Kathleen McLaughlin's BLOOD MONEY: THE STORY OF LIFE, DEATH AND PROFIT INSIDE AMERICA'S BLOOD INDUSTRY

"We've built an entire segment of global medicine upon the certainty that a certain number of Americans simply can't live on a regular income alone." - Kathleen McLaughlin in Blood Money

I've had just enough good fortune in my life to have been the kind of person who could hear a phrase like "plasma economy" and think it was some of that charming combination of actual scientific terminology and gobbledygook that we call "technobabble" or more specifically "Treknobabble" - in which the meaning of "plasma" concerns a superheated state of matter used to make things go pew-pew-pew on a starship. Had I gone to a public university instead of the groovy private college that gave me a huge scholarship because it wanted more geographic diversity in its student body, I might have found out about the exchange of human plasma -- as in that straw colored fluid that separates out from red and white blood cells when blood goes through a centrifuge -- for money a lot sooner than I did. And, to be honest, coming from a vastly different socioeconomic background from my classmates at my swanky private college as I did, I might have been tempted into that industry back then too. Concert tickets, beer money, spontaneous train rides into The City to go shopping or clubbing or to the opera -- the cost of these things meant nothing to most of my peers but I had to think long and hard before saying yes to opportunities. Had my college been located in a less privileged area, where a plasma "donation" center might actually be located, well, I might have said yes a lot more often than I did, and never mind that I might have been too fatigued to properly enjoy it.

I've donated buckets of whole blood over the years, hitting the one gallon club too long ago to remember, and I was a regular platelet donor, too, once a random test of my donated whole blood revealed that I had never been exposed to a common virus that is very dangerous to premature babies and cancer patients, meaning my platelets were safe to give such patients in a way that most other people's weren't. I kept on donating platelets until I had to go on a medication that meant I couldn't donate anymore and felt horrible about it. But, only dimly aware via, of all things, a college guide by Lisa "Preppy Handbook" Birnbach that some folks out in the world sold their plasma for beer money, I never thought of selling my plasma.*

Like I said, I was fortunate. And really dumb with a credit card, but it could have been worse. But anyway, I only learned what the true, real-world meaning of the "plasma economy" was this year, when Kathleen McLaughlin made the political podcast rounds promoting her latest book.

As I learned when I read Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death and Profit Inside America's Blood Industry, the plasma economy was only really becoming a thing over in China while I was learning Chinese at my private college in the late 80s and early 90s. China built plasma donation centers all over its poorest regions like the province of Henan, and persuaded its poorest citizens that it was safe and altruistic and patriotic and slightly profitable to roll up a sleeve and let an already-big-but-not-yet-quite-global industry treat them like lodes of metal in a gold mine (plasma gets described as "liquid gold" a lot in this book). Only it wasn't quite as safe as advertised; cutting corners to meet demand and save costs led to unsanitary practices like reusing needles and tubing or not sterilizing phoresis machines... just in time for the HIV/AIDS crisis (which China ignored about as assiduously as the U.S.A. did for as long as possible/until some heroic women whom McLaughlin profiles called out the problem and were exiled for their pains) to kill or permanently impair countless citizens for (shortened) life and ruin China's blood supply for years and years to come.

Fortunately for the global trade in human plasma, which is made into a whole host of long-known and newly-developed pharmaceutical products that are pretty much all insanely expensive by the time they're administered to patients whose mobility, functionality, even lives depend on them, the same ghoul who retarded the U.S.A.'s response -- even acknowledgement -- of the HIV/AIDS crisis had also so accelerated our country's descent into gross economic inequality that conditions were perfect to start up a bigger, better, badder version of the plasma economy right here.

The trick, the industry had learned by the time a building boom of plasma centers started in earnest here, was not to rely on the seriously destitute/homeless, who among other things are less likely to be healthy enough to provide the staggering volumes of body parts the industry needs to satisfy global demand for the stuff (because only a tiny handful of countries allow this trade). But the people who are just a paycheck or a family crisis away from being that undesirably desperate can and have been incentivized not only into selling their plasma on the regular but also selling it as often as they possibly can, by paying them enough to supplement the kind of shitty jobs that in addition to not paying a living wage also tend not to allow workers to hit that magic 40 hours a week that would  qualify them to receive shitty health insurance and helpless 401k exposure to the stock market they offer instead of pensions -- but not paying plasma sellers enough for the supplementary income they get to actually help them beyond a tank of gas or sack of groceries or Christmas gifts for the kids.

