“Fraud is the new business model”

---

I don’t like watching politics on television, even when I agree with the people I’m watching. It gives me a funny uncomfortable feeling in my stomach, and what with my whole kidney-stone situation, one more abdominal complaint is not what I need.

 

 

 

But Partner and I happened upon a good interview the other day: Bill Moyers (whom I respect immensely) interviewing Bernie Sanders, the Independent Senator from Vermont. (I capitalize “Independent” on purpose; that’s his political affiliation. He generally caucuses with the Democrats, but he’s very much his own person. He identifies himself with the Scandinavian Socialists, believing with them that the purpose of a government is to ensure quality of life for its citizens, including essential human services like health care and education.)

 

 

 

Bernie was passionate and brilliant in the interview, as he generally is. Along the way, he spoke of Wall Street and the various feeble attempts that have been made to regulate it, and said this: “Fraud is the new business model.”

 

 

 

Both Partner and I nearly leapt out of our chairs when he said this. It’s such a perfect description of the current situation in the business world. In a word: the wealthy are using every means necessary to maintain and increase their wealth. Taxes are not for them.  (They’re “job creators,” so we mustn’t rile them up.) They don’t like government regulation either, which naturally drives up their expenses. They are not keen on paying benefits for their employees either, nor are they in love with the minimum wage. 

 

 

 

It’s the regulation thing that drives me wild. Before the Bill Moyers program, we’d been watching a program about derivatives. These are elaborate exchanges of packages of debt, currencies, etc., so cunningly crafted and marketed that the buyers often don’t really know what they’re buying (and often the sellers aren’t quite sure what they’re selling.) The buying and selling of derivatives was one of the bombs that blew up in 2008, torpedoing the world economy.

 

 

 

One of the experts interviewed was a little defensive about this, however. I can’t quote him exactly, but I can paraphrase him: “I don’t think the sellers were entirely to blame for this. I blame the purchasers too. They needed to be more careful about what they bought. It’s an open market, after all; you can buy and sell what you want.”

 

 

 

So evidently you can sell fraudulent securities, so long as you can find a buyer. Or tainted meat, or poison baby formula. No one is forcing the buyers to purchase them, after all.

 

 

 

And that’s why government needs to be a policeman: because a significant number of businesspeople will not hesitate to use fraudulent means to make money. And that’s all kinds of business.

 

 

 

Sadly, Bernie Sanders is only a voice in the wilderness now.

 

 

 

I hope more and more people come to this realization.

 

 

 

Otherwise: well, go to Netflix and watch “Rollerball.” Because, America, that’s your bleak ol’ future right there.

---

 

Consumers of the world, unite

 

---

David Pogue had two related pieces in the New York Times recently.  One was a review of something called the Vulkano, which should be the answer to everyone's prayer: a TiVo that also allows you to watch your at-home TV programming on the road, and on your mobile device, and on your computer.

This sounds great, but according to Pogue, it's not. The device, as he describes it, is pretty flawed: it's technologically limited, the menus are overcomplicated, it makes you do all kinds of elaborate quasi-programming stuff. And it's $380.  Not cheap, especially for something that doesn't work very well.

Pogue (who is never at a loss for words) also spun a second piece out of this: a little essay wondering why companies sell sub-standard products. What do they gain, after all?  He posits three possible corporate mindsets:

• “We'll just fix it later.”

• “We don't know what we're doing.”

• “We're doomed anyway, so we may as well market the thing the way it is."

 

He leaves out the one that I tend to favor, however:

• “We're completely amoral and will make money any way we can, even with a substandard product.”

 

I still remember reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, with its depictions of the horrible pre-union pre-regulation Chicago meat industry, and I can still visualize the scene in which one of the workers falls into a vat and gets rendered into lard.  (It was a long time before I ate corned beef again, thank you very much.)

Most flawed products these days aren't quite Soylent Green, but the profit motive is still as lively as ever.  

This is where we consumers get to exert market pressure on these cheese-eating money-grubbing vile cynical companies, kids:

• Do your research.

• Read the reviews.

• Whenever possible, go to the store and look at / fondle / play with the technology you're interested in.

• Don't buy a piece of rubbish, just because it's new and makes a lot of promises.  

 

In a word: don't eat the corned beef unless you're pretty sure that it's good corned beef.

To quote another famous consumer advocate: you have nothing to lose but your chains.

---