Archive for the 'Public Enterprise (Shouting Down, Crowding Out)' Category
Tuesday, December 6th, 2011
Strangling Public Enterprise
For those interested in the story of how the overclass suppresses not-for-profit public enterprise, the latest edition of Bloomberg Business Week carries a must-read.
Funny, isn’t it — the extravagant tricks required to preempt something that’s supposedly stillborn and/or self-destroying and/or a road to serfdom, if not simply impossible?
One might also wonder if the case of the model telecom legislation pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council will also be taught as part of another of ALEC’s efforts — an attempt, on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to plant state laws “requiring that all high school students take a class in ‘free enterprise’ as a condition of graduation.”
Monday, December 5th, 2011
Idea: #Occupy Post Office
The Occupy movement is drifting, trying to figure where to camp next. Meanwhile, the United States Postal Service, despite being all but mandated in the purportedly perfect and holy U.S. Constitution, is being further starved and strangled, at the cost of another 28,000 decent jobs next year alone.
Why not put 2 and 2 together, and demand that the United States not only stop the euthanasia, but reverse course and develop a robust, modernized postal system?
We know the USPS used to be permitted to open and maintain savings accounts, and that national postal services still do so in other nation-states.
We might also observe that the reason everybody states for tolerating the further erosion of the USPS — the rise of email, fax, SMS/text, and internet messaging, and the attending decline in paper-based letters and volumes — is merely a new form of the human process the Post Office was intended to encourage. Why permit the overclass to enjoy making the first half of the point without pressing them on the second? Why not fuse reason and radicalism, on a topic that few could dispute is of deepest importance?
So, Occupiers, why not occupy Post Offices and insist that the USPS be reinvigorated and launched into the business of building and maintaining a modern communications infrastructure, as well as maintaining some appropriate amount of snail-mail delivery? Why not use the USPS to compete with the corporate squatters who are now allowed to suppress public enterprise while sucking money-for-nothing from the patchy, over-priced, for-profit, advertising-intensive, second-rate telecom system in this country? Why not insist that the Postal Service build a modern, universally-available national internet, with lower prices, minimal marketing overlay, and no place for payouts to private investors? Why not out-compete the cell phone oligopolies and their pathetic but hugely expensive war over meaningless market shares? Why not insist that junk mail and corporate marketers pay first-class or even first-class-plus rates to use the public’s physical mail system?
While we’re at it, in our moment of deserved but dangerous bankster bashing, why not also press to restore the banking function to the Post Office? A 2% savings account sounds pretty good right about now, doesn’t it? And the deposits could be used to finance the USPS’s modernization and universalization of the means of citizen-to-citizen communication.
Why not insist on preserving and expanding a major public enterprise that provides decent jobs to people who do honorable, vital tasks? Why not stick it to the Man — and in some vital organs, for a change?
Thursday, November 10th, 2011
Internet as Fief
In today’s Advertising Age, Patrick Moorhead, senior VP, group management director, mobile platforms for Draftfcb Chicago, makes an apt and important point about how the corporation-dominated internet works:
We live in a kind of digital feudal economy these days. We live on land we don’t own, and we provide the masters of the realm (Facebook, Google, etc.) with unlimited free access to our data and behavior, which they monetize for billions of dollars. We get to keep our little plots of digital land for free and are otherwise pretty much at the whim of the feudal masters.
Of course, the masters are actually corporate capitalists, and the corporate capitalists at Facebook and Google are, as their founders now admit, 100 percent in the advertising business, meaning their product is both harvesting data and delivering eyeballs, eardrums, and mindshares to other corporate capitalists, who use those products to plan and execute marketing campaigns.
Nonetheless, the analogy to feudalism is apt. Surrendering corvée to exploiting overlords is the price of admission to almost all internet activities in the United States, including the basic search engine services mediated by Google.
Of course, there is no technical reason why the internet could not include first-class, not-for-profit, data-secure search engines and other services. It’s just that the overclass won’t permit such possibilities to be discussed, let alone implemented.
Tuesday, September 27th, 2011
USPS: Zombie Politics
When Ralph Nader steps in, it’s a sure sign it’s too little, too late. Hence, Nader is now trying to save the United States Postal Service by more of his trademark narrow special pleading.
Problem? The USPS was mortally wounded in 1967, when it had to stop opening savings accounts due to government restriction of both the size of deposits and its ability to pay interest rates competitive with those then offered by private banks. A second severe blow came in 1971, when Nixon pushed it to the very edge of the public sector in retaliation for a postal union strike. Eleven years later, the death-blow was delivered — of course — by the Reagan Administration, which ended meaningful public subsidy and required the post office to survive by selling its own “postal products,” which — also of course — were not to include things like savings accounts or insurance policies or anything else that might compete with the so-called private sector, despite the common practices of the rest of the supposedly free world.
More recently, mainstream politics have further strangled the USPS, including by the method about which Nader now complains, the amazing requirement that the USPS pre-pay its workers’ pensions to the government.
Why do I mention all this, apart from its obvious relevance to the TCT theme of the private sector’s reliance on the maiming of public-sector competition? (How attractive would a USPS savings account paying even the measly 2% rate that killed the practice back in the 1960s look in our age?) The answer can be seen here, at Deliver magazine.
