The Long Telegram

This post is about what Russia is currently up to and why.  The way I going to go about doing this is to use a popular narrative device, starting in the middle of the story.  And the middle of this story is a famous diplomatic cable that garnered the nickname, the "Long Telegram".  It was close to 6,000 words long.  That is far longer than the usual diplomatic cable.  So how did it come to be sent?

In early 1946, a man named George F. Kennan found himself in temporary charge of the US Embassy in Moscow.  He would later be officially appointed to the job.  But this time around he was in temporary charge while the process of appointing, confirming, and installing a new Ambassador played out.

Kennan was one of a small group of Russia experts in the US government at that time.  Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas grouped the more prominent members of this group together as "The Wise Men" in their book of the same name.

Kennan had studied Russia extensively.  He had also spent many years serving in the US Embassy in Moscow.  Both his study and his on the ground experience drove him to the conclusion that US policy toward Russia (then officially known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR, but which I will uniformly call Russia in the interests of simplicity) was seriously in error.

Then someone made the mistake of asking his opinion.  He felt compelled to answer at length because

[the] [a]nswer . . . involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our forms of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress [my] answers into [a series of] single brief messages without yielding to what I feel would be dangerous degree of oversimplification.  I hope, therefore, [that the State] Dept. will bear with me if I submit in answer to this question five parts . . .

[In fairness, Mr. Kennan is an excellent writer.  But it was common practice at the time to leave out the odd extraneous word to minimize length in diplomatic cables.  I have added these words back in to improve clarity and readability.  You can read the full and unmodified "Long Telegram" for yourself here:  http://www.ntanet.net/KENNAN.html.  Also, I later make reference to the "X Article".  You can read it here:  https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Sources_of_Soviet_Conduct.]

Before getting into what he had to say I need to provide some context.  For centuries Russia relied on the Tsarist form of government.  It was a minor variation on the then common monarchial system that had long been the preferred form of government all over Europe.

As a side effect of the upheaval attendant to World War I, the Tsars were thrown out and the Communist Revolution installed a nominally Marxist government in its place.  They renamed Russia to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (The country's name eventually reverted back to "Russia" in 1989 when all the countries that had been swept up into the "Union" were allowed to revert back to being independent countries.)

As soon as the dust settled in the aftermath of World War I, various European powers sponsored a counter-revolution that was supposed to toss the Communists out.  (The Europeans supported the "White" Russians who opposed the Marxist "Red" Russians.)  The US joined in on the European side of the conflict.  The counter-revolution was unsuccessful.

In the run up to World War II the maxim that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" became applicable.  As a result, Russia eventually became an ally of the British, (and eventually) the US, and others, in the fight to defeat the "Axis" powers of Germany, Japan, and (at times) Italy..

At the end of the War there was real interest in the US in keeping the alliance intact.  So, a serious effort was made to remain on friendly terms with Russia but Russia wasn't interested in cooperating with that plan.  In early '46 the official policy of the US government was still to try to hold things together.

Kennan thought that effort was doomed to failure.  He wrote his Long Telegram to explain why.  It was broken down into five sections:

1. Basic features of [the] postwar Soviet [Russian] outlook
2. Background of this outlook
3. Its projection in practical policy on [an] official level
4. Its projection on [an] unofficial level
5. Practical deductions from [the] standpoint of US policy

It covers a lot of material that is not germane to what I want to talk about.  What I am interested in is the parallels Kennan makes between the Tsarist outlook and methods and the ones Kennan attributed to Russian leaders of that time.  Let me quote Kennan at some length

At bottom the Kremlin's [Russia's] neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive [to a] Russian sense of insecurity.  Originally, this was [the] insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on [a] vast exposed plain in [the] neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples.  To this was added, as Russia came into contact with [the] economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area.  But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted Russian rulers rather than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundations, [and, therefore,] unable to stand comparison [to] or contact with [the] political systems of Western countries.  For this reason[,] they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between [the] Western world and their own, [and] feared what would happen if [ordinary] Russians learned [the] truth about [the] world without [the world outside Russia][,] or if foreigners learned about [the] world within [Russia].  And they have learned to seek security only in [the] patient but deadly struggle for [the] total destruction of [a] rival power, [and to] never [engage] in compacts and compromises with it.

Later in the Telegram he wrote

This thesis provides justification for that increase in military and police powers of [the] Russian state, for that isolation of [the] Russian population from [the] outside world, and for that fluid and constant pressure to extend [the] limits of Russian police power[,] which are together the natural and instinctive urges of Russian rulers.  Basically[,] this is only the steady advance of uneasy Russian nationalism, a centuries old movement in which [the] conceptions of offense and defense are inextricably confused.

Kennan is not attributing these concepts to the Marxists that were running Russia at the time.  He says that's how Russians have always operated.  In fact, he explicitly makes reference to "a centuries old movement".  At the time of the Telegram, the Marxists had been in control for less than thirty years.

Kennan's thesis was that there was a commonality and continuity of behavior that extended from the Tsarists to the Marxists.  So, if your understanding of Russian behavior and attitudes in a contemporary context required them to differ markedly from the well established Russian norm, then either you needed to come up with a strong justification for the change, or you were likely wrong.

Kennan had been dealing with various Russian government officials, all the way up to Stalin, the leader at the time, and had seen no justification at all for a belief in a change either in attitude or in behavior.  In fact, he had seen a lot of first hand evidence to support a belief that it was "same old, same old".  So, in Kennan's mind, you could delete the word "likely" from the phrase and just go with "wrong".

Kennan's Long Telegram quickly received wide circulation within upper echelons of the US Government.   It turns out that others had also come to the conclusion that Russian thinking just did not run along the lines of alliances and cooperation.  They realized that Kennan had said what they were thinking.  He had just done so far more articulately than they could have done so.  So, rather than muddying things up, they just endorsed the Telegram.

Kennan reworked his Long Telegram, added some additional material, and published it in the July, 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, a highly respected journal.  The author was initially only identified as "X", so the article became known as the "X Article".  But Kennan was quickly identified as its author.  This article was the first one to characterize the US Anti-Russian strategy as the "containment" strategy.  (The word "containment" appears several times in the piece.)

So the attitude of the US toward Russia went from friendly and accommodating to hostile during this period.  You can pick various events and use them to mark the start of the Cold War.  Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech, for instance, happened in this time period.  But, starting shortly after the Long Telegram was sent, "containment" and "Cold War" came to dominate international politics.  It was many decades before that changed.

Before continuing, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that there was considerable justification for Russian paranoia.  First of all, Russia does not have the kind of natural barriers to hide behind that the US has.  Instead of wide oceans Russia has wide flat plains that can easily be marched across while simultaneously feeding the invading army.

And the idea of invasion was not a theoretical concept for them.  Besides the "fierce nomadic peoples" alluded to above, we have the fact that both Napoleon (France) and Hitler (Germany) invaded Russia from the West.  The greatest power in the world for many centuries (China) was located to the South.  And again, there was no natural barrier to protect Russia from a Chinese invasion.

Beyond that, there was the experience of the Marxist government in charge at the time of the Telegram.  The western powers had joined together to support the "White" Russians in their efforts use military force to kick the Marxists out less than twenty years previously.  Sure, all these attempts had failed.  And lots of countries have done lots of nice things for Russia over the centuries and decades.  But the case for paranoia remains a strong one.

So paranoia has been a feature of pretty much every Russian government going back centuries.  Unfortunately, so has repression and a large and generously supported secret police operation.  The justification for this has been far less clear.  The only thing I can come up with is economics.  Russia has not seen a lot of economic success.  But what little economic success it has seen has, for the most part, come while authoritarian governments were running things.

But non-authoritarian governments have not had much time to get themselves sorted out and, presumably, work their economic magic.  The Tsars got Russia into World War I.  That was an unmitigated disaster for Russian.  Under Lenin things at least stopped getting worse.  And he could blame a lot of economic troubles that happened on his watch on the war with the White Russians.

Stalin came in and started collectivizing everything.  This was a disaster in the agricultural segment of the economy.  But by then he had complete control of the reigns of power so there was no way to oppose him effectively.  And there was little outside information people could use for comparison purposes.  And what outside information there was, could be easily spun.  At the time the rest of the world was working its way through the Great Depression.

Kennan cautiously predicts that the Marxist's days might just be numbered.  He was completely wrong about that.  Russia suffered terrible devastation as a result of World War II.  But they were able to leverage the economic resources of all the territory they gained control of (Eastern Europe) to rebuild quickly.  Then Russia went through a period of economic growth that lasted for decades.

One thing Kennan got right was his discussion of "the succession problem".  He says it took 13 years to transition from Lenin to Stalin.  That seems like a bit of an exaggeration to me.  Russia did not come to a dead stop for anything like 13 years.  The succession that started with Stalin's death was another matter, however.

It took several years after Stalin's death for Khrushchev to emerge.  But then he didn't last long.  He was kicked out of the top job (and managed to not get killed in the process) after only a few years.  It then took several years for Brezhnev to consolidate power.  And he was ultimately a disaster.

Lenin seems to have had some real faith in Marxist principles.  But Stalin was just your basic dictator.  He did make a lot of noise about Marxism.  But it was just window dressing to disguise his political maneuvering.  His collectivization of agriculture and industry can be justified using Marxist doctrine.  But his real reason for collectivizing was simply to increase his own power and control.

