–basically a sure thing–no risk required.

This is how Capitalism “works”. It just keeps on doing what it does until the well runs dry. KABLOOEY! When and what happens then is anyone guess, but rest assured that the house will have hedged their bets, probably with pre-paid accommodations in gated communities with well armed guards.

According to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics for 2009 there are 254,212,610 registered passenger vehicles in the United States. It is generally agreed that the United States is a car culture in which virtually everyone owns or has access to a car, and uses at least one almost every day. Each of these vehicles is registered with the government and most oowner-operators are government licensed to operate their cars. In addition, most states require that operators of cars carry liability insurance.

The FBI estimates that there are over 200 million privately owned guns in the United States in the US, and if you add guns owned by the military, law enforcement  and others, the total comes to about 350 million. That’s about 1 gun for every man, woman and child in our great nation. Although it is rarely acknowledged, by the numbers of guns and gun related deaths and injuries, the United States is in fact, becoming as much a gun culture as a car culture.

The ongoing debate over gun ownership in the United States has turned to the idea that if we can’t limit gun ownership because of the SCOTUS interpretation of the Second Amendment, and we are therefore destined to be a gun-centric culture like it or not, then we should at least apply the same safeguards we use as a car-centric culture by requiring that guns and gun operators be government licensed and carry liability insurance. This, it is argued, will preserve citizen rights to self defense and help to prevent the situation in which only criminals have guns.

To many this solution, admittedly partial, seems reasonable, but let’s give it a bit more thought before we go off half-cocked.

Our car culture comes from our enthusiastic embrace of personal devices whose basic purpose, we agree, is transportation. Certainly other values intrude into our culture of cars, like status symbols, the pleasure of driving and possession of transportable personal space. We generally agree that it is wise to license and insure cars and drivers today because, with so many cars out and about, accidents happen.

But is a gun culture the same as a car culture?

Guns are not designed for transportation. They are designed to kill. And unless you rely on subsistence hunting, their principal application is killing people. Once the days of the anarchistic Wild West, where guns, the great “equalizers”, were instruments for meting out instant justice, fell well behind us, owning and carrying guns became an anachronism. Seeing another citizen driving a car does not give us cause to cower, but seeing a gun toting person approaching us, who is not a duly authorized agent of law enforcement, will give (and should give) most reasonable people, reason to fear.

In their recent history, Americans have no basis for appreciating what a gun-culture really is. In Afghanistan, where I lived for almost a year in 1972, most men carry a rifle. Afghans love their guns. The implicit message each gun toting man is sending is, If I think you have done me wrong, I will kill you, never mind what you thought your true intentions. In Afghanistan I learned that in a gun toting culture, you’d better be careful about what you do or say, or into whose eyes you look.

I also spent some time in El Salvador in 1999–another a gun culture. I was told by my host, Senor Juan Wright, that I should never go anywhere without one of his shotgun-armed bodyguards at my side. Unlike Afghans,  who carry their rifles boldly displayed, in El Salvador men carry their weapons in holsters, hidden from sight. Salvadorans are forced to assume that anyone they encounter is armed and dangerous. What might occasion gun play in El Salvador?–politics, bandits, drug smugglers, errants look or a bad hair day, will do. Salvadoran’s solution is simple. They make themselves armed and dangerous as well.

So do we really want to model an American gun culture after America’s car culture? Wouldn’t this simply have the effect of making gun play a regular feature of daily life as in Afghanistan and El Salvador? If this is the route we chose to take, it’s exactly what we’ll get. Wherever we go among other people, we will live in fear that for some reason or other, we may be confronted by others with guns. We will live in daily fear, tempered only be the knowledge that we are as armed and dangerous as the next guy.

Is that the America we want to create?

Big news today! U.S. spooks recently declassified reports containing almost proof-positive that China has unleashed a cadre of elite cyber-warriors, known as Unit 61398, who are raiding our cyberspace and stealing our secrets. They work their evil deeds in a big, decrepit, white tenement building off Datong Road in Shanghai, China.

As you can see in the sample report page below, 3Sigma.com, the very blog-site you are now reading, has been under attack by Unit 61398 for several months.

Nineteen of the visits documented on this single page–one of 128 similar pages–are flagged, China.

When I first discovered this deluge of Chinese visitors to my blog, I wondered what could be going on? Upon further investigation I saw that virtually all of the hits were on a single entry, “Leadership and the Principles of War“. I wasn’t getting spammed by the visitors so I could only conclude that this entry was viewed as particularly interesting by lots of web-surfing Chinese people. Their single minded-interest in this particular post troubled me enough that I took it offline, just to see what would happen. During the following days I could see that numerous attempts were being made by my Chinese visitors to access the entry by hacking my login password. After about a week of such attempts, my China trade dropped off precipitously.

It wasn’t until I started reading news of Unit 61398, that it dawned on me that my site was attracting Sino-cyber spies! In the light of this new information, I can see that a web search on terms used in this particular article and the attached document, (for example “United States”, “War”, “Strategy”, “Tactics”, “Combat”, etc.), would catch the attention of any self-repsecting spy.

Now that I know what’s going on, I have restored the article to online status, confident that the information it contains posses no threat to our national security, unless that is you consider the fact that our own leadership is largely ignorant of the lessons contained therein.  (See Iraq War and Afghanistan War as cases in point.)