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The Verdict on Thatcherism Is Clear

Thursday, March 13th, 2014

Simply compare how her UK squandered its oil wealth compared to Norway

Nothing says free market capitalism like Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady once proclaimed, “Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money.”

Thirty-five years after she swept to power as British prime minister, it is ironic that socialist Norway now has $830 billion in the bank and enjoys fully funded social programs that most of us can only dream of. Meanwhile the U.K. is enduring another round of wrenching austerity and owes over £1.3 trillion — about US$2.2 trillion. That massive debt grows by about $3.8 billion each week, while every seven days Norway adds another billion dollars to their bank account.

What happened? Both countries were in dire economic straights in early 1970s. Both countries came into the financial windfall of North Sea oil around the same time, exploiting the same resource — sometimes from the same drill rig. How could they have ended up in such vastly different places?

Rarely in history has there been such a clear-cut opportunity to explore the real world success or failure of competing world-views. Thatcherism has gone on to become an economic school of thought with true believers in positions of power around the world. The doctrine of cutting taxes, privatizing government assets and embracing deregulation continues apace around the globe to this day. But does it work?

First let’s agree on some fundamentals. Wealth flows from resources and oil is a particularly lucrative bounty. The 75 billion barrels of light sweet crude discovered in the North Sea was worth over $8 trillion at 2014 prices. With that much money on the table and the resource roughly evenly split between the U.K. and Norway, let’s see how socialism and Thatcherism fared in this economic cage match.

For starters, Norway isn’t precisely “socialist.” Like other Scandinavian countries, they have a mixed-market economy with relatively high levels of taxation and comprehensive social programs. The main difference was that Norwegians did not have an allergic aversion to public participation in their economy.

One of the first things the Norwegian government did was to incorporate a state owned oil company — Statoil — to ensure they had an equity stake in their own oil production and to act as a repository for oil expertise. Since Norway knew essentially nothing about the oil business, they had to learn fast and having a player on the field helped them do that.

Oil is also a good investment and the Norwegian taxpayer has enjoyed over $23 billion in Statoil dividends from their government’s stake in the company since it was founded in 1972. The equity value of those shares is worth another $64 billion.

Lady Thatcher on the other hand embraced the conservative ideal of minimizing government presence in the marketplace, virtually inventing the process of privatization. One of her first acts on election was to sell 80 million shares of British Petroleum, ending the majority stake the U.K. government had held in the company since 1913 on the advice of Winston Churchill. Thatcher sold the U.K.’s remaining 1.7 billion shares in BP immediately after the stock market crash of 1987. While this raised $20 billion at the time, adjusted for inflation, those same shares would be worth over $87 billion today.

Taxation is of course another yawning philosophical divide between Thatcherism and the Norwegian model. While Norway needed outside expertise and capital to develop offshore drilling operations, they also wanted to tax foreign companies to limits of tolerance — to “squeeze the lemon to the maximum” as one historian told me. An unspoken role of Statoil was to pass on informed intelligence from within the oil industry on costs, prices and players so the Norwegian government could better prevail at the negotiating table.

This was no garden party. With literally trillions of dollars at stake, Norway was playing to win. At one iconic meeting in 1974 the Norwegian government announced to a delegation of oil companies that they were raising the level of taxation on petroleum profits to 90 per cent from 50. After the shouting had died down, the minister expressed disappointment that some of them did not walk away from their offshore leases. “We should have taken more,” he admonished his bureaucrats in full view of the enraged oil executives.

Thatcher on the other hand seemed more enamoured with ideology than money. She told a Conservative conference in 1977, “Our aim is to make tax collecting a declining industry.” She and successive governments succeeded in that dubious goal. Even though the U.K. extracted nine per cent more oil and gas by 2011, they collected $156 billion less in petroleum taxes and royalties than the Norwegians.

– More… ➡

– Research thanks to Kierin M.

