I don’t even know what to say about this:
Based in part on surreptitious tape recordings, an FBI affidavit lays out allegations that a Sacred Heart pulmonologist kept patients too sedated to breathe on their own, then ordered unneeded tracheotomies for them — enabling the for-profit hospital to reap revenue of as much as $160,000 per case.
Ain’t capitalism grand?
NPR, “How to Sell Coke to People Who Have Never Had a Sip”
I knew Myanmar was pretty bad, what with the authoritarian junta in power and all, but no Coca-Cola polar bear ads? That must have been intolerable for the Burmese.
Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, at the annual shareholders’ meeting. The shareholders rejected a proposal to set goals on curbing carbon emissions.
Also, the shareholders rejected a proposal to ban discrimination against gays. Rex Tillerson was also the National President of the Boy Scouts of America recently, and during his tenure the Scouts were quite adamant about their ban on gays, although they’ve softened since he left the position.
Anyways, if you needed someone to be today’s biggest asshole, he’s my nomination.
Dennis Prager at National Review wrote an article on the Los Angeles Unified School District’s free breakfast program a little while ago that reads like some over-the-top parody of a rich white guy telling the undeserving poor they’ve got it too good. I don’t know what type of person reads this sort of crap and feels good about themselves for it, but there’s certainly assholes out there.
His unhinged screed isn’t particularly interesting, standard reactionary fare, but reason #4 that a free breakfast is the first stop on the express train to the gulag gets at an interesting point:
And fourth, the free breakfast profoundly weakens young people’s character. When you grow up learning to depend on the state, you will almost inevitably — even understandably — assume that the state will take care of you. And you will grow up also assuming — as do Europeans, who give far less to charity than Americans for this very reason — that the state will take care of your fellow citizens, including your own children.
The thing is, he’s talking about school children. If the school (oh, sorry, The State) wasn’t wasn’t providing the kids with a breakfast, it’s not like they’d be out there earning their way in life. Their parents would be making it. The state must not take care of anyone, so that they grow up learning to depend on their families.That’s the lesson he wants kids to learn, to accept a society where the wealth of one’s parents determines what kind of life one has. It’s a straight-up feudal vision of the world, where preserving inherited wealth and privilege is the cornerstone of society. We musn’t let the peasants think they have any expectation of rising above their station in life.
Well, we’ve got no time for excuses. Not because the bitter legacy of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they have not. Not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; we know those are still out there. It’s just that in today’s hyperconnected, hypercompetitive world, with millions of young people from China and India and Brazil — many of whom started with a whole lot less than all of you did — all of them entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything that you have not earned.
Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination. And moreover, you have to remember that whatever you’ve gone through, it pales in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured — and they overcame them. And if they overcame them, you can overcome them, too.
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But if you stay hungry, if you keep hustling, if you keep on your grind and get other folks to do the same — nobody can stop you.
From President Obama’s commencement address at Morehouse College. Well, that’s inspirational. Work harder. Overcome the systemic racism of American society on your own. If you keep at it, you can compete in a global race to the bottom in wages and working conditions. So stop making excuses. Christ, do we have to use the language of global capitalism to describe even our dreams and aspirations?
Ta-Nehisi Coates has more on how Obama talks to black audiences:
Taking the full measure of the Obama presidency thus far, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this White House has one way of addressing the social ills that afflict black people — and particularly black youth — and another way of addressing everyone else. I would have a hard time imagining the president telling the women of Barnard that “there’s no longer room for any excuses” — as though they were in the business of making them. Barack Obama is, indeed, the president of “all America,” but he also is singularly the scold of “black America.”
Also, see Corey Robin for a comparison with LBJ’s language at Howard University in 1965.
Jayati Ghosh, “Michal Kalecki and the Economics of Development”
This whole article is a great overview of the relevance of my favorite economist, Michał Kalecki.