His use of "show trials" (and other actions he took) actually ran counter to Marxist ideology.  Stalin needed to eliminate his enemies and this was often the tool he chose to use.  In many cases the people on trial for being "enemies of Marxism" were actually people who carefully adhered to Marxist doctrine.  The "Marxist deviation" they were accused of having participated in was entirely fictitious.  Stalin, on the other hand, frequently engaged in Marxist deviation.  But he had the power so there was no one to challenge him.

Khrushchev was not much of a Marxist.  But he was a far better one than Brezhnev.  All Brezhnev cared about was staying in power and keeping his cronies in power.  Everything else was left to rot.  When he finally died Russia was in bad shape.  But by this time he had systematically eliminated anyone he perceived as a threat.  The only people left were a bunch of his cronies.  They were both old and incompetent so Russia drifted for several more years.

By the time the dust settled it was too late.  We got the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the USSR.  Russia was back to being just Russia.  But by now no one knew how to run a democratic country.  And anyone who had any belief in things like honesty and the rule of law had been eliminated by Brezhnev and his cronies.  Things went badly and an opening emerged for Putin.

Putin spend a long time in the Russian intelligence service before he moved over to politics.  And there was a lot of continuity dating all the way back to the Tsars in how Russian intelligence people operated.  Putin is a capitalist and a democrat in the same way that Brezhnev was a Communist.  Putin has a strong interest in getting and keeping power.  Everything else comes in a distant second.

Unlike Brezhnev, Putin is relatively young and in good health.  So he has the energy necessary to get and keep power.  And, since he doesn't know any other way, he uses the intelligence services the same way Russia has always used its intelligence services.  And he executes foreign policy the same way Russia has traditionally executed foreign policy.

Again, quoting the Long Telegram, Russian foreign policy is designed

[t]o undermine [the] general political and strategic potential of major Western Powers[.] Efforts will be made in such countries to disrupt [their] national self-confidence, to hamstring measures of national defense, to increase social and industrial unrest, to stimulate all forms of disunity.  All persons with grievances, whether economic or racial, will be urged to seek redress[,] not in mediation and compromise, but in defiant, violent struggle for [the] destruction of other elements of society.  Here poor will be set against rich, black against white, young against old, newcomers against established residents, etc.

And, going back to the five point summary, both "official" (item #3) and "unofficial" (item #4) techniques will be used.  Official techniques comprise the public and acknowledged actions of the government.  This includes things like official pronouncements, treaties and other agreements, policy statements, etc.  Unofficial techniques include any action the government attempts to keep hidden.  This includes efforts by the intelligence services, secret treaties and agreements, government actions that are denied, etc.

Remember, the section I quoted above was written in 1946.  But it is an accurate description of what is going on today.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The only people who don't have a clear picture of what is going on are those that are ignorant of history and those who are willfully ignorant.  Unfortunately, there are far too many people that fall into one or both of those categories.

Medicare for All

I am returning to a subject I haven't addressed for a long time.  Back in 2013 I wrote:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2013/02/medical-costs.html.  About a year later I sort of addressed the same subject with:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/03/fixing-healthcaregov.html.  But this latter post was more about politics and technology than it was about medicine.

A lot has changed since then, right?  The first post was written in the middle of the Obamacare fight and that was ages ago.  Obamacare has been the law of the land for several years now, which actually has improved things.  Even so, remarkably little has changed.

"Medicare for All" is an eye catcher when it comes to a subject line.  But it  is misleading as I am not going to confine myself to just it.  Instead, in this post I am going to take a broad look at health care as a whole.  And one reason is that so little has changed is that there is so much noise and BS surrounding the subject.  And I like to write posts where I cut through noise and baloney and get to the real story.

And it turns out we can now start with a simple question for which we now know the answer.  The question is:

Is it okay for many people in the US to have poor to non-existent health care?

Republicans say "yes" and Democrats say "no".  This conclusion is borne out by the debate that surrounded Obamacare and the actions subsequent to its passage and implementation.  An argument can be made that Obamacare is flawed and needs fixing.   Republicans have made that argument all along the line from then to now.  It is a reasonable position.  After all, I agree with it.  Pretty much everybody agrees with it.  There is literally nobody, from Obama on down that thinks it can't be improved.

And we can divide the way it should be improved into two general approaches.  The first approach is espoused by the group that thinks it is a good foundation but various fixes and improvements should be implemented on top of it.  Vice President Biden and lots of others support this approach.  Then there is another group who start with the position that it has major problems.  This group says it should be scrapped and replaced with something else.  President Trump says he is in this group.  He is joined by a large majority of Republicans.

So where's the problem?  Republicans have been advocating for a "repeal and replace" strategy all along the line.  The problem is that in the entire time since President Obama proposed the plan that eventually became Obamacare, and right up to the present day, no Republican replacement plan has been brought forward.  None!  On the other hand, several serious attempts have been made to repeal Obamacare without including a replacement.

And it is instructive to review the history of where Obamacare came from.  Early in the Clinton Administration, a proposal was brought forward and championed by then First Lady Hillary Clinton.  It was a pretty good proposal.  And all along Mrs. Clinton said "if you have ideas for improvements, bring them forward".  For a long time Republicans engaged in a "death by a thousand cuts" strategy where they said "we don't like this" and "we don't like that".  However, they never proposed an alternative or a fix.

Late in the process they finally rolled out the outline of a plan to replace Mrs. Clinton's plan wholesale with a plan of their own..  It was produced by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.  It was introduced at the last minute and, frankly, was not a serious proposal.  But afterward, whenever anyone got serious about a major change to health care they would trot it out and say "this is our plan"..

Then a Republican Governor, Mitt Romney, got serious about health care.  He dusted off the Heritage Foundation plan, fleshed, it out, and tuned it up.  Then he got it implemented in the state of Massachusetts.  A Republican Governor implemented a Republican healthcare plan.  President Obama was serious about doing something about healthcare.  He figured that if he took Romneycare, tweaked it slightly, and proposed it as his healthcare initiatives, Republicans would embrace it.  It was, after all, a Republican plan through and through.  That plan is what is now generally referred to as Obamacare.

He expected it to be embraced by Republicans.  That was a reasonable expectation.  After all, it was their plan.  He probably thought resistance would come from Democrats.  But not one Republican voted for Romneycare/Obamacare.  Nor did Republicans make a serious effort to engage with it.  They instead engaged in a "resist everything, block everything" campaign, even though it was their plan.  Their strategy came very close to being successful in blocking President Obama's efforts to pass it into law.

Since then Republicans have made countless efforts to "repeal and replace" Obamacare.  Except they haven't proposed a replacement.  The reason for this is simple.  Any proposal they made would be less popular with their base than Obamacare.  The only conclusion that can be drawn from all this is that Republicans are okay with many Americans having poor to nonexistent health care.  That's what the current system delivers and they have made no effort to change it so that coverage is broadened.

So that leaves the Democrats.  One complaint, then and now, is that Obamacare does not cover everyone.  This was because his team made the calculation that any "universal coverage" version couldn't get passed.  Given how close Obamacare came to not passing this is a reasonable position.  None of the "no" voters voted "no" because it did not include universal coverage.  And, as a side note, Romneycare provides near universal coverage in Massachusetts.  The provisions of Roimneycare that would make Obamacare near universal, were left out in the first place, repealed later, or struck down in the courts by Republican judges.

It is possible to provide universal or near universal health care.  Lots of countries have done it.  And it can be done in several different ways.  In my 2013 post I mentioned a book called "The Healing of America" by T. R. Reid.  Amazon sells a Kindle copy for $13 and a paperback copy for a little over $16.  In it he examines the health care systems in use in 6 countries.  Some of the six plans he reviewed are cheaper.  Some are more expensive.  Some countries run the whole thing as a government operation.  Some countries insert insurance companies into the middle.  No two countries do it exactly the same way.

But in all of the cases Mr. Reid examined, everybody is covered, it is cheaper than the US system, and it doesn't matter whether you look at the pre-Obamacare US or the post-Obamacare US.  And, most critically, citizens of all six countries like their system better than Americans like ours, and citizens in all six countries are healthier and live longer than Americans.

What Mr. Reid did is what's called in business circles, "going to school on the competition".  You study what others are doing, you see how their system works, you see what it does well and what it does badly, and you go from there.  This works best for systems that have been up and running for a while.  That way you can see how well they work, not just in the beginning, but over time.  All the health care systems Mr. Reid studied have been in place in their present form for many years.

The smartest thing the US could do would be to adopt a system that is based on parts that are found in the systems of these other countries that look like they would work well in the US.  This process should result in looking at ideas that otherwise don't get discussed in the US.  Studying the strengths and weaknesses of each system, which Mr. Reid did in his book, would allow us to implement proven "best practices" while simultaneously avoiding common mistakes others have made.  The reason we don't do this is politics, pure and simple.

What we have is a bunch of people of power and influence who have adopted a position and are not interested in learning why it might be wrong.  So they do the political equivalent of putting their fingers in their ears and shouting "la, la, la, la, la" loudly, any time somebody tries to inject anything sensible into the debate.

This, in a nutshell, is the strategy Republicans have adopted on the subject.  They have had quite a bit of success with it.  At no time did Republicans admit that Obamacare was a Republican plan originally created by a conservative think tank, for instance.

