The Howling Fantods

It happens every year, such is the bane of a teacher, one who chooses to take full advantage of his three months holiday by doing as little as possible. With Septembers entrance and the idea of October becoming increasingly real come the howling fantods, a David Foster Wallace coined term for what the urban dictionary defines as 'a stage 4 case of the heebie jeebies'. The intense feeling of both fear and repulsion isn't necessarily generated by the students or actual teaching, but everything that comes with it: going to meetings (and sitting through hours of pablum in order to pick up the two or three crucial facts), preparing syllabuses (and the never ending discussion over whether it should be syllabi or syllabuses), preparing and grading exams and essays (and suffering the inevitable erosion in optimism every teacher has for a new batch of students abilities) , maintaining attendance lists and records of grades (and navigating the minefield of absence excuses and exceptions to the rules), opening and responding to the tsunami-like onslaught of emails (and resisting the incessant temptation to type what I really feel). In short, the bureaucracy.

Parallel to this, however, September also brings the promise of a new NFL season and the accompanying hopes and aspirations for both real and fantasy teams. Yet, even here one must be careful not to dwell too deeply as football is sad if you think about it too long. Then again, thinking about near anything to do with the state of humanity too long these days is a sure-fire avenue to abhorrence of the state of anything from pop culture to humanity's future, health care to warfare, ecology to theology, and robotics to politics. Alas, with a hat tip to Hunter S., ain't that the most fear and loathing inducing of them all; November is just around the corner meaning either Hillary Clinton (Shillary Clintoon) or Donald Trump (Drumpf) will become the most powerful person on the planet.

"Chill", you say, "after all, at worst, things have always looked this bleak from certain angles, at best, humanity is continuing its unstoppable march of progress, and really, much of the fear is a consequence of this progress as it's thanks to the abundance of information our shiny technology makes available that things look so desperate." Ahhh, young grasshopper, knowledge is not wisdom, information is not even knowledge, and, worse, what passes for information today is not even that as it is far more often mindless drivel designed to drive eyeballs to screens or shameless propaganda. Driven by biology, we seek ever greater data highs, mindlessly scrolling in search of the next hit while in bed, in the car, on the tram or sitting amidst friends and family. Instead of expanding our world, the result has been to shrink or simply limit the endless spectrum of possibilities which exist thereby driving us to the two most extremes: yes or no, black or white, good or evil, Coke or Pepsi, Republican or Democrat, Cuntservative or Libtard.

By reducing our thought processes to such binary thinking, this deluge of data makes it impossible to support one side on some issues and agree with another on different issues as the media landscape has adapted to satisfy our natural instinct to confirm our biases. The Manichaen worldview that results allows us to feel intelligent without understanding, and once we feel intelligent, we feel superior. Reflection is impossible in this reductionist landscape and we begin to rely on words such as "always" and "never" while ignoring the infinite nuances which exist and instead slip back to the way we saw the world as children. Simplicity's a virtue in a pop song or when a head coach instructs his players, but a dangerous weapon when spilling from the mouth of a demagogue.

Anyhoo, before I get too far ahead of myself, let's get back to the upcoming NFL season. As is tradition around here, we'll go through the league making predictions about how every team will do while giving all you fantasy football freaks a few players to target in your upcoming drafts using their ADP (average draft position) from Fantasy Football Calculator best on 12-team PPR leagues. Parallel to this, each division will be accompanied by one of the world's eight biggest problems. Tall task you say? Hut, hut, hut!

NFC East - Cowboys, 'Skins, Eagles, Giants and greed

This once mighty division has fallen on hard times. Gone are the days of the Triplets, the Hogs, the Helmet Catch, and, um, whatever glory the Eagles have ever enjoyed. Jaworski? Cunningham? Anyway, the division that has won the most Super Bowls since the 1970 merger (12) is now probably the worst in the league. I'm not calling the Cowboys this year after Romo broke his back (ok, a bone in his back) after breaking his collar bone twice last year. If the Dak Prescott Cowboys win 8, I'll be happy. Instead, it'll be the loathsome 'skins playing a single playoff game this year. The Giants vie for first but fade down the stretch while the Eagles will save the Cowboys from finishing last as last week they decided to sell their present for the future.

Yet it's Dallas that has the most lucrative fantasy gem. Maybe. I feel RB Ekekiel, aka Zeke, aka Eze Elliot, aka Easy E (at least that's how all the cool kids podcasters are calling him) will be a top 3 back, book it. Whether you draft him fourth (which I will be doing) or if he should come later in the RB1 run is a coin flip, but I'm betting on a full work load behind the best line in football is #4 worthy despite Romo's injury. Tony's broken back does knock Dez way down to the late 2nd round though and makes TE Jay Witten waiver wire fodder for half a year. Dak's only draftable in 2QB leagues. Today. The 'skins running game will be led by Matt Jones who I'm not drafting in his early 7th round range. Watch his shoulder and fumble-itis, making UFA Robert Kelley an interesting last round flyer. TE Jordan Reed is too expensive at the end of the 3rd thanks to his injury risk but QB Kirk Cousin is worth snagging in the 10th. Rookie phenom WR Josh Doctson had buzz but can't get on the field, I'd only take DeSean Jackson from their receiver corp at #83, he's damn quick and consistent when healthy and looks good.

Eli is always a safe late QB if you play the waiting game on the position. I'm kinda dreading being 3rd in any draft as you've gotta take OBJ, Odell Beckham Jr. but don't think he's gonna be worth the price. WR Sterling Sharpe is an expensive rookie at the top of the bottom of the seventh, I'm saving for another freshman, but Victor Cruz could be worth a dart if he comes back at 80% of his two-years-ago-self. Rashad Jennings played lights out to finish '15 after a disastrous 4-headed monster experiment in NY, I'd take a shot on him at #77. It's PPR, so think about Vereen at the end but leave the rookie Paul Perkins alone along with any Giants TEs. It's rookie QB Carson Wentz time now that Sam Bradford has been sold for picks but not for your team. TE Zach Ertz is more intriguing at his end of the 8th price thanks to the rookie dump off tendency provided he's healed. Leave WR Jordan Matthews alone at 65, stone hands or attention lapses, but I like both Ryan Mathews as a workhouse at the beginning of the 6th and sparkplug Darren Sproles at his bargain basement price.

Doubtless, a sharp-eyed rabblerouser will have noticed my not using the full name of the Washington Football Club. Their media programmed knee-jerk reaction would likely be to call me a libtard. Instead of using the name controversy to, well, throw names at each other, the team should have just given in to the logical end of the game and sold the rights. No more upset Native Americans, no more apoplectic people screaming about political correctness. Simply replaced by the American way. Profit at the expense of progress. For the owners at least as I'm sure it would net Daniel Snyder a few hundred million minimum. Could it be worth a billion? Seriously.

Snyder joined Cowboy owner Jerry Jones at the top of the worst owner list a couple years back in large part due to greed which has played its hand in destroying their franchises as it has in corrupting the so-called free market capitalist system. Once upon a time owners had a greater stake in what their workers created as both made a long-term commitment to wealth generation, wealth that wasn't quarterly profits but progress. The incentive today is skewed towards get yours while you can, all too often at the expense of others, which has resulted in the largest transfer of monetary wealth from the have nots and have somes to the haves in history over the past 35 years. With this comes the power to perpetuate and calcify the current social order into the future. Income elasticity falls to zero as the American Dream falls victim to the greed that birthed it The most instructive illustration of how much more of society's creation the rich are skimming is in this chart:

Yeah, that's the percentage of total income taken home by the richest 0.01% (one out of 10000 people). Notice their earning over six times the proportion they did in the 1970s. Oh, and thanks to the supposed efforts to solve the financial crisis (caused at least in part by this inequality) such as quantitative easing, inequality has dramatically worsened in the past few years. Oh, and wait until the robots take over, things will get worse fast, cause then the owners of capital won't have to pay anybody anything. Riddle me this Batman. How does an economic system driven by consumption survive when the consumers aren't able to, well, consume? Answer. It can't or, better, it does for a while, and then one day it doesn't.

