Wednesday, October 30, 2013

17 of 18 health insurance marketplaces had successful rollouts & are working fine

By Marc Jampole

If 18 large organizations installed, customized and rolled out new complicated software systems, how many rollouts would be relatively glitch free?

Ask any experienced information technology (IT) consultant and they’ll likely answer, ”About 50%,” without blinking an eye. That’s based on facts.

At least half of all software installations fail miserably—over budget, past the deadline and missing key features. Take enterprise resource planning software (ERP)—software that runs an entire enterprise: about 60% of companies installing ERP report receiving less than half the benefits they thought they would get from the software. And customer resource management (CRM) software, which makes it easier to track sales and customer contact—shows a 50% failure rate.

Isn’t it amazing then that 18 government entities have just launched websites using sophisticated software and 17 of them have few if any glitches? I’m talking of course about the new health insurance marketplaces set up by 16 states, the District of Columbia and the federal government.

Unfortunately for millions of Americans, it’s the largest one that has experienced the snafus. The fault lies with the Obama Administration. If it had begun developing the federal electronic health insurance marketplace earlier, it would have had time to do proper testing and removed the bugs before the legal date for opening.  Instead, the Administration pussy-footed around waiting to make sure the law wasn’t reversed after the 2010 elections or declared unconstitutional.   Similar pussy-footing around is responsible for some, but certainly not all the numerous software failures in the private sector.

So what we have is 17-1 for governments, when the private sector only would have managed maybe 9-9. The real story of the rollout of Obamacare is that government can and often does do things better than the private sector.  In this case, what government seems to be doing better is implementing sophisticated software systems.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Idaho prisons show once again that privatization of government functions is not such a good idea

By Marc Jampole

We got another reminder of the failure of much privatization of government functions in a Wall Street Journal article detailing the woes that the state of Idaho has had since it privatized its state prisons in 2000. The current vendor is walking away from a new contract, leaving Idaho with several lawsuits alleging understaffing leading to gangs rampaging violently through Idaho’s private prisons.  The Journal article quotes one of the three board members of Idaho’s Department of Corrections: “Privatization is a failed concept in the state of Idaho.”

Privatization is also a failed concept when it comes to schools. For years studies have shown that charter schools—private schools run with public money—underperform public schools.  And a recent study showed that when all factors are considered, private schools also underperform public schools.

By the way, Idaho isn’t the only state having problems with privatized prisons.
I look at the privatization movement as nothing more than a government wealth transfer program. Since the decline of private sector incomes, government jobs now tend to pay more than private sector jobs at all levels except the top executives, who tend to make significantly more money in the private sector. By privatizing a school or prison facility, what the government is really doing is taking money from the many entry and midlevel jobs—union jobs to a large degree—and giving it to senior management and the investors. It’s a kind of reverse Robin Hood. 

The question remains unanswered as to why the government tends to do better than the private sector on such tasks as educating our children or housing our prisoners. Is it that these functions are inherently better served by government for some reason? Perhaps it’s because government is more stable and will always be around, whereas private institutions come and go as part of the “creative destruction of capitalism?” Or maybe public schools and prisons work best because government workers tend be unionized, since numerous studies show that union workers are more productive? Or maybe the service aspect of working for the government makes executives more dedicated to their customers and less willing to cut corners. Certainly when there is public scrutiny, it’s more likely an exec who cuts corners will be found out. I like to think that the fact that public schools and jails outperform private ones comes down to the simple fact that in America the most competent make the most money and public school teachers and correctional officers make more money than their confreres working for privatized concerns.

Whatever it is, we have gathered enough evidence now to recognize that the privatization movement has been a failure, except for the executives and investors of the companies who get the federal contracts and the factotums these rich folk send to state legislatures to vote to privatize yet more government functions.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

Editorial: Obamacare Survives


John Boehner’s miserable performance as the nominal head of the House of Representatives during the recent showdown over the budget and debt ceiling has enhanced his claim to the title of Worst House Speaker since the Civil War.

Boehner’s fear of a revolt by approximately 30 “Tea Party” Republicans caused him to ignore his duties as speaker of the House — a constitutional office that requires him to act in the best interests of the nation, not just his own party. Instead he has consistently refused to allow bills to be heard that would help the President spur the economy, if they were not supported by a majority of the Republican caucus. He also refused to allow House conferees to negotiate with the Senate on the budget and appropriations before they expired on Oct. 1. Then he kept the House from voting on a “clean” continuing resolution that would have prevented the shutdown.

Only after the GOP’s more sober corporate sponsors began to panic at the prospect of a Treasury default did Boehner allow the business-class Republicans to vote with the Democrats to defuse the debt crisis and put the government back to work.

In shutting down the government for 16 days, Boehner and the House Republicans cost the United States more than $24 billion, according to Standard & Poors, and perhaps as much as $31 billion, as estimated by Moody’s Analytics. But Republicans still blamed the shutdown on President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for refusing to negotiate on defunding the Affordable Care Act as a condition for passing the continuing resolution.

We should be concerned that Sen. Rafael “Ted” Cruz (R-Texas), who helped to marshal the House Teabaggers to hold fast for defunding the government when the Democrats did not submit to their demands to defund Obamacare, against the advice of more senior Senate Republicans who could count. In the end, Cruz got 17 other senators and 144 House members to vote for default. He apparently is determined to make another run at shutting down the government and blocking a further debt extension next year.

“This was going to be a multistage, extended battle,” said Cruz, “but we’ve also seen a model that I think is the model going forward to defeat Obamacare, to bring back jobs, economic growth ...”

Which, of course, is nonsense, from the leader of a cabal that has stymied jobs and economic growth.

After the budget and the debt ceiling were resolved, the cable news channels had to find another crisis to cover. Luckily for them the new “Obamacare” website that debuted Oct. 1 was experiencing major malfunctions as millions of people, including the uninsured, the underinsured and the merely curious swamped HealthCare.gov. Most of them were unable to set up accounts that were needed before they could go ahead and browse available plans.