The passage here is about Kalecki’s model of growth in a capitalist economy. This is, I gather, different from what’s often called the Kalckian growth model, which was worked out by Joan Robinson and others using some of Kalecki’s ideas after his death. Kalecki’s actual model of growth didn’t really exist, because, as the quote above refers to, he didn’t actually believe that growth was actually produced by capitalist mechanics, but by other factors. In his words: “my criticism of capitalism goes even further than that of Karl Marx. Marx took an expansion of capitalism for granted, whereas I think that you have to explain this by some exogenous factors.”
I’ve been doing a bit of reading on different Keynesian and post-Keynesian models of capitalist growth, and they all seem to have various shortcomings. Also, if I had to guess, I’d say that we won’t get around to working out the mechanics of growth in a capitalist economy until we no longer have the resources to make such a thing possible. In the meantime, I’ll post some more about what I can figure out about such things.
Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard than Americans. That’s true whether you’re talking about an individual calculus or a collective calculus. Safety rules that are appropriate for the United States would be unnecessarily immiserating in much poorer Bangladesh. Rules that are appropriate in Bangladesh would be far too flimsy for the richer and more risk-averse United States.
Protesters at Bangladesh’s garment factories:
Some 1,500 workers marched to the Dhaka headquarters of the main manufacturers association, demanding the owners of the collapsed factories be punished.
“The owners must be hanged,” one protester cried, as others tried to lay siege to the headquarters.
Maybe, and this might just be crazy talk, the safety standards in Bangladeshi garment factories are not decided by welfare-enhancing choices made by the people of Bangladesh, but rather forced on them by the massive disparities in wealth and power that are the hallmark of modern, corporate, globalized capitalism. Slate pays Matt Yglesias good money to avoid falling prey to this type of crazy talk, though.
Michał Kalecki, “The Essentials of Democratic Planning” in which my favorite economist offers his advice to the UK’s Labour Party in 1942. Labour would indeed go on to win in the following election, but never did take Kalecki’s advice to maintain full employment policies in the face of resistance from the capitalist class.
I think the basic idea is sound. Basic Keynesian policies can be used to guarantee full employment, which erodes the class power of the capitalists, and puts more power in the hands of the working class. Thus, a more radical politics becomes possible. Of course, the capitalist class knows that guaranteed full employment would eventually destroy their class power, and put mobilizing politically against it ahead of their own profits. The big question is how to withstand this pressure. Labour in the 1950s and 60s always backed off full employment policies. Kalecki described this as the “political business cycle.” The same dynamic seems evident today.
Moshe Marvit at In These Times, “War, Fascism and General Electric”
Sure, the events in question took place in 1947. It’s still entirely emblematic of the relationships involved in modern capitalism.
Talk about buying low and selling high. Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned oil company, reportedly offered to bail out Cyprus’s troubled financial sector in exchange for exploration rights to the country’s natural gas.
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Hence Gazprom sweeping in with its “friendlier” rescue offer. It’s not clear if they wanted to take over the entire bailout, which would cost roughly €16 billion, or merely the depositor bail-in of €5.8 billion, but either way they’d be getting a pretty rock-solid deal: The gas reserves could be worth as much as €300 billion, though it would likely take about seven years of development to start exporting gas and collecting revenue, not to mention fears of competing claims on the reserves from Turkey.
Tim Fernholz, “Gazprom’s audacious offer to bail out Cyprus in return for its natural gas”
Ain’t modern capitalism grand! There’s always something that can be privatized to pay off some debt that a different set of companies stuck the population with.
It occurs to me that putting those last two quotes I blogged together makes for a striking contrast to between the way our society treats the children of the rich and the children of the poor. It always gets to me when free-market types decry attempts to create “equality of outcome” and claim that they want to preserve “equality of opportunity.” Frankly, it’s just bullshit. There’s no such thing as “equality of opportunity” in a capitalist society. Some children have parents that provide executive concierge services to plan their golf-themed 21st birthday parties, and some kids find themselves handcuffed to a railing for not wearing a belt.
