Unsourcing

It seems at least plausible that a principal contribution to the burgeoning income inequality in the U.S. is offshoring and outsourcing. The mechanism is straightforward supply and demand economics coupled to the de facto compensation mechanisms for corporate executives: if a corporation outsources and offshores those functions and obligations that are typically performed by lower earning workers – custodial, secretarial, customer service, manufacturing, and so on – at lower cost (and almost invariably lower compensation to the workers performing identical functions) than it would incur by hiring its own employees, it simultaneously undercuts the compensation bargaining position of its own and its competitors workers in these lower earning roles, and it boosts corporate profits which are in turn used to justify increased compensation of the high earning executives. The executive rewards incentivize (for the executives) the repetition of this income diverging cycle.

What is only now becoming obvious (at least to me) in the unfolding mortgage debacle is that a significant portion of the U.S. corporate sector has added a third component to the outsourcing/offshoring strategy: unsourcing.

Unsourcing: deliberately failing to perform essential and/or long established and/or legally required corporate functions and obligations, usually as a means only to increase executive compensation. Usage: The Countryslide Mortgage Company recently announced that it will be unsourcing its processing and maintenance of mortgage documents in all future mortgage transactions. Executive bonuses totaling the GDP of Bolivia were distributed following the announcement.

In retrospect, I suppose, we should have anticipated this. Unsourcing is the easiest and least costly of the three strategies to implement. The corporation simply doesn’t fulfill its functions and obligations.

To flesh this out just a bit, my reading of the Daily Caller article linked above (disclaimer: have your favorite stomach remedy handy before reading - it’s sickening) is that one significant element now contributing to a potentially renewed and particularly virulent contagion of the financial sector is through the complete abandonment by – for lack of a better word – “banks” of their admittedly mundane but long established and essential clerical role in processing and maintaining documentation associated with the mortgages that they issued, bought, sold, sliced, diced and apparently pureed.

Now don’t get me wrong. On the scale of evil, unsourcing by Corporate America is probably not the worst. This unfolding economic dark night of the soul has unearthed evil upon evil: gambling, unconscionable greed, collusion, corruption, extortion, narcissism, deception, delusion, fraud, theft, malfeasance, misfeasance, and on and on. But somehow through all that I still, probably foolishly, retained a sense that if we could just peel off those rotting outer layers, thick as they were and difficult and unpleasant as it might be, that there was at least a tiny redeemable core at the center. But there is something so primal about unsourcing as a corporate strategy in such a central position in the economy, that now I am not so sure.

Update: More here.

U.S. Economy, 2010 (In A Nutshell)

What do you call it when the proudest infrastructure accomplishment of a country whose economy is imploding, primarily provides quicker access for retirees to gamble away their savings and is named for a friendly fire casualty from a deficit-fueled and unwinnable war?

Prescient.

Are you taking notes, China?

GTFOOTMYS

In response to the “shrillness and intolerance” of the New Atheism (NA), one of the distasteful conceits that has enjoyed a revival in defense of religion against the onslaught of the NA “barbarians” is that religion and science/rationality are non-overlapping magesteria, NOMA. The basic idea is “that’s yours to think about (leptons and quarks) and this is mine (how many angels can dance on the head of pin), and you stay out of my business (wine BECOMES the blood of Christ) and I’ll stay out of yours (covalent bonds).”

There are some pretty straightforward arguments that decimate the NOMA paradigm, but the fact that despite these it is stronger than ever, suggests it may not be a worthwhile front in the overall conflict.

So rather, than fight the NOMA paradigm in a frontal assault, I humbly suggest that a more productive approach might be to enlist, to challenge, the ardent NOMA proponents – for example, the Karen Armstrong’s, and the Francis S. Collins’s, and the Francisco Ayala’s and the whole Templeton lot for that matter – to live up to their grand NOMA ideals. If they are genuinely willing to live the NOMA ideals then I am genuinely willing to give them a second listen.

But let’s be perfectly clear about what that means in practice: when some s**thead two-bit cleric says of homosexuality:

"Some suppose that they were pre- set and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and unnatural. Not so. Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember, he is our Father.”

a s**thead two-bit cleric utterly lacking in understanding of prenatal biochemistry, genetic predisposition, the empathy necessary to gracefully accept others living out their lives as they were born, and even, apparently, the reflective ability to experience cognitive dissonance at his infantile doctrine in the face of something like, say, spina bifida [yes, why would our heavenly father do THAT to anyone?], then the brave little NOMA warriors will in unison, very loudly, and in boldface font say unto him or her: “Get The F**k Out Of This Magesterium You S**thead!”

