Every so often, it is important to step back from the minutia of the dozens of stories in the immediate news, look back over a longer period at a few BIG events and see if a common theme emerges. A few stories, documentaries and scandals over the last ten years reviewed as a set highlight a key concern about a key layer of our economy.
The Opioid Crisis
The history of business and regulatory decisions that produced the so-called "opioid crisis" has now been well explained in at least two different forums -- a New Yorker article from October 30, 2017 on the Sackler family
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-painand a documentary film Do No Harm: The Opiod Epidemic
http://www.donoharmdocumentary.com/which covers the exact same history. What any history of the problem shows is that Purdue Pharma carefully designed a promotional campaign to heavily compensate salespersons to convince doctors to prescribe oxycontin for conditions never previously deemed worthy of long-term pain medication, even when they knew within six months of launching the drug. Purdue even focused on high profile doctors to sell within the medical community to provide an added level of apparent independence in claims of the drug's safety.
The VAST majority of addicts didn't instantly (or voluntarily) change from normal middle-class, God-fearin' Muricans into scuzzy dregs of society in a day. For the VAST majority of addicts, their disaster began with a prescription from a doctor that wasn't merited in the first place or should have been curtailed without weeks or months of renewals. A doctor -- a PROFESSIONAL -- made that first disastrous decision. TENS OF THOUSANDS of doctors have made that first disastrous decision. Nearly 40,000 people DIED of opioid overdoses in 2016 alone. That doesn't reflect the tens of thousands more who are hooked and destroying their lives and the lives of those around them but just haven't managed to kill themselves yet.
Financial Meltdown of 2008
The root cause of the worldwide economic meltdown that began in 2007 then snowballed in 2008 was a world financial market that blurred national and economic boundaries with a blizzard of highly leveraged contractual bets, all based on a theory that mixing a variety of financial instruments together always reduces net risk. In America, that general problem was magnified by the "real-estate industrial complex" of banks, homebuilders, real estate agents and appraisers who combined to create a self-reinforcing spiral of mortgage fraud that dovetailed perfectly with the larger worldwide financial fraud of bundling millions of those fraudulent mortgages into collateralized debt obligations which were further combined using the same blend-rate-price-sell cycle.
Did the tens of thousands of individuals in these industries "conspire" to perpetrate this fraud? They didn't have to. Everyone faced the same reinforcing financial incentives to continue participating, a large share of those involved not only knew the math didn't add up and many likely knew they were individually committing crimes. Virtually no one in a position to know demonstrated a sense of PROFESSIONALISM to speak up to regulators or law enforcement. And there were THOUSANDS of people in a position to know the degree of fraud taking place.
The Destruction of Puerto Rico
Wall Street firms floated a $3.5 billion municipal bond issue for Puerto Rico in 2014 less than 14 months before the territory was forced to default on payments and declare bankruptcy. Why did Puerto Rico need $3.5 billion dollars in 2014 and why couldn't banks and investors see its default coming? Banks had already sponsored roughly $60 billion in bond offerings from 2008 to 2014 which produced high fees for banks and produced higher interest rates due to the risks of the ever-increasing debt load. However, investors -- perversely -- weren't waved off by the high rates as a sign of risk. Instead, they were seen as easy gains in a climate of historically low interest rates. Of course, those investors believed they could find a greater fool in time when reality hit or that someone would step in to avoid a default. The BANKS, however, realized in 2014 the jig was up and Barclays and Morgan Chase partnered on one last bond offering which
- aimed at raising enough cash to make the next round of payments,
- produced one final round of fees for the Barclays and Morgan Chase and
- allowed those underwriters to exit their own positions before the final default.
In other words, the 2014 bond issue was a carefully crafted getaway plan hatched by armies of PROFESSIONALS at two banks who created the disaster in the first place by violating their fiduciary obligations to the Puerto Rican government and investors but were in a position to orchestrate one last charade to preserve liquidity as they unwound their exposure while trapping a last round of investors. Puerto Rico was already crippled before any hurricane ever hit the island in 2017.
