Part 7 Avarice 65 to 67: The Meme

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The true power of the American two-party system comes in pro-business Democrats and disgruntled Middle Class Republicans who blame the Poor rather than the Meme.  Elected Democrats do not go far enough to help Labor because of wanting business money to fund campaigns.  Middle Class Republicans are tempted by religion, patriotism, and classism to focus on sentiment rather than mathematics. 

The Poor are so spited by the Middle Class that America would rather pay an exorbitant amount more in total based on the idea that the Poor are a problem that is both ignored and blamed.  Single-payer does not give healthcare to the Poor or the old; it puts the Middle Class in a better economic negotiating position and increases their buying power.  However what gets marketed by the Meme is the opposite.

The Rich want the current American healthcare system because it worships individuality in the Meme.  A top-Meme human is special.  One’s wealth should be able to purchase a fountain of youth in the form of privatized-exclusive top-dollar healthcare.  The Meme makes the top-percenters feel entitled to this access to such elixirs and procedures as a way of segregating one from his or her animal status.  To suggest single-payer healthcare to the Rich under the Meme is threatening to take away this potential nostrum.  The private panacea is earned by wealth to qualify a body above a Poor-human inside the Meme.  

One is somehow different from the Poor by going to M.D. Anderson in Texas and getting the premium cancer drug.  Why use the $2,000 device?  The heart valve marked up to $30,000 must be better.  The medical device industry inflates sales prices under such logic.  It has a higher price; therefore the extra infused profit in a non-free market purchase is confused as beneficial.  

Top-end private universities operate in a similar capacity.  The knowledge is not really different.  The body is not different, but it looks “better” on a resume or an obituary.  Either a human possess knowledge or not.  Either a person is alive or dead.  Either a heart valve replacement works or it does not.  The Meme attaches sentiment in the form of product differentiation to these goods (knowledge and health.)  The Meme profits from this false exclusivity.  The higher cost medicine is not necessarily more effective, but the prior one’s patent is expiring so this new drug proven to be better than a sugar pill, but not the prior medicine is the one the commercial is marketing to patients. 

This is one reason in the psychology of the Meme, America’s Republican Congress detests and obstructs a full public-health option, despite the conclusion almost every other First-World democracy has made with healthcare.  Economically the American Congress knows single-payer is better for the country and worse for the corporations.  However even more pernicious on a psychological level, the Meme spreads the idea that government healthcare means lower-quality-medicine.  

The Meme spreads false knowledge as if Americans have special bodies.  Big-Pharma’s ultimate goal and pursuit is not to find Viagra, but the fountain of youth in a pill that the Rich can buy.  The pill can be given to the Rich’s progeny.  Immortality is at stake.  If the money does not flow to these corporations this goal is further away, if not impossible.  It does not matter how farcical this may be in reality, or if it did transpire the ethics of sharing or not sharing say a cure to cancer, AIDS, or the Holy Grail to reverse basic cellular decay and reinstall youth like trans-differentiation in the Turritopsis nutricula jellyfish. 

The Meme wants to maintain the disparities of the Humans are not Animals status through all systems, particularly healthcare.  Are Americans to die in the street?  Are Nigerians?  Are Koreans? Etc. Where is the line as a global society?  What happens if everyone is healthier under the logic of the Meme?  What happens if everybody lives longer including the Poor, which outnumber the Rich at the top of the Meme?  How does that affect government budgets, corporate profits, and order and control over societies? 

In these questions of life and death we can unravel the role of volition and systematic decision making inside the Meme.  In this humans can own what we choose.  In this we can see why the Meme is so vehemently against certain ideas in health and education to preserve its order. 

Therefore currently the stock market becomes obligation-less and externalizes the full costs of products sold.  The profit margins on every drug, device, or bed sold and paid through a private-health-insurer in America is fraudulent.  Single-payer encapsulates this error, not perfectly, but to a greater degree. 

The Vietnam / small-nationalist country example flies in the face of the Meme with healthcare.  If a small Poor country like Cuba can provide some form of workable socialist medicine, why couldn’t the United States create an outstanding form of universal healthcare?  

This is one reason why the Meme has driven the Republican side of the U.S. Congress to try to defund the Affordable Health Care Act over and over.  “Obama Care” is not even close to universal healthcare, as it is sure to enrich private health insurers even more since more humans will be fined if they do not purchase the private health insurance industries products.  

Democrats, as part of the Meme, did not insist on the “public-option” so crucial to the Affordable Health Care Act.  This way the mirage of socialized medicine can flounder and universal health care in America becomes more unachievable because of the confusion.  The Meme may even go so far as to have computer saboteurs assault the AHCA’s healthcare.gov website to a state of inept dysfunction and hinder the design, implementation, and operation in a political quagmire. 