Now, there's lot of nonsense on the other side of the aisle.  And I am now going to get into some of it.  Let's start with the most fundamental truth about healthcare:

Health care inevitably eventually puts a price on life.  Further, it puts a price on quality of life.

I have seen this time and time again in my lifetime.  When I was a kid, health care was cheap.  It isn't any more.  What has happened in the interim is that a whole bunch of people have come up with a whole lot of ways to improve health.  But, on average, these improvements and innovations keep getting more and more expensive.

Everybody was poor during the Great Depression.  If you were in the medicine business and you were pushing an expensive treatment, people would chose to die.  In many cases the decision was forced on them because they literally didn't have the money.

I grew up some time later.  But the overhang of that behavior was still around.  Medicine was plain and cheap back then.  But the "plain and cheap" medicine of the time produced a lot of people dying who wouldn't today.  Or they were sick a lot of the time from things we can now prevent or cure.

We now have a vaccine that prevents people from getting Polio, a disease that killed some people and left lots of others confined to something called an "iron lung" for the rest of their lives..  We also have ways to treat things like infectious diseases that used to sicken almost everybody and kill far too many.  The Polio vaccine was introduced when I was a kid.  It was cheap.  Many of the medical innovations of the time were cheap.

But people found more and more ways to spend more and more money to develop the next medical improvement.  So, soon you had the thousand dollar drug.  That led over time to drugs that can cost a million or more dollars.  After all, you can't put a price on life, right?  It turns out, however, that people are very reluctant to fork over their hard earned tax dollars or insurance dollars, to pay for an expensive cure for somebody they don't know or don't like.

There are some good reasons for the steady increase in the cost of health care, and some bad ones.  But the trend has so far proved unstoppable.  Someone can always come up with a new treatment that saves live or improves quality of life but costs more, often much more, than the old treatment.  At some point someone has got to sweep in and say "no".  We are going to let that person die.  Or we aren't going to improve the quality of life for that person.

No one wants to make these kinds of decisions.  We as a society have figured out dozens of ways to avoid having to directly answer the question of who should live and who should die.  And then there is the "bright line" problem.  There is no bright line between things that are too expensive and things that, while expensive, seem worth the cost.

There are always procedures that are a little more expensive or a little less expensive than other procedures.  But one way or another something draws the line and some things fall below the line and are provided and other things are deemed to be above the line and are not.  And "not paid for" means someone dies or suffers an impaired quality of life.  So,

Medicine is always rationed.  The only thing we are really arguing about is who sets the rationing rules and what they are.

Someone, who opposes some change to health policy will say "that's rationing -- we can't do that".  If the person saying it is knowledgeable on the subject, then they know it is a lie.  Any "expert" who is unwilling to say "there will always be rationing" is purposefully conning the less well informed.  Con men (and women) should not be listened to.

Get over it.  If we are honest, we are never arguing between a "rationing" system and a "not rationing" system.  We are instead arguing either about who does the rationing or about what the rationing rules are, or possibly about both.

Obamacare put in rules requiring insurance policies to cover certain situations.  The most famous example of this is "pre-existing conditions", but there are many others.  Generally speaking, these changes improved the quality of the insurance coverage.  But they also increased costs.  (SPOILER ALERT:  Health care is not free.)  What this did was "ration less but pay more".  It did NOT eliminate rationing.  It just changed the rationing rules.

The primary rationing mechanism used in the US is bureaucrats working for insurance companies.  There was an argument in opposition to Obamacare that went "it will put government bureaucrats in charge of your medical care".  First of all, that wasn't true.  Second of all, if it was true what we were actually doing was shifting the decision from insurance company bureaucrats to government bureaucrats.

In that context, lots of people would have seen the shift from using insurance company bureaucrats to using government bureaucrats as an improvement.  Finally, many of the people pushing this line knew it wasn't true.  Obamacare has taken some discretion out of the hands of insurance company bureaucrats.  But the Insurance people are still the ones making the decisions that deny some people life saving treatment.

Reid in his book makes it clear that a number of systems would result in a system that was cheaper and worked better.  And he is not alone.  That is a broadly shared consensus among those who have studied the health care systems used in other countries.  And, based on the experience of many countries around the world, people would like the new system better than the current one.  So what's the holdup?

Let's start with money.  It seems obvious that cutting red tape and bureaucracy is a good idea.  It should save money.  Okay.  That means you want a British style system where the government does everything.  All the doctors, etc. are government employees.  They have no financial incentive to run you through expensive procedures so they can get a kickback.  And they don't waste their time on forms and paperwork.

Every doctor office dentist office, etc. in the US has at least one person whose full time job is to shuffle paper.  The US system demands vast quantities of paper.  Those paper shufflers are running up costs and not improving the quality of the medical care you get.  But medical offices literally can't stay in business without them.  So now you're sold on the British system, right?  I'm guessing you are adamantly against a government run medical system in spite of the fact that it would be cheaper and work better.

So how about the French system?  Hospitals, doctors, etc. are independent.  There are even insurance companies.  The government provides an "audit" function but doesn't provide any of the actual care.  Well, in France the whole process is strictly regulated.  There are so many regulations that everybody might as well work for the government.  In spite of this, French health care is far better than that found in the US and it's cheaper.  That should give you an idea just how wildly inefficient the US system is.  Pretty much any other system works better and is cheaper.

The Canadian system has gotten some coverage here and there.  It delivers a better quality of service, on average, than the US system.  This is reflected in many ways.  But a simple example is it's popularity.  Most Canadians live near the border.  So they are pretty familiar with the US system.  They are uniform in preferring their system to the US one.

They have good reason for this.  Everyone is covered.  And routine procedures are covered.  So people don't get sick as often.  And when the do get sick, the problem is caught and cured more quickly.  But the Canadians have not figured how to avoid rationing.

Their system covers all reasonably inexpensive and common procedures.  It covers many expensive procedures too.  But one of the ways they keep costs down is by being slow to provide non-life-threatening expensive procedures.  You get them for free but you have to wait.

The US medical system is the best in the world, if you are rich.  If you have money to throw around, the US system will take great care of you.  Some relatively well off Canadians run into this expensive-but-not-life-threatening situation.  Some of them come down to the US where they can get the procedure immediately.  They just have to pay a lot of money.  But if you have the money then it often seems worth it.

So, the US system is the best system, if you are rich.  The Canadian system is better if you are in the middle, financially.  The Canadian system is far superior if you are poor.

So why can't we fix our system.  Well, here's one reason:

People don't like their medical plans.  It doesn't matter if it is an employer provided plan, a union provided plan, a plan from the Obamacare Exchange, or whatever.  What they do like is the team at the doctor's office, clinic, etc., that they have been using for the last few years.  They have built up a level of trust with this particular group of people.  So, they very much want to stick with them.

The thing that scares people about various proposals is that they fear that something MIGHT get in the way of them sticking with the medical professionals that they know.  It's not a chance they want to take.

I'm convinced that if this last issue is addressed in a way that people are convinced will work then they will support the plan, whatever it is.  But doing so is complicated.  And the devil is in the details.

And there are lots of people that want to mess with the details.  They want to make some "minor" tweak so that one group or another ends up making a whole lot of money out of the deal.  And that makes this almost impossible to pull off in a political context.

People know there is a problem.  They just look at any specific "solution" and find reasons to distrust it.  Senator Warren has run into this recently.  She rightly calculates that a fast transition saves money.  So she initially wanted to do it very quickly.

She recently put out an updated plan that stretches things out to three years.  But it also had a lot more detail.  And that additional detail caused a lot of people to conclude that her plan MIGHT get between consumers and their medical team.

The short term concern about having to change doctors, etc. overrode the potential long term benefit of better service at a lower cost (and likely the ability to keep their current doctor).  And that put a lot of people off her plan.  And that caused her standing in the polls to take a big drop.

There are several ways to go that I think would work well in the long run.  But, due to the problem I have just been discussing, I don't see how we get from where we are to one of these plans.  So, is there a way forward?  Yes!

Moving toward the French plan could be done in such a way as to allow people to keep their current medical team.  So that eliminates one roadblock.  All we have to do to get there is to pile enough regulations on top of the current system.  Done correctly, we will end up with something very similar to the French system in the end.

But the whole process (except possibly when we are close to the finish) will be horribly inefficient.  Most of the intermediate steps will increase overall health care costs.  And I don't know how the French fund their current system.

In the US pretty much every company or union is a separate path along which the money flows.  One of the things that is really disruptive about the US system is that changing jobs almost always involves changing health plans and that threatens the connection to the health team.

France, and the other countries have fixed this problem by getting businesses and unions out of the health care business.  When you change employers your health plan doesn't change.  And, therefore, your health team doesn't change.  They do this by using a single payment path that runs through the government.  There would be a lot of resistance by Republicans to this.  Currently, companies and unions oppose it too.

But I think the company/union resistance can be handled by coming up with a good transition method.  For both companies and unions, the health plan is part of the compensation package.  Let's say that the company/union contribution can be zeroed out.  Then if all the money saved went directly to the employee in the form of increased compensation, I think the change could be sold.  If employees are sold on the change then I think both companies and unions would be happy to get out of the health care business.

