Betting On Death: Wall Street's Latest Voodoo Moneymaking Scheme

What happens on Wall Street stays on Wall Street...unless they lose their shirts and need us to bail them out against our will because our elected representatives are in the fucking bag.

While our economy is still in shambles, Wall Street is already paving the way for the next big bubble: the death bubble.

The New York Times recently featured an incredibly disturbing article titled, “Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance.” Here’s how it works:

“The bankers plan to buy ‘life settlements,’ life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to ‘securitize’ these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

“The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return…”

After reading that last line, I paused in mid sentence for a few seconds, and scrolled back up the page to see if I had unwittingly navigated my way to The Onion, because this sure read like a satire to me. Nope. Then I wondered if the Yes Men had outdone themselves and actually hacked the New York Times website (instead of simply printing and distributing fake copies of the paper as they did last November). Slowly I began to realize that this wasn’t a joke, and that this article by Jenny Anderson was discussing an all-too real developmental-stage speculative enterprise that literally bets on death.

You’ve got to hand it to Wall Street. These people remain undeterred in their never-ending drive to make profit where it was thought there was no profit to be made. They’ve had two major bubbles in the last decade, both brought on by wanton speculation fueled by the kind of cockeyed, sky’s-the-limit optimism you see from the cheerleaders on CNBC and in other financial media. Both bubbles burst quite dramatically, although the latter was—and still very much remains—an economic crisis of epic proportions. And yet, here we have some investment bankers who have already drawn up and are starting to push the next great moneymaking scheme before we’ve even gotten ourselves out of the current fuckup which they helped create. And the kicker is, it works in the same way those dubious mortgage securities did (and still do). I can only hope that the anonymous banker in the article who said, “We’re hoping to get a herd stampeding after the first offering,” is completely wrong, but if he’s right, we might just have another bubble—the death bubble—coming down the pike in a few years time.

Of course, this lament of mine will be moot if our economy collapses before life insurance speculation can matter. This is not some remote possibility. The fundamentals of the U.S. economy are still terrible, regardless of how well the Dow has been doing. (Don’t even get me started on those fuckers at CNBC.) We still have serious problems in this country, starting with the dollar. Not that anyone in a position to do anything about our falling dollar agrees this assessment, but that’s the reality. If I had the balls, I’d take a trip to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing at Treasury and destroy the presses myself. Would this be the only way the government would stop printing money? It would seem so. If this lunacy isn’t stopped soon, it’s going to take an SUV full of $100 bills just to buy a Whopper with cheese.

While the falling dollar has expectedly helped to narrow the U.S. trade deficit over the past year (July’s data notwithstanding), the Baltic Dry Index indicates that international trade has declined in absolute terms. Just about every U.S. manufacturing sector has been declining, with the exception of the arms sector. As such, the official U.S. unemployment rate is 9.7%, but this figure is bunk, as it includes neither those unemployed Americans who have simply stopped looking for work, nor former full-time workers who have been forced to work part-time (often at minimum wage). When these folks are included, you get a 16.8% unemployment rate—and a much realer sense of just how shitty the U.S. economy is.

But enough gloom and doom about our economy, and back to rich people betting on Americans dropping dead.

Now, I’m not one of those people who thinks a cure for cancer has been found and that the medical industry is suppressing it because they want to keep cashing in on the lucrative cancer treatment business. However, it is not unreasonable to ask what effects large-scale death speculation would have. Right now we have no way of knowing just how big this will become, but if the life insurance speculation game (and that’s really what it is to these people) becomes as popular as (subprime) mortgage-backed securities were earlier this decade, there are going to be a lot of rich and powerful investors out there who stand to gain everything from a retardation of medical innovation. Theoretically under this scheme, if you hold bundles of these securitized life insurance policies, it would be just wonderful for you if somehow hospitals, doctors, and all medicine and knowledge about the practice of medicine just disappeared, and we as a people had to resort to playing with snakes and making sacrifices to please Asclepius in the hopes that he will heal us.

