Archive for January, 2010
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
Rape in Context
From The Daily Howler:
Total spending on health care, per person, 2007:
United States: $7290
Switzerland: $4417
France: $3601
United Kingdom: $2992
Average of OECD developed nations: $2964
Italy: $2686
Japan: $2581
To anyone with an ounce of sense, it’s obvious what those data mean. A real progressive would scream and yell about those remarkable data. But in the career liberal world, all is silent. We’ve been silent for the past fifteen years—since the last time we failed.
(Note: Paul Krugman discussed similar data in a series of columns in 2006. Michael Moore discussed this situation in 2007, in Sicko. But go ahead: Name the liberal journal, or the career liberal journalist, who used the work of Krugman or Moore as a springboard to a long, shrill discussion. Which of our liberals did that?)
People are happy with their current insurance for a fairly obvious reason: They don’t know how badly they’re being looted! In part, they don’t know that basic fact because our career liberals simply won’t tell them. “We’re not Europe,” Serious People write. And that has largely been that.
Nuff said.
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
More from Behind the Green Curtain
The corporate capitalist marketing of allegedly “green” products depends on fixing buyers’ attention on the end commodity only. How many bio-diesel users, for instance, understand that bio-diesel not only diverts food to gas tanks, but is a net energy loser that requires more hidden petro-inputs than plain old gasoline-burning? Not many.
And there’s a reason our moguls conceal their processes: Every time a green scheme rings the cash register, a strip mine run by gangsters gets its wings.
That is a photo of a “rare earth” mine in China. The New York Times‘ Keith Bradsher (who wrote an excellent book about the insanity of the car corporations’ SUV push of recent decades) reports today:
GUYUN VILLAGE, China — Some of the greenest technologies of the age, from electric cars to efficient light bulbs to very large wind turbines, are made possible by an unusual group of elements called rare earths. The world’s dependence on these substances is rising fast.
Just one problem: These elements come almost entirely from China, from some of the most environmentally damaging mines in the country, in an industry dominated by criminal gangs.
Miners scrape off the topsoil and shovel golden-flecked clay into dirt pits, using acids to extract the rare earths. The acids ultimately wash into streams and rivers, destroying rice paddies and fish farms and tainting water supplies.
A close-knit group of mainland Chinese gangs with a capacity for murder dominates much of the mining and has ties to local officials, said Stephen G. Vickers, the former head of criminal intelligence for the Hong Kong police who is now the chief executive of International Risk, a global security company.
The biggest user of heavy rare earths in the years ahead could be large wind turbines, which need much lighter magnets for the five-ton generators at the top of ever-taller towers. Vestas, a Danish company that has become the world’s biggest wind turbine manufacturer, said that prototypes for its next generation used dysprosium, and that the company was studying the sustainability of the supply. Goldwind, the biggest Chinese turbine maker, has switched from conventional magnets to rare-earth magnets.
And, of course, the world’s most powerful and sophisticated overclass pleads ignorance to it all:
Western users of heavy rare earths say that they have no way of figuring out what proportion of the minerals they buy from China comes from responsibly operated mines.
“I don’t know if part of that feed, internal in China, came from an illegal mine and went in a legal separator,” said David Kennedy, the president of Great Western Technologies in Troy, Mich., which imports Chinese rare earths and turns them into powders that are sold worldwide.
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
Good News: Olympics in Trouble
According to Advertising Age, NBC-Universal, the media mega-conglomerate subsidiary of General Electric, will lose money broadcasting the upcoming Winter Olympics. Apparently, this will be the first time money has not been made on an Olympics.
Here’s hoping it’s the beginning of the end for this hateful proto-fascist mix of fake sports and nationalist mind-conditioning…
Monday, January 11th, 2010
(Deceased) Elephant in the Room
Here, friends, is a photo of the 375-pound battery-pack for the allegedly forthcoming Chevy Volt, which will allegedly boast a driving range of a whopping 40 (yes, 40, four-zero) miles:
20 gallons of gasoline, by the way, weighs about 125 pounds, so this photo confirms that, after decades of intensive research, the best battery our transportation-dictating corporate overclass can come up with still weighs three times more than the onboard fuel it would theoretically replace, and, for all that, will carry you roughly one-tenth as far as an average current motor vehicle.
For those interested in more details, see this post on our new sister blog, Death by Car.
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Ford Thumbs its Nose at Distracted Driving Facts
Do corporate capitalists really commit highly-researched mass murder in order to reap their profits? You bet your expendable “consumer” ass they do.
Today’s example: The Ford Motor Company’s promulgation of its “Sync” package of telecommunications interfaces in the dashes of new cars and trucks.
Among many other extremely dangerous things, the newest version of “Sync” is going to add hands-free text messaging to the increasingly distracted driving experience.
A long train of independent research has shown that the use of hands-free cellular telephones provides little or no safety benefit compared to hands-on use.
Given that text messages are inherently denser and not genuinely live and interactive, even when converted to audio, they almost certainly require quite a bit more attention than does a phone conversation. Hence, hands-free texting is virtually certain to contribute to thousands of additional automobile deaths every year.
Ford cares not:
“[Sync] is a reason now to buy a Ford,” Chief Executive Officer Alan Mulally said in an interview.
“Sync is easy to sell to a person under 35,” said John Wolkonowicz, an analyst at IHS Global Insight of Lexington, Massachusetts. “Sync is about entertainment and connectivity, which is very Gen Y.”
To the extent it bothers to explain its murder-for-money, Ford relies on the old tobacco corporation gambit: Fudge-talk about unreleased internal “studies”:
Ford, which has endorsed legislation to outlaw texting while driving, said its research indicates that hands-free communication doesn’t distract drivers.
“Most of the industry studies show that just driving and just talking is the same,” Kuzak said. “As long as the customer’s eyes are on the road, they are not compromised.”
And our public servants’ response to this blatant bullshit? Nothing, nada, nil.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood testified Oct. 29 that he found Ford’s Sync system distracting when he tested it on a Taurus sedan during a visit to Dearborn.
“As much as I liked driving the Taurus and as much as I liked the Sync system where you put your BlackBerry in and it syncs all your numbers, it’s a distraction,” LaHood told a House highways subcommittee at a hearing on distracted driving.
Despite this personal finding of the highest transportation official in the land, literally nothing is being done to block Sync and its counterpart plans at the other car corporations.
At the level of social criticism, this increasing encroachment of entertainment and marketing on the space of the car-driver is still more proof of the totalitarian nature of corporate capitalism. As somebody once noted:
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
Even when the invasions and expansions begin to threaten the future viability of the system’s own core commodity!
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
Meanwhile, on the Production Side
Seems job satisfaction of U.S. workers is at an all-time low.
Under market totalitarianism, the ordinary people are not supposed to expect jobs to be a source of happiness or personal growth. As Noam Chomsky says, when it comes to their internal structure and operations, private businesses are unaccountable tyrannies. A few minimal regulations keep the most egregious kinds of theft and endangerment under some external control, but beyond that, going on the wage-clock generally means finding a way to make it through another stretch of deadening mindlessness and stress.
It speaks volumes about the completeness of our overclass’s social domination that, in our time of Great Recession, we constantly hear about “cutting back” on our shopping and product-acquisition, but nobody dares suggest that maybe we could resolve many of our frustrations and dilemmas by taking a radical democratic look at work and employment issues.
And not to pile on, but one might also note how well the current dilemma was predicted in 1974 by one Harry Braverman, who was consciously trying to extend Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital. Braverman’s book reads like it was written yesterday. The only missing piece is a chapter on the globalization of employment.
On that last point, reader Mapp posted this fascinating comment and link.