But, of course, this change would not free any money up to pay for a presumably more expensive (in the short run) health care system.  If nothing else, a new money stream would have to replace the old money stream of company (possibly to union) to insurance company to health care provider path.  The health care people need to get paid somehow.

If we use a government system then inevitably, taxes would have to go up.  Theoretically, the taxes of the employees and union members could go up the same amount as their increased take-home pay without harming them.  But that is hard to do and even harder to sell.  The Warren wealth tax represents an alternative source.  She is already planning on dedicating a large amount from it to cover health care costs.

And I'm sure many of you can lay out your own objections to what I have just laid out.  And the fact that it is so easy to come up with objections to changes in health care is why it has been so hard to improve the system.  But it is important to note that health care costs are going to go up if we do nothing.

They will go up because people will find new, expensive ways to improve one or another aspect of health care.  They will then proceed to find a way to get paid.  But the current system compounds the problem by piling all the inefficiencies and inconsistencies of our current system on top.  The current system magnifies cost increases.

An option that is getting talked up a lot is "Medicare for All".  Now, you need to be 65 or disabled to qualify for Medicare.  And, in theory, it is paid for by Social Security taxes.  The whole thing is calculated so that, on average, a senior citizen has contributed enough over the years to cover the cost of Medicare in his/hers golden years.

But the "Medicare Trust Fund" will run out of money in about a decade, according to most estimates.  So there really isn't enough money to fund the current system.  Medicare expansion proposals vary from lowering the eligibility age by a modest amount to, in the most extreme proposals, opening Medicare up to literally everybody.  Some proposals let people voluntarily opt in to Medicare.  Others make it mandatory.

It is important to understand that Medicare is just a big, government run, insurance plan.  There are no executives pulling in millions but, in terms of analysis, it's an insurance plan.  So it's like France.  So, if we were sensible about these sorts of things, which we are not, we could look to France for ideas about what to do and what not to do.

The reason that people talk about Medicare is that it has a good reputation.  It provides a good quality product with far less overhead than insurance plans.  But there is lots of bureaucracy/paperwork involved.  Those paper shufflers in doctor's offices spend a lot of time dealing with Medicare.  And it is important to understand that Medicare is not the whole solution.

I am on Medicare.  But I also have a "Medicare Supplemental" plan.  Medicare doesn't cover everything.  It just covers a lot of things.  That leaves a lot of gaps.  The combination of Medicare and my supplemental plan provides me with a level of coverage that I am happy with.  Just plain Medicare would fall far short.

The supplemental plan costs money.  I can afford it so I pay.  But what about people who can't pay.  Mostly, the "Medicare for All" people don't talk about this problem.  It's not their fault. There is so much BS and noise being thrown around there really isn't room for a discussion of this issue.

If we could get to a point where the BS and noise people shut up or were shut up then a discussion of this and many other topics would be possible.  (One reason they throw up the BS and noise is because they don't want these subjects discussed sensibly.)  But far too many people powerful people benefit from injecting BS and noise into the discussion of subject after subject for me to believe that is a problem that will be solved soon.

If at this point you are saying to yourself "I hate all the options, even the option of doing nothing" then you have been paying attention.  (And I hope you can now engage with the subject with a clearer understanding.)  But it is important to understand that it is possible to make the current system worse.  A repeal of Obamacare without replacing it with something that is as good or better is just the most obvious example.

But this is a subject, like climate change, where doing nothing is not really an option.  So I applaud all of the people who I think seriously want to improve the situation.  Even if I don't think a plan has much of a chance, just thinking about that plan make a change for the better more likely.

Finally, if you want a "glass half full" way to look at this, here's one.  If you are going to do something about one problem and ignore another one, do something about climate change and ignore health care.  If you think things look bad when you look at the health care landscape, trust me, things look far worse when you look at the climate change landscape.

An open letter to Bill Gates

Dear Mr. Gates:

You recently sat for an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at an event sponsored by the New York Times.  In it you made some remarks about taxing the rich, especially yourself.  I have seen enough of the clip to know that you did not intend your remarks to be taken completely seriously.  But I seriously invite you to address how wealthy people like yourself and large corporations like Microsoft should be taxed.

The thrust of the commentary on your remarks is that you are feuding with Elizabeth Warren and her "wealth tax" proposal.  Supposedly you are shocked and appalled by what she is proposing.  I think that is far from the truth.  You are a thoughtful and public spirited person.  You are known for taking a deep dive into what interests you.

Senator Warren is running for President.  As such, she needs to construct her proposals with an eye to how they will be perceived by voters and the press.  This is not necessarily bad.  I do not know if, absent these considerations, she would or would not be proposing something different.  But her current circumstances prohibit even the possibility of doing that.  You don't operate under that constraint.  You are much more free to say what you mean and mean what you say.

And, based on your words and actions, I think you and the Senator are actually in close agreement as to the overall goals and objectives a tax system should support.  You (and your close friend and fellow mega-billionaire Warren Buffet) have frequently stated publicly that the wealthy should be taxed more heavily than they currently are, for instance.

And your past remarks on increasing taxes have usually been in the context of tax rates on current income.  But that is not at all the same thing as a "wealth tax" that goes after your assets.  So one might think that when it comes to assets, your agenda and that of the Senator might diverge.  But you have repeatedly and forcefully advocated for the "giving pledge".  Subscribers promise to donate half their net worth to charity upon their death.  That takes a far bigger bite out of a person's wealth than what the Senator is proposing.

Now there is a difference.  You have contributed a substantial portion of your wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  But you and your wife control how and on what the Foundation spends the money.  If you were to instead give the same amount of money to the government you would not control how it was spent.

Your foundation appears to be well run and has an excellent track record when it comes to spending money efficiently and effectively.  And this track record applies both to the amount of money that goes to performing the actual work but also to what work the Foundation funds.  You look for situations where the Foundation can be effective and can advance important goals.

But the same is not always true when it comes to the "charity" vehicles other wealthy people employ.  In many cases their "charitable operation" is just a tax dodge or a public relations effort designed to burnish the reputation of the sponsor.

A classic example of this is the Donald J. Trump Foundation.  Mr. Trump was recently forced to permanently shut his Foundation down, admit guilt to a long and shocking list of illegal behavior, and pay a $2 million fine.  This is perhaps the most egregious example of this sort of thing.  But less egregious examples of "charitable organizations" that perform little or no charitable or educational activities are two a penny.

A frequently advanced argument is that giant rewards must be available in order to simulate risky innovative activity which, we are told, eventually will greatly benefit society as a whole.  But the life history of you and many others does not support this.  Every case is a little different.  But your case serves to illustrate this and it is one I am familiar with.

You were raised in an upper middle class family that valued hard work and encouraged excellence and competition.  Although your home situation was more than comfortable it was definitely not "lifestyles of the rich and famous".

Your parents were, however, able to afford to send you to a private high school and then on to Harvard, one of the most expensive schools in the country.  There, the level of financial support they provided, was not sufficient to enable you to keep up with the smart set.  But it was sufficient to fund your frequent participation in poker games.

And, of course, you dropped out of Harvard and moved to New Mexico where your lifestyle was more "starving student" than it was "jet set".  But your low rent existence was not a problem you felt needed fixing.  You were completely focused on the goal of making Microsoft a success.  Nothing else was important.  And this singular focus on making Microsoft a success continued for many years afterwards.

But it was not until years later when Microsoft's association with IBM began paying off to an extent that no doubt surprised even you, that your financial situation improved substantially.  During the period leading up to Microsoft's super-success you worked extremely hard, probably harder than you have worked at any time since.

But during this long period your expectation was not that Microsoft would eventually become the most valuable company in the world.  Oh, you always hoped and expected that eventually Microsoft would become a success.  But the degree of financial success you envisioned for Microsoft was several orders of magnitude smaller than what actually transpired.  Yet that much more modest goal was enough to motivate you to go "all in" for a long time.

As soon as Microsoft hit it big you could have substantially changed your lifestyle.  But you didn't.  Oh, you bought a very expensive car and some other toys.  You eventually built a $50 million house.  But the sum total of all of these expenditures represented only a small portion of your income at the time.

And for several years after you hit it big you maintained a remarkably ordinary lifestyle.  You were seen standing in line to watch a movie in a regular movie theater, just like everybody else, on several occasions during this period.

You did eventually go inside the bubble.  But was not a choice you made because you found it appealing.  Instead it was a direct response to a credible kidnaping threat involving one of your children.  Given your net worth at the time, going inside the bubble was the appropriate response of a loving father concerned for the safety of his family.

And to this day you make a concerted effort to get outside the bubble.  You can't do it in the first world due to security concerns, if for no other reason.  But you can and do get out of the bubble during your frequent sojourns into the third world.

I think you enjoy the interactions you are able to have with regular people in poor countries.  There the rules of engagement are different.  These people don't really know who you are.  They know you are some kind of foreigner.  But for them you fall into the "stranger from a couple of villages over" category.  They know how to deal with that category of people.  And it does not require them to completely change their behavior.

I many places you fall into the category of people who are so famous and powerful that people you meet have inevitably developed preconceived notions about you.  Such preconceived notions inevitably color an interaction.  They feel they can't behave as they normally would.

So you can have normal conversations about normal things with the people you encounter when you are far off the beaten path in a way that is often no longer possible in the "civilized world".  Being poor doesn't make people dumb or uninteresting.  So these people have something to say that is worth hearing and I bet you routinely learn from them.

