Two American Families (Frontline)

This week PBS's Frontline released its ground breaking documentary following two blue collar families from Milwaukee over the past 22 years--"Two American Families." From the halcyon days of well paid industrial labor through the leaner years of the creation of Alan Greenspan's precariate to the economic non-existence of the Lesser Depression, Bill Moyers and Frontline trace the hardships and struggles of the once mighty American Middle Class.

They provide a front row seat to see first-hand the atomization of American culture through the eyes of "ordinary people" drawing a correlation between the macro level power-plays and politics and the micro level bills that are unmet, gutted communities, and hopelessness of the forsaken. Marx once said that the history of a family is the history of a nation. "Two American Families" is the story of the United States as the American Dream began to evaporate in the twilight of Empire.

Check it out on the PBS website, here, or tune into your local PBS station.

Thoughts on the NSA

By Gene Ogorodov

On the 4th of July, a day where we ostensibly celebrate our freedoms and liberties as Americans, it seems reasonable to share a few thoughts on the negation of American privacy by the NSA and the National Security State that has arisen in the last few years.  So:  

NSA et, ut dicitur, homo non est. Sunt inferiora naturae quam in lege est simia. Nunc ergo veni, ut eas transferre in linguam Anglicam.

PERM Fake Job Ads Defraud Americans

If one doubts the validity of this flick, NPR did a story on this phenomena, here. The US is a country that fosters perverse incentives to harm Americans. We need schools and hospitals, not foreign wars and H-1B visas. 

The (Un-)Affordable Care Act and The Commonwealth of Massachusetts

By Gene Ogorodov

In the beginning of May Gov. Deval Patrick signed legislation that would bring Mass Care into accordance with the Federal Government's Affordable Care Act. This will fundamentally change Mass Care making insurance more expensive for residents of Massachusetts and increasing the tax burden required to fund the plan. With a vote and the stroke of a pen the Governor and the General Court have set in motion the forces that will transfer hundreds of thousands of recipients of subsidized health care into the outstretched arms of insurance companies along with our public coffers too.

The math that demonstrates the fiscal irresponsibility of subsidizing insurance companies rather than patients should be obvious to anyone that has ever opened an economics book. The movement of money to commodity to money (M—C—M') requires the second amount of money to be greater than the first, viz. (M'>M). If M'≯M there is no intrinsic motivation for the movement of goods or services, which in this case is Health Care. The magic little number (M'-M) which is the catalyst for transferring health care from health care providers to patients via insurance companies is called profit.

The American Empire 2.0

By Gene Ogorodov

On the Saturday, June 1, 2013 the New York Times published a book review by Julian Assange of The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Assange correctly denounces this technocratic manifesto as a sketch of an Orwellian dystopia that the American People and the World would be well advised to avoid. 

Far from bringing about unimaginable freedoms and more direct communication with government, a world where every scrap of data from every person is stored in some giant cloud sitting in Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley or being run through countless programs at the NSA can only lead one to "imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces — forever."