This is what the moneyed interests of this country want. While they’re busy turning their millions and billions into more millions and billions in relatively short order thanks to the casino economy, the rest of us continue to slave away for ever-decreasing real wages at jobs we’re not sure how long we’ll have. That way, we’re continually worried about job security and our overall welfare and won’t raise a stink about being smacked around all the time. We are serfs in a neo-fiefdom. We’re easily replaceable. And we’re fun to gamble on—our credit, our mortgages, and soon our life insurance policies.

I’m an advocate of the free market with two qualifications: (1) no corporate welfare; if a business needs state subsidies, it doesn’t deserve to exist. (2) Regulation, regulation, regulation. Ideally, no regulation would be necessary. However, as has been well-documented, big business is always inventing new and exciting ways to bend us over and take full advantage of our vulnerabilities. If you’re a worker, the main thing to know about companies in the free market is this: if there’s nothing stopping them, they will fuck you if they think fucking you will be profitable. It’s the nature of the system, which is why safeguards are needed to prevent wholesale raping and pillaging.

Now if you’ll excuse me, this serf has some land to till.

- Max

Excessive Happiness Disorder

Are you as happy as this horse all of the time? If so, seek medical treatment immediately.

Do you know someone who by all appearances seems excessively happy all of the time? Do you consistently get annoyed when in the presence of such a person? If so, then you have already become well acquainted with the havoc that people with E.H.D. (Excessive Happiness Disorder) can wreak on the lives of those that have to deal with them. Any person who consistently displays behavior indicative of being highly cheerful, exuberant, giddy, or just plain content with life may be suffering from EHD. Although often misdiagnosed, EHD should not be confused with more severe psychiatric illnesses such as Bipolar Disorder, which is characterized by extreme mood swings. In contrast, people with EHD maintain a consistently elevated mood and never suffer from periods of depression. The key diagnostic feature that identifies EHD is the person’s profound sense of denial with regard to the reality that much of life is suffering. The denial is often so extreme that people can consistently maintain a chipper disposition and effectively go through life without ever experiencing strong negative emotions. In such cases, it is the loved ones of the person with EHD that incur the most pain.

I have often reflected on the intriguing phenomenon of excessive (or insufferable) happiness, long before it became identified as a legitimate psychiatric diagnosis. Years ago, while working the overnight shift at a local hospital, I often had the displeasure of coming into consistent contact with someone that would now likely be diagnosed with EHD. Every morning at 7am when I was gearing up to leave work, Jane, the human resources director, would cross my path. Then, with a beaming, yet completely unwholesome smile, she would say: “Goooooooood Mmmooooorrrnnning” in a high-pitched and infinitely annoying voice before continuing on her way. Waves of disgust and the pangs of anger would always flush over me after witnessing this site every morning. Why was I having this negative reaction to such a seemingly pleasant person? For the longest time, I thought it was some flaw in my own character that was to explain this curious phenomenon. I knew myself to be a person inclined toward the pessimistic and depressive side of things, so I figured I must really be angry about having to face the fact that this person appears to have something positive, something I most certainly lacked. This reasoning, however, did little to curb the unpleasantness of seeing this woman consistently at the crack of dawn. In order to make myself feel at least slightly better about my intense reactions to her, I assumed that she really could not possibly be this happy and that she must be masking some hideous secret that confronts her everyday when alone gazing in the mirror. It was not until Jane made a certain comment at a staff meeting that I began to see things differently. This is when I first suspected that her issue was more severe than I had thought.

The staff meeting was really a class designed to teach the employees about proper stress management. My co-workers and I were asked to identify certain things in our lives (both in and outside of the work environment) that triggered stress for us. The leader of the group then went around the room and asked everyone individually to talk about the stressors we had just identified. When it was Jane’s turn to share, she promptly disclosed that she does not encounter any stressors whatsoever! She was, in effect, claiming that she lives a 100% stress-free existence! Of course, she also made this comment while displaying her characteristic shit-eating grin on her face. I was infuriated and instantly started having fantasies of strangling her to death. Here was a woman pushing 60 years of age that seemed comfortable admitting that she has some inhuman capacity to avoid becoming flustered or upset by anything in her life. That was the moment I became aware of the depths of denial that had to be working in order for her to maintain the abnormal sense of cheeriness.