My point is that it was not necessary to dangle the real possibility that if you worked hard, took some risks, and were lucky, you would end up the richest man in the world.  The reward of success was, no doubt, part of what motivated you to do what you did.  But the possibility of a much more modest reward would have been more than sufficient to elicit your best effort.  And you are very aware that, while you have gained much, you have also had to leave behind some things you value.

You mentioned in the Sorkin interview that you have paid $10 billion in taxes.  That's a lot of money.  And, by one account your net worth is a little more than $100 billion.  Accepting that figure for the sake of argument, that means you have paid out about 10% of your net worth in taxes.

But consider a person earning $50,000 per year, or perhaps a family earning $100,000 per year.  (These figures are at or above "median" income for American families.)  They likely pay more than 10% of their earnings in taxes, a point your friend Mr. Buffet often makes.  So your tax rate is actually on the low side.

But that's not the whole story.  The income figures I just cited were "gross" income figures.  They represented every dollar these people earned.  But in your case, we are talking about "net", what's left of gross income after all expenses are paid.

For an average person, having a net income of 10% would be considered quite good.  So they are paying more than 100% of their net income in taxes.  One of the things that distinguishes the rich from the poor is that for rich people the percentage of their income that ends up as net income is fairly high (often well over 10%).  For poor people the amount of net income they end up with varies from a small percentage (likely less than 10%) to none at all.

Now consider a large corporation like Microsoft.  Microsoft employs a wide range of tactics to reduce its tax burden.  And they are quite successful.  A significant number of the Fortune 100 corporations pay no Federal Income tax at all.  Many other Fortune 100 companies pay only a small percentage of their reported profit in Income Taxes.  The combined Income Tax paid by the Fortune 100 is a very small percentage of their combined profit.

Now I freely admit that Microsoft and other companies pay large amounts of other taxes.  But then so do ordinary people.  We both live in Washington State which has a high Sales tax.  Our state also has Business and Occupation taxes that apply to corporations, property taxes that apply to both corporations and citizens, and a variety of other taxes.  The Federal government also engages in many forms of taxation.  It doesn't limit itself to just the Income Tax.

But again, these other taxes apply to both average people and rich people.  And these other taxes tend to burden the poor more than the rich.  But you already know all this.  And if you don't, you have access to very smart and skilled people who do.  You also have access to smart and skilled people who know all about corporate taxes, an area I suspect you have generally had little interest in, in all their myriad forms.

So you agree with Presidential candidate Warren that taxes on rich people should be increased.  Based on your giving pledge and your Foundation I would say you also agree that wealth should be taxed.  I don't know what your thinking is on what is right and wrong on the Corporate tax front.  But I suspect you think they too should pay more.  So I am just going to assume you think that way.  If you don't, go along with me anyhow, at least for the sake of argument.  And I am absolutely positive you think the way corporations are taxed could be improved, a lot.

So I hope I have convinced you that your thinking and Ms. Warren's thinking is not all that different, at least at the conceptual level.  But, as they say, "God is in the details".  And when it comes to the details, I would be surprised if you didn't have some major disagreements with her proposals.  After all, that was the thrust of the remarks you made that I started this letter off with.  And it is in those very details that your skills and access to resources positions you to make a real contribution.

I invite you to propose changes to how personal income and wealth should be taxed.  I invite you to propose changes to how corporations should be taxed.

You know a lot about these subjects but likely not enough.  But in the past you have characterized yourself as having a "high bandwidth".  By this you meant that you had the capability to quickly absorb large quantities of complex technical information and to be able to organize it so that you can make sense of it and act intelligently on it.  Taxation is noting if not a large and complex subject.

Right now you probably don't know enough about it.  I think you still have that high bandwidth capability.  You also have access to the very best experts in these areas.  Should you choose to do so, I think you can become a skilled expert in this subject area in a relatively short period of time.  Once you have done so I sincerely want to know what you recommend.

To be fair to the Senator I would suggest you put together proposals that would raise roughly the same amounts candidate Warren proposes to raise.   That would allow an "apples to apples" comparison to what Ms. Warren has proposed.  But you will most likely find that you disagree with the revenue goals she has proposed.  This is a contentious area and reasonable people can honestly come to substantially different conclusions.

I would like to see your recommendations (and the thinking that underlies them) as to what revenue goals you think are most appropriate.  Revenue goals that differ significantly from hers lead naturally to different tax proposals.  But there should be a lot of commonality.  So putting  out two sets of proposals, one that matches the Warren's revenue goals, and one that matches yours should not require much additional effort.

These issues are contentious.  As a result most of what is said about them is heavily influenced by the position a particular commentator occupies on the political spectrum.  As a result most people have little or no access to nonpartisan, fact based information.  But you have been very successful in staying out of the partisan fray.  Theoretically, you belong in the %$#@* billionaire pigeon hole.  But that does you a disservice.

This is something you can do perhaps better than anybody else.  Most people don't have the expertise and lack the means to acquire it.  Many of those who do have the expertise have been captured by partisans of one flavor or another.

On the other hand, it takes a considerable amount of political skill to operate in the areas the Gates Foundation operates in.  But you have managed to position yourself and the Foundation in such a way that you can and do work with everybody.  That skill allows you to make a real contribution, a contribution that requires avoiding being seen as the pawn of one group or another.

When coupled with the abilities you possess and the resources you have access to it is easy to see that you are unique in your ability to perform this very valuable service.  I think I have made a compelling argument for why it is important that the service be performed.  You are able.  The only question is: are you willing?

So out of a sense of patriotism and in a belief that you can actually do some good here, I invite and request you to undertake this project.  You will have my deepest and most profound thanks if you do.

Respectfully,

Malicious phone calls - November 2019 update

The last time I reported on this subject there was a different man in the White House.  On April 27, 2015 I put up the following post:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2015/04/mallicious-phone-calls-good-news.html.  The subject, then and now, was malicious phone calls.  And the title of that post included the phrase "good news".  I would like to report that things have gotten even better since then.  Unfortunately, honesty forbids me from saying that.  To review:

Malicious phone calls consist of spam calls, robo-calls, requests that you answer a survey, unwanted solicitations on behalf of a political candidate or issue, etc.  I got, and unfortunately still get, a lot of them.  It became particularly annoying when I retired.  Most, but far from all, of these kinds of calls come in during the day.  Retirement meant that I was now home so I could be annoyed by all of them, not just a few of them.

At the time I didn't have caller ID.  It used to be an expensive additional feature.  Now it is ubiquitous and usually included "at no additional charge".  Eventually I caved and got it.  Initially I paid a small fortune for it.  But then I changed to a service that included it for free.  Caller ID helped but many calls still got through.

For those I tried all the tactics "experts" recommend.  I didn't answer them.  Or I answered but tried to keep the telemarketer on the line for as long as possible.  Or I hung up immediately.  Or I pressed "1" (or whatever number they specified) to be deleted from their list.  Finally, I tried hurling the most horrible obscenities I could think of at the telemarketer.  None of it worked.

And, across the several thousand malicious calls I have by now received, I never once forked over a single cent to any of them.  You'd think they would mark me down as a lost cause and stop harassing me but they never did.

As I reported in my 2015 post, I eventually signed up for a "blocker" service called "NoMoRobo".   At the time, it was the only service available but it has since been joined by many others.

NoMoRobo is what's called a "black list" service.  They maintain a list of "bad guy" phone numbers.  If one of them calls me they take the call over and answer on my behalf.  This required me to train myself to not answer until the phone had rung at least twice.  That is annoying but a side effect was that it allowed me to keep track of how many blocked calls I was getting.

Unfortunately, scammers and other bad operators have figured out how to at least partially get around black lists and the other tactics the blocker services use.  But, compliments of the Trump Administration, a new white knight has appeared in the form of Ajit Pai, the current FCC Chairman. To hear Pai tell it, he has taken several effective steps to actually fix the problem.  So what's he done?

In 2017 the FCC put in a rule change.  It made it legal for telephone companies to put technology in place that would block calls from "invalid, unallocated, and unused" phone numbers from going through.  The FCC, at least according to a press release they issued, has also made "significant progress toward caller ID authentication".

They did this "through adoption and implementation of STIR/SHAKEN standards by networks [telephone companies]".  They have also "proposed or imposed monetary forfeitures totaling $245,923,500".  In August of this year the FCC also announced new rules to let the FCC crack down on bogus calls and texts originating from overseas.

Sounds impressive, right?  It would be if any of this had resulted in actual progress.  The monetary forfeitures, for instance, would be impressive if that represented actual money actually collected.  But I suspect that "proposed" is the important word here.

The same press release indicated that the FCC had initiated 140 enforcement actions.  But there are far more than 140 bad actors out there.  And how many of these actions have resulted in operations actually being permanently shut down?  I suspect the number is far less than 140.

The STIR/SHAKEN (truly an awesome acronym) technology sounds like a good idea.  Back in the day, figuring out where a phone call came from ("originated") was technologically easy but often practically hard.

Telephone calls were then handled by dedicated custom equipment.  And the "network" was a simple affair.  The current standard for telephone numbers was put in place in the '60s.  Each ten digit "phone number" consisted of a three digit area code, a three digit exchange, and a four digit phone number.