This glitch was annoying, but not entirely unexpected. Previous initiatives to expand health care, such as the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) under President Bill Clinton, Medicare Part D under President George W. Bush and Commonwealth Care, the Massachusetts health care exchange under then-Gov. Mitt Romney, also had rocky startups. But the traffic jam at HealthCare.gov was quickly translated by the talking heads on TV into a disastrous blunder that threatened the health-care reforms.

Your editor waited a week before trying to check out the online health insurance exchange. In two tries over a couple days, I was unable to set up an account. But after the feds did some work on the website the weekend of Oct. 19-20, I tried again on Oct. 21 and found that I was able to bypass the account setup and simply price the insurance plans that are available on the exchange.

It turns out that, despite Republican efforts to sabotage the initiative, Texans (at least in Austin) have 80 plans to choose from. Those under 50 can get health coverage for as little as $109 per month for catastrophic coverage, which has a maximum deductible of $6,350. That might seem like a lot, but your medical bill can run past that deductible in a hurry if you break a leg or find that you need a new kidney, which young adults occasionally do.

Texans over 50 in Austin can get health coverage for as little as $185.83 monthly for catastrophic coverage ($265.92 for a couple); $245.98 for the Bronze Plan, which is designed to cover 60% of all health care costs for the average person ($352 for a couple); $287.76 for the Silver Plan, which would cover 70% of health costs ($411.80 for a couple); $328.22 for the Gold Plan, which would cover 80% of health costs ($469.70 for a couple); and $399 for the Platinum Plan, which would cover 90% of health costs ($571 for a couple).

As it happens, my existing coverage with Aetna is priced comparably with the cheapest Bronze Plan, which is a Blue Cross HMO, but my Aetna PPO plan has better features, so I probably will keep it. Many families will benefit from the new choices — particularly those with pre-existing conditions that made it hard or impossible to get affordable insurance under the old system. For example, when my wife was laid off from the Austin school district in 2011, we paid $544 monthly to keep our coverage under the COBRA plan for what was similar to a Silver plan now available for a couple at $411.80. When we looked at getting our own coverage in 2011, we were unable to find an insurance company that was willing to cover my wife, who had a pre-existing condition. (She found another job that offers health coverage, but I had to find my own insurance, since TPP staff — but not the editor — get insurance through the Storm Lake Times in Iowa.)

And, far from costing jobs, the Affordable Care Act actually gives potential entrepreneurs the option to quit their old jobs and start new businesses without risking loss of health coverage for their spouse and/or children who have health problems. And small businesses will get tax credits to help them cover their workers.

So if you were unable to get into HealthCare.gov the first couple weeks, splash your face and try again. If you still can’t get through on the website, you can get help 24/7 by calling toll-free 1-800-318-2596. In many cities, you can stop by community-based health care exchange navigators to check out your options (find help in your area at LocalHelp.HealthCare.gov). And compare them with your friendly neighborhood insurance agent.

Consumers have until Dec. 15 to enroll for coverage that starts Jan. 1. Subsidies are available for people making up to 400% of the poverty level. Those who are uninsured have until March 31 to enroll in a health plan or face a fine. (Those below the poverty level will either be covered by Medicaid at federal expense or, if they are in states where Republican officials have refused to accept the federal money to help the working poor, at least they will not be penalized for their state’s miserly interference.)

As of Oct. 20, the White House said 476,000 Americans have begun applying for insurance, out of 19 million who had visited the website. More than half of the applicants are coming from the 36 states where the federal government was forced to take the lead in running the markets. The rest come from 14 states running their own markets, along with Washington, D.C.

Republicans have a three-year head-start on telling lies about what Obamacare will do, so it may take several weeks to get the system running smoothly and convince working-class Republicans (God help them!) to check their options on the healthcare exchange. But the health reforms will save lives of people who, as of Jan. 1, can go to the doctor without fear that the wrong diagnosis will cause their insurance company to cancel their policy and leave them adrift.

The Congressional Budget Office predicts seven million Americans will sign up for insurance in the health care exchanges between October and March, including 2.7 million young and healthy people. Nine million are expected to sign up for Medicaid. And anybody whose insurance premiums rise because of the Affordable Care Act may assume that a major reason is that their insurance provider is now required by federal law to provide benefits and pay for claims that previously would have been denied. And the Republican Party cannot let that accountability stand. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2013
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Selections from the November 15, 2013 issue





DISPATCHES
Fox’s ‘Obamacare’ smears can’t stand scrutiny;
Ohio expands Medicaid under 'Obamacare';
Oregon cuts uninsured population by 10% in two weeks;
Farm bill showdown over food stamps;
Kochs see $100B profit from tar sands pipeline;
Labor warns Dems: Don’t mess with Social Security or Medicare;
Sanders named to budget panel;
Sequester cut 1.2 million jobs;
Jobs report shows jobs needed, not theatrics;
Cruz gains from government shutdown;
Schweitzer mulls Dem prez race;
Biz lobby backs away from comprehensive immigration reform;
Sailor describes ocean as dead;
Stats: 'Obamacare' isn't creating part-time economy;
New voter ID law almost blocks Texas judge from polls;
CNN poll: Obamacare more popular than GOP;
Texas rep to disabled vets: Everybody's got to sacrifice ...

BOB RUNDLE
We should build an economy that’s fair to all

JOAN WALSH
Kick shutdown extortionists out of office

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Obamacare is a victory for women









Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Movie promoters resort to print ad consisting of two blank pages and a URL

By Marc Jampole

Page A9 of today’s New York Times is entirely blank. So is page A10, with the exception of a cryptic website address at the bottom of the page:  wordsarelife.com.

What could “words are life” mean? And where will the URL lead us? To religion? Politics? To some feel good pop psychology or philosophy?

In fact the URL redirects to thebooktheif.com, which is a rather conventional website promoting a new movie, “The Book Thief,” based on the novel of the same name by Australian Markus Zusak. Narrated by the character called Death, the novel is about a German girl during World War II. The trailer and scenes come right out of the style I call “middle brow art house”: soft, pastel or autumn colors that seem painterly, music in the French light classical vein, a ponderous importance in the voices of the actors as if every line dripped with meaning, beautifully composed static shots. The director of the film, BTW, also directed “Life of Pi.” Enough said there.

