pete <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Jul 2009, Michael Gurstein wrote:
>
>> I think the what's dominant now is the ever-popular Wiley Coyote school of
>> applied economics...
>>
>> M
>
> I think this needs a T-shirt....
And one for the Wiley Cat School of Security Studies:
When Ah sees a stranger sneakin' crosst mah backland, Ah ups with
Ol' Betsey and BLAM! And Ah tells if he's friend or foe when Ah
turns him ovah. -- Wiley Cat
I've mentioned before my favored metaphor for the origins of the
financial melt-down: uncoupling of respiration from phosphorylation in
mitochondria, i.e. while the respiratory chain goes on, furiously
burning sugar, the energy isn't handed off to ATP synthase but gets
turned into heat. Catching up recently on my obsolescent biochem, it
turns out the brown adipocytes in small rodents have dedicated
"uncoupling proteins" and their action actually facilitates
temperature control. But mitochondrial uncoupling in general is a
consequence of pathological or toxic conditions.
So a little finance is a good thing for the social organism but when
the financial system uncouples itself from producing useful, real
stuff for real people and takes off on its own, it doesn't take so
very long before it's burning up astronomically more resources/assets
without regard for the social organism's overall needs.
One guy gets a clue:
It was July 2007 and [Wendell] Potter, a senior executive at giant
US healthcare firm Cigna, was visiting relatives in the
poverty-ridden mountain districts of northeast Tennessee. He saw
an advert in a local paper for a touring free medical clinic at a
fairground just across the state border in Wise County, Virginia.
Potter, who had worked at Cigna for 15 years, decided to check it
out. What he saw appalled him. Hundreds of desperate people, most
without any medical insurance, descended on the clinic from out of
the hills. People queued in long lines to have the most basic
medical procedures carried out free of charge. Some had driven
more than 200 miles from Georgia. Many were treated in the open
air. Potter took pictures of patients lying on trolleys on
rain-soaked pavements.
For Potter it was a dreadful realisation that healthcare in
America had failed millions of poor, sick people and that he, and
the industry he worked for, did not care about the human cost of
their relentless search for profits. "It was over-powering. It was
just more than I could possibly have imagined could be happening
in America," he told the Observer
Potter resigned shortly afterwards....now works at the Centre for
Media and Democracy in Wisconsin....
-- http://www.truthout.org/072609R
but he hardly makes a dent in the relentless, uncoupled financial
focus of (inter alia, of course) the "health care industry".
- Mike
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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