NFC West - Seahawks, Cardinals, Rams, 49ers and nationalism

Just a few years back the west sent a division winner to the playoffs with a losing record and now has two Super Bowl contenders along with a now struggling team just 3 years removed from the big dance and a franchise in LA! I do hate the Shithawks, I mean Jesus Christ that self-righteous '12' thing the fans have, and did Russell Wilson instagram himself losing his virginity to some B star no one out of the US has heard of? But they'll hold off the Cardinals for the crown; Wilson's also a football freak and better than old man Carson Palmer. The Rams have another #1 pick falling flat, but they don't need Jared Goff to keep the 49ers in the basement of the division. San Francisco could be historically bad offensively while at least LA has RB Todd Gurley.

Todd's the stud here but just by a hair as a case could be made to take Cardinal RB David Johnson ahead of him. Regardless of the order, it's Easy E, DJ and Gurley as the top 3 RBs ahead of All Day and Lamar in my mind. Both Thomas Rawls and Carlos Hyde carry high risk for 4th rounders, the former hasn't played in preseason following surgery after his gruesome season ending ankle injury last year and the latter suffered the dreaded concussion in the Niners second preseason game. At one point this preseason, the Cardinals WR trio of Michael Floyd, Larry Fitzgerald and John Brown were going back-to-back-to back in the 5th round, the former two still are and might be too pricey but take advantage of Brown's concussion (that's a bit off, no?) and grab him at his mid-7th round sale price. James Baldwin is too expensive thanks to all those TDs last year, expect regression, but 2nd year speedster Tyler Lockett is worth a 7th round prick if John Brown's gone, especially if you're league counts return yards and TDs. Don't touch any of the 49ers or Rams wide-outs, ok, a case could be made for Tavon Austin in the 10th, but don't buy the Torrey Smith hype as the QB situation in San Francisco is a clusterfuck. I'm not buying the other QBs here either as both Wilson and Palmer are overpriced for different reasons and you never take Case Keenum. Tight ends come to this division to die (Jimmy Graham please stand up).

Speaking of standing up, you might have heard 49ers QB Colin Kaepernick stood up by sitting down during the national anthem the other day. Seriously, in a jingoistic ritual that would mystify most foreign observers, the Star Spangled Banner is played before every game, with people doffing their hats and singing the lyrics while tears stream down their face. You might have seen it during a Super Bowl or something. Anyway, believing they are the freest people in the world, Americans are completely oblivious to the propagandistic and conformity inducing effects such ritualized behaviors have, um, I mean little kids pledge allegiance to a classroom flag every day. So, for the first time in awhile, a professional athlete has put his endorsement deals in danger (ok, granted, his flagging abilities has lowered his earning potential, we're not talking about Lew Alcindor/Kareem Abdul-Jabar, Casius Clay/Mohammed Ali level here) to lodge his protest that the country isn't living up to its bargain. In response, this is the vitriol that millions are exposed to in order to maintain the deflect, divide and maintain the status quo:



Of course this tactic isn't unique to America unfortunately as a decade of economic crisis, a 15-year-old-turning-perpetual or perhaps civilizational, Huntingtonian war and ensuing refugee crisis are stewing together to produce a nasty nationalistic edge in much of the world. The near year old government of Poland, where I've been living for almost a decade, has succeeded in transforming the country using the same crap. Here, we've got an unelected dictator (ok Jaroslaw Kaczynski does have a seat in the Sejm, the parliament), who blames the Russians for killing his twin brother, the Germans for spreading gender ideology (really, they think gender's a 'disease' akin to homosexuality here), and refugees for having parasites. Besides destroying the constitutional court, media independence and privacy, so far the biggest thing they've done is try to push the percentage of baby strollers used by parents to carry actual babies above that used to haul cans and bottles by bums. I think its hoped that giving families 500 zloty (about $150) per month for every child after the first will solve the demographic problem so they won't be forced to allow immigrants in as most other countries do to plug the looming pension gap. Strangely enough, the drumbeat to war against Russia isn't only being played in Poland where they're taunting Putin with a new missile shield courtesy of America, which makes Trump the safer choice over Hillary but he'll have to lose because supposedly he's a racist and she's not. Or something.

NFC North - Vikings, Packers, Bears, Lions and corporate welfare

The black and blue division features the most storied team in the league, a Saturday Night Live skit, AP also known as AD and a toothless Panthera leo. The first, the Green Bay Packers should regain the division crown provided RB Eddie Lacy keeps his weight under 250 lbs and WR Jordy Nelson is 90% of his pre-ACL tear self to help QB Aaron Rogers recapture his 2014 form. The gruesome, non-contact, season ending injury to Vikings QB Teddy Bridgewater during practice forced the team to mortgage the future to bring in Sam Bradford. Not sold on the move but he's an upgrade on Shaun Hill and should put them in the wildcard hunt. The Lions lost Megatron (WR Calvin Johnson) to retirement but picked up WR Marvin Jones to pick up the slack in offensive coordinator Jim Bob Cooter's (the best name in football) scheme. If anyone can topple the Packers, it'll be the Lions if they play like they did in the 2nd half of last season when they went 6-2. The Bears need too many things to go right to really challenge: QB Smokin' Jay Cutler needs to care, WR Alshon Jeffery needs to stay healthy, 2nd year WR Kevin White needs to learn to run routes and RB Jeremy Langford needs to channel his inner Matt Forte.

On the fantasy side, I believe Langford is undervalued in the 4th and Lacy will be worth his ADP in the 2nd while I'd take AP if he dropped to me at the tail end of the 1st but still don't trust Ameer Abdullah, though he could be a league changer if he breaks out as a bellcow 7th round pick. At WR, Alshon Jeffery is too much injury risk for my blood at 23rd. Don't draft Kevin White. Could be Marvin Jones or Golden Tate being the 1A or 1B, that's why they're near back to back at the front of the 6th and worth it. Or Jordy Nelson, or even Randall Cobb for that matter if the aforementioned ACL frees him up to be his #2 self. Jordy's a little high at 18 but I'm buying Cobb in the middle of the 3rd. All the Vikings receivers took too big a hit for me to buy. The breakout TE could very well be former Ram fan tormentor Jared Cook catching balls in Green Bay. From Aaron Rogers. Who is too rich for my blood; if I want a reasonably priced QB in this division it would be Stafford who you can nab in the 11th. It's a tempting strategy to wait on him, but watch who your opponents have drafted, you may have to reach to the 10th for him if say someone like Taylor goes before you pick.

The Vikings will host their first game in brand spanking new, aptly named US Bank Stadium. Perfect name for the welfare teat suckling pair, the NFL and banks. We'll never compute how much world wide public debt was taken on just for the last crisis on behalf of the banks. US citizens took on about $30 trillion for the bailouts alone. A crisis which was mostly caused by income inequality which has since gotten worse thank to the bank saving bailouts and quantitative easing. Meanwhile, the Vikings are the latest in a line of public coffer looters as the land of 10,000 lakes is at least an extra half billion deeper in debt thanks to owner Zygi Wilf doing what the system is designed to do. Take money from the bottom and funnel it up. Did you know that not only did the Rams leave St. Louis for Los Angeles but they also left the city over $100 million in debt to repay for the stadium they had to build the Rams the previous time he threatened to move the team to LA? Oh, the Vikings get the 2018 Super Bowl, which may earn the city money, but only those who own the means to make it, ie. the owner class. Bread and Circuses for the masses to distract them from noticing that their taxes subsidize Walmart's ability to pay workers less than survival wages, pay tens of billions of Wall Streets bonuses, pay Big Oil tens of billions in subsidies (almost $500 billion a year worldwide), pay hundreds of billions to Big Pharma so they can charge patients hundreds for a single pill, and pay the MIC trillions to wage wars in their name.

