corporate profits

Making America the Best Place on Earth to Work

Leo Gerard — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 09:37:33 -0500

Not the wars. Not greenhouse gasses. Not even the deficit. The issue most important to Americans is jobs.

Despite that, jobs failed to make an appearance in the State of the Union address.

The talk was all about business. Business was doing better. Business needed taxpayers to help pay for research and innovation. Business will get government help to eliminate pesky regulations. Business must have lower taxes.

The most telling statement was this:

“We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business.”

Especially because it wasn’t matched by a companion:

“We have to make America the best place on Earth to work.”

The speech expressed a policy in which business is the focus of government, taking precedence over workers. The American colonists created a government for their own benefit; they did not constitute an agent to serve business. A policy giving corporations primacy is risky for American workers.

The state of the union noted that happy days are here again for corporations and banks:

“Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again.”

Never mentioned, however, were the 14.5 million unemployed Americans, the sustained record rate of foreclosure, and the increasing poverty and food bank reliance among citizens of the richest nation in the world.

The state of the union outlined a plan under which the government will coddle corporations, essentially proving companies government welfare using American workers’ tax dollars. If businesses create jobs for workers as a result, fine. If they don’t, there’s no plan to exact a penalty.

For example, under the policy described in the speech, American workers will fork over tax dollars to pay for research and development for businesses that are sitting on a record $1.8 trillion in cash reserves -- hoarding it rather than creating jobs.

The president said:

“Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven't seen since the height of the Space Race. And in a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal. We'll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology -- an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.”

Maybe it will create new jobs. Hopefully. But no guarantees were offered. Mentioned as a business success story in the speech was a Michigan company, Luma Resources, which began manufacturing solar shingles with the help of a $500,000 government grant. It created 20 jobs, $25,000 a job. American taxpayers might think that’s a little pricey, but what’s worse is the potential for Luma Resources to go the way of Evergreen Solar, squandering the corporate welfare.

Evergreen, the third largest maker of solar panels in the U.S. and recipient of at least $43 million in corporate welfare, announced earlier this month it would close its main American factory in Massachusetts and move manufacturing to China. Eight hundred Americans will lose their Evergreen jobs by April.

Evergreen officials said China will give the company even higher amounts of corporate welfare, which, of course, makes sense since China is not a capitalist country. Its economy is government controlled. And that government routinely violates international trade regulations – by providing banned subsidies to industries and by deliberately devaluing its currency.

No matter how better educated American workers get. No matter how much more innovative. No matter how much more productive. No matter how many tax dollars the government spends on research and development, if the corporations that benefit move manufacturing overseas, the American workers who paid for it will suffer.

In fact, it’s more than suffering; it’s betrayal by their government that provided tax benefits to companies for off-shoring jobs. It is betrayal by their government that fails to stop violations of trade laws by countries like China that lure away firms like Evergreen.

At the end of the State of the Union speech, the president said:

“From the earliest days of our founding, America has been the story of ordinary people who dare to dream.”

An ordinary American dreams of a family-supporting job, owning a home, saving enough to pay for a child’s college education, helping to build a safe community. Corporations aren’t Americans, no matter how often the U.S. Supreme Court grants them rights that the U.S. Constitution guarantees to human beings. Businesses aren’t citizens. Their allegiance isn’t to America. It’s to profits. They dream only of dollars. They concede no responsibility to family, community or country.

They were not included when the president said:

“Tucson reminded us that no matter who we are or where we come from, each of us is a part of something greater -- something more consequential than party or political preference. We are part of the American family.”

The top priority of the American government must be making America the best place on Earth for Americans. If that’s good for corporations, great. The government must never place American citizens second.

2 words to banish from healthcare

Louis S Revesz — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:55:33 -0400

Say you’re a betting person. If someone gave you great odds to get rid of the words “recission,” and “pre-existing condition,” in the healthcare debate, would you take it?

If you would, you’d be skunked by the obvious.

It seems like a given that any healthcare reform legislation will make insurance companies invoking pre-existing conditions and cancelling their contractual obligations with policyholders through recission illegal. But let's agree to remember egregious examples of these practices as evidence of past barbarism.

So, what’s the first word we must absolutely ban? Consumer.

After all, we don’t really consume health care the same as we “consume” Skittles or nacho corn chips. Only people in the thrall of a sugar imbalance or addicted to the fifth taste, umami—a meaty or savory taste produced by several amino acids and nucleotides—consume Skittles, nacho chips, and other snack foods. Ordinary people may occasionally eat Skittles and nachos. They may also eat high-fat charbroiled burgers and French fries created by food flavorists for various fast food brands. Some people may also eat lots of antioxidant-loaded fruits and vegetables created by nature, although sadly, they’re probably in the minority.

And most prudent people seek professional care from doctors when they get sick; unfortunately, we’re a hearty species and can punish our bodies, minds, and spirits for years before we suffer a crisis that threatens us with death and debility. It’s usually at this point that even the poor seek medical assistance to return to a state of health, and hence, the term, healthcare.

