Headache

So, I tried to write about how the US finances itself, but I got such a horrible headache, I gave it up. The Federal Government is an incomprehensibly complicated behemoth. I get better at navigating the Federal websites, but they are still so disconnected functionally that you wind up with no idea of how the structure is organized, let alone how it works.

I went to Muckety.com, a fascinating website that displalys organizational maps of all manner of businesses and governmental structures. It took me four tries to get Muckety to recognize a link to its own section outlining the genreal structure of Our Govenment. I still couldn't get it to map it out. Anybody has better luck, let me know.

This exercise in mental flagellation began as an attempt to figure out how the government would fund health care. The medicare trust was pirated years ago to be replaced with a bunch of congressional promissory notes. That Bridge to Nowhere could have been your grandmother's artifical hip, but it was not to be.

So, foolishly, I started with the Treasury web site, dove into the Bureau of Debt Management site, and got suckered into reading the minutes of the August meeting of the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee. Members? CEO's of Goldman Sachs, JP MorganChase, Pimco, BlackRock, Moore Capital Investment and so on. (BlackRock, if you're interested, is in the process of buying the Capital Investment Division Of Barclay Capital LLC for 6.6 billion cash and 38 million shares [19.9%] of Barclay's. The will rename themselves no doubt. But I digress).

Not knowing anything about Moore Capital Investment, I Muckety'd again. I suggest you try it. It starts out as a four-link map, one of which is the Mutual Funds Association. I Muckety'd that. That (much more complex) map had a link to the top 100 members of this association. The screen blossomed into a labrynth of companies. Like who? Oh, Goldman Sachs, JP MorganChase, Pimco.... Now I know how Mickey felt when he kept trying to chop up all those brooms.

Most, if not all, of these plutocrats run hedge funds. So the guys who advise the government on how to structure its debt are the very same knuckleheads (Very Rich Knuckleheads)that just screwed everybody and his brother out of houses, retirement funds, and, in the end, health care.

Migranous. Hemicranial.

The only comfort I can draw from this chalkboard screeching nail bed stabbing exercise, is that maybe--just maybe--the whole freaking thing is so incestuous that the plots of the few to rob the many may be too cumbersome to really organize, and that this last money meltdown was just as much by chance as that butterfly in Tokyo that flapped its wings and made it rain in New York. Maybe.