NFC South - Falcons, Saints, Bucs and Panthers and oil and plastic

Seven months removed from their near Cinderella run to the championship the Panthers should be the strongest team in their division once again as they return much the same team, minus CB Josh Norman but plus WR Kelvin Benjamin. It never pays to pick the Buccaneers, but I'll peg them at two here as Lovie Smith isn't anywhere near them this year. One should never underestimate a Drew Brees led team but the Saints Super Bowl window closes a little more this year while they languish in 3rd and the Falcons bring up the rear.

Real life and fantasy talent abound in this division starting at QB, except for Matt Ryan who seems to have completely lost the plot. Nevertheless, Cam Newton at 35, Drew Brees at 63, and Jameis Winston at 128 are all draftable, but I like them in reverse order for biggest bang for the buck. Julio Jones has to depend on Ryan to get him the ball but he's still worth a top three pick while Mohamed Sanu across from him over from the Bengals looks good and a bargain at the end of the 11th. Buc WR Mike Evans is the other stud here and should benefit from improved QB play and so-called 'positive TD regression' making me want him more than Dez, putting him in the top 10 WRs. Heads up, fellow Buc Vincent Jackson doesn't look finished, I like him at #126. The Panthers somehow got by with WR Ted Ginn last year but both Kelvin Benjamin and Devin Funchess will be the guys; although, I couldn't pull the trigger on Kelvin at the beginning of the fourth, Devin's a deal in the ninth. The Saints WR suffer from diffusion as Brees spreads it out so much making Brandin Cooks and rookie Michael Thomas too pricey at #25 and #119, but Willie Snead's on my radar if he falls to the end of the eighth. At TE, Greg Olsen is always solid but too high at the start of the 5th, stay away the Bucs, don't get suckered into buying Austin Sefarian Jenkins potential, ditto the Falcons as I don't even know their TE, but watch Coby Fleener in the TE happy Saints offense; I'm buying at #76.

My wife had plastic at number one in terms of the scariest thing facing us these days. Can't blame her, people spend a buck on piece of junk that will be used once and then stick around about 1000 years. If you don't know what microbeads are, check it out, messed up. And oil? What woe can't be pinned on it? Climate change? War? Yet, governments such as the US subsidize its production far more than renewable energy. How messed up it that? Paying companies to use up crud that is killing us instead of promoting self-reliance. Never mind that July was the hottest month ever recorded, or that it was the 15th consecutive monthly record, enough people have been convinced that there's no way that human activity could have any hand in changing the climate by their tardification source of choice, be it religious based, media based or simply economics based. That last one is the cudgel many try to use to bash the otherwise rational into submission: why try to save ourselves from extinction by curbing and cutting reliance on fossil fuels when doing so will cause us all to go broke; which of course means we'll starve to death. I'm sure this one even works on the people of Baton Rough, latest victims of a once in a thousand year climate event that I'm sure had nothing to do with anthropogenic climate change. Don't worry, they've got nothing on the people of Alberta still living in denial about what happened in Fort McMurray where at least they got to make a few bucks before what they were doing caused the place to burn to the ground.

AFC East - Dolphins, Patriots, Bills, Jets and privilege and racism

Oh my god I hate this division. The Patriots have won it seven years in a row and 13 of the last 15, and not even sidelining QB Tom Brady for the first four games (yes, Deflategate is still a thing in a world stuck on repeat) will take the title away from them. I mean who's gonna beat them here? The Jets? You mean the team that missed the playoffs thanks to three consecutive drive killing interceptions in the last game of the year? The Dolphins? Really? You think Arian Foster is going to save a team that couldn't figure out how to use Lamar Miller? The Bills? Rex Ryan's Bills? You do know he brought in his brother Rob to run the defense, right? Bills fans seem to really hate tables. I prefer ignoring this division all together, screw you Patriots, go ahead and win a division that no one cares about.

You know what, maybe you should just ignore this division in fantasy too. Except maybe TE Rob Gronkowski. A lot's been made of the shrinking gap between Gronk and the rest of the TEs, but I'm not buying it. Take Gronk in the middle of the 2nd or ignore the position until much later. The Pats 2nd TE, Martellus Bennett is the only other draftable TE here. I hate Jordan Cameron and do the Jets even have one? Whether you pick QB Tom Brady depends on your draft and bench space; if you choose to take him in the 6th, you'll need to pick up someone like Tyrod Taylor at 119, or one of the Ryans, Fitzpatrick at 160 or Tannehill at 164 in the last couple rounds. Leave them all and target Derek Carr or Matthew Stafford thanks to their first four game opponents. LeSean McCoy is attractive as an RB1 in the late second as is Matt Forte in the mid-fourth but I can't stomach either Arian Foster or Jay Ajayi from the Dolphins or any of the Patriot running backs. The best WR in the division is 32 years old so I'd have trouble taking Brandon Marshall at the end of the 1st round. Jarvis Landry is a PPR machine and makes a great WR2 if he slides to you in the 3rd. If you're confident that Sammy Watkins has relearned how to run, he was a monster at the end of last year and would make a good consolation if someone scoops Laundry on you but I'm not taking 4-game-Bradyless-post broken foot Julian Edelman in the same round. Yes, Eric Decker is worth his fourth round slot, but I never take his boringness, I'm not down on DeVante Parker at 103 but might take a shot on teamate Kenny Stills with my last positional pick in the 13th. The other flyers are Pats WRs Chris Hogan and rookie Malcolm Mitchell, but they'll be available on waivers.

I admit that I hate the Pats for no other reason than the aura of entitlement that seems to surround them. This privilege inevitably results in them doing all kinds of crap they think they're allowed to do because of who they are and even if they get caught, the price they'll have to pay makes the penalty worth it, kind of like, say, the way banks behave. Cheat, win a title, pay a fine. Cheat, make billions, pay a few million. Same goes for the oil companies, ditto the insurance business, etc... It's gotten to the point where not only do the corporations and super wealthy feel entitled to special treatment but the public expects it as well. Yet, deep down, the majority doesn't accept it and are in need of someone to give a voice to their grievances, someone not afraid to speak their mind even if it upsets a few apple carts.

Here's what I love. This nouveau alt-right constantly claim to being held hostage by political correctness; the libtard thought police is limiting their rights. Yet, the mere mention that support for the Trumps, Brexits, La Pens or Kaczynskis of the world is at least in part a product of racism is somehow taboo despite it being indisputably true. First, look at some of the supporters, be they KKK members in the US or ONR supporters in Poland, regardless of whether or not they are the majority, they represent a significant slice and they are racists, not just the silent kind, but the truly evil kind. Second, listen to their words; gone are the halcyon days of subtle dog whistle calls to violence and replaced with the overtly racist Trump calling Mexican immigrants drug dealers, criminals and rapists or Kaczynski claiming refugees carry "parasites and protozoa" or other Polish politicians calling them "human trash". Thanks to dialogue's impossibility in today's polarized political reality, simply stating these things automatically gets you labelled as an enemy of the state, or citizens of "the worst sort". The inevitable outcome of such talk is the violence against minorities we see spiking around the world. It's a wonder the very people inciting the hatred by denouncing foreigners can even act surprised when emigrants from their own country are murdered abroad. Maybe this is how the world was caught off guard by Hitler.

AFC West - Broncos, Chiefs, Chargers, Raiders and war

Well, this is weird. You win the Super Bowl with the worst quarterback in the league who will be remembered by many as the greatest in history capping off a run of five straight division titles only to come into the next year without a QB. I'm picking the Broncos to tumble to third as both the Chiefs and Raiders leapfrog them leaving the Chargers to languish in the basement. The Chiefs finished last year with a ten game winning streak and will ride the return of RB Jamaal Charles and Justin Houston to the division crown. The Raiders are stacked with young talent and earn a wildcard birth while Denver adjusts downward to the most-Manning era and the Chargers give up the most points in the league. Fear not, Oakland will come out losers as that prick Mark Davis figures out a way to get Las Vegas to pay for a new stadium for the Raiders next year.