To use the word “consumer” in the context of healthcare is to flatten the value of regaining health to the accountant’s ledger or the businessman’s abstraction. And yes, I realize this is not a new insight—yet it remains significant—especially if we consider Professor George Lakoff’s message to progressives to frame debates to reflect their values—or lose the argument.
(See: http://www.truthout.org/082009B )

To say you “consume” healthcare is to tacitly agree that it’s okay to regulate its consumption—and to profit from its consumption—much in the same way as you might profit from the utilization of widgets or any unit of production. The word “consume” is bloodless, which is extremely convenient since people denied access to treatment can end up very bloody indeed, and even dead.

Besides, do insurance companies produce healthcare? No, they’re middlemen who determine access to various systems of acute care and create quotas for levels of consumption based on business alliances and so-called cost-cutting measures. If you seem to have disease x, you can get tests a and b, but only from a preferred provider. But forget about getting procedure c anywhere, it’s experimental. Or if a healthcare professional (HCP) doesn’t know which disease you have based on your symptoms—your insurance company will allow you to “consume” tests d and e. But if that doesn’t nail it, tough noogies, you’re over your widget quota anyway, and don’t switch jobs or it’ll become a pre-existing condition. That’s if you haven’t already been kicked off your plan for having zits as kid that you didn’t fess up to during enrollment, i.e., you’re a victim of recission.

Okay, so do physicians produce healthcare? Of course not! Nobody produces healthcare. Caring for people who are ill is, at best, a service. Caring for the ill professionally—i.e., minding people who’ve manifested a disease through evidence-based medicine requires close attention to their lifestyles, knowing the latest research, being a good diagnostician, and having an intangible factor that comes from interacting with people. None of which is ever really possible when healthcare is a commodity, because the doctor isn’t there for the patient, he or she gets 5 minutes tops to prescribe meds and order tests to be consumed.

Does anyone remember that when the now much-maligned health maintenance organizations came into being in the 70s, it was with the supposed raison d'être that prevention of illness or maintenance of health is ultimately cheaper than expensive acute care for disease? Of course, that was before we’d heard the Nixon-Ehrlichman conversation on Michael Moore’s SICKO and were let into the insurance scam of denying care and still making money! (See: http://www.alternet.org/movies/55049/sicko_is_michael_moore's_best_and_most_powerful_documentary/ )

But let’s take a deeper look. Say you manage to get access to affordable healthcare in a humane medical system and the doctor cures your illness, does that mean you’re well? Probably not. So there are 2 choices you can make. Sometimes when you’ve been cured, the disease will scare you into changing behaviors that may have, might have, even remotely could have contributed to getting sick, and soon enough, you’re feeling good because you’re living cleanly. And that’s what’s called “wellness.” Of course, there’s another choice, and that’s doing nothing, or ignoring all the behaviors or lifestyle choices that contributed to your illness in the first place—and that means you’ll stay chronically ill—with continual drugs to suppress symptoms and tests to “detect” the next acute breakdown. And nobody can call that “wellness.” No one should call it health, either, although it’s the best we can hope to get under a reformed system that doesn’t address prevention. Nope, without dealing with the cause of illness, this state is more of hellish Limbo where you wait for the inevitable shoe to drop.

Any healthcare system that really stands a chance of limiting costs and increasing wellness must address all of the slings and arrows of our outrageous environment—from factory farming that dumps pesticides into depleted soil and sells infected meat, to giant corporate food businesses that inject preservatives and chemical flavors into high-fat, high-sodium, high sugar and low fiber food products that starve our bodies of nutrition and force them to adapt through inevitable chronic illnesses such as obesity, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and various autoimmune diseases, to name just a few. It’s a life of self-created pestilence to increase the profits of shareholders. Save money. Live better? We should all look more closely at the high cost of low prices.

Maybe the biggest environmental outrage is perpetuating the flatland of values that enshrines laissez-faire, the-market-always-knows-best, blind capitalist’s valuing profit above all else. What such a flatland ultimately does is create a mega-frame impervious against all arguments for human decency, the public welfare, and just plain, old good common sense.

So here’s the other word we need to ban from the healthcare debate: profit.

New Data, Same Story

Eric Lotke — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 11:33:16 -0400

Today’s data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis tell the same old story.
National GDP is dropping and personal incomes are dropping along with it. These are troubled times.

But wait! There's more! Corporate profits are on the rise.

Source: BEA: GDP, personal income, corporate profits as percent.

Are corporate profits a leading indicator of a turnaround? Or the next chapter (same old chapter) of winners and losers in the new economy. Real people struggle while corporate chieftains laugh all the way to the bank.

By the way: Maybe check out my new novel, 2044. The problem isn’t Big Brother. It’s Big Brother, Inc.