Archive for the ‘money’ Category
regulation shuffle
Greenspan met Rand in the early fifties after leaving Columbia, attending meetings at Rand’s apartment with a circle of like-minded jerkoffs who called themselves by the ridiculous name of the Collective and who provided Greenspan the desired forum for social ascent.
These meetings of The Collective would have an enormous impact on American culture by birthing a crackpot anti-theology dedicated to legitimizing self interest — a grotesquerie called Objectivism that hit the Upper East Side cocktail party circuit hard in the fifties and sixties.
It is important to to spend some time on the seriously demented history of Objectivism, because this lunatic religion that should have choked to death in its sleep decades ago would go on, thanks in large part to Greenspan, to provide the entire intellectual context for the financial disasters of the early twenty first century.
Griftopia, Matt Taibbi
Minsk and Havana
Americans in 2007 paid $7,421 per capita for healthcare as opposed to $2,840 paid by the Finns and $3,328 by the Swedes, but life expectancy in the United States is not as long as it is in thirty other countries, among them Finland and Sweden; the first-year infant-mortality rate in the United States is higher than it is in some forty other countries, among them Slovenia and Singapore. A newborn child stands a better chance of survival in Minsk and Havana than it does in New York or Washington.
The money allocated to healthcare in most other developed countries (in Canada and France as well as in Germany and Japan) provides medical insurance for the entire citizenry. Not in America; 46 million citizens (15 percent of the population) are uninsured. Patients with sufficient funds can buy a brain implant or a bionic eye, but an estimated 22,000 people died in 2006 for lack of insurance; 59 million other people reported their inability to receive needed medical attention.
The God in the Machine, Lewis Lapham
Peter Rudd
strawdogs 