Each exchange consisted of a separate and unique set of equipment.  The last "hop" of a phone call was always from your phone to your exchange.  Exchanges were connected by "trunk" lines.  If a call originated from a number in your area code then your exchange hopped the call over a trunk line directly to the exchange that owned the phone on the other end (or handled it internally, if the call originated from within your exchange).

If the call originated "out of area" then it was hopped over a trunk line to the "long distance" exchange for your area code.  It in turn hopped the call over a trunk line to the exchange handling the originating phone's area code.  From there the call was hopped over a trunk line to the right exchange machine, and finally from there to the originator's phone.  Lucky for us, all this happened almost instantaneously.

Back in the day it took minutes to trace all this out, if you wanted to know where a call originated from.  But, also starting in the '60s, specialized computers called ESSs were put in place in exchanges.  Eventually, all exchanges had one.  That permitted caller ID and the phone number of the originator's phone became instantly available.  And that solved the problem for a while.

Then VoIP made its appearance.  The ESS computerized telephone switches enabled phone signals to be converted from "Analog" (wavy lines) to "Digital" (bits and bytes).  It wasn't many years before all long distance calls used the digital option for the part of the call that covered long distances.

And, if we have access to the call in digital form, why not ship the bits and bytes across the Internet.  VoIP stands for Voice (analog) over Internet Protocol (digital).  Soon it became much cheaper to ship bits and bytes long distances over the Internet than it was to ship them the same long distances over dedicated digital telephone circuits.

The problem is that VoIP is all smoke and mirrors.  If you fake things up well enough it looks just like the real thing.  And faking up the caller ID information to look any way you want it to look quickly became ridiculously easy to do.  You can now do it with a standard smart phone.  And it was definitely to the advantage of the bad guys to fake, which is commonly referred to as "spoof", caller ID information.

But the FCC is now all over this sort of thing like a wet blanket, right?  If only.  I got over twenty blocked calls yesterday and the count for today is rapidly approaching double digits.  And I still see the same bad behavior I have been seeing for years.

The telephone companies are now blocking "invalid, unallocated, and unused" phone numbers, right?  Wrong!  The "number" part of a caller ID is always supposed to be exactly ten digits long.  (When you dial a number the system will often fill the area code in for you.  Phone numbers are always exactly 10 digits long, even if it sometimes doesn't look that way.)

But I have gotten at least one call recently where the "number" part of the caller ID was short by a few digits.  (At the time NoMoRobo didn't have an entry for that number in their black list so I was able to see all the caller ID details.)

There are no valid area codes that start with zero.  If there were then dialing "0" to be connected to the operator wouldn't work right.  Is the "0" a request to be connected to the operator or a request for an area code starting with "0"?  The only way to eliminate ambiguity is to make sure that no valid area codes start with "0".  The same logic applies to exchanges.  None of them can have a number that starts with "0" either.  So the "invalid" part is missing in action.

I also get calls that NoMoRobo is letting through (until I report them and they update their list) where the "name" part is something like "CELLPHONE USER" or "NEW YORK  NY".  These are common defaults for cell phones.  Sometimes the user can change this.  Sometimes (common with pre-paid "burner" phones) the user can't.

But in all cases what these are is numbers assigned to accounts that used to be active aren't any more.  (And apparently it is possible to get lists of these "no longer in use" numbers, if you have the right connections.)  In other words they are "invalid" or "unused".  So that part isn't working either.

The STIR/SHAKEN standard is supposed to deal with VoIP and international call issues.  I am not going to go into the details.  They are complicated but, from what I have read, once it is implemented it should work.  But the fact that it is complicated means that it is hard to implement.  And "hard to implement" inevitably morphs into "slow to be implemented" in the real world.

And it must be implemented at every step along the way before it can work.  So my guess is that implementation has been "unaccountably delayed".  If the FCC pushes hard then it might be implemented extensively enough to do some good by, say, the end of 2020.  If the FCC doesn't push then God knows when it will get implemented.

And that leaves enforcement actions / penalties.  The FCC has routinely announced "successful" enforcement actions periodically going back more than a decade.  I have seen no indication that there has been enough successes in this area to make a noticeable difference.

One piece of good news is that they finally increased the penalties to the point where they are big enough, if assessed and collected, to represent real pain.  The old penalties were so small that they didn't even rise to the level of "business expense" let alone being painful enough to justify a change in behavior.

If anything, the situation since 2015 has gotten worse rather than better.  The tools necessary to bypass attempts to block malicious phone calls have gotten better and cheaper.  This has had the perverse effect of making the decision phone companies made a long time ago turn from a good idea, from a business point of view, to a bad one.

Back in the day they decided to come down on the side of protecting the bad actors, the purveyors of malicious phone calls.  Their calculus was that they would collect more money from the bad actors than they would lose as a result of the abuse their regular customers would suffer.  And for a long time they were right.

But what they have done has driven young people away from voice (spammy) and to text (not so much).  And that has reduced the market for voice services drastically.  And that has hurt their bottom line.  It just took a long time for this trend to become apparent.  Now, there is little they can do to reverse this trend.  Implementing STIR/SHAKEN might help.  Then again. it might not.

I'm an old fart so I prefer voice to text.  As such, I would love to be in a situation where it would be appropriate to heap praise on Mr. Pai and his FCC.  But I can't.  To date, he has been long on press releases and short (as in non-existent) on effective action.  When his efforts show actual results I'll let you know.

Snowden

In the last week or so I have told several people that I was reading the "Snowden book" or that I was going to write a blog post about "Snowden".  Many people's response surprised me.  They asked me "who is Snowden?"  Edward "Ed" Snowden was a big fucking deal for several months about six years ago.  On many days he dominated the news.  There was intense interest in who he was, where he was, what he was up to, what he had done and why.

But in a pattern that has unfortunately become all too common, any legitimately newsworthy thing, and Snowden was definitely legitimately newsworthy, fades to the point where few people remember anything about it in an astoundingly short period of time.  He has written a book called "Permanent Record".  It was published recently and I finished reading it a few days ago.  The title is anodyne enough that it does not telegraph to most people why he was a big deal so let me explain.

Snowden spent several years as a contract employee working for various parts of the US intelligence community, what he short hands to the IC.  He also spent several relatively short stints as a direct employee of the Federal Government.  Most of the time he was directly employed by the Federal Government he worked for the CIA.  In all cases he was a computer guy.

Toward the end of his period of employment he collected a large number of top secret documents.  He did this in a way that did not alert anyone that anything was amiss.  He was also able to smuggle these documents out of the high security facility he worked in without being caught.  He was then able to leave the country after contacting various members of the press, again without alerting anyone that anything was amiss,  Finally, he turned the documentation over to the press who promptly started writing and publishing stories based on the contents of these documents.

He saw himself as a whistleblower who was performing a necessary public service.  Others had a far less flattering opinion of him.  He was promptly charged with espionage and related crimes.  For complicated reasons he ended up stuck in Moscow, although he has steadfastly contended that he has in no way cooperated with the Russians and had no classified information with him when he ended up there.  Needless to say, the fact that he ended up in Moscow, where he still lives, added to the sensationalism.  And that led to even more saturation press coverage of him at the time.

So who is Snowden, what did he do, and why did he do it?  He wrote the book to answer those kinds of questions.  As to the "who", he was born in North Carolina in 1983 to a military family.  Although he was and is very smart, he was a poor student who initially did not want to follow in the family tradition.  But then 9/11 happened.  That caused him to reverse course and join the Army aiming to become part of an elite unit.  An accident during training resulted in a medical discharge that put an end to that plan.

He slightly altered his trajectory.  He still wanted to be of service to the government but figured he was better suited to doing computer things in the IC.  That's not as easy as you might think to do.  But he figured out how to do it and once he got a foot in the door he was very successful almost from the start.

He had demonstrated a high level of computer ability from an early age.  That turns out to be an area of expertise that was and still is highly valued within the IC.  He ended up doing what I call "system administration" work, something he was very good at and a specialty that was in continuous short supply.  (He goes into great detail about subspecialties and draws distinctions that, while they are meaningful to him and to me, add needless complexity so I am going to ignore them.)

Broadly, system administration involves the construction and maintenance of computers, computer systems, and the networks that tie them all together.  The system administrator's job is to tie it all together and to make the result perform effectively as an integrated unit.  It is up to others to figure out how to make what the system administrator creates and keeps running do useful work.

He was not a "programmer".  Programing work is more task specific.  They make the pieces that make this computer or system or network do a specific thing.  But frankly there is a lot of overlap between what programmers do and what system administrators do.

Snowden, for instance, could write programs but didn't consider himself that good at it and it did not interest him.  But there is a programmer-like activity that he was very good at.  He could write "scripts".  These, in turn, allowed him to automate a lot of the routine tasks system administrators needed to perform to keep the computers, computer systems, and networks, running smoothly.  Writing programs and writing scripts are very similar activities.  I know.  I've done both.

The difference between programming and system administration has more to do with outlook than the nuts and bolts of the job.  A programmer's typical concern is with all the details necessary to perform a very specific activity that is typically a small part of a much larger process.  System administration is much more "big picture" in its outlook.  What's the main goal?  It turns out that the skills are nearly identical.  It is only the outlook, and to some extent the tools, that change.