And speaking of how most countries have prohibited this trade, you won't believe where another huge pool of donors comes from. Hint: that flow stopped abruptly when COVID-19 closed our land borders for a while, and still hasn't really recovered since a follow-up debacle in which Homeland Security suddenly decided that crossing into the U.S. to sell body parts counted as labor and violated the terms under which most plasma sellers were permitted to come in for a day. 

And speaking of COVID-19, I couldn't stop wondering as I read: given that the people whose veins are tapped the most to meet the global demand for plasma are the same people who were hardest hit and mostly likely to have died from the virus before they even had the chance for cynical and manipulative blowhards to persuade them not to get the vaccine, to the tune of some 800,000+ souls lost forever, how many plasma sellers did we lose to COVID-19? And did their habits of selling their valuable plasma for pittances twice a week increase their susceptibility to dying of COVID-19 if they caught it? We might never know, because even before the pandemic, nobody seemed interested in studying the long-term effects on plasma sellers of the practice. There's too much money at stake for gigantic multinational corporations and too little concern for the human motherlode they mine, very few of whose members are treating Senators or Supreme Court Justices to lavish yachting vacations if you know what I mean.

Adding to the inherent (and aggravating) interest of her subject is McLaughlin's own connection to the plasma economy: she suffers from a rare autoimmune condition that leaves her dependent on regular infusions of an insanely expensive medication made from human plasma. Several times a year, the combined plasma of dozens, if not hundreds or maybe even thousands (it's kind of hard to know because the industry isn't exactly bragging about this in prime time) of people is slowly infused into her body over the course of five boring hours at a high but fluctuating cost to her medical insurance provider and to McLaughlin herself. A journalist with a history of covering things like what HIV/AIDS did to China (and herself living in China on and off over many years), it was surely inevitable that she would come to write a book like this, and from a compelling personal perspective. 

It also gave her a conversational inroads with the many plasma sellers she interviewed in places like Rexberg, ID, Flint, MI and El Paso, TX that few journalists could match. Her combination of gratitude and ever increasing discomfort with the whole subject color every line. 

And, as we demand more and more from nosy journalists who call attention to problems we've been happy to go on ignoring, McLaughlin has given considerable thought to what we might, as a civilization and as a nation, do to make this system less exploitative and safer. Compensate plasma sellers fairly and on a consistent basis. Do basic research on how frequent extraction of this fundamental body part affects the short- and long-term health of the extractees. And, of course, restore the social safety net so people don't get trapped in this system in the first place. 

Blood Money is a captivating and infuriating read, despite its tendency to repeat points and even whole sentences - like pretty much every other major non-fiction book in this age of publishing consolidation, this text could have used a bit more attention from an editor or two, but of course that would cut into the bottom line and, who knows, the poor overworked editor now having to do the equivalent of five people's jobs might also have been a little weak and exhausted from a lunch hour passed in a crappy recliner with a fat needle stuck in the crook of her arm, sucking out her blood and forcing an anticoagulant into her vein. 

I learned a lot and was made to think a lot about a system I've only been dimly aware of, out of what seems more and more like plain old luck. I might yet find myself in the position of the people McLaughlin interviewed, though given my own personal constellation of obnoxious health issues, if our society ever reaches the point where it's depending on the plasma of people like me, we're pretty much screwed all the way.

Here's hoping...

*There have been times when I was in desperate enough financial straits to have done it, but such times have only ever come upon me when I lived and worked (on a salary basis for pay that I learned years later would have qualified me for food stamps and Medicaid even though I had the words "executive" and "director" in my job title) in regions too isolated and remote to participate in the plasma economy; any money I'd have been paid would have just burned up in the gas tank of my shitty car driving some 300+ miles round trip to be tapped.

Philip K. Dick's IN MILTON LUMKY TERRITORY

So it might surprise folks that In Milton Lumky Territory, a very posthumously published piece of Philip K. Dick's literary fiction, is in many ways the strangest and most uncanny of his works I've ever read. Then again it might not; it's still Philip K. Dick, after all.

What makes it uncanny is the veneer of surreality -- if not unreality -- that the years have lain over its basic story of three characters whose neuroses get in the way of communicating, who are so worried about how they're coming across that they're not coming through. But it's not the characters or their strained, pained interactions (which are as beautifully and compellingly rendered as anything in highbrow White Male Narcissist literature) that make reading this novel so weird.

Its their world. Banal, ordinary, mundane, but also, through the action of time and economic upheaval, harder to believe could have ever been real than any Martian colony or post-apocalyptic California or urban techno-dystopia or tank full of humanoids engineered for another planet that Dick concocted.