Thankfully, I only had to deal this woman infrequently in the workplace. Imagine, however, that someone you loved or had regular daily dealings with suffered from this condition. It can be enough to drive anyone mad. This is why it is so important for those suffering from EHD to seek treatment immediately. Unfortunately, those suffering from this condition are often in extreme denial and, as such, typically blame others for being jealous of their seemingly natural happiness. They fail to see the damage that their condition creates for those around them. The denial at work with these individuals is so extreme that they simply cannot comprehend the fact that proper mental health really lies in a balance between experiencing positive and negative emotions. They are essentially blind to the reality that life is not super-duper every second of every day.

If you suspect that you or someone you love may be afflicted with EHD, you should contact a psychiatrist or mental-health professional about seeking proper treatment. If you still do not believe that EHD is a legitimate mental disorder, please watch this informative clip.

~Wolf

Funniest Creation Story Ever

We are pleased to announce that the $100 grand-prize for the Inebriated Discouse Creation Story Contest goes to Richard Lawler, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at James Madison University.

So, without further ado.... Here is what ESPN would call an Instant Classic:

You may want to click here for a larger view.

It Looks Like We Have A....Runner Up!

The runner up for our Inebriated Discourse Creation Story Contest is this entry submitted by Jose Pacheco. Congrats, Jose. Consider your $50 award the first donation to the Church of PantherFalconX.

Be sure to check back tomorrow morning when we will have the winning story posted. This thing is a must read.

Before the first day, God said “Let there be me!” And it was so. Now that God existed, he was free to create the rest of the universe, which he did on the first day. And it was pretty good.

Somehow despite the fact that God was God, he had very low self esteem. In an attempt to fix this, God created Barny and Dirk to worship him. Unfortunately, all Barny and Dirk wanted to do was play with each others funny bits, so God said, “Stop that. It's disgusting... Why, I might even go so far as to say it's an abomination!”

Barny and Dirk pleaded with God saying, “Please allow us to continue! It feels really good. Why give us these parts if we're not supposed to play with them?” And God said, “I was in a rush, and I hadn't thought things through completely. Since this is kind of my bad, I'll think of something.” With that, God picked up Barny, turned his member inside-out, and returned him to Dirk.

And God said, “Barney, I chose thee because you must now change your name to something more suitable for someone with an inside-out member. “Dirk” is way too badass a name, so I couldn't pick him. Your new name is Crystal. Anyhoo, you two feel free try out your new parts. Oh, and from now on, rubbing your funny bits together will now result in the creation of more of you who can worship me. And on the subject of badass names, stop referring to me as “God”. I shall henceforth be known as “PantherFalconX”” And it was good. Dirk and Crystal had many descendants which populated the earth.

Then PantherFalconX noticed that men behaved like assholes in the name of PantherFalconX, doing things like murdering non-slaves, raping other men instead of raping each others daughters, and mowing the lawn on Saturday. This made PantherFalconX angry. “Why are you doing these terrible things?” PantherFalconX asked Mosey, the leader of the men. “As punishment, I have removed all the dinosaurs, coolest of all the animals, from your domain.”

“But PantherFalconX”, Mosey replied, “How are we to know what displeases you If you have not told us? Could you perhaps give us a list of the top 10 or so thing we are not to do? And can we please have the dinosaurs, coolest of all the animals, back?”

“No!” PantherFalconX replied. “You were made in my image, and even though you all seem to look different, you should just know what displeases me! There's no way I'm giving you dinosaurs back, with the possible exception of those lame flying ones. And by the way, I'm pretty sure I mentioned to your ancestors Dirk and Barny that the man lying with man was an abomination.”

“No, you said it was disgusting, and only suggested that it might be an abomination. Besides, we thought that only applied to consensual man on man action, not man on man rape, which is what we're doing,” replied Mosey.