In reading the book I saw a lot of myself in Snowden.  I saw him as a kindred soul.  But there are differences.  I was born in 1947, roughly 35 years before he was.  To state the obvious, it was a different time.  I wrote my first computer program as a freshman in college.  He was six years old when he wrote his.

He grew up surrounded by people who worked for the government.  I didn't.  He felt much more constrained by his environment.  I was comfortable with the environment that I grew up in.  His parents divorced while he was growing up.  Mine didn't.  He felt a need to "hack" the system.  For the most part I just wanted to make the system work better and more efficiently.

Then there is the broader environment we came of age in.  I grew up during the Vietnam era.  This caused me to think carefully about things like right and wrong and what the moral thing to do is.  Just the tenor of the times led me to be far more skeptical of institutions including the government.

He grew up during the "safe" '90s and in a military family.  He got his sense of right and wrong from his family.  And his environment bred a high degree of trust and acceptance of the government, its leaders, and its policies.  Military people don't make policy.  They implement policies made by others, whatever those policies may be.

In that environment being apolitical is appropriate behavior.  That is, until 9/11 happened.  At that point he had no experience or expertise with which to form a judgement independent of that of the government.  The government said "we are the good guys, they are the bad guys, and they have done a bad thing to us for no good reason".  The only appropriate response he could think of was to join the army so he could take the fight to the bad guys.  So he did.  My thinking on the subject was much more nuanced so it led me in a different direction.

One thing we shared, however, was a belief that if you sign up to do a job you should do your best to do it well.  We take our responsibilities seriously and we resent others who have a more cavalier attitude toward theirs.  We also expect our supervisors to also take their responsibilities seriously.  And part of a supervisor's responsibilities should be a concern for when things are and are not being done right.

If a subordinate finds something that looks wrong he or she should report it to his or her supervisor.  That supervisor should take the report seriously and, in normal circumstances, undertake an investigation.  But once sufficient proof has been developed and verified that a problem exists then the supervisor has a duty to move to get the problem fixed or to explain why things should remain the same (the abnormal circumstance).  Doing nothing is NOT an option.

Both of us kept score.  If problems were not handled appropriately, we took note.  And we looked for patterns.  At least initially Snowden was naïve.  He expected supervisors to do their jobs.  He was surprised when people up the chain of command did not respond appropriately.  They were much more "don't rock the boat" than "let's go ahead and fix the problem".  With a cynicism born of Vietnam, I was equally disappointed but less surprised and more careful when management fell down on the job, than he was.

There is another important way we are different.  John Le Carre, the great spy novelist, was a part of the British Intelligence Community before he turned to writing novels for a living.  There he came to the conclusion that con men make the best spies.  Spies need to be expert liars and manipulators of people, for instance.

He addressed the subject at length in fictional form in one of his books, "A Perfect Spy".  He has said that it is the most autobiographical of his spy novels.  In it we find that Pym, the protagonist, is the son of a con man.  And a lot of the skills that made him successful as a spy were things he learned at his father's knee when he was a child.  Both Le Carre and I believe this carries over to the real world of spying.  Con men and spies use the same skills.

I would make a terrible spy.  I can't lie worth shit.  I am terrible at reading other people.  And I make a horrible con man.  Snowden, on the other hand, is proud of the scam he pulled off as a six year old.  He also relates various schemes and scams he employed to get out of school work and otherwise "game the system".  This is a skill he takes pride in.

There is a hacker technique called "social engineering".  It consists of conning people into doing things for you that they shouldn't and with them letting you do things you are not normally allowed to do.  Here's a simple example from a past era.  A hacker would call a telephone operator and behave like a telephone company repair man.  If the ruse worked then the operator would let the hacker perform "systems" functions that, for instance, bypassed the billing system.

Successful spies are good at social engineering.  Snowden was good at social engineering.  I am not.  That's enough of that.  Let's get back to the book.

As reported above, Snowden went to work for the IC.  This is harder to do than you would think but he was a better researcher than I am and he figured out the process.  He then proceeded to game it (in a good way) to both get into the system and also to end up where he wanted to end up.  At this point he still felt bad about not having gotten in the fight as a soldier as a result of his boot came injury.  So he wanted to be at "the pointy end of the spear" when it came to postings.  He wanted to do field work in dangerous places.

But his plan backfired.  The managers he had so successfully impressed chose to put him into a cushy position in Switzerland instead, not exactly a hardship post where they are shooting at you.  But he prospered.  He is a very good systems engineer and he developed and implemented various significant improvements to the computer infrastructure that is now ubiquitous in intelligence and pretty much everywhere else.  His bosses continued to like him and his work (more good social engineering) and he was flagged as a rising star.  Another thing he leaned was that contracting was the way to go.

For various stupid reasons the Federal government has shifted away from work being done by government employees and toward work being done by contractors, people working for firms that are hired by agencies to do the actual work.

A cynic (I plead "guilty") would say that this is so that there are a lot of companies with a lot of executives that can contribute to political campaigns, participate in the "revolving door" between government employment and civilian jobs, can give elected officials bragging rights about how many federal dollars are spent in the district, etc.

The shift from using government employees to using contractors is always sold as being economical and permitting additional flexibility.  But that is 100% BS.  Here's what Snowden has to say on the subject:

The extent of my access [as a contractor] meant that the process itself might be broken, that the government had given up on meaningfully managing and promoting its talent from within.

Anyhow, Snowden "revolving door"ed between government employment and being a civilian contractor a couple of times.  For the most part he found it easier to move to whatever work he wanted to move to by being a civilian contractor.  Being a civilian contractor also paid a lot better.

He rightly questions this system particularly when it comes to system administrators.  System administrators are like janitors in that they see everything.  Janitors see it in the trash.  System administrators see it on the file systems of the computers they administer and across the networks they monitor.  As such, they are the ones who need to be the most trusted people anywhere in the system.  So, from a practical point of view, they have the highest effective security clearance of anyone.  This may or may not be reflected in their "official" clearance level.

So why should a contractor, who owes whatever allegiance he might possess to a company like Dell or Booz Allen (two of the companies Snowden worked for), work diligently to preserve and protect the government and its interests?  Shouldn't you want you want these people above all to have interests that are tightly aligned with those of the government?  Yet it seems that these most critical jobs are the first to be outsourced.

There is (or used to be) a strain of thought in conservativism called "strict construction".  The idea is that if you want to understand what is and is not Constitutional you should look at the plain text of the US Constitution.  Beyond that, it is also appropriate to look at what the founding fathers had to say at the time.  See what their general thinking was on an issue.

Then look closely at what they had to say about various components that were put into or left out of the Constitution.  Words written and thoughts thought at the time should guide you.  The Constitution does not need updating to allow for new and changed conditions that have come into being between then and now, they say.  The sole exception applies to the various amendments to the Constitution that have been approved since.

There are also large "militia" and "gun rights" groups associated with conservatives.  They note that the US was born in revolution so revolution is always an option.  If, of course, there is a "just cause" and the powers that be are not moving appropriately to redress this just cause.

Snowden lays out a case for his actions based on these two concepts.  He first analyzes the plain language of the Constitution,  For instance, the fourth amendment reads "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized".

He then argues that much of what the IC routinely sweeps up falls into the category of what the fourth amendment says should be "secure" from government snooping.  He then goes on to argue that warrants are not properly issued that would permit the government to snoop in a Constitutionally appropriate manner.  In short, Constitutionally speaking, the IC is way out of line and something needs to be done about it.

His argument is completely in line with mainstream conservative thought when it comes to strict construction.  It is also completely in line with other constitutional and civil liberties experts from other parts of the political spectrum have to say.  So this, in Snowden's thinking, constitutes a "just cause".

Then there is the matter of the remedy.  If the institution is moving to correct the wrong than no action is warranted on Snowden's part.  But he amply documents in the material he caused to be released, and to which he had legal access as a systems administrator before then, that the leaders of the IC put these policies in place on purpose.  They worked hard to do exactly what they did.

And since then they have taken many steps both to keep these policies in place and to make sure that word of them did not leak out.  So Snowden rightly concluded that any effort to take action while staying within the system was doomed to failure.  And that, according to the logic espoused by the militia/gun people, justifies "revolutionary action".  So here too Snowden's actions fall squarely within the boundaries of conservative thought in this area.  In this case, however, many people located along other parts of the political spectrum would and did beg to differ.

But so far what I have described is Snowden's opinion of the material he had uncovered.  Let's take a look for ourselves at what Snowden found that so concerned him.  And to do that properly we should first take a step back.  You see, for Snowden, history started with 9/11.  He made no effort to find out what had come before.  But I have been interested in this subject for decades.  I am, for instance, currently reading a 750 page tome that covers the history of intelligence activities starting with ancient times and going forward from there.

But we don't need to go so far afield in either time or place.  It turns out that in the period between the first and second World War there was a time when a US intelligence agency received a copy of every single international telegram transiting New York.  Domestically, the FBI operated a "black bag" unit for many years.   It specialized in illegal break-ins.  The FBI also tapped phones, usually legally but often not.  But this sort of thing was so difficult and expensive to do that all government agencies combined could only go after perhaps a few hundred people.  Yet there are hundreds of millions of people in the US.

All this is "security by obscurity".  Almost everyone is safe from being spied upon, not by reason of the fact that it is illegal, or that regulations prohibit it, but by the fact that it is so difficult and expensive that only prominent people get targeted.  Passing laws, writing regulations, putting effective controls in place, can all help (and have helped in the past).  But with the computerization of everything and the internet-ization of everything, the fact that there are a lot of us is getting less and less effective as a protection.