In Milton Lumky Territory depicts an insignificant backwater in mid-century America, but its an America with a functioning manufacturing economy, in which it's quite possible for ordinary schmoes like PKD's typical barely competent boob-heroes to make a living, own a house, start or acquire a business, travel great distances by car just on the off-chance of maybe finding a warehouse full of newly-imported, as yet unknown and unmarketed Japanese typewriters* that can be bought cheap and sold in their downtown stores in places like Boise, Idaho not just for a profit but for enough to live on comfortably.

Fascinatingly and probably unintentionally also, In Milton Lumky Territory depicts the seeds of this economy's doom. One of the main characters, Bruce, starts off the novel working as a buyer for one of those newfangled discount houses, the ancestors to today's big box stores, before meeting Susan and letting himself be suckered into her dream of making something of her little two-bit typing and mimeographing business. There's also the aforementioned Japanese import typewriters Bruce is hankering to find and sell, the first wave of globalization and the downfall of an economy in which American businesses build durable and useful goods to be sold, used and repaired and used again in America.

It feels almost like PKD is taunting us, we who live in what can be argued is one version or another of his post-apocalyptic techno-dystopias he later created when he gave up on being a highbrow literary novelist and turned to science fiction and pulp to make his living. If only we'd been satisfied with what we had back then, maybe we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now. We could have lived in this novel, but instead, we had to break things and ruin things, let in globalization and inflation and deregulation and union-busting and general plutocracy.

But all this is just rich modern subtext to the experience of reading In Milton Lumky Territory. There is also the actual story, a soap opera plot in which Bruce and Susan meet (again**) and sort of back into deciding they're in love and should marry their fortunes together and encounter the title character, Milton Lumky, who is a traveling typewriter and typing supplies salesman (that there could be such a profession!), only to alienate him and then belatedly find they need him, for he perhaps holds the secret to finding the golden opportunity of Bruce's theoretical warehouse full of languishing game-changing Japanese machines. The characters' interactions bristle with tension, with misunderstanding, with neuroses, with the drama of miscommunication and buried intentions and revelations that seem more than a little creepy.

Which is to say that so many of the things we read PKD for are here, one does not miss the spaceships or the aliens or the revelation that the president is a robot.

I know this world existed once. My parents have vivid memories of it and I trust their accounts. Its relics can still be found all around us (myself, I have three wonderful old manual typewriters, one from 1926, that all still work beautifully because they've been lovingly cared for and used well and kindly over the years by people who respected them and expected them to last). Those empty storefronts in your city's downtown used to be occupied by businesses like Susan's; those factory buildings weren't always chic yuppie loft condos.

It's a lost world, and it's our own decisions, not a comet from space or a machine uprising or a nuclear misunderstanding that lost it for us. And that makes this the most poignant PKD of all.

*Dude. Typewriter fetishists take note. This story is about people who buy and sell and repair typewriters and paper and ribbons and carbons, and they talk about them a lot. It's pretty much heaven.

**Their original meeting lends all this a soap opera sudsiness that is good for too many guffaws to spoil here.

100 Books #110 - Nicholas P. Money's TRIUMPH OF THE FUNGI: A ROTTEN HISTORY

When the author gets out of his own way and just lets us enjoy his material, Triumph of the Fungi: A Rotten History is as interesting and entertaining a book on the subject as one could wish. From Dutch Elm disease to the Potato Blight, Money surveys the history of fungal plant pathogens and their economic and aesthetic impact on the landscape in just the right amount of detail; one feels like a mycologist but isn't having to slog through a lot of soil chemistry data, which is enormously appealing to a lay reader like me.

What isn't appealing is a prevalence of what I can only describe as authorial snottiness; Money lets his personal opinion intrude on his storytelling just enough to be annoying, if not downright offensive: in his speculations about the origins of Dutch Elm disease, for instance, he tells us "I'm all in favor of blaming the Chinese, but in this instance they seem faultless"; pages later, describing the efforts of an early pioneer in research on a disease that all but wiped out coffee production on Ceylon/Sri Lanka, a pioneer who just happened also to be a reverend, he describes him as "a curate with presumable devotion to Christian superstitions" for really no reason at all other than to sound like a jerk, it feels like (to this reader, anyway).* Honestly, I can't believe an editor let stuff like this slide. Once I noticed this tendency, I couldn't stop seeing it, which often spoiled my enjoyment of a book for whom I am exactly the audience.