What is Deliver? Published by the USPS,
Deliver magazine, is [a] resource for mail marketing strategies brought to you by the United States Postal Service.® What We Do: Deliver magazine arms marketers with research, news and commentary impacting their industry.
That’s right. Deliver magazine is a public-sector enterprise that advises capitalists on how to prepare and send junk mail! Now, there’s an activity that doesn’t need to be regulated by the supposed representatives of the people!
Go take a look at Deliver‘s website. There, you will discover such shining examples of the public spirit in action as this piece, “Power in the Mailbox”, by spammer-marketer Steve Cuno (who also happens to post apologies for his trade at randi.org, where they hold to the view that capitalism is rational and honest):
Time for a disclaimer before I proceed. I’m not attacking e-mail marketing. I shall contrast it with direct mail only to bring out some of the latter’s advantages. E-mail has advantages, too, but that’s another column for another day.
A number of unique factors work in direct mail’s favor. One is what your English literature teacher called “willing suspension of disbelief,” our ability to set aside reality and lose ourselves in a story. When a direct mail letter shows up in a personally addressed, stamped envelope, part of us wants to believe that someone took a moment to compose, print, address and post it, just for us. All the better if the letter calls us by name and bears a signature in fountain pen–evoking blue. A good writer can make an e-mail blast sound personal, but there is no electronic substitute for the look and feel of a signed letter in a stamped, addressed envelope.
Willing suspension of disbelief knows no demographic limitations. Consider my publisher friend. A technologically savvy marketing insider, she knows my shop, understands digital printing, publishes my articles and, on occasion, pops for lunch. Had she paused to analyze, she would easily have seen that the letter in her hand was direct mail. But — and this is the point — she chose not to pause and analyze. Nor did other recipients. Remember, these were high-balance customers, not exactly the intellectual dregs of society. Of those who replied, 80 percent willingly suspended their disbelief and thanked the bank president for writing them.
The near-overnight appearance of spam laws and filters provides another. No sooner had e-mail blasts arrived than the public demanded laws restricting them, servers blocking them, and junk filters dispatching them.
By contrast, laws governing physical mail are far less restrictive, despite more than 200 years of opportunity to enact them — and for good reason.
Yes, in America, we don’t regulate the mail. We merely cripple and prostitute its deliverer.
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
The Basis of “Private”/”Free” Enterprise
History shows that, stunning as the thought is, state legislatures in the USA are more, not less, dominated by business lobbying than is the federal government. And that dominance is certainly even greater in the South, where white people remain staggering deluded about themselves and the realities of their society and world.
So, it’s really not very surprising that North Carolina legislators are presently strangling public, not-for-profit provision of internet services. Clearly, the reason is that such services are a mortal threat to corporate revenue streams. The simple fact is that telecommunications services can be more efficiently, effectively, and cheaply provided by the public than by capitalists.
So, the North Carolina legislature is simply going to pass a law that artificially imposes all the irrationalities — and more — of the private sector on the public sector.
Remember this the next time you see some wanker talking about the supposed naturalness and glory of “private enterprise.”
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011
Spybook
While vacationing this week, I had the displeasure of sitting through much of The Social Network. Before I saw it, I was virtually certain that it would do for Facebook what its screenwriter Aaron Sorkin did for the U.S. Presidency, namely execute a clever but thorough whitewash. I was right. A rock should fall on all the pampered, egocentric ciphers behind Facebook. But, by exploiting the old “They just wanted to watch the money” principle, Sorkin manages to flip the inklings of that sentiment and make all the vacant psychos involved seem somehow cool and aspirational. Indeed, the last line in the film is about how Mark Zuckerberg is “the world’s youngest billionaire.”
Sorkin’s film is, of course, silent on the ulterior purpose of Facebook, which is to deploy what appears to be just a new way to stay in touch with friends but is actually a huge, screamingly invasive and profitable engine for marketing research, a.k.a. corporate spying.
Here is a snip from today’s Advertising Age on Facebook’s latest advance:
This month — and for the first time — Facebook started to mine real-time conversations to target ads. The delivery model is being tested by only 1% of Facebook users worldwide. On Facebook, that’s a focus group 6 million people strong.
The closest Facebook has come to real-time advertising has been with its most recent ad offering, known as sponsored stories, which repost users’ brand interactions as an ad on the side bar. But for the 6 million users involved in this test, any utterance will become fodder for real-time targeted ads.
For example: Users who update their status with “Mmm, I could go for some pizza tonight,” could get an ad or a coupon from Domino’s, Papa John’s or Pizza Hut.
The real story of Facebook is that, as “social networking” software, it was a moderately clever idea and minor technological breakthrough. The government, if it were ever allowed to compete with private enterprises, could sponsor or directly develop an excellent substitute for that in a month, and make it non-commercial and secure. But that wouldn’t serve the corporate overclass, would it? They are looking — and paying — for exactly what Zuckerberg and his buddies are providing: new ways of gathering free information about the details of people’s off-the-job activities.
None of that makes it into Sorkin’s sly, product-placing paean to privileged whoredom.
