Archive for the 'Public Enterprise (Shouting Down, Crowding Out)' Category
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
Well, Duh
The New York Times today ran this timid little observation:
The president’s new provision seemed to offer Republicans an opening for a new line of criticism — that Obama and Democrats are anticipating the possibility of hefty price increases for health insurance even after their big legislation is adopted.
Gosh, you think so? You think private, for-profit corporate medical insurers might keep raising their prices after it becomes illegal for citizens not to buy their products?
“Seems” rather more than merely “possible,” wouldn’t you think?
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
Public or Private?: The Source of Invention
I’m off to a holiday lunch, but here’s the start of a new post about the myth of “market” innovation, written by a business-based expert:
Take a look at the powerful inventions that have changed society and ask what role design research played:
- The Airplane
- The Automobile
- The Telephone
- The Radio
- The Television
- The Computer
- The Personal Computer
- The Internet
- SMS Text Messaging
- The Cellphone
What role did design research play? What role did marketing research play? No role.
More on this later, but suffice to say most or all the above items were created by the public sector.
Monday, December 14th, 2009
Forbidden Fruit: Domestic Reconstruction
In their 1966 classic, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, economists Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy explained how corporate capitalism restrains public spending even as it grows increasingly dependent on it. The problem, Baran and Sweezy noted, is that, from the perspective of the investing class, only certain forms of government spending are tolerable. The sorting mechanism, argued Baran and Sweezy, is “the stability and cohesiveness of the country’s class structure.” And, thanks to their very usefulness and economy:
[M]ost governmental activities designed to satisfy collective needs involve either competition with private interests or injury to the class position and privileges of the oligarchy, and…for these reasons opoosition is quickly aroused and rapidly reinforced.
Whenever a possible avenue for public spending threatens established investor interests, Baran and Sweezy predicted that “roadblocks” would “be encountered long before socially rational and desirable goals have been attained.”
What kinds of spending, meanwhile, could make it past the roadblocks and become actual, relatively unchecked government projects? The answer, according to Baran and Sweezy, is spending that “neither creates nor involves competition with private enterprise,” either economically (in terms of sales) or ideologically (by undermining the system’s core dogmas).
One of the prime forms of public spending that does pass the corporate capitalist roadblock, Baran and Sweezy observed, is military spending. On the economic/sales side:
There are no private military establishments with a vested interest in keeping the government out of their preserves; and the military plays the role of an ideal customer for private business, spending billions of dollars annually on terms that are most favorable to the sellers. Since a large part of the required capital has no alternative use, its cost is commonly included in the price of the end product.
Meanwhile, on the ideological side, business interests don’t at all dislike military spending’s ideological impetus:
[M]ilitarization fosters all the reactionary and irrational forces in society, and inhibits or kills everything progressive and humane. Blind respect is engendered for authority; attitudes of docility and conformity are taught and enforced; dissent is treated as unpatriotic or even treasonable. In such an atmosphere, the oligarchy feels that its moral authority and material position are secure.
So, why do I mention this classic, largely (and extremely foolishly) forgotten social-science prediction? The answer is this recent blog comment by Stephen M. Walt (yes, THAT Stephen M. Walt), who writes:
I was struck by Louis Uchitelle’s article in the Sunday NY Times on the dearth of big public works projects here in the United States. “For the first time in memory, the nation has no outsize public works project under way,” he says, and then reports that:
Some economists argue that the continual construction of new megaprojects adds a quarter of a percentage point or more, on average, to the gross domestic product over the long term. Again, cause and effect aren’t clear, but the strongest periods of economic growth in America have generally coincided with big outlays for new public works and the transformations they bring once completed.”
One might add that we aren’t spending enough to maintain our existing public infrastructure, and state and local governments across the country are facing deep budget deficits (and in some cases, a very real risk of bankruptcy).
But it’s not as though the United States hasn’t started some big public works projects over the past decade or so; it just hasn’t been doing them here at home. We’ve spent billions constructing military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, and another billion or more on a giant embassy in Baghdad and another one in Pakistan. Needless to say, those “public works” projects are a drain on the U.S. economy rather than a source of additional productivity.
As I’ve said before, Americans have come to believe that spending government revenues on U.S. citizens here at home is usually a bad thing and should be viewed with suspicion, but spending billions on vast social engineering projects overseas is the hallmark of patriotism and should never be questioned. This position makes no sense, but it is hard to think of a prominent U.S. leader who is making an explicit case for doing somewhat less abroad so that we can afford to build a better future here at home.
It is indeed hard to think of a prominent leader who is making a case for screamingly obvious public works projects here at home. That’s because, promise of “change” notwithstanding, THERE ARE NONE.
For the exact reasons Baran and Sweezy named over 40 years ago, major, screamingly obvious public works projects are doubly forbidden here in “the land of the free.” Despite their huge economic and ecological benefits, things like building a genuinely modern railroad infrastructure and reconstructing our cities and towns to emphasize cycling and walking are both bad for private business sales and ideologically dangerous.
Modern, comfortable, reliable trains and walkable, sociable towns would not only kill the car business, but would require comparatively little upkeep, once finished.
Meanwhile, what might the public conclude if it had blatant evidence that 23.7 trillion dollars could do something rather more helpful than restoring Wall Street bonuses and refueling Detroit marketing machines?