And PantherFalconX said, “Of course it applies there as well! Don't think that just because you made it through one and a half years of law school, you can outsmart me! If you lead a righteous life, your soul will come and reside in my home when you die. That's a pretty sweet deal, yet you mock me at every turn. Do you have any idea how nice Rocktastic Manor is? I've wall to wall carpeting and central air. I've even got a heated swimming pool in the back, for PantherFalconX's sake.”

“I'll tell you what. Because I am a merciful PantherFalconX, instead of just destroying the whole lot of you, I'll just turn those who displease me into pillars of salt, or some other condiment. Then you can figure out the rules that way. And just so this really sinks in, not only will you be turned into condiments for displeasing me, but your souls will be eternally banished to this new place of eternal torment I'm building called Bunnyville. That's just a working title, by the way.”

As the earth become covered in pillars of salt, chutney, and wasabi, Man slowly learned what displeased PantherFalconX. Things like gay sex, spilling seed after regular sex, women wearing coolots, men wearing capris while worshiping golden tree kangaroos. They even somehow learned that PantherFalconX wasn't happy with men who didn't mutilate their penises.

And it was then that almighty PantherFalconX realized his terrible mistake. The souls of interesting, free thinking men were being banished to Bunnyville (no longer a working title), while the souls of boring, self righteous sheep were overrunning Rocktastic Manor, pretending that they didn't just pee in his heated pool.

With that, PantherFalconX hit upon a solution. He would remove absolutely any evidence that he actually exists from the world, and the souls of anyone that was reasonable enough to come to the conclusion that PantherFalconX didn't exist would now be granted admittance to Rocktastic Manor, while the souls of believers would now be banished to eternal torment in Bunnyville. And it was good.

If you're somehow not yet convinced this is the one true creation story, I offer as evidence a list of prominent dead people who did not believe in the existence of PantherFalconX:

Albert Einstein

Gautama Buddha

Leonardo da Vinci

Saladin

Abraham Lincoln

Kermit the Frog

Blaise Pascal

Louis Pasteur

Jesus Christ

Jesus H. Christ

Suleiman the Magnificent

Dustin Diamond

Suleiman the Merely OK

Marco Polo

Dora the Explorer

Joseph Smith

Julius Caesar

Caesar Cardini

PantherFalconY

Xenu

Xena (Warrior Princess)

George Washington

Tony Danza

I'll finish with the thought first suggested by Blaise Pascal's less well known brother Clarence Pascal.

“Even though PantherFalconX may exist, a person should wager that PantherFalconX doesn't exist. In so doing, you have possible eternal admittance into Rocktastic Manor to gain, and you don't have to waste time going to church.”

This Week's Meet The Press Panel Autopsy

Amazingly, I was able to watch this week’s Meet the Press panel featuring Rudy Giuliani and Thomas Friedman without enduring a cerebral meltdown. Tom Brokaw and former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford were also on the panel.

Here are some highlights (lowlights, really):

At one point, Giuliani was bitching about Medicare and the prospect of a public option possibly leading to a government monopoly on health care. Why? Because the government would be able to undersell private insurers and price them out of the market.

Does everybody get that? Giuliani is wary of government health insurance because it doesn’t have to make a profit, and so would be able to provide affordable coverage for Americans at the expense of bloodsucking, premium-jacking private HMOs. Giuliani is not alone in ruing this scenario where health insurance is provided as an end in itself instead of as a means to a profit. Conservatives like to ask, What’s wrong with making a profit? Fundamentally, nothing. But when the health care of hundreds of millions of people is tightly intertwined with the need to satisfy the financial interests of shareholders and executive boards, you’re asking for trouble.

Giuliani also asked an important question, but coming from him it was more partisan than sincere. He wondered how we’re going to pay for a public option—a legitimate concern, but Harold Ford was there to say something I’ve been waiting for a pro-health care reformer to say, and basically that is: Why didn’t you ask how the country was going to pay for the Bush tax cuts, or the Iraq war? Ford then noted that outrageous rate at which premiums are climbing annually, which Giuliani apparently tried to deny. Go get ‘em Harry.

Moderator David Gregory actually said this about his panel: “If I were preparing a Sunday brunch, it doesn’t get any better than this.”