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Financial melt-down, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Wealth Disparity | No Comments »

Right to refuse access by mining companies voted down in Senate

Thursday, March 13th, 2014

– This in from Australia which appears to be the U.S.’s little brother clone in the South Pacific.

– There, the corporations, through influence on government, are slowly gaining their will in all things – just as we’ve seen for some time now in the U.S.

– dennis

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A bill to give farmers and others the right to veto entry onto their properties by mining, oil and gas companies has been voted down in the Senate.

Queensland Greens Senator Larissa Waters introduced the ‘Landholders Right to refuse (Gas and Coal) Bill 2013’, which was defeated 44 to 9.

The bill also called for the Federal Government to buy back farms that have coal seam gas and coal mines on them.

Senator Waters says moves to protect prime agricultural land in Queensland and so-called critical industry clusters in New South Wales have failed to protect farmers.

“We saw an awful lot of promises on this issue before those respective parties were elected that they would act on this issue,” she said.

“What’s been produced just under-delivers in the extreme.

“Queensland made these promises years ago, and still haven’t even delivered. It’s still in bill format.

“The New South Wales ultimate protections that were passed actually have so many holes in them it’s almost like they’re a coal seam gas well themselves.”

Senator Waters says the bill was to redress the lack of right of farmers and others.

“Currently landholders across the country, in most instances, don’t have the right to say no to mining and coal seam gas companies that want to come onto their property.

“They only have the right to negotiate the compensation amount that they get.

– More… ➡

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Corporate takeover of Government, Corruption, CrashBlogging, Human Rights, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Wealth Disparity | No Comments »

Supreme Court rules Drug Companies exempt from Lawsuits

Wednesday, February 26th, 2014

“In short, the Court ruled that the FDA has ultimate authority over pharmaceuticals in the US. And if the FDA says a drug is safe, that takes precedent over actual facts, real victims and any and all adverse reactions.”

– Corporate rights are clearly taking the ascendancy over citizen rights. How far can this trend run before things get wicked?

– dennis

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July 7, 2013. Washington. In case readers missed it with all the coverage of the Trayvon Martin murder trial and the Supreme Court’s rulings on gay marriage and the Voting Rights Act, the US Supreme Court also made a ruling on lawsuits against drug companies for fraud, mislabeling, side effects and accidental death. From now on, 80 percent of all drugs are exempt from legal liability.

Drug companies failed to warn patients that toxic epidermal necrolysis was a side effect. But the Supreme Court ruled they’re still not liable for damages.

In a 5-4 vote, the US Supreme Court struck down a lower court’s ruling and award for the victim of a pharmaceutical drug’s adverse reaction. According to the victim and the state courts, the drug caused a flesh-eating side effect that left the patient permanently disfigured over most of her body. The adverse reaction was hidden by the drug maker and later forced to be included on all warning labels. But the highest court in the land ruled that the victim had no legal grounds to sue the corporation because its drugs are exempt from lawsuits.

Karen Bartlett vs. Mutual Pharmaceutical Company

In 2004, Karen Bartlett was prescribed the generic anti-inflammatory drug Sulindac, manufactured by Mutual Pharmaceutical, for her sore shoulder. Three weeks after taking the drug, Bartlett began suffering from a disease called, ‘toxic epidermal necrolysis’. The condition is extremely painful and causes the victim’s skin to peel off, exposing raw flesh in the same manner as a third degree burn victim.

Karen Bartlett sued Mutual Pharma in New Hampshire state court, arguing that the drug company included no warning about the possible side effect. A court agreed and awarded her $21 million. The FDA went on to force both Mutual, as well as the original drug manufacturer Merck & Co., to include the side effect on the two drugs’ warning labels going forward.

Now, nine years after the tragedy began, the US Supreme Court overturned the state court’s verdict and award. Justices cited the fact that all generic drugs and their manufacturers, some 80% of all drugs consumed in the United States, are exempt from liability for side effects, mislabeling or virtually any other negative reactions caused by their drugs. In short, the Court ruled that the FDA has ultimate authority over pharmaceuticals in the US. And if the FDA says a drug is safe, that takes precedent over actual facts, real victims and any and all adverse reactions.

