Archive for the 'Restriction of Macro-Choices' Category
Monday, February 21st, 2011
Wealth Secrets: Warren Buffett’s Public Subsidy
The Province of British Columbia provides its residents the ability to buy public, not-for-profit automobile insurance.
In the United States, where public insurance is more aggressively opposed by the overclass, publicly provided automotive coverage is entirely unavailable. Consequently, the insurance is inferior and the premiums higher. And the record profits of U.S. insurance companies, which Advertising Age reports “reached $26.7 billion in the first nine months of 2010″ — where do those go?
Largely to folks like Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway empire owns Geico.
The basis for all those private-sector profits? Sheer waste: To promote brand awareness, Geico and its “competitors” engage in saturation advertising of their private monopoly-protected inferior product. According to Ad Age, advertising expenditure by insurers more than doubled between 2000 and 2009.
The overall sales strategy in pure Pavlov. With few differences between companies’ policies and no competition from the public sector, repetition-implanted name recall is everything:
[T]he average shopper can name just four insurance brands off the top of their head, according to J.D. Power. And the way to get on that list is to advertise — all the time. “There’s enormous overlap between the companies that advertise a lot and the companies that are growing faster,” Mr. Shields said. “It seems very much to work.” (Ad Age, February 21, 2011)
Such are the glorious “efficiencies” of capitalism.
Friday, January 14th, 2011
Al Gore Manifesto
Stuart Staniford, who tracks peak energy problems, today suggests that those of us who hope to help engineer soft landings ought to abandon socialism in favor of Al Gore. Speaking of human history, Staniford proposes that, “at least until we decide to engineer better human beings, a decent society will have an economic elite.” To try to combat elites, in Staniford’s view, is to deny human nature. The best we can do, he suggests, is to accept and nurture our overclass, in hopes of convincing “them, like Al Gore, to use a portion of their undoubted economic privilege in an attempt to move society in a direction of lower impact and less emissions.”
FWIW, I replied thusly:
If you are going to appeal to big history, I would suggest you stick with it. 5,500 years ago, permanent elites figured out how to keep surplus wealth for themselves as “property.” That, as you note, was the beginning of the end for egalitarian kinship societies.
Fair enough.
But when did anybody start making a serious attempt to check ruling classes and their stories of biological superiority? 1776/1789. Less than 250 years ago, on a 5,500-year timeline.
And when did socialists start trying to extend democracy to economic affairs? 150 years ago. And they also did so while making the mistake of dismissing existing democracy as mere bourgeois illusion. So, socialism 2.0 has barely started, here in the latest 20 years on that 5,500-year timeline.
And here you are, talking about the naturalness of elites? I don’t buy it, either as history or strategy.
The point of leftism is not absolute monetary equality. It is the extension of democracy over macro-economic choices.
Of course, the impending energy/eco crash is going to make modern wealth levels and our range of macro-economic options a lot smaller.
Capitalists, meanwhile, are militant ostriches and obstacles, like it or not, because they are trying to retain what is utterly unkeepable. Al Gore thinks electric cars are a sufficient answer.
Friday, October 29th, 2010
American Math: Where 74 = 19,000,000
In the United States in 2009, there were 151 million people who received wages. As reporter David Cay Johnston has begun to explain, there is a rather amazing collection of statistics being kept in this crucial area by the Social Security Administration.
Johnston explains some of the shocking, if not at all surprising, facts revealed by a bit of analysis:
[These statistics] do give us a stunning picture of what’s happening at the very top of the compensation ladder in America.
The number of Americans making $50 million or more, the top income category in the data, fell from 131 in 2008 to 74 last year. But that’s only part of the story.
The average wage in this top category increased from $91.2 million in 2008 to an astonishing $518.8 million in 2009. That’s nearly $10 million in weekly pay!
You read that right. In the Great Recession year of 2009 (officially just the first half of the year), the average pay of the very highest-income Americans was more than five times their average wages and bonuses in 2008. And even though their numbers shrank by 43 percent, this group’s total compensation was 3.2 times larger in 2009 than in 2008, accounting for 0.6 percent of all pay. These 74 people made as much as the 19 million lowest-paid people in America, who constitute one in every eight workers.
And remember: This comparison includes federally taxable wages only. It says nothing about stock options, expense accounts, or benefits.
And single-year wage data also say nothing about wealth distribution, which, in a capitalist paradise like the United States, is far more unequal than the income structure.
Finally, I would invite people to just goggle these stats. Contemplate, for instance, the pyramidal structure of the wage system. By far the most densely populated wage segments lie at the low end of the scale. And the slots get almost precisely less-filled as they ascend into the unconscionable stratosphere.
Likewise, one might examine these numbers and ask “our” politicians why the fuck they never shut up about the so-called “middle class.” Aren’t the bottom and the top really the overwhelmingly important issues? And, even without knowing the facts Johnston discusses, aren’t people thirsty for some leadership and meaningful choice in this area?
Alas, few topics are more off-the-table in our market totalitarian society. The mass media are owned by corporate capitalists who enrich themselves by serving the other corporate capitalists who are the sponsors of their fare. The ruling (R) v. (D) junta, the money-grubbing Business Party duo-mono-poly, a.k.a. our “serious” policians? The same.
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010
“The Consumerist,” My Ass
Consumers Union is certainly an admirable and important group. It is also an unfortunate one. Not only does it legitimize the slave-word “consumer,” but it has also declined into a mere shopper’s watchdog that has nothing to say about corporate capitalism and its radical incompatibility with a decent human future.
Seems that CU has now picked up the website called The Consumerist. The site, cited with affection by sources like Advertising Age, redoubles and hipsterizes all the present flaws of CU.
Better shopping is not going to get the job done, folks. However many issues we face at the micro level of what to buy, our make-it-or-break-it century’s pressing problems all have to do with the lack of democratic control over macro-level policies. You’d never know that, however, by consulting Consumer Reports or The Consumerist, which, as is probably well understood by their corporate partners, divert potentially radical attention from the political to the merely personal level.
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, 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.”