Oakland has the shiniest fantasy toys: RB Latavius Murray might be too high at the end of the 3rd with rookie DeAndre Washington (worth his #133) lurking, but Amari Cooper should dominate his second year justifying his #20 position, and fellow WR Michael Crabtree and QB Derek Carr are steals at #81 and #106. There might not be any draftable TEs in Oakland, but the Chargers have one of the greatest looking to break the TE TD record - Antonio Gates is worth every penny of the 102 spot. WR Keenan Allen was on his way to a record season before a freaky kidney laceration, he could be a bargain even at #14 as is 2nd year RB Melvin Gordon and PPR god Danny Woodhead; draft them happily at 51 and 56. With his team trailing all the time, QB Philip Rivers should be good value at the tail end of the 8th round. The Chiefs might win the division but their offense is boring, I mean their QB won't even be drafted. Sure Jeremy Maclin showed that KC WRs can actually score TDs but he's just a tad overpriced at the beginning of the 4th. There's too much risk in the backfield as Jamaal Charles comes back from his 2nd ACL and turns 30 just after Christmas at the 2/3 turn, but scoop up his backup Spencer Ware in the 8th or 9th. TE Travis Kelce should provide just enough return to justify a 6th round pick. In Denver, I always avoid running backs, will stay away from the QBs, would take WRs Demaryius Thomas in the late 3rd and Emmanuel Sanders in the 7th and am more than intrigued by their TE Virgil Green who you should be able to pick up for free off waivers.

Never mind the clusterfuck that is Syriqistan, the chicken hawks have their sites set on a bigger conflict: Russia. Bored with siphoning off wealth from the productive economy, arming opposing sides of conflicts, scattering arms around the world and fudging the books to the tune of $6.5 trillion in a single year, and eager to justify spending over $1.5 trillion dollars on a plane that doesn't work, it's clear that the military industrial complex is intent on pushing us into a conflict with armageddon-like consequences. Step one, foment a faux revolution in Ukraine. Step two, continue to flaunt promises to not expand into Eastern Europe by continuing to do so by building a missile shield in Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic (but say it's to protect the west from Iran!) while embarking on a trillion dollar nuclear arsenal upgrade, Step three, pound the public with a deluge of evil empire, Putin is bad, faux hacking stories. Step four, put a war hawk in the Oval Office. Sit back and wait for the fireworks:



AFC North - Steelers, Ravens, Browns, Bengals, and the failure of experts

Ah, the AFC North home to a franchise that honestly believes they can do no wrong despite being even more evil than most, another better known as the Bungles, one that should be the Colts, and, um, the Shit Stains. Seriously, the Stillers, er, Steelers are led by Rapey McGreyPenis and are rumored to have the best offense, like, totally ever, but since they can't get everyone on the field at the same time due to suspensions, we'll never know. Meanwhile, the Bengals proved last January that it is actually scientifically impossible for them to win a playoff game no matter how much better they are than their opponent. Despite winning two Super Bowl victories since Art Modell magically created the Ravens, they'll never be a real team. And Cleveland, well, what can you say? They'll always be the Browns. The Bengals will win the division again only to lose their first playoff game, the Stillers will field enough players to fight for a wildcard, the Ravens will win more games than last years dismal five but only manage third yet will hold off the resurgent, yes, resurgent Browns who nevertheless stay in the cellar.

Fantasy gold awaits the aggressive claim staker here particularly at WR from surefire #1 Antonio Brown and slightly overpriced #5 AJ Green to the ultimate risk/reward choices of Josh Gordon and Steve Smith Sr. An early 5th round pick seems to steep for Flash as he's suspended the first four games and all it takes is one more toke for him to find himself out of the league while for some reason I'll gamble the last pick of the 12th on a 37-year-old returning from a double ruptured achilles. In between, Kamar Aiken at 115, Mohamed Sanu (142), and rookies Corey Coleman (127) and Tyler Boyd (143) are all reasonably priced, Terrell Pryor at 174 and Mike Wallace in the previous slot are great for larger league players. At QB, Big Ben takes too much punishment to stay intact all year while RGIII knee will fold at some point but they could be paired with someone like undrafted Joe Flacco. The Red Rifle's (Andy Dalton) 137 seems like a bargain to me. Want a high-upside RB at a discount price? Well, here's La'Veon Bell who you can get at #12 because he's suspended the first three games, after which he could be the highest point getter in the league. Grab him, but you'll need an extra roster spot for his replacement DeAngelo Williams and you'll need to grab him before #68. I'll always take pass catching Giovanni Bernard at #60 over bulldozer Jeremy Hill at #50 but vice-versa in Cleveland as Isaiah Crowell's 112 is more appealing than Duke Johnson's 70. Skip the mess that is the Ravens backfield. Tremendous value in descending order at TE: Jesse James (undrafted, so free), Gary Barnidge (79), Tyler Eifert (116, cheap as dirt but will miss a few games meaning you'll need to draft another TE). Again, I'm passing on the Ravens carousel here.

Despite the best efforts of think tanks, media pundits and sages to convince us that the likes of Drumpf and Brexit are merely the by-product of stupid people voting against their self-interests, they are, in fact, in large part the product of years of poisoning the well of public dialogue, decades of a quid pro quo relationship among the so-called cognoscenti, the traditional media and the ruling class. Once upon a time much of research done was carried out in universities and laboratories that were for the most part publicly funded. However, as neoliberal policies were implemented, shrinking tax revenue, particularly from the rich and corporations, strangling funding to public institutions, such as NASA and universities, and deregulating everything from the financial industry to the labor market, the majority of research came to depend on private financing. Not only did this make once autonomous institutions dependent on corporate sponsorship but it also gave rise to the rapid expansion of influence wielded by so-called think tanks. You know, those benevolent sounding places that provide the majority of panelists on TV debates and commentary in newspaper articles such as the Heritage Foundation, the Brookings Institute, RAND, and the Center for American Progress.

The world's a complicated place so clearly we need experts in fields requiring years or decades of study to provide guidance. Yet, it doesn't take a genius to figure out the fatal flaw here, but at least one, Upton Sinclair, put it into words, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!". In football, as in much of the capitalist model, this arrangement often works. Taking the example of the NFL draft, the owner, unless he's Jerry Jones, might have the final say in draft choices, but he relies on a myriad of scouts (experts) to give him advice as s/he is unable to keep track of all the variables that factor into each decision, much like the average voter in the voting booth. Those who give advice that results in positive outcomes, say, suggesting a seventh round draft choice who turns out to become a three-time Super Bowl winning quarterback, earn increased trust in the future while those who recommended taking JaMarcus Russell with the #1 pick overall lose the confidence of the owner or their job as there is a direct line of accountability  between the scout and owner.

Now, think of that aforementioned average citizen. (S)he has been assured by a leading economist/military adviser/university academic that the policies included in the platform of the Republicrat party benefit him/her. Now, 30+ years later, after faithfully marking an X next to that party's candidate every couple of years, s/he is no better, or even worse, off than s/he was 30+ years ago. S/he can't fire the experts who led her astray, and in fact many of those very experts are now in higher positions. Why? For the simple reason that the advice wasn't intended to benefit the voter but instead those who paid for the advice in the first place. What? An economist arguing in favor of NAFTA then and TTIP today? A four-star general advocating war in Iraq yesterday and somewhere else tomorrow? A geologist producing a report paid for by Haliburton which claims there's no earthquake risk of fracking in Oklahoma? No wonder we have lunatics running around claiming vaccines cause autism, 9/11 was an inside job and the world is run by the Bildebergs. It's surprising more people don't.