– More… ➡

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Corporate takeover of Government, Human Rights, Politics - The Wrong Way, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Robert Reich: Where is the angry middle-class revolution?

Wednesday, January 29th, 2014

Our incomes are shrinking while the 1 percent profits. Change will only happen when the middle class gets mad

by Robert Reich on Salon

People ask me all the time why we don’t have a revolution in America, or at least a major wave of reform similar to that of the Progressive Era or the New Deal or the Great Society.

Middle incomes are sinking, the ranks of the poor are swelling, almost all the economic gains are going to the top, and big money is corrupting our democracy. So why isn’t there more of a ruckus?

The answer is complex, but three reasons stand out.

First, the working class is paralyzed with fear it will lose the jobs and wages it already has.

In earlier decades, the working class fomented reform. The labor movement led the charge for a minimum wage, 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, and Social Security.

No longer. Working people don’t dare. The share of working-age Americans holding jobs is now lower than at any time in the last three decades and 76 percent of them are living paycheck to paycheck.

No one has any job security. The last thing they want to do is make a fuss and risk losing the little they have.

Besides, their major means of organizing and protecting themselves — labor unions — have been decimated. Four decades ago more than a third of private-sector workers were unionized. Now, fewer than 7 percent belong to a union.

Second, students don’t dare rock the boat.

In prior decades students were a major force for social change. They played an active role in the Civil Rights movement, the Free Speech movement, and against the Vietnam War.

But today’s students don’t want to make a ruckus. They’re laden with debt. Since 1999, student debt has increased more than 500 percent, yet the average starting salary for graduates has dropped 10 percent, adjusted for inflation. Student debts can’t be cancelled in bankruptcy. A default brings penalties and ruins a credit rating.

To make matters worse, the job market for new graduates remains lousy. Which is why record numbers are still living at home.

Reformers and revolutionaries don’t look forward to living with mom and dad or worrying about credit ratings and job recommendations.

Third and finally, the American public has become so cynical about government that many no longer think reform is possible.

When asked if they believe government will do the right thing most of the time, fewer than 20 percent of Americans agree. Fifty years ago, when that question was first asked on standard surveys, more than 75 percent agreed.

It’s hard to get people worked up to change society or even to change a few laws when they don’t believe government can possibly work.

You’d have to posit a giant conspiracy in order to believe all this was the doing of the forces in America most resistant to positive social change.

It’s possible. of course, that rightwing Republicans, corporate executives, and Wall Street moguls intentionally cut jobs and wages in order to cow average workers, buried students under so much debt they’d never take to the streets, and made most Americans so cynical about government they wouldn’t even try for change.

But it’s more likely they merely allowed all this to unfold, like a giant wet blanket over the outrage and indignation most Americans feel but don’t express.

Change is coming anyway. We cannot abide an ever-greater share of the nation’s income and wealth going to the top while median household incomes continue too drop, one out of five of our children living in dire poverty, and big money taking over our democracy.

At some point, working people, students, and the broad public will have had enough. They will reclaim our economy and our democracy. This has been the central lesson of American history.

Reform is less risky than revolution, but the longer we wait the more likely it will be the latter.

– to the original article: ➡

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Corporate takeover of Government, Corruption, CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Financial melt-down, Human Rights, Politics - The Wrong Way, The Perfect Storm, Wealth Disparity | No Comments »

David Simon: ‘There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show’

Sunday, December 15th, 2013

The creator of The Wire, David Simon, delivered an impromptu speech about the divide between rich and poor in America at theFestival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, and how capitalism has lost sight of its social compact. This is an edited extract

America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where there is a plausible future for the people born into it. About 20 blocks away is another America entirely. It’s astonishing how little we have to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity.