This is especially frustrating because the book is also full of fascinating bombshells of insight, as when Money points out how the results of a lot of early researchers in to Dutch Elm Disease had their results pretty much ignored because they were women, and a lot of dumb theories and ideas that came from men got credence, "frustrated progress in understanding the nature of the problem." Or when one Thomas Lipton -- yeah, that Thomas Lipton -- saw opportunity on Ceylon and started buying up rust-fungus-ruined coffee plantations to grow cheap tea on.* Or that "Plant pathologists can serve a [sic] excellent vectors of fungal disease." Or that the chromosomes packed into the zoospores of the potato blight fungus contain around 22,500 genes (for comparison, human chromosomes encode around 24,000).

See? Fascinating!

And we won't even talk about the chapter on chocolate. Oh my!** (Well, okay, maybe a little "...imagine massively swollen gentials in response to an infection of  your pituitary gland and you'll grasp a human analogue of this plant disease.")

But then the obnoxiousness makes a return in a chapter about fungal pathogens on rubber trees, in which the author makes as many condom jokes as he possibly can and throws in one about an exporter waiting anxiously for a rubber stamp in a colonial office. Har.

Overall, though, this is a great read. I especially appreciate the criticisms of modern agriculture that are gently buried in this text: fungal disease epidemics only really happen in monocultures; the bigger the plantation**, the bigger the problem. And while Money (wonderful name for a writer about economic threats such as these, eh) never says it outright, really, the worst thing that ever happened to these plants we exploit isn't really the fungi; it's us. Or maybe we're the best thing. Maybe these plants, like some have said that maize/corn does, are actually exploiting us, giving us a little something useful in exchange for our efforts to spread them, keep them bug and disease free, and in general let them take over the earth at the expense of other plants not "smart" enough to provide something we find useful or tasty?

And then, maybe, aren't the fungi the really smart ones, since they've let us humans do all the work of setting them vast banquet tables for them to enjoy?

Lots to think about, when we think about fungi, no?

*Oddly, the victim of this barb, Rev. Miles Berkeley, gets spoken of in seriously glowing terms later in the book. So, you know, why even make a remark like that in the first place? Once I got to the chapter wherein Money describes Berkeley as a "great man" all I could think about was this stupid dis earlier in the book. ARGH.

**And this after Lipton got into the retail business after his family fled the potato famine in Ireland, so "it might be said that Lipton was an improbable beneficiary... of two of history's worst fungal epidemics."

***Theobroma cacao... food of the gods, threatened by, among other things, Witches' broom/escoba de bruja.

****Some nicely subtle digs at slavery there, too.

100 Books #61 - James Rickards' CURRENCY WARS: THE MAKING OF THE NEXT GLOBAL CRISIS

If there is one thing over which I am pretty sure I have no control whatsoever, it is global finance. So why can't I stop reading about (and listening about -- oh, how I love Planet Money and Marketplace!) what's wrong with it? I'm pretty sure I've even wondered and wailed about this on this blog prior to now, but I'm too demoralized to check.*

But hey, if you're one of those people (and I have been!) who always kind of squints and says "huh?" when you hear about, say, the U.S. accusing China of "currency manipulation," well, this is a very good book to consult, to read cover to cover and, probably, to read again a few months later when all of its very clearly presented points and arguments have faded from your memory.**

Wisely, Rickards leads it all off with a fictitious scenario, gleaned from his direct experience participating in the first ever Pentagon-sponsored war games to focus on financial war, which nicely illustrates what are the weapons, tactics, strengths and weaknesses of combat via spreadsheet, ledger and currency peg instead of all the other ways that usually grab headlines. Financial war never grabs headlines, because it can never be made to sound scary enough.

This book, though, takes a pretty good stab at making it scary enough.

Rickards spends a good third or so of the book walking us through the currency wars that have already come and gone, for despite his book's title's suggestion that this is all potential, stuff that could happen someday, we're actually right at the leading edge of Currency War III.***

When an economy stagnates and nothing else seems to work (as in the American past, for instance, government stimulus or upticks in consumer behavior have done the trick), a relatively easy fix is to devalue your currency relative to everyone else's, making your exports more attractive to buyers around the world. This, of course, only works if no one else is doing this, and our history in employing this kind of tactic is grim; the first time we tried it led to the Great Depression and World War II, the second to stagflation in the 1970s -- and neither of those, Rickards points out, happened to a world as intimately economically interlinked as ours. There was no Eurozone in the 1930s, and the Yuppies of the 1980s whose spending sprees largely pulled us out of stagflation are now aging out of productivity and have done everything they can to make sure that the generations who have to pick up after them have little to no opportunity to mimic them -- everybody is in debt up to his or her eyeballs, in this country.