I checked in other newspapers—Wall Street Journal and two Pennsylvania dailies—and didn’t find the ad.  It may have only run in the Times.

The ad raises some interesting questions about marketing. Clearly, the producers of the film think that people are going to wonder about what wordsarelife.com is all about and go to the website. I have no question that, compared to most other print ads in any publication, this two-page ad will influence more of the audience to comply with the call to action—to visit the website!

But once at the website, I wonder how long people will remain before heading elsewhere, disappointed that what they are seeing is a shill for a movie. Will people think, “Gee this approach is clever” or will they feel let down and disappointed, having anticipated something political or spiritual?

Two aspects of the website will tend to make people feel disappointed or betrayed, as opposed to enjoying the cleverness of the pitch: First off, you don’t go directly to wordsarelife.com, but are rerouted to another website, which people who frequently surf the web often associate with a betrayal or trick.

Secondly, the website is so derivative and unclever that it is disappointing as a piece of entertainment. If, by going to the website, we stumbled upon an incredible scene from the movie to the sound of offbeat or catchy music, the creativity of the website would continue the creativity of the print and that would be fine. But instead, we get a static image, some pious words from a very serious young girl and music that sounds like leftovers from a French flick about romance between octogenarians.

The film’s producers must have run the print ads in front of focus groups, but there are many ways to skew the results of focus groups, which is why they have no statistical validity. And it may be that the focus group participants saw the ads without seeing the website, and so demonstrated that the approach worked in terms of a call to action. We can only speculate as to what research went into the decision to run the ads, but I get a gnawing feeling that the producers and their ad folk misinterpreted the results of research or fixed them through employing faulty methodology.

Yet even before we get to the website, I question the wisdom of placing this ad. Is the front section of the New York Times the best place for this print ad? People read different media in different ways and when they read a newspaper they read different parts of the paper in different ways. The same people who actively seek out movie ads in the entertainment section as part of planning their evening or weekend they may skim past all ads in the front section, focused as they are on digesting the overnight news.

The idea, of course, is that they can’t look past the two blank pages and that they will be enticed to visit the website because wordsarelife.com is an open-ended phrase that suggests spirituality, or at the very least higher order thinking—the very kind of thinking the reader is supposedly doing at the time he or she is reading the news section of the New York Times.  I can see this scenario working in the real world, but I can also imagine large numbers of people understanding immediately that the ad is a big sell and feeling betrayed even before they get on their computers or portable devices.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Lonely picket tells Park Avenue residents about their right-wing neighbor, David Koch

By Marc Jampole

The luxury apartment building at 740 Park Avenue in New York’s Upper East Side is so famous that it even has a book dedicated to its history. Now lots of churches and castles have volumes describing their history and residents, but not many apartment buildings achieve this mythic status. When the news media uses a single building to represent real money, it’s usually 740 Park,  which stands as a monument to Art Deco architecture at the corner of Park and East 71st Street.

Jackie Kennedy Onassis supposedly grew up here. Among other apartment unit owners we find this interesting triple play: John D. Rockefeller sold it to Saul Steinberg who sold it to Stephen Schwartzman, all billionaires and among the wealthiest men in the world when they set up housekeeping at 740. Among other notable residents of 740 Park at one time or another include Ronald Lauder, Jerzy Kosinski, Ronald Perelman, Steve Ross, John Thain and Vera Wang, all heavyweight money.

But perhaps the most infamous of the billionaires and multi-millionaires at 740 Park is David Koch, who took advantage of the awful Supreme Court decision in Citizen’s United to finance first the Tea Party and then the movement to not raise the debt ceiling or fund the government unless the Affordable Care Act was defunded. I think that even casual followers of news recognize David Koch and his less public brother Charles. 

Too bad for the other building residents that even as I write this blog entry, camped outside the door of 740 Park is a scruffy middle-aged man with three anti-Koch signs. He hangs out legally at the edge of the green awning and close to the street on completely public property.

The posters are all manufactured block print lettering in all caps on corrugated cardboard, so the letters hardly stand out and are hard to read a distance. The copy on the three signs says it all:
1.       

KOCH INDUSTRIES

LEADING THE CHARGE

IN THE CORPORATE

COUP D’ÉTAT OF

OUR DEMOCRACY

 

2.       

THE KOCH BROTHERS

DESTROYING OUR LAND

POLLUTING OUR AIR

POISONING OUR WATER

KILLING OUR DEMOCRACY

 

3.       

DAVID & CHARLES

KOCH

THE NEW FACES OF

ORGANIZED CRIME

 

The man is dressed in a denim army-style jacket and blue jeans, standard fare for protest rallies. Sometimes he stands and sometimes he sits. The man’s hair flows beneath his shoulders and is blond quickly going gray. His face has the sun creases of someone who has spent a lot of time working or playing outside. This sole protester could very easily be middle class, but what betrays his impoverished circumstances is his lack of teeth when he smiles. When he’s not engaged in conversation with willing passers-by, he reads a tattered paperback book.

The guy is passing out little two-sided postcards for a website called PopularResistance.org, which is the current website of one of the main national Occupy groups. The website should prove useful to anyone interested in protesting the current rule by the one-percenters, which has led to the most inequitable distribution of wealth since the Gilded Age. Sections of the website offer resources and information about existing protest group, forming new groups, getting informed about the issues and learning about community organizing and nonviolent protest.

It did my heart good to learn that someone was bringing the battle—in this case a class war—to the bad guys. But then I realized that the Tea Party financier is probably spending time at another of his several residences.

Or maybe Koch is on a retreat for one of the many boards of which he is a director. Or perhaps he’s visiting the theatre named after him at Lincoln Center or the dinosaur wing of the American Museum of Natural History, which also bear his name. He could even be hiding out in one of the many hospitals to which has given a collective $395 million.