Examples abound, from the seemingly benign to the unequivocally asinine to the, um, well, those with the effects of strychnine. Obamacare, drones, and free trade all sound good to both those selling the idea and the ADD-suffering electorate. After all, who could be against increasing the number of people with access to health care, reducing the number of soldiers coming home in flag-draped coffins and expanding job-producing trade? Alas, the assurances of Grima Wormtongue couldn't do a better job of keeping the promises of such spells intact in the mind of the populace while doing the exact opposite. The scam of Obamacare was to sell the idea of moving toward healthcare coverage for everyone while disguising its primary purpose, to extend the healthcare market of the for-profit private insurance industry. Its inevitable failure is inscribed in its fundamental contradiction: providing affordable quality healthcare on the condition of satisfying the profit prerogative of capitalist corporations. Regardless of what the Atlantic tries to convince you, health care is a right, not a business. What better way to win the war on terror than blowing up bad guys by remote control? A doubly effective message combining the vision of technological progress while inoculating the TV news consuming public from the horrors of Vietnam-style numbers of returning body bags. So long as no one notices the terrorists don't hate us for our freedoms but for blowing up their hospitals and wedding parties. Finally, loosing trade from the constraints of bureaucracy is the image most think of thanks to the 'free' of free trade. Well, the experts forget to tell you about the non-free part where corporations use cheap labor to pad their executive compensation packages instead of paying middle-class wages to workers at home and gives those same corporation the power to overturn national laws if they interfere with profits through secret tribunals known as Investor State Dispute Settlements (ISDS).

AFC South - Colts, Texans, Titans, Jaguars, and terrorism

After years of having the division as a playground, the Colts stumbled to an 8-8 record as the Texans advanced to the playoffs. If Indy's offensive line finds away to stop QB Andrew Luck from being pummelled play after play they should find their way back to the top, but it's not a gimme. And I don't think it's the Texans who will challenge them but the Jaguars who after a decade of irrelevance finally, at least on paper, have what it take to take the division. Houston battles into December but fall short while the Titans, though slightly improved from last year, remain in the cellar.

I'm all in on former Dolphin, now Texan RB Lamar Miller as I picked him up both in my 10 team PPR snake draft and 20 team auction (yes, 20 teams!). Couldn't say no at the price, 12th pick and $45 respectively so I say he's worth his current #11 ADP. Teammate Nuk Hopkins is a bit overpriced at #6 as the rookie pairing of Will Fuller and Braxton Miller syphon away a few of his targets. Will's worth a shot at #128. I like the Jag players over the Colts, of the WR Allens, I'd buy Robinson at #10 but maybe not Hurns at #67. Both RBs are interesting too, taking either Chris Ivory at #87 or TJ Yeldon at #91 while TE Julius Thomas is intriguing at #98 and QB Blake Bortles could make the leap to elite so grab him at the end of the 7th. Did you notice Luck wasn't Luck even before getting shut down for the year suffering from a half dozen ailments that would each incapacitate us mortals? I'm not in on him at #59 nor WR TY Hilton at #29 but would take Donte Moncrief in the fourth and TE Dwayne Allen, without Coby Fleener around, in the 11th. Don't take Frank Gore regardless of how many yards the stats say he somehow wound up with last year. I can't help liking all the Titans but the RBs may be going too high. I know they paid a lot to bring him DeMarco Murray, but he was awful last year in Philadelphia and the rookie Derrick Henry will vulture some TDs making them both overbought at #41 and #72 respectively. They'll be a run first team, but QB Marcus Mariota (141), TE Delanie Walker (66) and new WRs Rishard Mathews (152) from the Dolphins and rookie Tajae Sharpe (113) are worth taking at their ADPs.

How else to segue into terrorism beyond saying it's simply unbelievable that we could take something so obviously complex that it would drive someone to kill themselves and others, and try to fit it into a neat narrative. No, it's messier than that, so I'll try:

The problem isn't that they hate us for our freedoms.
The problem is that we sell arms to Saudi Arabia so they can bomb the shit out of Yemeni hospitals and wedding parties.
The problem isn't that Obama is a secret Muslim.
The problem is that he sits atop a mostly-secret, lacking in any oversight extra-judicial program to kill military-aged Muslim males with drones which also happens to hit the occasional wedding party.
The problem isn't that Obama and Hillary founded ISIS.
The problem is the US produces and sells over half of the world's arms, loses over half of the of the guns they ship to war zones, metastasizing a U.S. imperium that’s often supporting both sides of the conflict, arming the world and widening the so-called "War on Terror".
The problem is not Muslims infiltrating the west and forcing us to wear burkinis.
The problem is blowback from western colonization from Algeria to Iraq and America’s War on Terror catalyzing an unprecedented global humanitarian nightmare while the media ignored the damning conclusions of the U.K.’s Chilcot Report and the troubling details of the long-anticipated "28 Pages" on Saudi involvement in 9/11.

And that's before I even get started on Palestine.

The Long and the Short of it

For the most part I've lost the taste for making predictions, but I always make an exception for football. The NFC should come down to the usual suspects, the Shithawks, Cardinals, Packers and Panthers so I'll stick my neck out and say the Cardinals advance to the dance. A lot needs to happen but most importantly Carson Palmer needs to stay healthy, the rest should take care of itself. In the AFC I'm looking for a new team to finally rise above the Pats and Broncos. The Kansas City Chiefs, yes, the red tomato, Andy Reid-led Chiefs make it to their first Super Bowl since IV in 1970 when they beat the Minnesota Vikings. That's as far as I'll go today.

Try to enjoy your football while you can as it may not be around much longer. Much as the present system's internal contradictions will bring about it's collapse or revolution, a game whose object is to hurl one's body with as much force as possible at another isn't long for this world. Concussions, the culture of violence along with the feeling of impunity it engenders in those who play all argue for its termination. Add to that the looting of public coffers, the deep rooted sexism, and even the horrible diet of those attending games and its hard to argue against pulling the plug. Ah, but the fact that it helps the rich get richer while the rest of us suffer thanks to both football and the major problems in the world tell me both will continue as long as we allow them to. This November, when faced with a choice between the two most hated candidates in history, one will still win as the majority are still convinced there's no other way. Funny how people gloss over the fact that when voting for the lesser of two evils you are still voting for evil.

We're Doing It Wrong

Chapter 9 Mile

Detroit is bankrupt. Or not. Or it is. Regardless, the city that provided the American Dream's 20th century engine has fallen victim to the 21st century version. By now you've likely heard most of the stats: it was the 5th most populous city in America in 1950 with over 1.8 million (and only a couple hundred thousand short of 3rd), today only about 700,000 remain, nearly a quarter million have left in the past decade alone; half the parks have closed since 2008; 78,000 vacant structures and 60,000 vacant land parcels; 40% of the streetlights are out and the city has just 36 ambulances, of which generally no more than 14 are in operation at any given time, and there about 12,000 fires a year to go along with the highest violent crime rate in the US (why not bust a cap in someone's ass for a few bucks when you can get a pizza delivered faster than it takes the cops to respond, about 58 minutes compared to the 11 minute national average and only 8.7% of the cases are solved compared to 30.5% nationwide); tax collections are down 20% over the past five years and the official unemployment rate stands at 18% which is misleadingly low as less than half of those over 16 are actually working. Oh, and there's $18 billion in debt growing by a few hundred million a year. You know the script by now, cue the neoliberal-agenda-advancing blame game chorus of big government, corrupt politicians, greedy unions and gold-plated pension plans because, as we know, this is an isolated incident that the free market will clean up with its invisible hand, just another black swan, nothing that even an awful Hollywood movie could've predicted:

Er, you mean..., no, it can't be so simp..., seriously? ROBOCOP 2! It couldn't have at least copied the script from the original? Is it really just a transparent attempt to sell off what remains of the commonweal and maybe establish an Ayn Randian tax-free "commonwealth" for our modern day John Galts on Belle Isle selling citizenship at $300,000 a head in hopes of becoming a 'Midwest Tiger' to compete with the Asian Tiger of Singapore? Wait, no, this just seems like a thinly veiled attempt to impose an anarcho-capitalistic future on all of us, after all, $37 million, that's just monopoly money, Omni Consumer Products (OCP) doesn't really exist and we all know there's no such thing as robocops to come and save the day! Alas, that's the point, science fiction isn't meant to read as an instructional manual but a warning. The dream has become a nightmare we must wake from and realize that Detroit is but a microcosm of the defunct American model that celebrates profitability rather than society, individuality over solidarity and conformity but not equality. Otherwise, they'll keep turning up the heat by adding zeroes to the bill, turn OCP into an acronym for Oligarch Controlled Polity while their semi-autonomous drones circle the skies keeping us in line.
 