There’s no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divorced from the American experience that I know. But there might as well be. We’ve somehow managed to march on to two separate futures and I think you’re seeing this more and more in the west. I don’t think it’s unique to America.

I think we’ve perfected a lot of the tragedy and we’re getting there faster than a lot of other places that may be a little more reasoned, but my dangerous idea kind of involves this fellow who got left by the wayside in the 20th century and seemed to be almost the butt end of the joke of the 20th century; a fellow named Karl Marx.

I’m not a Marxist in the sense that I don’t think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn’t attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that.

You know if you’ve read Capital or if you’ve got the Cliff Notes, you know that his imaginings of how classical Marxism – of how his logic would work when applied – kind of devolve into such nonsense as the withering away of the state and platitudes like that. But he was really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when it gets everything it asks for.

That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.

We understand profit. In my country we measure things by profit. We listen to the Wall Street analysts. They tell us what we’re supposed to do every quarter. The quarterly report is God. Turn to face God. Turn to face Mecca, you know. Did you make your number? Did you not make your number? Do you want your bonus? Do you not want your bonus?

And that notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the metric by which we’re going to measure the health of our society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. I would date it in my country to about 1980 exactly, and it has triumphed.

Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection.

It’s pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don’t let it work entirely. And that’s a hard idea to think – that there isn’t one single silver bullet that gets us out of the mess we’ve dug for ourselves. But man, we’ve dug a mess.

After the second world war, the west emerged with the American economy coming out of its wartime extravagance, emerging as the best product. It was the best product. It worked the best. It was demonstrating its might not only in terms of what it did during the war but in terms of just how facile it was in creating mass wealth.

Plus, it provided a lot more freedom and was doing the one thing that guaranteed that the 20th century was going to be – and forgive the jingoistic sound of this – the American century.

It took a working class that had no discretionary income at the beginning of the century, which was working on subsistence wages. It turned it into a consumer class that not only had money to buy all the stuff that they needed to live but enough to buy a bunch of shit that they wanted but didn’t need, and that was the engine that drove us.

It wasn’t just that we could supply stuff, or that we had the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we created our own demand and started exporting that demand throughout the west. And the standard of living made it possible to manufacture stuff at an incredible rate and sell it.

And how did we do that? We did that by not giving in to either side. That was the new deal. That was the great society. That was all of that argument about collective bargaining and union wages and it was an argument that meant neither side gets to win.

Labour doesn’t get to win all its arguments, capital doesn’t get to. But it’s in the tension, it’s in the actual fight between the two, that capitalism actually becomes functional, that it becomes something that every stratum in society has a stake in, that they all share.

The unions actually mattered. The unions were part of the equation. It didn’t matter that they won all the time, it didn’t matter that they lost all the time, it just mattered that they had to win some of the time and they had to put up a fight and they had to argue for the demand and the equation and for the idea that workers were not worth less, they were worth more.

Ultimately we abandoned that and believed in the idea of trickle-down and the idea of the market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. It’s astonishing to me. But it is. People are saying I don’t need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. I’m not connected to society. I don’t care how the road got built, I don’t care where the firefighter comes from, I don’t care who educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It’s the triumph of the self. I am me, hear me roar.

That we’ve gotten to this point is astonishing to me because basically in winning its victory, in seeing that Wall come down and seeing the former Stalinist state’s journey towards our way of thinking in terms of markets or being vulnerable, you would have thought that we would have learned what works. Instead we’ve descended into what can only be described as greed. This is just greed. This is an inability to see that we’re all connected, that the idea of two Americas is implausible, or two Australias, or two Spains or two Frances.

Societies are exactly what they sound like. If everybody is invested and if everyone just believes that they have “some”, it doesn’t mean that everybody’s going to get the same amount. It doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be people who are the venture capitalists who stand to make the most. It’s not each according to their needs or anything that is purely Marxist, but it is that everybody feels as if, if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don’t get left behind. And there isn’t a society in the west now, right now, that is able to sustain that for all of its population.