I don’t look at Koch’s civic and charitable contributions as a redeeming virtue, but rather as proof that he has too much money, much of it inherited.  His charitable activities fail to lend credibility to his extremely ignorant views. Yes, he helps to educate children in paleontology, but he also pays good money to spread doubt on global warming. Even while rich folk were both entertained and edified in the David Koch theatre during recent performances, thousands of poor children across the country missed Head Start early education and nutritional programs because of the recent government shutdown.

I applaud the sole picketer and wish more would join him and that other picketers were outside the residences of the ultra wealthy who are bankrolling conservative ideas.

But all the picketing in the world will do no good unless we remember to vote for the most progressive candidates in primaries and general elections—every election, not just every four years. We also have to keep the pressure on elected officials to raise the minimum wage, pass laws that make it easier to unionize and inject more money into repairing roads, increasing mass transit and subsidizing alternative energy.

All the same, it was good to see someone tell the truth about the Kochs in front of their neighbors.

Monday, October 21, 2013

Study proving public schools outperforms private schools is ignored by news media

Marc Jampole

It doesn’t surprise me that somebody figured out how to prove that public schools outperform private schools.

And it doesn’t surprise me that this seminal study is being ignored by the mainstream news media. As of one day after Atlantic released its article reviewing The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools, a Google search yielded but one article covering the important findings of authors Sarah Theule Lubienski and Christopher A Lubienski.  

The Lubienskis took into account the effects of affluence, disabilities and other background factors and found that then public schools outperformed private schools over the past twenty years. According to Atlantic, the Lubienskis report that the Educational Testing Service, Stanford and Notre Dame all took a look at the same statistics—datasets they call it—and came to the same conclusions.

The Lubienskis aren’t saying that public school students score higher, because test comparisons show that the average private school student scores higher. But the private school student is likely to be wealthier, come from a stable family, not have a disability and not have suffered early life trauma. Correct for these factors—in a sense only compare apples that fell from the private school tree with those that fell from the public school tree—and the public school wins hands down. Not only that, but far from the crisis in public education that many see, the Lubienskis make a strong case that public schools are doing a fine job educating the youth of America.

The results of the study don’t surprise me because I live in the real world and in the real world the best get paid the most. Now I’m not saying that Alex Rodriguez deserves to make more money than Miguel Cabrera, but that they and every other professional ball player make a lot more money than minor leaguers, those in foreign leagues, semi-pros and beer league softballers.

The best lawyers tend to make the most money. The best accountants tend to make the most money. The best writers—business and entertainment—tend to make the most money. The best musicians tend to make the most money. Forget the obscene fact that Beyonce makes about 200 times what the concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic does, they both do quite well when compared to the average piano teacher who gives lessons through the Jewish Community Center or the YMCA.

Public school teachers make more money than private school teachers. Doesn’t it make sense that they would therefore do a better job and that public schools would therefore do better in quantitative comparisons?  I know that there are some very competent and dedicated private school teachers, but in general, how could they outperform public school teachers, who make so much more money?

Thus my lack of surprise to learn that public school students outperform private school students on a level playing field and that public schools and their teachers are more open to innovations and trying new learning techniques.

Nor was I surprised that the news media has ignored the Lubienski book. One of the ideological tenets of the mass media is that the private sector always outperforms the public sector. In the case of education, it's just not so, but the news media filters out this important news for ideological reasons.

The news media, owned as they are by large companies, have come to share big business’ disdain for unions, especially over the past 30 years. The news media will certainly give fair coverage to both sides of most labor disputes, but in feature coverage they give far greater voice to anti-union pundits, writers, politicians, theories and events than to those in support of unions. Weakening unions is one key strategy in the 30 year class war in which wealth has been transferred from the middle class and poor up the economic ladder to the wealthy.

Charter schools, vouchers for private schools, school and school district takeovers—virtually all of right-wing school reform attacks public school teachers because they are unionized and therefore make a decent wage. As supporters of this campaign against public teachers unions, it only makes sense that the news media ignores important books such as The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

We’ve been ruled by incompetent minority since Supreme Court gave 2000 election to the candidate with fewer votes

By Marc Jampole
 
Perhaps the best characterization of the U.S. political scene since the turn of the 21st century is to say that we have been ruled primarily by an incompetent minority.

Let’s face it. The victory this week over the economic know-nothing Tea Party came with very few spoils for the American people: All the majority got was the right to keep a functioning economy through the rest of the year and a continuation of the sequestration spending cuts that have hurt so many people and serve as a drag on the economy. So in a real sense the minority ruled.

And it is an incompetent minority who don’t understand fully the dire ramifications of not extending the debt ceiling and who fought a battle that they could not win. That battle cost the economy billions of dollars, put hundreds of thousands of people out of work and ground to a halt much of the workings of government, but not the processes related to the law whose implementation the minority said they wanted to impede.

It’s taken political trickery and the selection of partisanship over what’s good for the country to keep a minority—and often a minority of the minority—in power.  It started with what may have been election tampering in Florida in the 2000 presidential election that was affirmed by the Supreme Court voting along party lines. This combination of state shenanigans and Supreme Court recklessness led to a man who admitted basing decisions on gut and faith rather than facts and analysis being declared president even though he had fewer votes.

So the minority took charge in 2000, and what an incompetent minority it was: The pursuit of the Iraqi war without a plan to govern Iraq displayed incompetence. Going to war with Iraq instead of chasing Osama bin Laden displayed incompetence. Establishing a gulag of torture sites displayed incompetence because most military experts agree that torture doesn’t work (and whatever any movie portrays, the facts show that torture did not help capture bin Laden). 

Then there’s Hurricane Katrina, which displayed Bush Administration incompetence at its low point.

When Barack Obama swept into office in 2008 he brought with him an army of competent people, but after a brilliantly planned 2008 election strategy, the president and Democrats forgot that you need both houses to govern. They incompetently let the Tea Party dominate the 2010 Congressional and statewide elections. Of course, the Tea Party had a lot of help from the mainstream news media which lionized them while ignoring the many progressive candidates and rallies that took place before the 2010 election.  Analysis of polls show that Tea Party candidates won because many Democratic voters stayed home. The 2010 surge for right-wingers came about because the Democrats stupidly forgot to rally their own troops.

