Prometheus 6

Every so often I check my referral logs and see who came in asking what questions. Where folks are coming from is of slight interest, normally when I'm tracking down a spammer. Just now I'm looking at the "last 20 minutes" report and some neuron misfired and made me look at the visit detail page of a visitor from North Carolina that spent almost half an hour looking at two pages: The Human Sacrifice topic page and a post that had been so categorized. The visitor's IP...Sitemeter will tell you how the computer identifies itself, if it does...belonged to Moore & Van Allen, one of North Carolina's larger law firms, and the subject of the article I linked.

THE INFLUENCE GAME: Front group fights health bill
By ALAN FRAM
The Associated Press
Sunday, November 15, 2009 11:22 AM

WASHINGTON -- One operative tried to enlist trade groups in Maine to oppose government-run health coverage. Another helped a member of a Las Vegas conservative group appear on local talk radio to criticize the proposal. A third persuaded a Louisiana activist to post an opinion piece on a conservative blog.

These below-the-radar activities were the handiwork of a law firm in Charlotte, N.C., that operates a secretive group called Americans for Quality and Affordable Healthcare. The organization's sponsors remain a mystery - its Web site offers no clues, and the law firm won't say.

And my comment on the story was succinct: anyone with that much money that has to hide who they are, are cowards and up to no good.

Why should we listen to cowards, no matter how wealthy? Unless they're explaining to you how to get wealthy yourself...which frankly is the opposite of what "Americans for Quality and Affordable Healthcare" is doing.

Why is the name in sneer quotes? An interesting op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal presents the general idea:

No other institution—with the possible exceptions of the government or the military—spews out acronyms and initials quite as prolifically. I call these products of financial engineering "WACronyms," because they tend to sound innocent when, in fact, many of them are full of wacky complications and incomprehensible risks.

They range all the way from ABS and ARMs; CARDS and DECS; CBOs, CDOs, CDS, CLOs, CMBS and CMOs; EIAs; ETFs; HLTs; IPOs; LBOs, MBOs and BIMBOs; MBS; PERCS; PIPEs; REMICs; RIBs; SAMs; SPACs; SPARQS; STRYPES and TANS; ELKS, LYONs, PRIDES, TIGRs and ZEBRAs; to NINAs, NINJAs and other nonsense.

While you shouldn't automatically refuse to invest in a WACronym—among others, some ETFs, or exchange-traded funds, may be worthwhile—these catchy abbreviations are always a signal that you should analyze the underlying investment with extreme caution. A WACronym is a sure sign that somebody is trying to sweet-talk you into buying something you might never invest in without the cutesy come-on of the shorthand name.

In peddling WACronyms, Wall Street's marketers are exploiting a quirk of the human mind that psychologists call "fluency," or our tendency to find familiar or easily processed ideas more appealing than unusual, cumbersome ones.

This is the reason every Republican bill had a name whose acronym spelled a word that they wanted you to believe encapsulated the meaning of the bill. And obviously there are ways other than the use of acronyms to get this effect. Like calling yourself "Americans for Quality and Affordable Healthcare" when you are actually "Corporations for the Prevention of Consumer Protections." Had they named themselves according to what they actually areand actually do the rejection would be immediate and universal.

But they don't have to do that. Because they are wealthy enough to lie successfully by hiding behind Moore & Van Allen. And cowardly enough to do it.