And so in my country you’re seeing a horror show. You’re seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you’re seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You’re seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we’ve put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.

We have become something other than what we claim for the American dream and all because of our inability to basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse.

Socialism is a dirty word in my country. I have to give that disclaimer at the beginning of every speech, “Oh by the way I’m not a Marxist you know”. I lived through the 20th century. I don’t believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth. I don’t.

I’m utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument’s over. But the idea that it’s not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn’t going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that’s astonishing to me.

And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That’s the astonishing end of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted.

And one of the things that capital would want unequivocally and for certain is the diminishment of labour. They would want labour to be diminished because labour’s a cost. And if labour is diminished, let’s translate that: in human terms, it means human beings are worth less.

From this moment forward unless we reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism.

Mistaking capitalism for a blueprint as to how to build a society strikes me as a really dangerous idea in a bad way. Capitalism is a remarkable engine again for producing wealth. It’s a great tool to have in your toolbox if you’re trying to build a society and have that society advance. You wouldn’t want to go forward at this point without it. But it’s not a blueprint for how to build the just society. There are other metrics besides that quarterly profit report.

The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It’s a juvenile notion and it’s still being argued in my country passionately and we’re going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I’m astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?

If you watched the debacle that was, and is, the fight over something as basic as public health policy in my country over the last couple of years, imagine the ineffectiveness that Americans are going to offer the world when it comes to something really complicated like global warming. We can’t even get healthcare for our citizens on a basic level. And the argument comes down to: “Goddamn this socialist president. Does he think I’m going to pay to keep other people healthy? It’s socialism, motherfucker.”

What do you think group health insurance is? You know you ask these guys, “Do you have group health insurance where you …?” “Oh yeah, I get …” you know, “my law firm …” So when you get sick you’re able to afford the treatment.

The treatment comes because you have enough people in your law firm so you’re able to get health insurance enough for them to stay healthy. So the actuarial tables work and all of you, when you do get sick, are able to have the resources there to get better because you’re relying on the idea of the group. Yeah. And they nod their heads, and you go “Brother, that’s socialism. You know it is.”

And … you know when you say, OK, we’re going to do what we’re doing for your law firm but we’re going to do it for 300 million Americans and we’re going to make it affordable for everybody that way. And yes, it means that you’re going to be paying for the other guys in the society, the same way you pay for the other guys in the law firm … Their eyes glaze. You know they don’t want to hear it. It’s too much. Too much to contemplate the idea that the whole country might be actually connected.

So I’m astonished that at this late date I’m standing here and saying we might want to go back for this guy Marx that we were laughing at, if not for his prescriptions, then at least for his depiction of what is possible if you don’t mitigate the authority of capitalism, if you don’t embrace some other values for human endeavour.

And that’s what The Wire was about basically, it was about people who were worth less and who were no longer necessary, as maybe 10 or 15% of my country is no longer necessary to the operation of the economy. It was about them trying to solve, for lack of a better term, an existential crisis. In their irrelevance, their economic irrelevance, they were nonetheless still on the ground occupying this place called Baltimore and they were going to have to endure somehow.

That’s the great horror show. What are we going to do with all these people that we’ve managed to marginalise? It was kind of interesting when it was only race, when you could do this on the basis of people’s racial fears and it was just the black and brown people in American cities who had the higher rates of unemployment and the higher rates of addiction and were marginalised and had the shitty school systems and the lack of opportunity.

And kind of interesting in this last recession to see the economy shrug and start to throw white middle-class people into the same boat, so that they became vulnerable to the drug war, say from methamphetamine, or they became unable to qualify for college loans. And all of a sudden a certain faith in the economic engine and the economic authority of Wall Street and market logic started to fall away from people. And they realised it’s not just about race, it’s about something even more terrifying. It’s about class. Are you at the top of the wave or are you at the bottom?