Once having won a majority of 2010 state legislatures, the Republicans were in a position to gerrymander new Congressional districts that gave them a large number of secure House seats.  Thus in 2012, the Republicans kept the House, even though they won millions of fewer votes for their Congressional candidates than the Democrats did.

The current Congress majority was thus elected by a minority of voters.  A minority of the minority—the Tea Party—took control of the legislative process because of the incompetence of Speaker Boehner and the fear of moderate Republicans that the Tea Party would spend lots of money to defeat them in primaries. 

And now the Tea Party has revealed how incompetent it is by driving the country to the brink of financial ruin—and for a goal that could not be attained. 

Let’s hope that Democrats have learned from the 2010 experience and treat the 2014 midterm election as if it were as important as a presidential election. That means raising a lot of money and reminding the voters constantly of how the Republican Party almost let a right-wing know-nothing faction destroy the world economy. It means sending the president, VP Biden, Bill and Hillary and new progressive heroes Elizabeth Warren and  Bill DeBlasio all over the country to campaign for Democratic Congressional representatives, state legislators, county commissioners, even dog catcher!!  It means loading vans with minorities, senior citizens and students and bringing them to the polls to vote on Election Day.  

It’s time that the American people rose up and overthrew the tyranny of the incompetent minority that has been running this country into the ground since the election of Bush II.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

New study shows why we have to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour

By Marc Jampole

Your Big Mac and Baconator aren’t as cheap as you think they are. In fact, every time you bite into a burger or other fast food concoction, the federal government subsidizes your meal—and the profit made by the fast food company.

That’s because more than one half of low-wage workers employed by the largest U.S. fast food restaurants earn so little that they get public assistance.  An analysis of Census Bureau figures by researchers at the Universities of California-Berkeley and Illinois released this week found that 52% of fast food workers used Medicaid, food stamps or the Earned Income Tax Credit program, between 2007 and 2011.  In fact, more than twice as many fast food workers sign up for public aid programs than does the overall workforce.

Another study—this one by the National Employment Law project (NELP)—found that public assistance for fast food workers costs U.S. taxpayers $3.8 billion a year. That’s a $3.8 billion subsidy to the fast food industry and denizens of fast food. It’s almost 2% of the total sales of the U.S. fast food industry, but a much larger portion of the profit. So if senior management of McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and Sonic are enjoying their country club memberships and private pools, they have the U.S. government and taxpayers to thank.

The NELP study estimates that the average in-store fast food employee makes $8.94 an hour.  That works out to less than $20,000 per year for someone working 40 hours a week 52 weeks a year.

I can understand why taxpayers subsidize the development of alternative energies, oil and gas drilling and university attendance. But why are we subsidizing an industry that contributes so much to our national health epidemics of obesity, diabetes and heart disease?

I’m thinking that if we ended this subsidy by raising the minimum wage to a decent level—say $15 an hour—your burger and fries would likely cost a little more and that the big fast food purveyors would make a little less profit. Of course, if fast food cost what it is supposed to cost without government subsidies, maybe some part of the market for fast food would opt for healthier and tastier food.  While that might lead to healthier Americans, it would definitely lead to fast food companies making even less money. And we couldn’t have that, could we?

Could and should.

The argument that raising the minimum wage would lead to job losses is complete garbage.  Employers tend to only hire when they need someone and when they can demonstrate to themselves that the additional employee will help to make a lot more money than the new employee’s salary, benefits and cost to train and equip. Many companies get fat over time and have to do occasional trimming or purging—but that’s not related to the minimum wage. These companies didn’t hire additional workers because they were cheap, but because company management thought they needed them at the time.

It makes sense that employers like to pay as little as possible for everything, including labor. But the minimum wage sets a floor on how low employers can go for public policy reasons: most everyone would agree that it’s in the best interest of the country to make sure that people who work will be able to eat and have shelter. With the current minimum wage, far too many don’t have the basics.  It’s time to raise it.

The call for $15 an hour minimum for all workers is realistic because over the past 30 years we have allowed the minimum wage to lose ground against the cost of living and corporate profits. Keeping the minimum wage low was an integral part of the game plan in the class war against the middle class and poor that the wealthy began in this country under Reagan.

The first step in returning to a more equitable distribution of wealth is raising the minimum wage.

You might have to pay more for your hamburger, but fewer of your tax dollars will go to the public aid programs for the poor that so many Americans love to hate.

Monday, October 14, 2013

New book documents how jellyfish are inheriting the oceans, with a lot of help from humans

By Marc Jampole

If even just half of what Lisa-ann Gershwin reports in Stung! is true, then many younger readers may be telling their grandchildren stories about the long ago days when humans caught ocean fish and ate them. Stung! gives the depressing news about how we’ve managed to pollute the oceans probably beyond saving. By beyond saving, Gershwin means a return to Earth’s oceans some 500 million years ago when disgustingly slimy and stingy jellyfish ruled.

Gershwin catalogues overfished areas, red tides, jellyfish blooms, heated and oxygen deprived waters, waters polluted by fertilizer and other human wastes and man-made catastrophes that collectively are killing many fish species and destroying the ocean’s delicate cycle of life.  She gives copious examples of all the problems we have created:
  • Over-fishing, which means taking so many fish out of the water that a species is doomed to extinction.  Included in overfishing is the problem of bycatch, which occurs when fishing for one species leads to the capture and destruction of other species.  There is also bottom trawling, which essentially runs a large rake across the water’s floor, picking up delicacies like shrimp but destroying plant and other animal life.
  • Eutrophication, which is a type of pollution caused by excessive fertilizer and sewage runoff causing an accelerated growth of algae and other plant life, leading to a disturbance in the balance of underwater life.
  • Other kinds of pollution which causes deformities or contaminates fish and other sea creatures.
  • The decline in oxygen levels in the oceans, which leads to the death of virtually all higher forms of life.
  • The increasing acidification of the ocean, which dissolves shells. Particularly alarming is the fact that ocean acidification destroys diatoms, tiny creatures at the base of the food chain of higher order animals like fish, whales and penguins. Acidification also makes it more conducive for the type of tiny creatures upon which jellyfish love to graze.
  • Climate change, which is warming the waters, again upsetting nature’s balance and leading to the imminent extinction of many sea dwellers.