And so, what are the Fed and our elected officials doing to bring us out of our current severe slump? Well, what is "qualitative easing"?

Oh yeah, it's printing more money, to deflate its value, to make our exports more attractive to other markets, which only works when no one else is doing it.

Except, you know, everybody else is doing it, in some fashion or other, especially China, who while not printing extra new money of its own "on purpose" is forced to do so to maintain its peg to the dollar at current levels, which China very stubbornly wants to do so that its exports do not become less attractive to other markets. Other markets like us.

Of course, if things continue in this crappy vein, we're not going to be able, as ordinary American consumers, to afford their exports, no matter how attractive they are, especially if what Rickards and friends fear most, the collapse of the dollar, happens. And reading between the lines of this book, and remembering everything else I've read on not just finance but history and neuroscience and psychology and culture, it's really pretty much not a matter of if that will happen so much as when -- chiefly because policymakers elected and appointed vastly underestimate the risk thereof, so are not even remotely prepared to deal with it when it comes.

But all is only lost if we keep trying to apply the same bad solutions to our current problems, he says.**** If we can get ourselves out of the rut of the devaluation mindset and take some corrective measures, we may yet come out of this without proving all the dystopians right (or at least not completely right): break up those "too big to fail' banks (I'd be happy to see that), re-regulate if not outlaw derivatives trading (again, fine with me) and... well, go back to the gold standard, which is something you usually only hear from Ayn Rand/Austrian economics types but is starting to make more sense to me now that I have had a long, hard look at what has become of us under a system of that economists call "fiat money" (basically, money the value of which is controlled by government regulation, i.e., by politics) -- though I still don't find a return to the gold standard an entirely comforting thought: gold is very much a finite commodity, and no one has shown me how such a return to a gold standard isn't also a return to a zero-sum game -- even if instead of just gold we say "gold as part of a larger basket of commodities." And the people who think a zero-sum game is just fine, thank you, are always the ones who grabbed first and grabbed most and are perfectly happy to sit on top of what they grabbed until the end of time and watch the rest of us beg.*****

Oh, and by the way, China is buying up a lot of gold on the sly, apparently. And water rights. WATER RIGHTS, PEOPLE. Including water rights on water no one has ever exploited, like Patagonian mountain ice caps. Because someday, that might be the only kind of water available. Oh, don't get me started on water war stuff, too, in this post. Just don't.

And but so, you know, China already controls something close to all trade in rare earths, without which we cannot currently make much in the way of high tech gear. And they've been pondering the strategic niceties of economic warfare, asserting that when histories of the 20th century are re-written it will be stories of currency war that command the most attention, for years now.******

Which all makes me think that Jim Munroe's sadly snarky new film, Ghosts with Shit Jobs, isn't so much lo-fi science fiction as a documentary that fell backwards a few years through time.



So if you're getting from this that Currency Wars is one of the scariest damn books I've ever read (and I've read all the Jeff Sharlets), then you're getting it right.

And like I said, there's really nothing I can do about it, except tell people about this book. Five stars, drawn with a very shaky hand.

*Well, except for one thing. Rickards spends most of Chapter 9 putting paid to the idea that economics somehow became a natural, instead of a social, science in 1947 or so, asserting that stealing science's clothes and giving each other Nobel prizes may have been fun, but the economists were no better at foreseeing or preventing financial crisis in 2008 than they were in 1908, thank you very much:

University biologists working with infectious viruses have airtight facilities to ensure that the objects of their study do not escape from the laboratory and damage the population at large. Unfortunately, no such safeguards are imposed on economics departments.

This made me smile even as I remember an incident in 1987 when I told my high school teacher that just because he was drawing a bunch of graphs on the board that didn't mean it was science. I feel weirdly vindicated, at least until I remember that said teacher basically told me to shut up and go back to reading that hobbit crap. Which, as there is ample evidence of on this very blog, I pretty much did.

**Which, of course, you won't notice has happened until you try to have a conversation about this stuff over mah jong with someone who gets all of his or her news from Rush Limbaugh, if your life is anything like mine.

***I haven't yet decided whether or not saying something like "World War III is here, and it's a financial war" is entirely accurate, but I'm leaning towards a yes, there.