So how does it get better? In 1932, it got better because they dealt the cards again and there was a communal logic that said nobody’s going to get left behind. We’re going to figure this out. We’re going to get the banks open. From the depths of that depression a social compact was made between worker, between labour and capital that actually allowed people to have some hope.

We’re either going to do that in some practical way when things get bad enough or we’re going to keep going the way we’re going, at which point there’s going to be enough people standing on the outside of this mess that somebody’s going to pick up a brick, because you know when people get to the end there’s always the brick. I hope we go for the first option but I’m losing faith.

The other thing that was there in 1932 that isn’t there now is that some element of the popular will could be expressed through the electoral process in my country.

The last job of capitalism – having won all the battles against labour, having acquired the ultimate authority, almost the ultimate moral authority over what’s a good idea or what’s not, or what’s valued and what’s not – the last journey for capital in my country has been to buy the electoral process, the one venue for reform that remained to Americans.

Right now capital has effectively purchased the government, and you witnessed it again with the healthcare debacle in terms of the $450m that was heaved into Congress, the most broken part of my government, in order that the popular will never actually emerged in any of that legislative process.

So I don’t know what we do if we can’t actually control the representative government that we claim will manifest the popular will. Even if we all start having the same sentiments that I’m arguing for now, I’m not sure we can effect them any more in the same way that we could at the rise of the Great Depression, so maybe it will be the brick. But I hope not.

David Simon is an American author and journalist and was the executive producer of The Wire. This is an edited extract of a talk delivered at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney.

– To the original Article: ➡

– research thanks to Gus H.

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Conflict, Corporate takeover of Government, Corruption, CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Financial melt-down, Human Rights, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Wealth Disparity | No Comments »

“Managing Transparency”

Sunday, December 15th, 2013

By George Monbiot of the UK’s Guardian – 2 December 2013

Politicians and officials are desperately seeking to justify their transatlantic assault on democracy.

Panic spreads through the European Commission like ferrets in a rabbit warren. Its plans to create a single market incorporating Europe and the United States, progressing so nicely when hardly anyone knew, have been blown wide open. All over Europe people are asking why this is happening; why we were not consulted; for whom it is being done.

They have good reason to ask. The Commission insists that its Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership should include a toxic mechanism called investor-state dispute settlement. Where this has been forced into other trade agreements, it has allowed big corporations to sue governments before secretive arbitration panels composed of corporate lawyers, which bypass domestic courts and override the will of parliaments(1).

This mechanism could threaten almost any means by which governments might seek to defend their citizens or protect the natural world. Already it is being used by mining companies to sue governments trying to keep them out of protected areas(2,3); by banks fighting financial regulation(4); by a nuclear company contesting Germany’s decision to switch off atomic power(5). After a big political fight we’ve now been promised plain packaging for cigarettes. But it could be nixed by an offshore arbitration panel. The tobacco company Philip Morris is currently suing Australia through the same mechanism in another treaty(6).

No longer able to keep this process quiet, the European Commission has instead devised a strategy for lying to us. A few days ago an internal document was leaked(7). This reveals that a “dedicated communications operation” is being “coordinated across the Commission”. It involves, to use the EC’s chilling phrase, the “management of stakeholders, social media and transparency.” Managing transparency should be adopted as its motto.

The message is that the trade deal is about “delivering growth and jobs” and will not “undermine regulation and existing levels of protection in areas like health, safety and the environment”. Just one problem: it’s not true.

From the outset, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership has been driven by corporations and their lobby groups, who boast of being able to “co-write” it(8,9). Persistant digging by the Corporate Europe Observatory reveals that the commission has held eight meetings on the issue with civil society groups, and 119 with corporations and their lobby groups(10). Unlike the civil society meetings, these have taken place behind closed doors and have not been disclosed online.