The removal of the public-option became its death knell, but Obama Care is still seen as a plausible bridge to single-payer.  That is why the Meme strives for its annihilation.  Giant economy states like California and New York will serve as the true petri dishes to grow single-payer from Obama Care to boomerang back from the states to the nation by the mid 2020’s.  Republicans understand this potential and therefore are obstructionists.  Conservative governors like Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal and Texas’ Rick Perry refuse federal support and sabotage their state exchanges.  This is in hope of postponing or preventing the inevitable math from toppling rhetoric.  

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The most dangerous idea to the Meme is a single sustainable individual living freely off of the energy of the sun on land, absent financing from a bank, need to go to a store, or ask for permission from the system to exist because a rational and healthy public safety net is present.  This individual may live in a self-sufficient community or family or be solitary, but the superstructure of assurances are reasonable and anti-Meme. 

This type of individual in action has taken on the taboo of the Meme by becoming more animal-like, yet the individual retains the moral-authority of the non-killing of his species.  This evolution of human is most dangerous as he represents the glaring non-necessity of the Meme given a threshold of adoption amongst humans supported by the subtext of communication granted by empirically-sound safety nets.  Humans will have evolved into a level of potential peace the Meme by its nature deters.  The unlikeliness of humans voluntarily expending the effort to live in such a manner helps explain the prevalence of the Meme. 

Early humans did not want to be off on their own.  Failure at hunting equaled death.  A broken leg in the wild equaled death.  Even a successful hunter needed to mate.  The insurance of agriculture, assistance for an injury, and communication to spur cognitive development were all assets in the long term evolution of humans.  The Meme became a quotient of systematic dynamics to prioritize survival.  Humans conquered nature and all other animal predators.  The greatest remaining threat was other humans. 

As farming turned into land ownership, governments and economies developed around the transfer of wealth to syphon resources to those blessed with equity in real property.  How did continents of un-owned land become allocated; violence, military force, the annihilation of “pagans” and most importantly adherence to the Meme.  Imperialism, kingdoms, regicides, and empires have flowed into post WWII America, as previously described, to get us to the present. 

Avarice or greed is at the center of this equation and the core of the seventh commandment.  The Meme feeds off our wanting.  Wanting creates manipulative people who are pliable and will bend desperately to acquire a resource those commandeering the top of the Meme control the supply to make scarce or abundant depending on self-interest.  

Greed controls the leaders of the cheap-labor countries.  O.P.E.C. regulates the price of crude oil and creates mega-wealthy ruling classes in countries of penniless-people living in dust.  The Meme and America prefer it this way.  The Middle East and Africa are not incapable of rising to the first or second world.  They are systematically repressed under the avarice of selected few at the top of the Meme’s pyramid to keep the masses of their countries bickering under the guidance of religious books and the tyrannies of carefully-funded despots.  

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank utilize funding from the countries at the top of the Meme to regulate the actions and events in the nations of the Poor.  Third world countries are severed by debt.  Populations are disparately bifurcated into the mega wealthy and the Poor who serve the upper-class, the interests of foreign nations and the Meme.  

Drugs and produce are to South and Central America what oil is to the Middle East.  The United States gets its coffee, cocaine, bananas, marijuana, and sugar etc. and South and Central America get drug cartels, the slums of Brazil, and human trafficking for twenty-first century slavery to nail down Texas roofs.  Exploitive immigration laws for the “new” immigrants compared to the Euro-originals and militarized borders are how the Meme responds when these cheap resources are threatened.  Africa is treated similarly by the Meme, although due to location China is a larger player in Africa’s exploitation.

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The American Dream is a paragon of greed.  A member of the Poor is led to see social climbing as attainable.  Maybe in the post WWII 1950’s this was more-so to achieve the silver-status Middle-Class.  However, this was connected to the platinum-level exponential wealth accumulations of the top one percent.  As the factors in the global economy described earlier continue to play out, the gap in real time earnings of 1950’s America and 2013 America is larger.  The relative earnings of that America Dream are far more spurious and fraudulent.  

The Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous movements are only the beginning of the anti-Meme responses.  Humans like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning are imprisoned or sent to exile.  Revolutions of citizen activism like in 1901, the 1930s, the 1960’s are recurring due to the cognitive dissonance due to the wealth gap inside the fabric of the American Dream fraying.

To combat this, the Meme feeds America more promises of heaven, expanded governmental lotteries in the form of Power Balls and Mega Millions and a troth of reality-shows that serve as surrogate lotteries to reinforce the American Dream.  One can be an Idol, Talented, a Master Chef, see a Dancing Star, be a Ninja Warrior, or the last houseguest alive after Big Brother is done watching.  One can aspire to have a Duck Dynasty or be a Pawn Star.  One can cling to what one has in a vaccine of appreciation of at least I don’t have it that bad by seeing fresh traffic accidents to stare at in the form of Honey Boo-Boo, a Hoarder, a Teen-Mom, a Dancing Queen or a Jackass.  