****There is a whole section advocating for a shift on the part of policymakers toward the newish sub-field of behavioral economics that I won't even try to summarize here because I'm still thinking about it, but it's pretty damned interesting, and not just because it returns economics to the soft social sciences in general but also because it incorporates research and conclusions from complexity theory, psychology and neuroscience in place of lies, damn lies and statistics. Of course, behavioral economics can be as correct and awesome as it wants, but it does us no damned good if it isn't put to use, which Wall Street and the Fed do not seem likely to do as they're quite happy with the current system, however broken it might be, that allows them to bamboozle regulators with pseudoscience and way too much data. Sigh.

*****I must confess, though, that the section in which Rickards goes into great detail on how a return to the gold standard, at this stage of the game, might work, my eyes glazed over a bit.

******Oh, and there's a laughable passage in this book where someone makes the argument that our cultural exports to China can yet save the day, or at least the balance of trade. You know, software, Hollywood films, music. Because, yes, great respecters of intellectual property, the Chinese. I'm sure paying the full retail price for Blu-Rays of Celebrity Apprentice is definitely part of China's overall politico-economic playbook.

100 Books #12 - Michael Lewis' BOOMERANG: TRAVELS IN THE NEW THIRD WORLD

My name is Kate Sherrod, and I have a problem.

I seem to be unable to resist indulging in my bad, unhealthy, depressing habit of snagging every remotely interesting-sounding book about the current financial crisis that I see. And reading them quickly, even though, at this point, I'm pretty sure I've read every perspective on it available, if not every one imaginable.

But then, see, there's always something new to be found. And this book is a great example -- even though I had previously read early versions of two of the chapters when they were articles in Vanity Fair.

For what Michael Lewis has done here is visit two of the "PIG" countries* to try to get a grip on what happened there, and continues to happen, as well as making stops in Iceland (they of the brand-new high-flying bankers-who-should-have-stayed-fishermen and also of ordinary citizens who have flat-out refused to bail those bankers out), Germany and California**.

It was the German chapter that I found most eye-opening, despite the fact that Lewis spends a lot of it amused at watching his interpreter-driver come to grips with a book purporting to expose Germany's natural character (as, esentially a bunch of badly closeted fecophiliacs, obsessed with dirt but preferring to appear otherwise, to appear spotlessly sterile and clean; clean on the outside, dirty on the inside). For as many books as I have read on this subject, I had never thought to ask why Deutchebank and other German banks were so willing to participate in the sub-prime mortgage debacle that the American investment banks cooked up. I was too fixated on the greed and suicidal stupidity of the Americans to concern myself with the apparent cluelessness of the Germans.

But Lewis wasn't -- which is why he's a bigtime financial writer and I'm a doofus poet living on Mars -- and he wanted to know why the German bankers had acted so witlessly in the years heading up to the crisis. And what he found had a lot to do with that whole national character thing - dirty on the inside, clean on the outside. Since the USA's banking sector appeared to be well-regulated, to have serious rules, then why wouldn't its financial products be as good as the American bankers said they were? The forms were being obeyed to the letter, after all.

So yes, while the Greeks were busy not paying taxes and being woefully un-civic minded and the Irish were busy selling Irish real estate to each other and the Icelanders were busy doing something other than fishing for once, the Germans were willfully not looking for the evil little man behind the curtain. And California, well, California, as I observe in my second footnote, needs a whole 'nother book maybe.***

So yes, I have a problem, but with books like this still out there for me to enjoy and learn from, it's not a problem I'm much interested in solving at present. Which makes me just like everybody else.

*PIG now being the financial dude acronym for the quickly sinking/defaulting nations of Portugal, Ireland and Greece.

**His hillbombing mountain biking interview with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger alone is probably worth the price of the book, guys, and would probably make an awesome book with more material. Apparently, someone else already wrote it and yes, a sample of California Crackup is already on my Kindle. Did I mention that I have a problem?

***Though a Cadillac Desert comparison does come to mind. Just as the Colorado river is now way over-allocated and doesn't make it to the ocean anymore because the original allocations were made in a record flood year, so too California's budget; everyone (by which I mean state employees and retirees) got used to what they were getting in fat years and refused to give it up in lean until boom! California is completely dysfunctional and heading for ruin.

100 Books 18 - Matt Taibbi's GRIFTOPIA: BUBBLE MACHINES, VAMPIRE SQUIDS AND THE LONG CON THAT IS BREAKING AMERICA

Matt Taibbi was an old hand at documenting the rape of a national economy long before most of his current readership had ever heard of such exotica as Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps. Spending most of the 90s in post-Soviet Russia watching a handful of well-positioned would-be oligarchs either collude with or just plain swindle the Russian government and the western "privatization experts" who swarmed to help in the full-scale conversion of the biggest experiment in command economies in history to a market economy.