Though the Commission now tells the public that it will protect “the state’s right to regulate”(11), this isn’t the message the corporations have been hearing. In an interview last week, Stuart Eizenstat, co-chair of the Transatlantic Business Council, instrumental in driving the process, was asked whether companies whose products had been banned by regulators would be able to sue(12). Yes. “If a suit like that was brought and was successful, it would mean that the country banning the product would have to pay compensation to the industry involved or let the product in.” Would that apply to the European ban on chicken carcasses washed with chlorine, a controversial practice permitted in the US? “That’s one example where it might.”

What the Commission and its member governments fail to explain is why we need offshore arbitration at all. It insists that domestic courts “might be biased or lack independence”(13), but which courts is it talking about? It won’t say. Last month, while trying to defend the treaty, the British minister Kenneth Clarke said something revealing:

“Investor protection is a standard part of free-trade agreements – it was designed to support businesses investing in countries where the rule of law is unpredictable, to say the least.”(14) So what is it doing in an EU-US deal? Why are we using measures designed to protect corporate interests in failed states in countries with a functioning judicial system? Perhaps it’s because functioning courts are less useful to corporations than opaque and injust arbitration by corporate lawyers.

As for the Commission’s claim that the trade deal will produce growth and jobs, this is also likely to be false. Barack Obama promised that the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement would increase US exports by $10bn. They immediately fell by $3.5bn(15). The 70,000 jobs it would deliver? Er, 40,000 were lost. Bill Clinton promised that the North American Free Trade Agreement would create 200,000 new jobs for the US; 680,000 went down the pan(16,17). As the commentator Glyn Moody says, “the benefits are slight and illusory, while the risks are very real.”(18)

So where are our elected representatives? Fast asleep. Labour MEPs, now frantically trying to keep investor-state dispute mechanisms out of the agreement, are the exception(19); the rest are in Neverland. The LibDem MEP Sir Graham Watson wrote in his newsletter, before dismissing the idea, “I am told that columnists on The Guardian and The Independent claim it will hugely advantage US multinational companies to the detriment of Europe.”(20) We said no such thing, as he would know had he read the articles, rather than idiotically relying on hearsay. The treaty is likely to advantage the corporations of both the US and the EU, while disadvantaging their people. It presents a danger to democracy and public protection throughout the trading area.

Caroline Lucas, one of the few MPs who remains interested in the sovereignty of parliament, has published an early day motion on the issue(21). It has so far been signed by only seven MPs. For the government, Kenneth Clarke argues that to ignore the potential economic gains of the trade agreement “in favour of blowing up a controversy around one small part of the negotiations, known as investor protection, seems to me positively Scrooge-like.”(22)

Quite right too. Overriding our laws, stripping away our rights, making parliament redundant: these are trivial and irrelevant beside the issue of how much money could be made. Don’t worry your little heads about it.

– To the original Article: ➡

– Research thanks to Piers L.

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Corporate takeover of Government, Corruption, CrashBlogging, Financial melt-down, Human Rights, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

AND NOW THE REST OF THE STORY ABOUT OBAMACARE

Wednesday, November 13th, 2013

– ObamaCare – we’ve all been hearing a lot of ‘bad’ news about it (and all that bad news is well funded and backed by the very people (read big business) who stand to lose money if people in the U.S. actually got a better deal on healthcare).

– Well, here’s the other side of the story that you WON’T find on the big U.S. networks (controlled as they are by big business).

– Thanks to my friend, Ron, at the Sky Valley Chronicle in the U.S. for writing this.

-dennis

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Just a few facts the nightly news left out

You would think that after the past few weeks watching the mainstream/lamestream nightly TV news shows and reading some newspapers that the screw ups with the rollout of the national website for the Affordable Health care Act (e.g. Obamacare) was of world importance.

Something right up there with global terrorism and young guys walking into schools, malls and airports with AK-47’s and commencing target practice.

Night after night (as modern Europe watches this surrealistic circus show and shakes its collective head in disbelief) Americans have been treated to lead stories about how horrible this terrible thing is/was/will forever be.