What's Going On? First off, there is a lot of blame to spread around and it's easy to get lost in detail and fail to separate cause from effect, especially as so many of the latter are easily packaged and sold as the former. Corrupt politicians such as Kwame Kilpatrick taking kickbacks or a city run by a one-party government sure look like causes, but they're not. Even the more obvious culprits such as the '67 race riots and the resultant white-flight or the cities susceptibility to disaster due to the lack of economic diversity that comes with being a one-industry town were nothing but manifestations of the root of the problem. Ditto the city's 60% poverty rate for children and the 50% of the population reported to be functionally illiterate. No, we've gotta go way back, maybe not as far as Adam Smith or David Ricardo as it isn't capitalism itself we need to castigate nor even to Henry Ford's first assembly line to find the cause of Detroit's decline. It might seem a bit unfair and facile but let's simplify things and point the finger at poor old Simon Kuznets and his work developing the first comprehensive set of measures of national income, what we know today as GNP and GDP.

Wait, bear with me a moment as not only will it take at least that long to explain how something as mundane and seemingly practical could be the cause of Motown's meltdown but the reality is Simon saw the great danger of his work from the get go and therefore seems a very good place to start the explanation. In his first report to the US Congress in a section titled "Uses and Abuses of National Income Measurements" he warned:

The valuable capacity of the human mind to simplify a complex situation in a compact characterization becomes dangerous when not controlled in terms of definitely stated criteria. With quantitative measurements especially, the definiteness of the result suggests, often misleadingly, a precision and simplicity in the outlines of the object measured. Measurements of national income are subject to this type of illusion and resulting abuse, especially since they deal with matters that are the center of conflict of opposing social groups where the effectiveness of an argument is often contingent upon oversimplification. [...]

All these qualifications upon estimates of national income as an index of productivity are just as important when income measurements are interpreted from the point of view of economic welfare. But in the latter case additional difficulties will be suggested to anyone who wants to penetrate below the surface of total figures and market values. Economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known. And no income measurement undertakes to estimate the reverse side of income, that is, the intensity and unpleasantness of effort going into the earning of income. The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above.

Pretty prescient stuff for an economist. Unsurprisingly, we failed to heed his warnings and this one number (well, two, GNP and GDP are different) and more specifically making sure it's constantly climbing has become the primary purpose of public policy. In fact, as economics and finance have come to completely rule our lives it's become an unhealthy obsession, the disease of our civilization.

Again, we need to pause and explain ourselves. Growth is good up to a point; there is no denying that life has been improved for billions thanks to the benefits accrued by advancements owed to growth. However,  we need to ask ourselves what is the point of growth if not to improve our quality of life? Now, there's a tricky term, "quality of life", how to measure growth against something so seemingly subjective? Living standards quickly devolves to "material living standards" and how many iPads everyone has. Happiness? Sounds good, but tough to quantify. Satisfaction? Ditto. All equally slippery. So let's start simple and graph the relationship of life expectancy versus per capita GDP in various countries. (More complete country chart can be found here.)

The first thing that jumps out is the near vertical rise on the left side as life expectancy quickly rises along with GDP. However, it's hard to miss the diminishing 'bang for the buck' we get from raising GDP, to the point that it seems to not have much effect after as little as $10,000 per head, hello Costa Rica. Interesting but so what, right? Well, we were originally trying to find the cause for Detroit's demise, but this is our first peek into the likely cause of not only the troubles there plus in Greece, Stockton, CA, Portugal, Jefferson County, Al, , Cyprus and those to come from Baltimore to California to Italy but also into what ails much of the west as efforts around the world for the past 75 years have focused on one thing: increasing GDP.

Superstition

Us humans are amazing in so many ways but one of our biggest failings is the inability to let go of strongly held beliefs, especially when they've explained so much, and worked so well, for so long. GDP and economics is no exception as cognitive dissonance and groupthink combine to create blind spots. Especially in America where after first beginning to recover from the Great Depression and then emerging virtually unscathed from World War II to find itself the only running engine to power the world's economy, GDP continued marching upwards. A key to remember at this point is that much of this period of strong growth coincided with a huge reduction in income (and wealth) inequality as much of the fruits of growth was spread from the penthouse executive board room to the basement boiler room. Also worth noting are the words of the foremost economist of the era, John Maynard Keynes, who upon seeing the tremendous opportunities made possible by growth, predicted that the working week would be cut to perhaps 15 hours a week, with people choosing to have far more leisure time as their material needs were satisfied. Incredibly, his optimistic prediction that (material) living standards in "progressive countries" would be between four and eight times higher was made in 1930, a year into the Great Depression! Sadly, this latter prediction has proved true (living standard in developed western economies will have risen about eightfold by 2030) while the former has fallen flat on its face.

You're probably wondering what all this has to do with Detroit, right? One word, hyphenated or not, like Jay Z: neoliberalism. It has not only robbed us of real progress but also ensures there will be many more Detroits and Greeces to come. See, growth, like so much that tastes good at first but eventually turns poisonous, became addictive. All was good up to the 1970s when the United States' unchallenged position as the colossus of the capitalist world came under assault. Rising international competition (read: Japan) as other nations had finally recovered their industrial base after the war coupled with multiple oil shocks as the Arab world awoke to the rape of their resources in return for peanuts led to declining productivity and profitability along with rampant inflation and unemployment, stagflation. Oh, there was a little war they lost too. The corresponding loss in confidence in the dollar also forced Nixon to end its convertibility to gold and take the world into the little understood world of fiat currencies. About the same time as growth seemed to be stalling, the Club of Rome's The Limits of Growth was making Malthusian claims on the unsustainability of infinite growth. The US was ripe for a revolution and they got it in neoliberalism.

The popular myth is that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher rode in to save the day. Of course they were nothing but marionettes and we all know that a marionette's puppeteer is called a manipulator and so it should come as no surprise that they also manipulated us. From neoliberal prophet Friedrich Hayek and his Mount Pelerin Society the poison oozed through Milton Friedman into the University of Chicago to spill out into the world via thinktanks spewing propaganda to be transmitted by their media lackeys and forced onto the rest of the world by the IMF, World Bank and WTO. America has the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute while the UK's versions include the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies founded in 1974 by Thatcher's mentor, Keith Joseph. Despite their benign sounding names, these are radical organizations with almost nothing to do with the likes of Adam Smith who understood something about Moral Sentiments and the dangers of private monopolies and everything to do with Hayek, Friedman and Rand and their belief in extreme individualism or social Darwinism. Freedom could only be achieved through economic liberalization meaning free trade, privatization, deregulation and relying on markets to provide public services.

No party on either side of the Atlantic has a monopoly on this evil. Democrat Jimmy Carter began the deregulation of the banking and transportation sectors. His party's Bill Clinton tag teamed with Labour's Tony Blair in devising the "third way" in a failed attempt to reconcile neoliberal economics with a commitment to social justice. This was always just smoke and mirrors to fool the unwashed masses as neoliberalism is inimical to the public good as it is always secondary to the market, an ideology wedded to the belief that the market should be the organizing principle for all political, social and economic considerations. As the benefits of citizenship are allocated on the basis of perceived economic utility to the state, corporations are considered the primary citizens while individuals are seen as consumers first and citizens second, peripheral ones at that. Corporations and those in the 1% are portrayed as job creators while the bottom 20% are framed as economic leeches siphoning off financial benefits they don't deserve when it is the opposite that is true as economic policy is designed to distribute wealth upward. Tax breaks and subsidies for corporations and the wealthy are called market incentives while benefits to the poor, aged or disabled are framed as entitlements. However, rather than withering away, as neoliberal theory would have it, the state has instead grown as it plays an active role in the introduction, implementation and reproduction of neoliberalism.