Saturday, December 5th, 2009
Dex Blows (as do all telephone capitalists)
...how to waste resources
In the western United States, one of the pieces of the old AT&T corporation is called Qwest. Qwest is about to do something it knows is unconscionable — throw yet another paper telephone book onto everybody’s doorstep.
If ever anything was outdated, it is the unrequested provision of paper telephone books for every household. But Qwest cares not. Phone book advertising remains a source of revenue and profit, so onward it steams, the planet and people’s time and space be damned.
Meanwhile, to alter the mental agendas of those who will soon be burning or recycling its unconscionable droppings, Qwest is running a multi-million-dollar TV ad campaign saying this:
This kind of pre-emptive interpretive suggestion is, of course, a common corporate marketing tactic. By shifting the issue from “Why another pile of useless paper?” to “What do I do with my old phone book?,” Dex spends some of its customers’ money (and its workforce’s foregone wages) engineering the mental climate its shareholders need.
Qwest an eco-criminal? No, not us! “Join us in our commitment to being environmentally responsible!”
What commitment would that be, one might wonder as one trips over 5 pounds of pointless tree pulp? None, of course. Qwest is pulling a Big Brother, pure and simple. Up is down. War is peace. Another immense waste of paper is a commitment to the Earth’s ecology.
If we ever manage to create a movement for social change we could really believe in, one of its most obvious tasks would be to nationalize all telecommunications infrastructure and provide all such services publicly, without any marketing costs or profit margins or unconscionable ecological and existential waste.
Until then, all the mental and physical garbage being foisted on us by outfits like Qwest and the cell phone corporations remains a “business” only on the basis of our failure to recognize how outdated such capitalist practices are.
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
The New Party Line on Cars
Keith Crain is the publisher and editor of Automotive News. In his latest editorial, he enunciates the new capitalist party line about the pivotal issue of transportation choice.
Crain begins with what appears to be some refreshing honesty:
For starters, there is the energy crisis. In truth, there has been an energy crisis since the early 1970s, only someone finally noticed. In the United States, those who could have helped end the crisis with an intelligent energy policy stuck their heads in the sand and hoped the thing would blow over. It didn’t.
Crain, of course, neglects to mention that nobody has shoved heads down into siliconic powder harder than capitalists in general and automotive capitalists in particular.
According to Crain, all that has now ended:
When Congress finally discovered the problem, it swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. So today the world is scrambling for new ideas and products that will help reduce the use of gasoline and open up opportunities for other forms of transportation.
Everyone knows about the Toyota Prius, now in its third iteration. It was the first successful gasoline-electric hybrid. It owns that market. But there are lots of hybrids on the market, and there will be plenty more.
This is where the crucial trick of the new orthodoxy occurs: After quickly mentioning “opportunities for other forms of transportation,” Crain returns to the business class’s century-old claim that micro-choices between car models is all anybody could ever want or need:
General Motors Co.’s long-heralded Chevy Volt will be introduced to the public next year. It is an electrically driven car with a gasoline engine that generates electricity for the car’s drive motor, not unlike the Electro-Motive trains GM manufactured for decades.
Plenty of new companies are popping up. Fisker will start production of a luxury plug-in hybrid in Finland next year. The car has enough design appeal that it turns heads wherever it is tested. Fisker has received a half-billion dollars in federal funds, most of which will be used for development of a second plug-in hybrid that will be built in the United States.
More minicars are on the way. The Smart, developed by Mercedes, will be joined by the Fiat 500 in the United States. And you can rest assured that the Asians will be right behind with similar vehicles.
We’re bound to see some electric vehicles and hybrids that use diesel engines for even better fuel economy. And it won’t be long before we see two- and three-cylinder engines being used for vehicles and charging systems.
It’s an exciting time for the engineers who are developing all sorts of new engines and vehicles.
It will be even more exciting for consumers. They have never had so many choices.
What Crain neglects to mention here is the extreme danger of his own intended purpose, which is to restrict public discussion of our continuing lack of serious transportation macro-choices. Sure, if you can spend $40,000, you might soon be able to choose a Chevy Volt. But, especially in most American cities, when will walking, cycling, and rails gain anything like equal infrastructural footing with automotive support systems?
They won’t, barring a social movement to reform the society. That’s because the world’s corporate overlords are deeply and systematically hostile to anything that would spoil their ability to continue selling automobiles at something like present volumes. So, particularly here in the world’s largest car market, nothing could be farther off the official agenda than providing “opportunities for other forms of transportation” to genuinely compete with cars-first transportation arrangements.
If we hope to save ourselves from impending ecotastrophe, we must resist the heavily sponsored, increasingly strident tricks of the car peddlers. Towns and cities built to favor walking and bicycling over energy-wasting machines are the only possible basis for a sustainable, progressive global civilization. Cars, due to their extreme inherent energy demands, can only be a minor part of the human future. Anybody who suggests otherwise is an enemy of your children.
Monday, November 16th, 2009
The Radical Truth About Energy
Nathan Lewis of Cal Tech says we’d need 10,000 plutonium (not uranium) reactors to produce 80 percent of existing energy consumption. To do that, we’d need to build a new plutonium plant every other day for the next 50 years, without any interruptions.
Conservation is coming and coming hard, my friends. The only question is whether we’ll retain any say in the adjustment process. Our current rulers, Obama distinctly included, don’t want us to gain the first glimmer of
awareness of the basic facts.