His forehead-slapping account of that wholesale fraud, which left ordinary Russians going for month or years without receiving their salaries and, in the provinces "eating each other out of boredom" is colorfully recorded in his and Mark Ames' The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, a delightfully profane, entertaining and, above all, clear and comprehensible read if ever there was one.

I wonder if he suspected, as he and Ames penned that blood- and cash-soaked opus, that someday he'd more or less be writing the same story about his home country.

Griftopia is essentially a sequel to The Exile with further biographical details removed; Taibbi's a married man now and presumably doesn't spend his leisure hours in appalling dive-bars-cum-whorehouses like Moscow's infamous Hungry Duck. Presumably. What he has continued to do is exercise superhuman patience in unraveling fiendishly complicated legal and financial dealings and the backstories of the masterminds behind them and reweaving the threads into a fairly elegant tapestry that conveys a lot of information simply and extremely entertainingly.

My readers have probably figured out by now that I have a sort of sick fixation on reading about the various ways in which we are screwing ourselves, or allowing ourselves to be screwed. I've read a lot of books that essentially warned of the financial crisis we're currently still experiencing (the best of which is Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century), and some good ones that dissect and lay out what happened and how (Daniel Gross' Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation and Michael Lewis' The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine being two I would recommend to anyone, and would have called my favorites before Griftopia hit my Kindle). I feel decently informed but there's still always more to know, and Griftopia satisfied that need, but it also satisfied something else.

I can't imagine Kevin Phillips or Daniel Gross or Michael Lewis calling former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan "the world's biggest asshole," for instance, though they have and did highlight Greenspan's huge role in the systematic dismantling over most of my adult life of as much as possible of the legal and regulatory architecture that has sheltered us from the large-scale disaster we're all now experiencing. Regulation throttles progress, he and his "greed is good" followers insisted, managing in the process to persuade a huge swath of the middle class, the ordinary small businessmen of this country who should have stood with the little people through all of this that the kind of local red-tape crap that made it hard for them to do business was exactly the same as the anti-trust regulations and close monitoring of derivatives trading and prohibition of insider trading and needed to go! It's breathtaking, and it's still going on; the Tea Party and its allies, little people who think they're one plugged toilet or new refrigerator sale away from joining the millionaire's club, still side with the fat cats and even now hiss and spit at the slightest mention of regulation. It's revolting, and yes, I think Alan Greenspan may well be the world's biggest asshole, as Taibbi says.

It's amazing what a little deregulation can do, not just in the derivatives market, where the resulting follies are well-documented in those other books I've mentioned and are probably familiar by now to anyone with enough interest in what's happened to us to tune in to Planet Money or read a blog once in a while, but also, and this shocked me though it shouldn't have in hindsight, in the commodities market, where a speculative bubble just as bad as the more famous internet and housing ones, drove prices on vital stuffs like gasoline and food way, way up, and forced ordinary people to the brink of starvation. The ridciulous "health care reform" bill we know as ObamaCare, which reformed health care financing only in that it made it easier for insurance companies to make more money, also comes into Taibbi's crosshairs. I'm in danger of straying into paraphrasing and spoiling his arguments here, as of just hitting you with a lot of raw text from the book -- Taibbi is highly quotable on these subjects and more, in his pitchfork-waving way -- and doing so would spoil a lot of the fun of reading Griftopia (imagine that! A fun book about the financial crisis!).

Fun though this book is to read, though, it's fun in the way that I refer to as triggering John Trent laughter (John Trent is the protagonist of John Carpenter's H.P. Lovecraft-inspired In the Mouth of Madness, the final scene of which features Trent watching a film of himself experiencing all of the horrors he thought he'd escaped from; his laughter is bitter and despairing and wholly familiar to people who have been forced to contemplate how badly screwed we are). Taibbi quite rightly points out that modern electoral politics are an irrelevant and distracting side-show, two parties, both far more answerable to Wall Street (source of campaign war-chest money) and other corporate interests than to the actual voters, duking it out over pointless culture war crap like abortion and who is really patriotic and how unfair it is that we can't teach Christianity in public schools. He ends on that depressing note without even trying to propose a way out of the mess, but I won't.

