Archive for the 'Public Enterprise (Shouting Down, Crowding Out)' Category
Sunday, August 29th, 2010
“Nearly Any”
The New York Times today headlines an interpretive piece, the main claim of which is this:
Yet even as vital signs weaken — plunging home sales, a bleak job market and, on Friday, confirmation that the quarterly rate of economic growth had slowed, to 1.6 percent — a sense has taken hold that government policy makers cannot deliver meaningful intervention. That is because nearly any proposed curative could risk adding to the national debt — a political nonstarter.
Translation: The overclass, as always, prefers Great Depression to a pro-labor shift in the distribution of power. This society remains entirely capable of employing all its able-bodied workers and thereby ending the present economic cliffwalk. What it lacks is a left coherent enough to demand what the elite won’t mention.
Friday, August 6th, 2010
The March of Marketing Surveillance
Neither recession nor depression shall slow the spread of corporate marketing’s Census-dwarfing surveillance on American households.
For those tracking this inexorable totalitarian phenomenon, The Wall Street Journal has been running a useful series. For those who know the institutional reasons, the main pattern is entirely unsurprising:
Unauthorized placement of spyware is large:
The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred.
It is also increasingly powerful:
Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them. These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.
“It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.”
Interestingly, it is also another very powerful argument in favor of public enterprise and nationalization of our communications infrastructure. Wikipedia, a non-profit, somehow manages to thrive without planting any spy code.
Friday, July 9th, 2010
A Headline Worth 1,000 Words
“U.S. Firms Build Up Record Cash Piles“
Under that headline, The Wall Street Journal reports this:
U.S. companies are holding more cash in the bank than at any point on record, underscoring persistent worries about financial markets and about the sustainability of the economic recovery.
The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that nonfinancial companies had socked away $1.84 trillion in cash and other liquid assets as of the end of March, up 26% from a year earlier and the largest-ever increase in records going back to 1952. Cash made up about 7% of all company assets, including factories and financial investments, the highest level since 1963.
And, of course, this:
The comfort of having cash on hand, though, comes at a high price companies may not be willing to pay for much longer. They are earning almost no interest on their holdings of cash, making it more difficult for them to achieve the returns shareholders typically expect from them. That will put pressure on companies to pare down the cash holdings eventually.
“Stockholders don’t want them to keep sitting on cash at a zero return,” said Paul Kasriel, an economist at Northern Trust. “They’re going to use it,” either to increase hiring and investment or to make payouts to shareholders in the form of dividends or share buybacks, he said.
Wanna bet which one it’ll be? Didn’t think so:
Earlier this week, retailer Target Corp. raised its quarterly dividend to 25 cents a share from 17 cents, saying that the company’s cash holdings were “well above the amount needed for optimal reinvestment in our core business.”
How fortunate for everybody that we love free markets and don’t begrudge people getting rich! And that we have a president who knows how things work, and that “Ultimately, true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector.”
Sunday, July 4th, 2010
Our Revolutionary Right/Duty
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Saturday, May 29th, 2010
Private Enterprise and Its “Regulation”
The New York Times is having one of its better days. Two separate stories expose the same simple but unmentionable truth: capitalists, with the quiet cooperation of the nominally public political structures they dominate, kill and despoil for money.
Story One: “Obviously, we’re all oil industry.”
Monday, May 24th, 2010
Even Carville Sees It
Black Reagan prefers the preservation of market fundamentalist tenets to execution of the laws and the most elementary kind of ecological concern, as David Pettit very usefully explains.
In fact, as Pettit notes, Zerobama’s now gotten so obvious and odious that it’s started to bother even the professional trickster James Carville, who correctly observes that Obummer is “risking everything” to keep the capitalists happy:
I think they actually believe that BP has some kind of a good motivation here.’ They’re naive! BP is trying to save money, save everything they can… They won’t tell us anything, and oddly enough, the government seems to be going along with it!
The 2008 Marketer of the Year would have to get massively better just to rise up to Epic Fail status. As it stands, he’s every bit as destructive as was his immediate predecessor.
