Archive for the 'Public Enterprise (Shouting Down, Crowding Out)' Category
Tuesday, May 4th, 2010
Cato is Clown Central
The mighty journalistic flagship USA Today carries a story about yet another preposterous effort by medical experts to pretend that the people who run the United States are going to consider making the nation’s built environment friendly to exercise. The delusional proposal in question is, in the credulous description of USA Today, a “comprehensive, wide-ranging strategies outlined in the new U.S. National Physical Activity Plan, which is being released today by an expert panel representing influential health organizations. Among groups involved are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American College of Sports Medicine, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society.”
The “comprehensive” plan is, as always, a melange of quarter-measures and rote incantations, none of which, puny as they are, stands a ghost of a chance of getting funded:
• Make sure roadway spending includes money for “complete streets,” accommodating cars, bikes and pedestrians.
• Have doctors assess patients’ physical activity levels at appointments and discuss ways they can meet the activity guidelines.
• Encourage early childhood education programs to have little ones as physically active as possible.
• Provide access to and opportunities for physical activity before and after school.
• Encourage school officials to find ways for children to walk and bike safely to school.
• Provide tax breaks for building owners or employers who provide amenities in workplaces that support active commuting, such as showers in buildings, secure bicycle parking, free bicycles or transit subsidies.
• Increase funding and resources for parks, recreation, fitness and sports programs and facilities in areas of high need.
Of course, for “balance” in its reporting on this piece of hopeless liberal special pleading, USA Today must turn to “conservatives,” who, of course, refuse to admit that any environmental discouragement of health exists in corporate capitalist America.
Cue the blithering clowns of the unintentionally hilarious Cato Institute:
“Most people are overweight not because there isn’t a sidewalk in their neighborhood but because we like to eat and we don’t like to exercise,” says David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C.
And the price of the changes could be high. “Everything costs something,” Boaz says. “Every action has a cost, and when it’s government-involved, whether it’s federal or local, they are generally less efficient with money. This is the elite planning for how the masses should live.”
Only in America, folks, only in America: Choices exist independently of environments. Government is always less efficient than mega-corporations, no evidence mentioned or required. And, despite the fact that big business marketing is the largest and most sophisticated program of behavioral control in human history and something that receives twice as much funding as all forms and levels of schooling combined, “elite planning for how the masses should live” can only come from the government or their evil dupes and shills, worried public health researchers.
Friday, April 30th, 2010
Sisyphus Had it Easy
Except in boom phases, the economic terms of capitalism always get worse for commoners. (We won’t think about ecology for now.)
This is most true in recessions, when capitalists redouble their efforts to expand their gross profit margins.
And, voilá — today’s New York Times reports as follows:
The broadest measure of the overall economy grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.2 percent in the first quarter of 2010, after gains of 5.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 2.2 percent in the third quarter.
While the expansion in output was welcome, it still has not brought the level of hiring growth needed to recover ground lost during the recession.
But as the unemployment rate has hovered around 10 percent for the last eight months — most recently it was 9.7 percent in March — concern about the job situation has persisted.
Even though any pickup in business is welcome, modest improvement may not be enough to ease the lasting pain caused by the so-called Great Recession, many economists say.
Consumer spending grew at an annual rate of 3.6 percent in the first part of the year.
Hiring only recently began to materialize, with the economy adding 162,000 jobs on net in March, of which 48,000 were temporary Census-related positions. The economy had destroyed about eight million jobs since the recession began in December 2007.
In standard NYT procedure, the overall tone of the story is one of mystified concern, with lead and conclusion both conveying muddled non-interpretations. As usual, the actual explanation is there, but buried in a single, hurried mid-story paragraph:
Businesses have found ways to make more with fewer resources, meaning that they have been able so far to meet additional demand for their products without bringing on many new workers. Companies are also sitting on a tremendous amount of cash, economists say, and appear unwilling to spend it.
In economic terms, what’s happened is that, in these lean times, our “entrepreneurial” overclass has indeed “found ways” to boost productivity, which is the amount of GDP produced per hour by the U.S. workforce.
In fact, according a recent estimate published by The Conference Board, in 2009, U.S. productivity grew by 2.5 percent in 2009, while overall GDP fell by 2.5 percent. Hence, the overclass was able to produce 2.5 percent less wealth while paying for 5.1 percent fewer hours of labor.
What this means is that there is not going to be any serious job growth unless the economy grows faster than 5 percent (the point these days at which labor demand would start overtaking capitalists’ ability to produce more with fewer employees) for a sustained period.
From a working class perspective, this means that, every year, as capital become more labor-efficient, the size of the boom it would take to bring back decent times for workers gets bigger, and hence, less likely.
(What all that means for the planet’s ecospheres is an equally important and damning topic.)
That’s the facts, Jack.
Thursday, March 25th, 2010
F-R-A-U-D
Mandated offers of coverage, but no cap on the price of the policies offered, in other words. So, actually, in practice, no insurance for sick or previously sick children until at least 2014. “Good news! We hereby offer you a policy for Tiny Tim! Your monthly premium will be $2,789 a month, with 20% co-pays for in-network services,up to a maximum of $25,000 a year.”