I'm pretty sure my former U.S. Senator, the highly quotable (and also occasionally profane -- I like my public figures salty, I guess) Alan Simpson, was as guilty as anyone currently in office of serving his paymasters first and the voters who put him in a position to serve those paymasters second while he was in office, but in his emeritus years he has embraced a cause that is quite dear to my own heart, and that is public financing of campaigns. Probably too little, too late now that the Supreme Court (in Citizens United vs the Federal Election Commission) has joined the "hand everything over to corporations because some animals are more equal than others and corporations are the biggest animals on the farm" parade, but it may not be too late. Have a look at Common Cause just to humor me, why don't you. It may be the best idea we've got left, though it's perhaps a mistake to try to do this from the top down. For one thing, a reform this major to how we elect the President of the United States would have to go through Congress, and the corporate/financial industry interests who call Congress's tunes won't like the measure and will put up an ungodly fight. No, we might have to start doing this at the local level. An ordinance in your city, establishing a common fund for city council candidates and requiring them to use their allotment from it and no others in running for office could just be doable, some places. And successes can spread. Just maybe.

We allowed Griftopia to swallow our polity, but maybe we can yet administer an emetic. What have we got to lose in trying?

100 Books 13 - Tyler Cowen's THE GREAT STAGNATION

The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better:A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton - Tyler Cowen

There's a wee bit of monomania going on in The Great Stagnation, which kind of befits its subject, the current economic downturn and how it is unlikely to really end anytime soon. Cowen's fixation as he ponders our plight is on the idea of "low-hanging fruit" and what it means when it's all gone. It's interesting to contemplate and Cowen makes a lot of good points with it but it's also pretty simplistic, and the resulting book suffers from a lot of confirmation bias.

What Cowen means when he refers to low-hanging fruit is the idea that, as a (North American) society, we've exploited all of the easy answers to our economic problems to the full: cheap energy, automation, global transportation, getting everyone into a public education system, abundant and unspoiled land, etc. From his perspective of omniscient hindsight, all of the innovation we've achieved to date has been easy*; it's future innovation that's unthinkably difficult because we've done it all, used it all, tapped it all out.

Married to this idea, Cowen pronounces what amounts to doom for our recovery from the current crisis, seeing even the signs of hope and change like the internet in the most negative light possible. For instancewhile it's nice that people are finding non-material ways of satisfying themselves, he says, that satisfaction does not help the economy -- but his reasoning here seems flawed. The fun we have on the internet (and he focuses unduly on the internet as a source of fun and maybe, occasionally, of education and collaboration. Maybe), you see, is really hard to measure using conventional statistical tools. It doesn't show up on old-style measures of productivity, for instance, and its effect on things like Gross National Product as currently evaluated is close to invisible. Rather than calling for new tools or new measures, though, Cowen simply pronounces our intangible internet fun an economic dud. The low-hanging fruit is gone, but don't look for a ladder.

Cowen also seems to be ignoring something else I see every day on the internet, which is innovation. When I go surfing, it's hard not to encounter an elegant new idea for managing riverine pollution, say, or a device that can allow its owner to tote hundreds and hundreds of books around in an object that weighs less than a single paperback. Cowen dismisses these as mere attempts to squeeze more juice out of the low-hanging fruit; I see them as ways that more people can benefit from it than currently do, an issue he does not bring up at all. In his world, there is only the West and its only our needs and our growth and forward progress and increase in living standards that matter. I find this more than a little reprehensible. But maybe, you know, I just don't get it and it's really great that we're worrying about how we're not as rich as we thought we were while there are still lots of people in the world who like both kinds of food, rice and rice.

Microfinance doesn't count as an innovation, either. Or portable water purifiers.

What's really good about this book, though, is the argument Cowen makes about the tendency in the West to use intellectual property laws and copyright to stifle others' efforts to improve their living standards. Whether it's hamstringing gadgets and content with DRM and other means of creating artificial scarcity to protect legacy businesses or banning age-old practices like seed saving, these kinds of practices can and do hold everyone back except for the elite few who benefit from them and have the resources to persuade political authorities to keep them in place. That doesn't just retard our Western GNP growth, but our future as a species.

On the whole, though, well, I'm glad this book was short. I'm loath to put books aside this year as I plod towards the 100 books goal, but were I not feeling self-imposed pressure to finish what I start no matter what, I might have given this one up, not due to its difficulty or its dullness (for it is not a dull book) so much as to my having read it all before. There are lots of books out there to explain the financial crisis and tell us we're stuck for a while and this is not a standout in that field for me. *I've got to wonder, though, what, say, Edison or Ford or George Washington Carver would say, if told that their innovations had been so easy or obvious!