As it turns out, each of these conditions makes the waters more conducive to jellyfish, since jellyfish can live in many environments and adapt well to a lack of oxygen.  Moreover, once jellyfish get a hold on a body of water, they multiply to the point of crowding out other life forms.

Stung! holds out absolutely no hope that we can fix the oceans. Gershwin’s last words in the book are “If you are waiting for me to offer some great insight, some morsel of wisdom, some words of advice…okay then…Adapt.”

But what does adaptation mean? I’m guessing that it means giving up on eating any creature from the ocean and figuring out how to eliminate the pollution from industrial fisheries, which right now contribute to the problem by dumping waste matter from production into the water. We’ll have to limit water sports to pools and other manmade structures, which we can keep clean of pollutants and jellyfish.  We’ll have to figure out how to keep jellyfish from destroying the filters of a variety of operations sited on bodies of water. It might mean developing technologies that actively clean carbon-dioxide out of the ocean water. It certainly will mean ending our dependence on burning fossil fuels, which is both warming the waters and injecting carbon into them.

Another recent book, Countdown by Alan Weisman, tells us what else we have to do: reduce the human population. We currently have about 7 billion people in the world and counting.

Some biologists think we can sustain 1.5 billion people living the kind of life we live in industrialized countries. My own back-of-the-envelope, seat-of-my-pants, pulled-out-of-thin-air estimate of the earth’s carrying capacity for humans is 1.0 billion. I pick that number because it’s the number of people on the earth in 1800.

My own belief—and it is only a belief—is that humans are so smart that we will survive, even if that means a return to living lives that, as Thomas Hobbes once put it, are “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  I assume that survival of humans will only come at the cost of a great decline in our population. My only question is whether war, epidemics, famine and chemical poisoning—the four horsemen of the Apocalypse—will cause the decline in our numbers or if we will take matters into our own hands and do it through birth control and family planning

 

Friday, October 11, 2013

Editorial: GOP: Saboteurs or Morons?


It would be amusing if it weren’t so maddening that Republicans blame President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for the federal government shutdown and House Republicans’ refusal to go along with raising the debt ceiling, which threatens to cripple the government’s ability to finance its debt and would disrupt the world economy, unless the President agrees to stop implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Republicans have talked themselves into risking financial calamity if Democrats won’t reverse the health care reform, which is designed to provide health insurance for the 48 million Americans, many of them working poor, who are not covered by health care plans — and it was a Republican idea to begin with.

Tea Party Republicans are the ground forces opposing all things Obama in Congress, intimidating House Speaker John Boehner and more moderate Republicans who would go ahead with the “clean” continuing resolution to put the government back to work. But the New York Times reported that conservative activists, led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III and financed by right-wing billionaires, have been working since President Obama’s reinauguration in January to derail the President’s health care law. More than three dozen conservative groups have pushed their fellow Republicans into shutting down most federal agencies, and the shutdown is enforced by radical groups such as Heritage Action for America and the billionaire Koch brothers whose many affiliated political action committees have threatened to run attack ads and primary challengers against Republican officeholders who refuse to toe the Tea Party line.

This is the latest manifestation of conservative Republican ideology that has been promoting anti-worker economics for more than 80 years, ever since the GOP resisted Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs to end the Depression. Then, after the Depression was ended, Republicans spent the rest of the 20th century trying to dismantle the New Deal, with its pesky regulation of businesses to protect workers and consumers. They went after Roosevelt’s signature program, Social Security, as well as Lyndon Johnson’s signature domestic health programs, Medicare and Medicaid, which were enacted in 1965. Now they don’t want President Obama’s Affordable Care Act to get a running start at showing that government can improve the lives of working people, even though “Obamacare” is patterned after a program that was originally suggested by the conservative Heritage Foundation and patterned after Mitt Romney’s bipartisan health-care reform in Massachusetts.

[See Thomas Frank’s cover story for more on the conservative long march to reverse the New Deal and Edward McClelland’s story on page 12 on how conservative economic policies under Republicans and Democrats hollowed out the middle class.]

It took a long time for the generation that owed their families’ survival in the Great Depression to the New Deal, and then thrived on the post-war economic expansion that created the Great Middle Class, to turn their backs on the economic system that made the United States the richest nation on Earth. The economy boomed in the 1950s and ’60s with strong industrial labor unions and income tax rates that topped out at 92% for the wealthiest classes, but as Big Money took over the newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets in the 1960s and ’70s, the word went out with numbing regularity that labor unions, high taxes and regulations were bad for the “job creators.”

In the 1960s, President John Kennedy decided to give the capitalists a break. He proposed that the top marginal tax rate be dropped to 77% in 1964. The top tax rate fluctuated between 70 and 77 percent through the ’70s, until Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. Reagan cut the top tax rate to 70% in 1980, then to 50% in 1982, 38.5% in 1987 and finally 28% in 1988. And you know what? Not only did capitalists take their profits out of their American factories and find cheaper places to manufacture their goods overseas; the Reagan administration also ran up record deficits as the national debt rose from $900 billion when Reagan took office to $2.8 trillion when he left. His successor, George H.W. Bush, reluctantly increased the top tax rates to 31%, but it wasn’t enough to turn the tide of red ink.

When Bill Clinton reached the White House in 1993, he convinced the Democratic Congress to increase taxes to 39.6% on incomes over $250,000. The budget and tax increase was adopted without a single Republican vote, as GOP economic leaders predicted — nay, they guaranteed — that the tax increase would plunge the US into economic collapse. Instead, of course, the late 1990s saw an economic boom and the increased tax revenues balanced the federal budget in 1998 for the first time since Lyndon Johnson left a balanced budget in 1969. Clinton balanced the budgets from 1998 through 2001, with surpluses for those four years totaling $559 billion.