The Tracks Of My Tears
Yeah, yeah, you're still wondering what all this has to do with Detroit going from being the city with the highest median income to bankruptcy in half a century and what it means to America and the rest of us. History has already been rewritten to tell us high wages and benefits were Henry Ford's idea when in fact they were fought for and won through struggle and solidarity. World War II had cemented Detroit's industrial importance as the Arsenal of Democracy and it seemed a place which was proof of capitalism's ability to generate and maintain a large middle class. The illusion was short-lived as jobs were already flowing out of the city to the suburbs in the 1950s just as the migration of African Americans to the city was increasing, lured by the promise of freedom and opportunity denied to them in Jim Crow's last, desperate days. Instead they were welcomed by white flight, residential segregation and deindustrialization; rising racial tension, ghettoization and joblessness was a recipe for disaster which erupted in the 1967 rebellion. In addition to dollar loss this of course kicked white flight into high gear resulting in the loss of much of the city's tax base. Throw in the oil shocks of the early 70s and their influence on changing consumer requirement and the failure of the auto industry to adapt and you had a city that needed a saviour but instead got no succour.

It's no coincidence that Detroit's decline coincides with that of America as the US had the most wealth for the parasite of neoliberalism to feed off and Detroit was its richest and most vulnerable city. Back in 1960, GM was not only the city's but the nation's largest employer and paid an average hourly wage of $50 in today's dollars, including health and pension benefits; today Walmart has assumed the mantle and pays $8.81 and a third of the workers work less than 28 hours a week and don't qualify for benefits. The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay has ballooned more than 1000% since 1950, from around 20 to 1 to over 200 to 1 (1,795 to 1 at JC Penney). Not only that but the highest tax rate faced by those CEOs was 91%; today it's under 40%. It was those CEOs at the big 3 who made the decisions that sped the demise of Detroit (GM’s Geo Metro 40 miles/gallon for $9,740 in 1991; today GM offers the Volt for $39,145 that requires you to plug it in AND put gas in it to only get 37 miles/gallon) aided and abetted by the neoliberal policies of maintaining short term growth at the cost of long term prosperity. Specifically, it was the financialization of the economy, the pursuit of 'free trade' policies and the war on drugs which sealed the fate of the city.

Neoliberalism is predicated on decreasing the individual's reliance on the state thus increasing their initiative to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. The problem is it is impossible for those mired in poverty to do this when they don't even have any shoes - ie. education, healthcare, adequate nutrition, employment opportunities. Meanwhile, those with closets already overflowing with footwear have their shoes shod whenever they need it. Er, let's try to explain that a bit better starting with the election of Ronald Reagan and the belief that income inequality was a prerequisite to growth. Not only was it seen to provide incentive to work harder but it raised the savings rate at the top and as the rich have a lower marginal propensity to consume than the poor it would therefore accelerate investment. Additionally, demand for new products almost always emerged from among the rich and it was them alone who could afford the cost involved in research and development thus enriching them should augment innovation. In 1981, the Budget Reconciliation Act along with the Recovery Tax Act introduced across the board tax cuts favoring the redistribution of income to the rich, deregulated monopolistic industries and began the war on the poor by reversing many of the social gains made over the previous 50 years. The shooting war, however, came with his war on drugs.

War (What's it Good for?)
Sometimes numbers are staggering enough on their own and require no explanation. When the explanation is every bit as distressing, well, then you've got the American prison industrial complex. Only China comes close to the US in prison population and only Russia approaches them in percentage of the population incarcerated. Though only comprising 5% of the world's population, the US has 25% of the world's prisoners, about 1% of the population is trapped in the system and the total number has increased 700% since 1970. Yes, it's been a booming industry that's seen $300 billion spent since 1980 to expand the prison system. Not only does it provide employment for the gatekeepers, it reduces the eligible workers counted in the unemployment rate. The poor, worth almost nothing to our corporate masters on the streets, can generate revenues of $30-$40 thousand a year behind bars. Unsurprisingly, almost half of federal prisoners are in for drug related offenses. The bipartisan love of war is illustrated by Clinton's signing of the crack cocaine sentencing guideline bill which targeted the poor black community by making crack cocaine convictions exponentially longer than those for powder cocaine. It gets even worse when you realize it was the CIA who introduced crack into inner-cities to fund waging war in Central America. Prison privatization has brought the market into play with the law while prison labour is a pretty attractive alternative for those looking for a, um, captive work force.

We shouldn't ignore that more traditional method of sacrificing the money and lives of the poor for the glorification and enrichment of the wealthy. Much like neoliberalism, the idea that war is good for the economy and therefore beneficial is a societal sickness that has been perpetuated by myth makers who mysteriously profit from this delusion. Here we should pause once again to consider the suicidal tendency involved in believing that GDP growth is a good thing. Did you know for example that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill added about $300 to the average Americans income? The bloated prison system adds about $125. The US medical system isn't the most expensive in the world (while getting worse results than most of the 'advanced' economies) because they like having millions die for lack of basic care (we hope), but because it adds more zeroes to the bottom line and GDP. Add in a bit of conspicuous consumption, insanely priced education and the trillions wasted on war and suddenly it's pretty easy to understand why even though the size of the US economy has doubled since 1970, overall well-being has declined. Reagan pumped up the gravy train flowing from the public to the private purse, Bush the elder began the family tradition of bombing Iraq, Clinton, though he oversaw a reduction in military spending still indulged in some explosions, Dubya, yeah, he almost doubled the amount spent to kill people and Obama has put a smiley face on murder by remote control.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered
It was Bush the elder who got the NAFTA ball rolling and kept the Uruguay Round of trade talks alive but it was Clinton's signature that brought NAFTA and the WTO to life and sealed Detroit's doom. The agreement turned North America into a 'free' trade continent which Clinton promised would promote "more growth, more equality, better preservation of the environment, and a greater possibility of world peace". Oh, and it would create 200,000 jobs. Well, he was only a little over a million off as a report by the Economic Policy Institute documented that 879,280 jobs were "displaced" due to the deal. Thanks to it and other free trade deals pushed on the public to promote growth, the exciting game of labor arbitrage has been played for the past few decades, a game always won by big business as profits are padded at the expense of labor as salaries are slashed and jobs outsourced. While employment protections are rarely included in these deals, NAFTA provided a template for investor protections which effectively remove sovereignty from signing states.When you wonder why neither the public nor your government can ban Monsanto crops to prevent the loss of agricultural diversity or Bayer from killing the bees we depend on for pollination or Chevron from poisoning the water table by fracking you'll be sure to find a clause in one of the corporate written free trade deals one of your governments sold to you as necessary for economic growth.

As mentioned a few hundred paragraphs above, it's rarely those on the throne making the decisions; therefore, its the stories of those who do that make for the grist in this modern day cautionary tale. Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin was one such Grima Wormtongue. Time Magazine would have us believe he was part of the Committee to Save the World (that's him on the left) when his face should have instead been pasted on a wanted poster. See, the crowning blow in this whole story was the financialization of the economy, a process that has allowed the illusion of economic growth to continue by simply feeding off existing wealth and borrowing from the future. For his service in the creation of the TBTF, TBTJ (too big to fail, too big to jail) bank, he was paid $126 million by the same financial institution whose very existence his policies made possible, Citigroup. Clinton's signing of both the Rubin championed Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which repealed Glass-Steagall which had kept gambling separate from banking, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act which prevented the regulation of financial derivatives delivered the coup de grace for Detroit and the rest of us leading us as they did directly to the 2008 financial crisis.