Really, Dave? Rudy Giuliani? Tom Friedman? While these guys are fascinating for many unflattering reasons, let’s not get carried away. I admit that Sunday brunch would be interesting with these guys, but I’d abstain from the actual brunch part, lest one of these guys makes me lose my omelet.

Besides, who needs Giuliani, Friedman, or even Harold Ford, when you could just have a roving gang of Tom Brokaws on your panel?

Friedman, commenting on the conservative backlash against Barack Obama’s scheduled speech to schoolchildren, called it “flat-out stupid” three times in seven seconds. No joke.

The panel then switched gears to Afghanistan, and I have to say, I was extremely disappointed that Friedman didn’t incorporate the staple of his Iraq war analyses: the Friedman Unit (FU) in his assessment of Afghanistan. I guess saying, “In the next six months…” on over a dozen separate occasions is only appropriate when dealing with Iraq. Anyway, Gregory quotes his column from today’s New York Times, titled “From Baby-Sitting to Adoption” about the seemingly changing U.S. mission in Afghanistan. The column is keeping with Friedman’s tradition of employing metaphor and mismatched imagery to obfuscate the simplicity of his ideas. In fact, the structure of a typical Friedman column can be expressed mathematically,

m + a (n ≥ 2) + s = typical Friedman column

Where (m) is metaphor, (a) is an anecdote only loosely (if at all) functionally related to (m), and (s) is a hopelessly simplistic conclusion drawn from the specious summing of (m) and at least two (a). Combined in this way, they equal a Friedman column.

Gregory asked the panel, “Is this war winnable?” to which Ford replied precisely what I was thinking—that we need to define what’s meant by “winning” before even attempting to answer the question. By then, however, time was almost up, so the panel barely scratched the surface. Perhaps it was for the better, because this Meet the Press was a real yawner.

- Max

Mother Of God!

10:46am: Jesus Christ. Right now Rudy Giuliani and Thomas Friedman are on the same Meet the Press panel. Stay tuned to see if I’ll be able to write a post despite the very high risk of a stupidity-induced cerebral aneurysm between now and 11:30.

- Max

Official Letter Terminating Texas Statehood

Now with forty-nine stars, Old Glory has never looked better.

Dear Texas:

We are happier than a pig in shit sorry to inform you that your statehood in the United States of America has been terminated, effective immediately. This decision has been made by the nation for reasons including, but not limited to the following (listed in chronological order):

• Slavery

Because you insisted on keeping slaves at the time, from 1861 to 1865 you were subjected to a severe disciplinary action known as the Civil War. Since this was your first offense, we readmitted you to the Union after your capitulation on this matter.

• The Nueces Massacre

In August 1862, a Confederate cavalry unit from Texas hunted down a group of several dozen German-Texans with Union sympathies who were in the process of fleeing to Mexico. Your Confederates overtook the group and gunned down thirty-four people, and executed several others after they were captured.

• The Texas Constitution

In 1876, you ratified a constitution that contained specific provisions for the racial segregation of schools and the enactment of a poll tax. Later, you held “white primaries,” specifically prohibiting nonwhites from voting in elections.

• Lynchings

In 1922, the New York Times observed, “Texas Leads in Lynchings” in an article noting that twelve of the country’s thirty lynchings so far that year had occurred in Texas. These violations merely continued your long, rich tradition of vigilantism in the face of evils such as, whistling at white women, looking at white women, using white restrooms, and just plain being black.

• The (legal) death penalty

While the rest of the civilized world has shunned capital punishment, not only do you maintain the death penalty, you embrace it with an unbridled enthusiasm that would impress the Chinese government. In the United States, you are by far the company leader in executions, at least one of which was of a mentally retarded man, and at least one other of which was of a (most likely) innocent man.

• Religious indoctrination in your public schools

Your theocratic tendencies are unbecoming of a state bound (although no longer) to respect the separation of church of state mandated by the U.S. Constitution. In 2007 you passed a law mandating that the Bible be taught in all public schools beginning this year.