One can see the effects of crime and the power of the law on Cops, Law and Order, CSI, or NCIS.  One can see the power of consumerism in entire channels dedicated to food, housing, music, and oceans of celebrity gossip.  One can always default to an old reliable game show to spin the Wheel of Fortune, guess the Price is Right in an hour long supermarket ad, or engage in the most blatant title Who Wants to be a Millionaire?  

The Meme populates the financial institutions of Wall Street to profit from all of this wanting.  The greed at the top of the Meme explains why bankers are paid so much.  Bankers profit from profit.  Banks borrow from taxpayers, sometimes have their debt secured by taxpayers in the cases of certain housing loans and then split the instruments into derivatives where sixty-six organizations hold the mortgage on a single home or government contracts that subsidize corporate revenue streams.  

The pre-2008 Freddie and Fannie Mac paradigms imploded from meeting investor expectations combined with government housing assistant requirements.  The Community Reinvestment Act and how it has evolved since 1977, and similar laws like the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992, required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to support “affordable housing lending” while purchasing and securitizing mortgages.  Did the Community Reinvestment Act known as the CRA lead to the entire current mortgage crisis; certainly not.  These types of acts encouraged banks into the highly profitable and highly risky sub-prime lending practices to low income borrowers and then securitized them through FNMA and Freddie Mac, which were inevitably sponsored by taxpayers.  

The CRA created rating systems for banks that were considered to allow mergers and acquisitions inside the banking industry.  These “too big to fail” banks coordinated expansions with significant consideration of CRA scores.  This system allowed interest-only loans where borrowers paid only a portion of the interest accruing and none of the principal on a monthly basis.  The loans escalated into higher payments to make up for the difference in later years.  This system was destined to explode on taxpayers.  

These lending practices encouraged banks to make loans regardless of risk, because the risk was ultimately held by the taxpayers in so many instances.  The media bemoans the horrors of foreclosures, but these homeowners were only renters.  Translation America built too many expensive houses, baited the trap with no money down, gave closing fees to banks, and the taxpayers are stuck with a slew of poor housing assets with no more renters.  

These types of lending practices that defied the core rate associated with risk principal that guides private lending markets in a capitalist free market economy were not isolated nor even in their majority lent to low income areas, but rather across America.  We saw Americans buying more house then citizens could afford and needed because lending practices were so loose. 

States and cities that saw booms in the average selling price of homes from the late 1990’s to the mid 2000’s were cycling down in a devaluation of property to re-adjust to what the price probably should have been in the first place by 2008.  States that never saw such inflation in housing prices were now not suffering as badly as states like California, Nevada and Florida.  Regulation was lacking.  Current period profits were maximized at the expense of the long-term losses the risks associated with those short-term revenues created.

The Meme sat at the bar and drank profit the whole time.  When the market crashed the Meme blamed the bartender for trying to drive home drunk.  Has intuitional reform happened?  Are any billionaires in jail?  Hell no, the bar just took a break and Wall Street is still drinking.  

From a political view, this is a failure of both sides of the aisle.  The policies forced lending to the poor on the bottom-end.  The rules encouraged banks to ignore historical levels of scrutiny to comply with Democratic-oriented mandates.  The lack of accountability for corporate banking profits appeased the banking industry.  Republican-oriented inaction led to the expansion of reckless lending.  

Rates should have never been that low on bottom-end high-risk loans to lure people into borrowing when the banker hedged risk on the backs of the taxpayers by splitting and selling the loan into confetti.  The correct free market reaction should have been to charge higher rates, not the bait and switch which actually happened.  Markets could not really charge higher rates, because the Federal Reserve repeatedly repressed them in an escalation of commitment to our downfall to hide our mammoth federal deficit.  

Too-Big-to-Fail happens when financial institutions are more concerned with the vig like a gambling house from conducting the transaction through a loan fee or prepaid interest than what happens when the loan goes bust.  CEO frauds like Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom etc. are consistently linked to excessive executive management compensation as a function of stock price through options.  This creates a Wall Street culture of humans managing companies and investment firms more concerned with the short-term quarter to quarter results than the long term health of their own entities.  We reach a tipping point where unfettered capitalism has become economic cannibalism.

The Meme crafts a rationalized absolute responsibility to stockholders to take that shortcut to maximize profit.  Management sees itself as stockholders due to the stock options and 401k plan.  Management is in a position to trade the long for the short term with plans to cash out.  Damages to the environment, unwitting stock holders who hold the stock after the inevitable decline, and false valuations through rhetoric rather than empirically-based market capitalizations are discounted. 

Lehman Brothers and Enron can fail, but the humans working there who cashed out before the crash made a fortune.  Bonuses and stock price fluctuations have become more linked to sentiment than mathematical evidence.  In the long-run 10K filings based on reality matter, but in the short these can be manipulated based on the rules of accountancy and the perceived penalties from the Securities and Exchange Commission.