Public Conclusions About a Non-Indictment
James Comey spent a year drafting his memoir of his career in the FBI and firing by Trump for refusing to publicly declare Trump as outside the scope of the Russia investigation. Despite a year of effort, Comey was unable to square known standards of behavior in the FBI regarding:
- not commenting on investigations in progress
- not commenting on investigations concluding with no recommendation of indictment
with his choices to:
- comment on the Hillary Clinton email server phase I investigation
- comment at its phase 1 conclusion what he did find, didn't find and how Clinton failed to meet his standards while declining to recommend indictment
- comment when RE-OPENING the investigation based on a sexting case which itself had nothing to do with Clinton
- comment again after finding nothing
In two weeks of media appearances touting his book, Comey repeatedly expressed regret that he was put in a situation where he and his beloved FBI were put in a situation of having to choose between least-worst alternatives during a presidential campaign but still seems clueless that all of those alternatives came about because he failed to act according to the well documented standards of his own profession.
Trump's Private Physician
If one can believe Harold Bornstein, a former bodyguard of Trump the private citizen and fellow toughie showed up at his office last week and didn't ask for a full COPY of Trump's records, they TOOK all of Trump's actual medical records. Not only any records that might have been filed under "Trump, Donald J" but also records filed under other aliases he has used over the years. (What might those be? Dennison, David? Barron, John? Coyote, Wile E.?) Under New York State law, doctors must retain medical records for 6 years. Patients are allowed to view and obtain COPIES but they are not allowed to remove materials from the original doctor's records.
Bornstein not only violated his regulatory obligations by giving his copies to Trump's associates but it sounds like he allowed them to rifle through ALL of his files to find OTHER files under Trump aliases to remove those as well. Of course, these offenses are nothing compared to the offense of allowing a patient to dictate their own letter of medical condition during a run for President. No one with a brain believed Bornstein wrote the letter when it was published but it wasn't written for people with a brain. It was written for idiot voters whose only concern during the campaign was Trump's physical health and might have been swayed to vote for him after hearing he would "unequivocally be the healthiest individual elected to the presidency." The potentially illegal seizure of Trump's records was triggered in the first place by the doctor publicly confirming Trump uses Propecia to counteract hair-loss. Does this sound like a PROFESSIONAL doctor to you?
The Wikipedia definition of a profession is
A profession is a vocation founded upon specialized educational training, the purpose of which is to supply disinterested objective counsel and service to others, for a direct and definite compensation, wholly apart from expectation of other business gain.
It's easy to blame what seems to be going on in America (and the world more generally) on a very small number of greedy, craven individuals managing to lie their way into positions of government power to tilt the rules in favor of the "uber-haves." It takes only slightly more effort to expand the blame game to the small margin of swing voters who are ignorant enough to be taken in by the disinformation spewed out by the corrupt forces in positions of power.
However, it seems many of the systemic problems we face are more process driven and involve a much larger sliver of the population holding professional positions in the areas of finance, law enforcement, media, science, etc. who appear to have retreated almost entirely from those professional obligations. We will always have crooks wanting to get into government. We will always have crooks getting into positions of power in corporations. We will always have idiot voters who can be easily duped to swing elections in favor of politicians who could not care less about those idiot voters.
That's why these professional roles are so critical to society. People in these roles have specialized education and they are typically well compensated. That means they should have enough financial stability to avoid being dependent on one bad client who demands they do the wrong thing to maintain their livelihood or professional standing. In reality, large numbers of these professionals are CONSISTENTLY failing to understand their duties are not just to the client in front of them but the rest of us relying on them to exercise sound judgment for the betterment of everyone.
It will be very difficult to change direction until the forces encouraging this retreat from professionalism are identified and corrected. The fish doesn't always rot from the head down.
WTH