What did Republicans learn from this experience? When George W. Bush was awarded the White House by the Republican Supreme Court in 2001, his administration expressed alarm that the federal government, with its budget surplus, was paying off the national debt too quickly, leaving capitalists no safe harbor for their excess profits, so Bush cut the top tax rate, first to 38.6% in 2002 and then 35% for the rest of his tenure, despite the costs of his War on Terror. He also cut the top tax on unearned income — interest, dividends and capital gains — to 15%. So millionaires and billionaires parked that undertaxed unearned income in banks overseas and the US national debt piled up once again.

After the 2008 election, when Barack Obama took office with the economy in free-fall, largely due to Wall Street financiers abusing the deregulation of the banking system, Republicans rediscovered the danger of a rising national debt. The GOP resisted Obama’s efforts to stimulate the economy with $800 billion in federal spending and tax cuts as well as his efforts to save General Motors and Chrysler with $85 billion in loans. Of course, they also resisted the drafting of the Affordable Care Act, which is expected to save the federal budget $210 billion through 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Still, after 43 straight months of private sector job growth, the slowly improving economy has halved the $1.4 trillion annual deficit Obama was handed in 2009, to a $642 billion deficit projected for 2013, but Republicans are demanding that Obama return to GOP economic nostrums.

Supply-side “voodoo” economics got its shot in the Reagan and Bush administrations and it has proven to be quackery that hollowed out the American economy and ballooned the national debt. If Republicans really were concerned with restoring the economy and eliminating the deficit, they would:

• Join progressive Dems in rolling back the top tax rates to the pre-Reagan levels and do away with the low rates for capital gains, which would give capitalists an incentive to reinvest their profits in their businesses, but make room for tax breaks for the middle class, which actually would stimulate the economy;

• Resume enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prevents cartels and large corporations from dominating the markets;

• Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, which kept investment banks from speculating with federally insured deposits;

• Replace free trade with fair trade laws that protect US jobs;

• Reverse economic policies that encourage corporate executives to maximize shareholder value at the expense of what is best for their employees and the communities in which they do business (as Thom Hartmann frequently argues on his radio show).

Instead, Republicans are demanding that they get something in return for letting the government open back up and pay the bills that Congress already has appropriated. One GOP proposal is that Democrats agree to “entitlement cuts” to Social Security and Medicare as a “compromise” from their previous demand that the Affordable Care Act be defunded. Some bad ideas just won’t go away. Whether Republican House leaders are saboteurs or simply morons, Democrats should stand firm against their hostage taking and leave Social Security and health care alone. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2013
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Selections from the November 1, 2013 issue













Karl Rove chides House Republicans for not having an endgame. He should know

By Marc Jampole

Congratulations to Karl Rove for joining the “reality based community,” which comprises you and me and other lesser mortals who look to empirical reality when analyzing and acting in the world. 

Remember it was Rove who, when referring to the war in Iraq, supposedly said that some people were “in what we call the reality based community” and “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality…That's not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.”

It was Rove, too, who exploded in rage when Fox News declared Obama the winner in Ohio and therefore of the 2012 presidential election. An Obama win went so much against the alternative reality that Rove and other Republicans had constructed that he went into a hissy fit of denial.

Now Rove writes in the Wall Street Journal that it was probably unwise of Congressional Republicans to start this current fight over the debt ceiling and federal budget. In the Great Karl’s words, “In general, it's not wise to engage in a battle without having an endgame.”

Entering a battle without an endgame is something about which Karl Rove should know quite a lot. Rove was part of the neo-con faith-based if-wishing-made-it-so brain trust that planned and implemented the Iraq War without considering what would happen after the invasion. They went to war without an end game. We all know how that worked out.

I’m sure all my readers’ hearts are as warmed as mine to learn that Rove has dropped his objection to reality and has decided that maybe it is better to think first and shoot later.

Rove does remain part of the conservative propaganda machine that is trying to sell us on the nonsense that the country blames the President and Democrats as much as they do the Republicans for the government shutdown and imminent default. The latest polls of course contradict that colored view, with 22% more of Americans blaming Republicans than blaming Obama and the Democrats.

The Republican media apparatchiks, including Rove, are also trying to convince us that the Democrats are more to blame for the mess, because they have refused to enter serious discussions about deficit reductions.  Also not a part of reality: As President Obama recently pointed out, House Republicans turned down 19 requests to enter into joint discussions with the Senate. I am not the first to speculate that the House Republicans were probably too busy to meet on the budget because they were taking more than 40 votes to turn back the Affordable Care Act.

What the Tea-Party Republicans really object to is that President Obama, Democrats, many of their fellow Republicans and most of the country see the world as it is and not the world that these right wingers want to bring into existence by denying reality, the Democratic process, and, most tragically, the needs of millions of innocent middle class and poor people across the country.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Republicans who say defaulting is okay are lying; reflect a “good old boy underbelly” business culture

By Marc Jampole

If the topic is the potential impact of not raising the debt ceiling, how do you know whether Senators Richard Burr and Rand Paul and Representatives Justin Amash and Paul Broun are lying? Their lips are moving.

All four of these distinguished legislators are saying that the impact of not raising the debt ceiling will be minimal. And all are engaged in straight-faced lying.

Representative Broun, Georgia Republican, says that Obamacare is the greatest threat to our economy, despite the many studies that show that the new healthcare law will save money because millions of newly insured people will go to doctors with symptoms instead of emergency rooms when very ill.  Obamacare thus adds money to the economy, something that is supposed to be good. By comparison, not paying all our bills will lead to hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs, interest rates going up and foreign investors losing confidence in the dollar as the central financial pillar of the global economy. That’s all bad.   

