The Ghetto Idea Is Enjoying A Renaissance

I came across a disturbing story on NPR today. It describes how the poor can be conveniently put in a box and forgotten.

By divvying people into rich (good people) and poor (bad people) conservatives can justify their greed and their habit of looking at people’s vulnerabilities as business opportunities.

But outside of nailing them to make their profits, the rich conservatives would rather pretend poor people don’t exist. They’ve been lucky and they seek to insulate themselves from the unlucky people.

Many of the less fortunate have gotten that way after encountering the sharp edge of rich people’s business schemes or political policies. But it’s hard to blame the rich. They can’t help themselves. Maximum profit and minimum responsibility is their religion.

The rich conservatives would like to avoid all responsibility for other people. Other people are there to profit from but never to be helped or looked out for. They’d rather put them on an ice floe and send them out to sea.

This selfishness has penetrated down into the working middle classes, whose margin of financial security has gotten thin. People in the striving middle classes are taught to emulate the rich in order to achieve financial security. Join the club by rejecting the poor.

We’ve become a selfish, uncaring society. Recent policies make poverty inevitable, inescapable and perpetual. These policies have mostly emerged from conservative and libertarian circles.

They put it more gently, but the philosophy is basically this: “I’ve got mine, fuck you.”

Oh, and "Praise Jesus."

The Insurance Industry Has Been Asleep

Scientific American is reporting on catastrophic flood projections in NY this century.

Wired magazine is describing similar catastrophic flooding in Miami.

Other coastal cities will experience similar catastrophe worldwide.

Two Questions:

Why hasn’t the insurance industry factored this enormous future cost into the premiums paid in coastal cities?

How and when will the insurance industry offload this enormous cost onto the public?

The insurance industry is supposed to inform its risk calculations with the best science. They didn’t.

Why?

Because the major insurers have for a few decades (at least since the merger mania during Reagan) considered themselves financial companies, not insurance companies. For this reason they’ve been more focused on the huge profits from fossil fuel investments during peak oil than on the huge costs that fossil fuel will precipitate through climate change as our major port facilities and coastal properties are flooded.

They’re all insured, by the way.

But major financial companies are too big to fail, so we will pay for their greed and the mistakes greed caused them to make. If, as purists say, capitalism and free markets are supposed to do our society’s thinking and planning, they’ve certainly failed us. They’ve all been asleep, selfish, self-centered, self-satisfied fools.

Hedge Fund Billionaires are Saints and Schoolteachers are Greedy Bastards

So, let's try and understand this...

Fifth grade teachers and firefighters who rescue kittens from trees are greedy bastards.

And hedge fund billionaires are saints devoted to the wellbeing of the community.

I will pause while your mind explodes.

This is really happening. Voters in Rhode Island have elected a fearless crusader who is going after the greedy schoolteachers on behalf of the heroic hedge funds.

The people who worked their whole lives on behalf of the community, teaching children, fighting fires, cleaning streets, policing parks, taking less pay in exchange for a pension, are actually terrible selfish greedy monsters who must be reined in and their retirement must be confiscated by the good, honest, crusading friend of Wall Street who is working diligently to return those pension dollars to the offshore bank accounts of the brave, honest hedge fund billionaires who know best what to do with that money.

Up is down. Good is bad. Greed is admirable. Unselfishness must be punished. Jesus was wrong. Hitler was right. ...Wait a minute, Obama is Hitler... I'm confused.

What do we know for certain?

Questioning billion dollar bonuses for Wall Street bankers is like lynching. We know that. It was in the papers the other day.

ObamaCare is like what Hitler did to the Jews. That was in the paper the other day too.

The CEO of Goldman Sachs is more saintly than Mother Teresa. That was also reported this week.

Mr. Rogers, who talked about kindness and unselfishness, was a sick individual who sapped the life force from two generations of Americans. I heard that on FoxNews.

And, yes, public school teachers and firefighters are horrible greedy bastards. It's been widely reported.

It's so hard to keep a solid grip on reality, on our values. Luckily America has talk radio to tell us what to believe.