Karen? Francis? Francisco? Anyone??

Update: Shrill and intolerant. Guilty as charged.

Gambling

The structure of gambling necessarily engenders both winners and losers, the winners benefitting at the expense of the losers. It’s part of the visceral “joy" of gaming. What has America done over the past generation but eagerly, seamlessly, ruthlessly integrate the gambling ethos into our economy, so much so that even curbing the gambling will utterly destroy the economy? It must feel exhilarating, self-actualizing, so self-evidently proper and natural for the few to walk away from the table with their multi-million and billion dollar compensation packages won so effortlessly at the expense of all those hapless 50+ year old losers and all the rest. What have we wrought? What have we wrought?

An Open Letter to President Barack Obama

President Obama,

I urge you to reconsider your administration's extraordinary and, in my opinion, extreme position on invoking the state secrets privilege to prevent review of targeted killing of U.S. citizens.

If we have learned anything as a nation, anything at all over the last troubled decade, it is that our extensive intelligence apparatus and best functioning executive processes are not immune to even the most basic failures.

It seems to me that precisely because of the inevitability of these failures our government was and has been wisely structured with checks and balances and this is nowhere more true than in the competition between the rights of individuals and actions of the government with its overwhelming power and resources. The targeted killing policy simply discards this fundamental principle and in a stunning manner that is the most irreversible, unenlightened, anti-democratic fashion imaginable.

As a veteran or our nation’s armed forces, I clearly understand that we live in a dangerous world and that the most important of your charges as president is the safety of America’s citizens. But, again, such safety is always a competition between the rights of the individual and the actions of an overwhelmingly powerful and self-evidently failure-susceptible government. Any realistic reflection on this policy in consideration of history, politics, and our constitution can lead to no other conclusion but that it demolishes a cornerstone of our values as a nation and will ultimately have tragic consequences. Again, I urge you to reconsider.

Acquired Dunning-Kruger Effect and Anosognosia Syndrome - ADKEAS

I humbly submit a new, brash, and untested hypothesis - that the existence of the tea-party, and particularly of the many tea-party enthusiasts enthusiastically embracing ideas that are patently counter to their own interests, is evidence of a heretofore unidentified chronic, devastating medical affliction: Acquired Dunning-Kruger Effect and Anosognosia Syndrome (ADKEAS).

An Open Letter To My "Moderate" Republican Representative

`God save thee, ancient Mariner !
From the fiends, that plague thee thus !--
Why look'st thou so ?'--With my cross-bow
I shot the albatross.

As you know from my missives to you on a variety of topics, you and I do not see eye to eye on many issues. Therefore you might be surprised to learn that I probably agree with you that the recently passed Health Care Reform bill is a stinker.

Now you might be thinking: “Great! The ‘stinker’ aspect of HCR is a winner, it even has my opposition constituents disgruntled” – and that a lot of folks like me will simply associate the stinkiness with your political opponents who voted for the bill. But, you know what? Some voters have the ability to be a bit more nuanced in our understanding of politics than when we voted for 5th grade class president, and I intend to make sure everyone I know is familiar with the following narrative of your role in HCR.

The background, and again, something on which I suspect we both agree: Americans currently pay more, a great deal more, per capita for health care than any other nation and yet more than 30 other countries have health care outcomes that outperform ours, and this situation is a serious and growing threat to the competitiveness of our economy, to say nothing of what it says about our values.

The leadership of your party, leadership you apparently willingly followed (considering your extensive voting record, public comments, and legislative actions and inactions with respect to HCR), opted to implement a strategy intended to do nothing less than simply ensure the defeat of any HCR legislation. This was in spite of your party leadership’s failure to advance any meaningful legislation to address the health care issues identified above during the many years when it was in control of the legislative and executive branches of government, the wide margin of victory by your political opponents - opponents who had made clear that health care reform was an agenda they would undertake - in the 2008 elections, the obvious attempts to forumlate the HCR bill in a bipartisan fashion, and the now painfully clear political miscalculation that the HCR bill would be defeated by a shameful partisan effort.

That is, when given the chance to improve a stinky HCR bill, to really do something on behalf of your constituents, even if it meant compromises on some issues, you instead squandered the opportunity in loyalty to party leadership whose judgement is now so obviously questionable. I will now and always think of and represent the stinking aspects of this bill as your legacy, a legacy you now so richly deserve.

Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.