• George W. Bush

While you are not alone among states in being a former slave state, a state historically fond of lynchings (including a 1998—nineteen ninety friggin’ eight—dragging death of a forty-nine year-old black man), a state with capital punishment, and a state that has attempted to promote religion in public schools, you alone are responsible for the ascendancy of George Walker Bush to the office of President of the United States. Although he was born in Connecticut, he is undoubtedly a product of the Lone Star State, and was elected to the governorship of Texas—a post which positioned him to make a serious run for the White House. It is not necessary to review the sorry record of this Roscoe P. Coltrane of presidents, because the effects of his disastrous presidency are already well-known by all parties concerned, and will be felt for decades to come.

Incredibly, even in light of these gross infractions, you have recently proclaimed that you—Texas—have somehow become too good for the United States of America. Your workplace rhetoric about wanting to secede from the Union is not only counterproductive, but truly outrageous when you consider that we have tolerated your shenanigans for 150 years. The idea that we—the United States—have committed a transgression against the “integrity” of your statehood is not only absurd, but insulting. It has become clear to us that you are no longer interested in being a productive member of the Union.

For these reasons and so many others, we, the United States of America, do hereby terminate your statehood.

Respectfully,

The Forty-Nine United States of America.

- Max

Texas Secession? Yeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaw!

Remember back in 2003 when the Iraq war started and Faux News was decrying antiwar protestors as “un-American” and “treasonous” for exercising their first amendment rights? Well, this same network has been conspicuously silent in the face of a fledgling Texas secession movement, first given lip service in April by its scumsucking governor, Rick Perry. By now, Perry has undoubtedly realized that he made a grave mistake by dropping the “S” word because on Monday a couple hundred crazies turned out at the statehouse in Austin to demand that Texas secede while proclaiming outright their hatred of the United States. What, I ask you, could be more “un-American” than seceding from America?

Indeed, at the top of the list of the most treasonous things you could possibly do, secession is right up there with spying for the enemy during wartime. And yet, we’ve heard nothing from Faux News about the un-American and treasonous protests in Austin, or the 51% of Texas Republicans who are in favor of seceding from the Union. Not surprisingly, Glenn Batshit Beck is giving the secessionists the thumbs up because to hear him tell it, America is becoming a socialist totalitarian police state, complete with government-mandated eugenics and euthanasia, and whatever other fantasies he can come up with while off his meds.

I don’t really care about the double standard here; I just wanted to highlight the case as yet another exemplar of the “fair and balanced” news coverage over at Faux News. The reason I don’t care is because I want Texas to secede. Can you think of a better way to start improving the country immediately than by getting rid of a backward, obstructionist hellhole such as Texas? Rather than fight to keep Texas and the South, Lincoln should’ve said good luck and god bless.

Okay, okay, so Lincoln shouldn’t have done that. Slavery was an evil worth routing out, even though it meant that those of us in the land of literacy and dental hygiene would suffer the consequences. Incredibly, Texas and the rest of the South are still bitter about Appomattox and the freeing of the slaves, as evidenced by the ubiquitous Stars and Bars that pepper the territories of the NASCAR Republic.

Had Lincoln left the South to its own dubious devices, it would be interesting to see just how long it would’ve taken the Confederates to abolish slavery, if at all. In fact, I think a few million dollars ought to be put aside for a research project to this end: Had the Confederacy prevailed, at what point (if any) would it have outlawed the practice of slavery? We could get the nation’s finest historians, sociologists, and political scientists from all parts of the country together to come up with an approximate answer to this hypothetical, but nonetheless important question. I think if people knew that the Confederacy would have freed the slaves in 1987, it might kind of damage the South’s credibility a bit in Congress, you know?

If Texas wants to be its own country again, then by all means we should let them. The secessionists probably think the rest of us are horrified at the prospect of a Texas-less America. Texas wants to secede! Oh no!

Pshaw. Those divorce papers couldn’t be signed fast enough.

Actually, forget the divorce papers. We can save ourselves a whole lot of time just by handing Texas a letter of termination—a letter I’m going to draft myself.

Be sure to check back on Wednesday when I plan on having a pink slip ready for what we can only hope will be the Lone Star State.

- Max