The cost and difficulty involved in snooping has dropped precipitously in recent decades.  In the run up to 9/11 it was relatively hard to snoop on people.  And, as a result of Watergate and a big scandal that erupted a few years later that involved the FBI spying on groups who were peacefully organizing against the Vietnam war, the laws were fairly tight and the IC fairly careful.  Snowden was apparently unaware of these and other pre-9/11 examples of IC overreach and the waxing and waning efforts to control it.  I don't know if his behavior would have been different had he known.

According to Snowden, the IC were blamed for missing 9/11 and accepted the blame.  I think the situation in more complicated but, in the interests of brevity, I am going to skip over that.  In any case, after 9/11 the Bush administration asked the IC "what do you need to do better next time?"  The IC's response was "give us a lot of money then cut us loose from regulation and oversight so we can us do anything we think is appropriate".  The result was the USA/PATRIOT Act, which gave the IC a ton of money and authorization to do pretty much anything they wanted to do.

The resulting buildup had only been under way for a few years when Snowden joined up.  So he had a front row seat on the worst excesses.  One of the things the IC asked for and got was wide authority to access pretty much any kind of data about anyone.  That was bad.  But what made it even worse was that they got authority to make it illegal for the companies on the receiving end of one of these requests to even acknowledge the existence of the request.  The law forced telephone companies, for instance, to lie about the very existence of a subpoena from the NSA asking for "all telephone records of all calls".

For those who don't follow this sort of thing as closely as I do, there are three principle agencies involved in all this.  The NSA is responsible for SIGINT, SIGnals INTelligence, anything they can find out about radio signals, the internet, and such like.  The CIA was responsible for HUMINT, HUMan INTelligence, roughly everything else.  But both agencies were restricted to activities happening overseas.  In other words, prior to 9/11 both the CIA and the NSA were expressly forbidden to spy on US citizens, especially if they were in the US.  The third agency, the FBI, was responsible for both SIGINT and HUMINT within the US and with respect to US citizens.

One of the main causes of 9/11 was "silo-ing", one agency not working closely with the others but instead keeping what they knew "in a silo".  As a result, nobody had the full picture.  The other main cause was a lack of focus.  The Clinton Administration had a cabinet level committee monitoring Al Qaeda.  The Bush administration shelved that.

So modest changes, primarily making all the agencies work together better, would have been enough to prevent another 9/11.  But the IC saw an opportunity and took it.  And things were set up so that there was basically no oversight.  Just the way an out of control bureaucrat likes it.  As a result, the IC was completely out of control at that time.

Here's Snowden's take on how the IC viewed themselves and 9/11:

The general sense of having been manipulated by the Bush Administration and then blamed for its worst excesses gave rise to a culture of victimization and retrenchment.

In that environment the IC is not going to ask itself "are we going too far?"  Instead, they are going to say "we need everything so that we always have enough dirt so we can successful defend outselves the next time something goes wrong".  So they tried to collect everything and to save everything.

When the Obama administration came in they could have tightened things up, cleaned things up, and reigned things in.  But they didn't.  Obama pretty much went along with everything IC related that he inherited from the Bush administration.  Snowden is justifiably harsh in his book for Obama's actions, or rather inactions, in this area.  This is a criticism I second even though I am an Obama fan.

Snowden concludes that "I had been protecting not my country but the state".  And by "state" he means the IC.  Later, he says "it was time to face the fact that the IC believed themselves above the law, and given how broken the promise [of meaningful oversight] was, they were right".  In short, "they'd hacked the Constitution".

This line of thinking led Snowden to believe he had to act.  And he felt that he was uniquely positioned to do so.  As a result of the early successes I mentioned above, Snowden was given an unusual degree of latitude.  In the middle of all this he found out he had Epilepsy.  He used this as an excuse to move to Hawaii and into a less stressful job.  But part of what was going on with him was that he had figured out that he would actually have access to more information from a "lower level" (think janitorial) position there.

This proved to be true.  While there he implemented a system for broadly collecting information from across the intelligence community and summarizing it in one handy spot.  He managed (social engineering) to sell the project as one that would benefit the IC.  But this was the foundation of the data collection that produced the wide range of documents he later provided to the press.  The details are interesting.  If you want to learn more about this, read his book.

His revelations did do a lot of good, in my opinion.  People had not had convincing evidence of how wide spread and invasive the data collection being done by the IC was.  And remember where I said the NSA and CIA were prohibited from domestic activities.  Post 9/11, that was no longer true and the reason we know this is because the Snowden documents told us so.  It turned out there was a lot of spying on ordinary US citizens going on.  The IC was collecting vast amounts of information on the routine activities of all of us.

Snowden's book is more of a memoir than a "this is what the documents reveal" so you will have to go elsewhere for a more complete description of what he revealed and what was changed as a result.  I will touch on just one thing.  There is something called the FISA court.  At the time of the Snowden revelations it was simply a rubber stamp.  Whatever the IC asked for, no matter how outrageous, the FISA court approved it.

That has changed and we know it has because of the Mueller Report.  Substantial detail on certain FISA warrants was provided therein.  As a result, we now know that the IC has to submit substantial documentation to get a FISA warrant and that the court takes its job seriously when it comes to making sure that a sufficient case has been made before issuing a warrant permitting the IC to go forward.

Have the changes been sufficient to make me happy?  Not even close.  But the situation has substantially improved.  And remember "security by obscurity"?  The IC has created a gigantic system for vacuuming up all kinds of information.  But traffic on the internet has grown by leaps and bounds since Snowden's revelations.  And this means that even with the IC's budget, which was more than $77 billion back in 2013, it gets harder and harder to filter the useful information out of the torrent we collectively now produce.  The playing field is slowly tilting back toward "security by obscurity" and that's a good thing.

As I noted above, there are a lot of people who are unhappy, to put it mildly, with Snowden.  But, like so much of modern politics, any kind of serious analysis is completely lacking.  As I noted above, Snowden's thinking is squarely in line with strict constructionist and militia/gun-rights thinking.  So they should be his most ardent supporters, right?  Wrong!  They are his most ardent detractors when, if they actually believed what they say they believe, they should be his most ardent supporters.  Opinions on the left are scattered.  But then there is no consensus position about these issues on the left.

Now, let me cover the story of how he ended up in Russia because it's short and fun.  As I laid out above, he had a plan for every step of the way and his plan worked.  Except he didn't have a plan for the final step, how to get away.  So he made it to Hong Kong, a place he selected as being press friendly (at the time) and lacking a US extradition treaty.  So far so good.  He was able to meet with journalists there, transfer the data to them, and spend some time with them explaining what they now had.  Also, so far so good.

But then they published.  As expected, he was immediately targeted.  To get away he needed to go to a country that would provide shelter and rebuff efforts to extradite him.  Hong Kong was not up to that task.  So he picked Ecuador.  We'll never know if that choice would have worked out because he never made it to there.

The Obama Administration immediately made it hard for him to travel by putting pressure on every country they could to deny him permission to overfly their territory.  So the only feasible route his supporters could figure out was Hong Kong to Moscow to Cuba to Ecuador.  He succeeded in getting on the plane in Hong Kong and the plane took off from there on time.

But while it was in the air the Administration took the additional step of revoking his passport.  So when he landed in Moscow he no longer had a valid passport so he could not leave.  Efforts to secure a new passport, say one issued by another country, failed.  He spent 90 days in the Moscow airport before the Russians decided to grant him limited residency.  So he now lives in an apartment in Moscow with the woman who was his girlfriend and who is now his wife.

Snowden claims the Russians have gotten no intelligence out of him.  Others have other ideas but, so far, there is no credible evidence contradicting Snowden's story.  The US government would like to embarrass Snowden.  The best way to do this would be to demonstrate that the Russians got a significant amount of material out of him.  But they have yet to go down this path.

Finally, we are confronted with the deepest of ironies.  The IC made a power grab in the wake of 9/11.  And for a long time it worked.  They got a big budget and authority to do pretty much whatever they wanted.  It was the dream scenario of every power hungry bureaucrat.

Obama pretty much left them alone in the early part of his administration.  The Snowden revelations caused the IC to be reigned in to an extent.  But they still had the giant budgets and way more maneuvering room than they had had before 9/11.  And if Hillary had been elected the good times would no doubt have continued.

But she wasn't.  And President Trump has nothing but contempt for the IC.  He believes foreign leaders like Putin over what the IC has to say.  The amount of injury this has done to the IC dwarfs whatever harm Snowden might have done to them (and I claim that in the long run he benefited them).

Sure, they still have the bloated budget but that's pretty much it.  As Trump trashes long standing alliances and cooperation agreements other countries, they have become more and more reluctant to work with the US IC.  And that severely constrains the IC's ability to act independently.  Being in the US IC just isn't as much fun as it used to be.  And, if you are working there to do good, it's even worse.

So they completely missed the greatest threat out there to their (and our) way of life.  That failure makes whatever IC shortcoming that 9/11 may possibly have brought to light shrink to insignificance.  And the "unfair" treatment they received at the hands of the Bush Administration was nothing compared to what Trump has dished out and continues to dish out on a nearly daily basis.  Irony of ironies.