Meanwhile, can you recognize the pattern here?:
NAFTA
WTO/Conclusion of Uruguay Round
AFDC —> TANF
Glass-Steagall repeal
Expiration of Independent Counsel statute
Romney-Ca…oops, Obama-Care
P.S. In case you’ve forgotten, during his award winning, massively fraudulent electoral campaign, Barack Obama promised his version of “health care” (largely an oxymoron in a capitalist medical system) reform would not include a personal mandate requiring all U.S. residents to purchase private medical insurance. As CBS News reported, this promise was presented by Obama as “the biggest difference between” himself and Hillary Clinton on the topic.
We now know that the only difference between Clinton and Obama is that the former was substantially more honest with the public about her actual plans for governance. Now, there’s a depressing thought…
Thursday, March 25th, 2010
More From Black Reagan
Did you operate an illegal war against Nicaragua? “Gosh, I can’t recall…But trees cause more pollution than automobiles do, ketchup is a vegetable, and the rich aren’t rich enough.”
Flash forward 22 years:
“What about the public option?” a man called out, interrupting the president in an exchange that seemed momentarily to throw Mr. Obama off stride by forcing him to depart from the remarks he was reading off a TelePrompTer.
“That’s not in it!” Mr. Obama called back.
“Why not?” the man replied.
“Because we couldn’t get it through Congress, that’s why,” Mr. Obama said.
Thursday, March 18th, 2010
What’s the Serbo-Croatian Word for “Fraud”?
Hint: It starts with a “K.”
Under the leadership of the 2008 Marketer of the Year, the Democratic Party has returned to the Clintonian task of deepening the medical insurance crisis in the United States. At present, the atrocity known as the Republican Party stands to the left of the Democrats on the issue. The Republicans favor doing nothing to combat the nation’s heavy reliance on over-priced, under-performing, waste-promoting “private medical insurance.” The Democrats? They want to make purchasing that defective product legally mandatory, and to use existing Medicare spending to help finance their attempted bailout of a yet another hopelessly broken, death-dealing capitalist industry.
Meanwhile, for those of you still laboring under the delusion that anything inside the Democratic Party is decent, consider the latest courageous action of Democrat Dennis Kucinich:
Dennis Kucinich, who had been one of the few voices of opposition to the faulty healthcare “reform,” announced today that he intend to vote “Yes” on the healthcare bill currently under consideration in the US House of Representatives. The announcement came after a high-pressure visit from President Barack Obama to the Cleveland district Kucinich represents.
Kucinich [had previously] railed against the House bill, claiming that it “…would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care.” This critique was backed up by a “No” vote in November 2009. In House deliberations, however, Kucinich had already moved off his single-payer position, first searching for a “robust” public option and then attempting to create a clause that would allow states to pursue single-payer programs. Today Kucinich went a step further, cowering to the will of a White House bankrolled by big pharma and the private health insurance lobby.
Kucinich called it “a detour” and claimed that all of his previous criticisms of the bill still stood. The healthcare bill had become, he proposed, a contest between the presidency and its far-right critics. More correctly, Kucinich caved to pressure from pro-Obama groups, such as Moveon.org who recently collected more than $1 million to pressure House Democrats who had voted no on the original bill. The extent of the pressure campaign was brought home when Obama appeared in Kucinich’s voting district this week and summoned him to a meeting on Airforce One. There, the terms of Kucinich’s sell-out were determined.
The one powerful voice that has been remarkably absent from the whole spectacular public discussion of healthcare reform is that of the private health insurance lobby. Why so quiet? Because they wrote significant portions of the bill currently under consideration in the House. Because they have purchased the support of Demcoratic and Republican representatives by spending an average of $609,000 a day on lobbying during the first six months of 2009. And, because Obama’s healthcare proposal will open up new opportunities to harvest taxpayer money by providing clunker healthcare plans to the uninsured. Kucinich knows this yet he will still provide his name to this damaging scheme.
Most of all, Kucinich’s betrayal points to the burning need for political activity, both electoral and social movement based, independent of the Democrats and Republicans.
If only the Democratic Party were merely a detour. Instead, they are just another off-ramp to the market-totalitarian wastelands, albeit one with mislabeled signs.
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
Keep an Eye on New Jersey
It’s actually far from funny. But, after three decades of selling the more deluded crackers the notion that big government is the primary source of economic hardship and social discombobulation, there are now enough deep believers to not just elect peddlers of this laughable dogma, but a few major office-holders who are actually going to try it all out.
One such is the perfectly-named Chris Christie, the doughy, mafia capo look-alike who was recently elected by the benighted part of the New Jersey electorate to be that state’s Governor.
According to today’s New York Times, Christie didn’t get the memo that actually cutting government is not something a good government-basher actually does upon reaching power:
“Today, we are fulfilling the promise of a smaller government that lives within its means,” Governor Christie said in remarks prepared for delivery at 1 p.m. “The defenders of the status quo have already begun to yell and scream. They will try to demonize me. They will seek to divide us rather than unite us. But even they know in their hearts, if not yet in their minds — it is time for a change.”
The plan?
Over all, [Christie's] budget would shrink state spending by 9 percent from the fiscal year that ends in June, to $28.3 billion.
Upending the priorities of his Democratic predecessors, Governor Christie unveiled a budget that would hit the poor, elderly, schoolchildren, college students and inner-city residents hardest, while largely sparing the wealthy and businesses.
It remains to be seen whether Christie can get this through the New Jersey legislature, given that most office holders, including those who peddle anti-government cant, secretly know that cutting government spending in the middle of a depression is a recipe for disaster.
But, if Christie gets his way, look for New Jersey to implode even faster than the rest of this deluded and dying empire.