A spike in prices at the pump killing demand for the SUVs that had temporarily saved them combined with the financial crisis bankrupted two of the three Detroit automakers, GM and Chrysler. The same crisis collapsed the Ponzi scheme run by banks that relied on a constant stream of new mortgages to be bundled and securitized and left millions homeless. As this predatory lending targeted African Americans, both Detroit and its residents were among the hardest hit. With an ever-shrinking tax base to support an immutable city infrastructure, budgetary problems have plagued Detroit for the last 20 years. Besides a brief respite in the mid-90s when it was falsely believed that new casinos and stadiums could reverse the city's fiscal problems, the city has been burdened with a junk debt rating. In an attempt to balance the budget, the combination of rising taxes and cuts in services drives out residents and businesses while the erosion to basic social services leads to a drop in home values and rising crime. Desperate politicians become an easy mark for the wizards of Wall Street who seem to offer a way out, and besides, when the bills come due they'll most likely be out of office. While the sheer audacity of the fleecing of Detroit is dwarfed by that of Alabama's Jefferson County bankruptcy tale courtesy of JP Morgan, Detroit could have done without a $2.7 billion bill for borrowing $1.4 billion in 2005 thanks to bankster interest rate swaps and derivatives.

Here's where the morality tale gets good. This financing deal was needed to fill a gap in the city's defined benefit pension funding, the kind that provide a guaranteed annual income after retirement. Public employees paid for those pensions with lower wages while working; n other words they accepted less then to get some later. But get this: governments consistently underfund their pension plans. In Detroit, the gap's about $3.5 billion, but nationwide all levels of government are about $1 trillion short. Not so bad, as Paul Krugman would have us believe, until you consider to come up with this figure necessitates an 8% average return on invested pension assets. D'oh! Not that whole growth thing again. It gets worse. Listening or reading to much of the MSM hype (always stating the $9.2 billion shortfall which includes unfunded health care obligations) one could easily get the impression that there is a movement afoot to convince the public these pensioners are greedy bastards who don't deserve a dime. The bankruptcy process will determine which creditors get paid back and in what order, pension plans justifiably fear they may fall to the bottom of the pile, because you know, society thinks giving $19,000 a year to someone who picked up garbage his whole life isn't as important as paying off banks and hedge funds.

There's the rub. It's true. Go read the comment thread on any article about the Detroit bankruptcy and you'll soon see that Joe Sixpack has been convinced that bailing out banks is/was good as they add to the economy while pensioners are bad as they subtract. They wouldn't consider the continuing bank bailout, as in the quantitative easing program that sees the Fed give banks $85 billion a month in interest free green pieces of paper in exchange for other pieces of paper, could pay off Detroit's debt four times over each month. Nor do they see anything bizarre about a city entering bankruptcy subsidizing a billionaire's hockey team's arena that will see the city pick up almost half of the $650 million tab because corporate welfare is called market incentives and I'm sure that the money sucked out of schools, parks and you know, quality of life things to build Ford Field for the Lions and Comerica Park for the Tigers in the past dozen years has worked out great; a bunch of spanking new stadiums for those who fled to the suburbs and therefore not paying for them  to come in to the city and enjoy while the only chance to see the inside for those paying for them will be if they're selling foam fingers and foamy beers.

Money (That's What I Want)

The press reports unemployment is falling, which is true, but the warped measurement is meaningless as employment isn't rising enough to even keep up with population growth. It's not just an insufficient number of jobs, it's the kind of jobs being created; the low-paying, menial, dead end sort without any benefits. In fact, 60% of the jobs lost during the recession were classified as mid-wage while 58% of the job gains since are low-wage. This wage suppression is great for companies like WalMart who get to have their workforce subsidized by the government as most of their worker earn so little they often qualify for government assistance; tax payers pay on average almost $1 million per store. All this means wealth is flowing up at an ever-increasing rate; 121% of the income gains since 2009 have gone to the 1% (yes it's possible as they've scooped a portion of the rest of the population's pie) while corporate profits are at all-time record levels and wages are at all-time lows. Zooming out from America, the wealth gap between countries is also widening, globally the richest 300 people own more wealth than the poorest 3 billion; the richest 1% have accumulated some 43% of the world's wealth, while the bottom 80% of the planet's inhabitants have just 6% between them. Guess which group is stashing up to $32 trillion in tax havens, effectively removing wealth from circulation.

Cognitive dissonance seems to be hiding the realization that the American Dream is dead, at least in the old idea of each successive generation living better than the previous. This is because neoliberalism is great at pumping up bubbles upon which the rich float while the rest sink with the pop; it's no longer true that a rising tide lifts all boats. Privatization, deregulation, globalization, robotization, computerization and financialization have transformed western capitalism from industrial to financial. In other words we've moved from a system which produced nothing in itself but derived profit from the value created by the exploitation of labour to a system that simply squeezes profit out of existing assets. The former system was able to thrive using the old panem et circenses gambit but with the latter, present system, eventually they'll be no more crumbs to toss to the masses. Suicide rates are already skyrocketing among baby boomers as economic insecurity pushes people over the edge and now their pensions are being circled by the sharks. Meanwhile the young face the choice of fighting for a job at McDonald's or going to university so they can add to the $1.2 trillion in student loan debt and cross their fingers they can get an unpaid apprenticeship position when they're done.

Instead of realizing we're all in this together though, those manipulating puppetmasters will pull our strings using the old techniques of, among many others, media manipulation (I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine), fear (terrorists!), divide and conquer (it's those greedy unions and pensioners!), patriotism ('Murica, F#ck Yeah!) and of course debt servitude to maintain control of the flock. Lockeed was bailed out because they build stuff to blow people up, Chrysler's been bailed out a couple of times, GM once, they build Godcars don't you know, the airlines had to be because of, you know, terrorism and the banks, well, without the banks, we know the whole world as we know it would have ended. What about New York City's bailout in 1975? Well, that's different than Detroit, because, well, it would create moral hazard this time, or something. What's that? What about Mexico? No, they didn't bailout Mexico in order to save face after NAFTA was signed, did they? Yep. But not Detroit.

ABC
Solutions? Well, there's a few out there. The first step, however, is the realization that we're doing it wrong. An economy based on debt (issued by bankers, not government) inevitably collapses on itself. Henry Ford himself said "[i]t is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning". New money is continually lent into existence at the push of a button so that existing debt can be repaid, but by necessity there is always more debt than money to pay it back. The dog chasing his tail leads to the need for infinite growth, an impossibility on a finite planet thanks to our enemy of diminishing returns, entropy. We've got to realize we already have enough known oil and gas reserves to kill ourselves and stop exploiting tar sands, shale gas and the Arctic. We need to refuse to pay a 280,000% markup for our most important resource, water. The purpose of economic policy shouldn't be to stimulate growth but to facilitate life. A transition to a steady state, non growth economy must eventually occur, the question is do we want to move that way gradually of our own choice or have it (or far worse) foisted upon us by the inevitable collapse of the system.

Alternatives to the constant drum beat of growth have been proposed such as Bhutan's Gross National Happiness, the New Economics Foundation's Happy Planet Index, and the Social Progressive Imperative's Social Progress Index. No growth or steady state economic policies need to be explored if we want to get off our suicidal treadmill. Perhaps once the US has been knocked off its perch atop the global GNP rankings by China sometime in the next decade we'll finally de-emphasize its importance. The chant of 'We're #2!" just doesn't have the same allure. America will still lead in such prestigious areas as anxiety disorders, obesity (well, Mexico might have passed them), incarceration rates, small arms ownership, health care cost, and energy use. Huh, taken together with the other effects of Detroit's problems mistaken for its cause, such as that 50% literacy rate and other societal diseases prevalent in America, one can make a case for simply finding a way to better spread the wealth than grow it. It seems we should take a lesson from the extreme wealth of Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe and extreme poverty of most of Detroit co-existing in an urban metropolitan area. Yes, in fact if I remember right there's a chart that shows the relationship between income inequality and an index of health and societal problems constructed by a couple of epidemiologists. Yeah, perhaps we should look at this a little closer, or maybe we'll save that for next time.