Both Representative Amash, Michigan Republican, and Senator Burr, North Carolina Republican, point out that with tax revenues still coming in, we will still be able to pay the interest on all the various instruments by which the federal government borrows money. But what they don’t say is that other bills won’t get paid—and no one likes that. When you’ve lent a buddy money and he’s paying you back, but you hear he isn’t paying back his sister, don’t you get a little uneasy?  

Their claims are so outrageous that even the U. S. Chamber of  Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, as free-market and anti-government as organizations can get, are telling Congress to raise the debt ceiling.

Broun, Burr, Amash, Paul and other Republicans suggesting that default ain’t so bad all reflect a “good old boy underbelly” business culture that no one likes to talk about in the big slick business publications like Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Forbes. It’s the culture of living right at the edge of financial ruin, one step ahead of your creditors, but still in the game. Multiple bankruptcies, dragging out payments, trying to keep afloat with another loan, selling suspect goods, using slightly suspicious selling practices, maybe puffing up inventory a little or pledging the same equipment on two personal loans—these actions characterize this entrepreneurial culture, and it’s surprising how large it is.  The good old boy underbelly business culture serves as the real underlying cause of the real estate bubble that wrecked our economy: liar loans, sub-primes, bundling bad loans with good—all qualify as underbelly business behavior.

In popular entertainment—“Cadillac Man,” “The Goods,” “Fargo,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Tin Men”—this business culture is associated with selling automobiles, real estate and siding, but in fact it’s not the business but the way the owner runs it that defines the good old boy underbelly culture.
Again, I ask you to personalize: Do you like doing business with these sharks? Why should banks, large multinational corporations and foreign companies be any different? They aren’t. They’ll do what any reasonable business person does when the risk of nonpayment is great—charge more.

Let’s also not forget about the millions of people whose lives will suddenly become much more challenging because they have been laid off or aren’t getting paid. It’s not just a matter of financial consequences. There are painful human consequences to refusing to raise the debt ceiling. 

In detailing the good old boy underbelly business culture I forgot to mention one thing: These business owners are all liars who lie frequently. Which brings us full circle to the Republicans who claim that defaulting on our bills won’t be so bad.

Monday, October 7, 2013

Economist Stephen D. King shows lack of imagination in telling economic horror story

By Marc Jampole

Stephen D. King, chief economist at HSBC and author of the recent When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence, painted a horror story as gruesome as any of his namesake in his New York Times Op/Ed article titled “When Wealth Disappears.”

King reviews the no-growth economy that Europe and Japan already have and is about to reign in the United States. King takes it as a fact that no-growth has to lead to a decline in the economy—that an economy that is not growing is weak and bad. He takes it for granted that because growth will no longer bring extra wealth each year, college costs will keep going up and we will continue to fray our safety net.

Common sense should tell you that this idea is nonsense. If we have already achieved great wealth, why should no more increases prevent us from performing the functions of an economy—to provide a reasonable living standard for everyone? We have so much wealth right now that we could feed, educate and care for everyone in our country—if we only redistributed it.  All a growing economy does is enable people to live a higher standard of living without having to seriously consider wealth redistribution.

The standard of living in the mature industrialized countries is already quite high.  Who says it ever has to get any higher?  Certainly we have to improve the lives of our poorest and most disadvantaged residents, plus there are billions of people living at or below subsistence in the developing world. But in general the middle and upper classes of the industrialized nations are living on easy street.

Of course if there is no economic growth, the improved position of the poor has to be funded from existing pots of money—and that means redistribution of the wealth. And that’s just not part of the agenda for the people who created the field of economics, most practicing economists, those who fund economic research and those who look to economic theory to guide their business operations—otherwise known as rich folk.  

The idea that a healthy economy requires growth is nothing more than a first premise, similar to the premise that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, upon which all of traditional geometry is based. The difference is that the shortest distance between two points really is a straight line (except to a few brilliant scientists and mathematicians), whereas an economy can thrive without growth. No ruling elite ever wants to try it though, because it takes planning and a commitment to the community that our wealthiest citizens don’t seem to have.

King’s own plan, outlined in broad brushes after his plea that we be honest about the end of abundance, will certainly benefit his employer without inconveniencing much, if at all.  Here it is:

“That means a higher retirement age, more immigration to increase the working-age population, less borrowing from abroad, less reliance on monetary policy that creates unsustainable financial bubbles, a new social compact that doesn’t cannibalize the young to feed the boomers, a tougher stance toward banks, a further opening of world trade and, over the medium term, a commitment to sustained deficit reduction.”

A higher retirement age and more immigration will keep the number of workers high and thereby lower wage rates, which is good for any employer. The “new social compact” assumes that taxes on corporate profits and wealthy shareholders will not go up; unspoken here is the obvious—that we could keep the current social compact if we taxed the wealthy at the rates we taxed them in 1950, or even 1980.  King does mention a tougher stance towards banks and less government manipulation of money, but what does he really mean? He has very concrete ideas when it comes to increasing the pain of working stiffs, but only vague strategic thoughts about modifying banking.    

It’s not just what King says, but what he doesn’t say. Immigration is a great way to funnel people from poor countries to rich countries with shrinking populations, but only if we have immigration across the board, not just for the wealthy and educated. There is nothing wrong with further opening world trade, but only if trading partners meet the high environmental, wage and work safety standards of the West. Otherwise free trade exploits both the poorly paid workers in developing countries and the middle class workers in wealthy countries who lose their jobs.

King’s horror story also doesn’t tell us how we got into this mess: by straining the world’s resources. We can’t grow anymore, because we don’t have the raw materials of growth.  Instead of bemoaning the shrinking population, King should embrace it and advocate efforts to bring down the population even faster.

And make no mistake about it. If we as a species don’t voluntarily bring down our population and learn to live well while using less energy and resources than Americans currently do, then we will see a true horror story—one in which the world descends into a hell of major wars, famines, epidemics and human-induced weather and chemical disasters.

Instead of fearing the end of growth, King should understand that it is a good thing and then set his mind of an economist to making sure that the end of growth does not also mean the end of wealth.

Of course, that’s not King’s job. His job is to help his company make more money.
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