The screw up, we are led to believe is on the same par with the United States invading the wrong country (Iraq) that had nothing to do with the 911 terrorist attacks.

To find out how much that little number has cost you so far in your “hard earned tax dollars” and how much is still being rung up on the national credit card each second of every day, check here .

Makes the health care web site screw up look like a Pee Wee Herman movie by comparison.

And when it comes to right wing leaning media like Fox News, this government screw up is the equivalent of the end of Western Civilization.

According to Fox News there are as we speak roving bands of wild eyed, blood drooling socialists going house to house strangling with their bare hands women and children and little old grandmas.

And as they squeeze the last living breath out of them, the murdering socialists (who are probably atheists as well) look their victims straight in the eye and scream, “Obamacare sent us! And we’re gonna kill ya all!”

The world has come to an end. The sky is falling. Fade to black.

But is it possible, just barely possible that a few things are being left out of that story?

Let us look and see, shall we?

AND NOW, THE REST OF THE STORY

There is a woman most of you have probably never heard of as her story was one of many like it that perhaps never made it as a lead story on the nightly Big Three network news or at Fox News of late.

Her name is Lela Petersen and she is the owner of a small store called “Anything And Everything” in Flagler, Colorado.

She is one of millions of small business people across America that the GOP is always so concerned about. The GOP is forever saying this and that will “harm small business people.”

So the GOP will probably love this story because Ms. Petersen and her hubbie can now look forward to a retirement thanks to Obamacare.

You see, under the current spiffy “free market” health care “system” Petersen, 57 and her husband Mike, 60, have been stuck with God awful expensive health insurance.

The HMO policy they’ve had since 1992 is now costing $1,950 per month, just for the two of them. It is, and has been, eating them alive financially.

Lela told a reporter for National Public Radio (NPR), “When you pay $1,950 for insurance you might as well forget retirement. There’s just no way.”

Five years ago she was looking at early retirement but never in her wildest dreams did she imagine health insurance costing as much as the rest of her bills combined.

For Lela that free market health care boogie wasn’t working very well. But thanks to America’s new Affordable Care Act ,Lela expects her insurance bill will be cut by more than half in January

In case you didn’t catch that as the nightly news did not: a MORE than a 50% reduction in her family’s cost for insurance.

At the start of October she checked out Colorado’s insurance exchange and found the exact same policy from the same insurer for only $832 a month. “It’s dropping us down about $1,100 a month. We can retire. We can go fishing. We can actually see a future,” Petersen told NPR.

Here is what made the difference. Becoming part of an insurance “pool” created by the act helped Petersen reduce her cost. The federal law also forbids insurance companies from charging more for pre-existing conditions. That saved her a ton of dough and then federal tax credits brought the cost down even further.

Now, there are millions of small business people across this country who are in exactly the same boat as Lela was/is. See the significance?

MILLIONS.

Does it strike you as odd these stories weren’t part of the bombastic news coverage of late?

And according to NPR’s coverage, “The Affordable Care Act will bring big changes for a lot of people,especially those who want to retire before they’re eligible for Medicare.

A 2012 survey by Employee Benefit Research Institute found 53 percent of workers polled planned to stay in their jobs longer than they wanted to, so they could keep health insurance through their employer.”

Read more about Lela’s new lifeline to a retirement here .

THE HORROR STORIES OF OBAMACARE

Would it surprise you to know that some journalists have followed up on some of these horror stories of late about Obamacare that have been carried on the TV news and right wing media sites and found that…well, they only told part of the story?

A recent post on CNN noted, “Here are just some of the mythical stories journalists have helped dispel and the lessons we can learn from them about the reality of the Affordable Care Act.”

Among the stories was one about Deborah Cavallaro who “was making the rounds on television complaining about how her current insurance plan was canceled under Obamacare.”

So a Washington Post columnist named Michael Hiltzik talked to her. He found out her current plan cost $293 per month but had a deductible of $5,000 per year and out-of-pocket annual limits of $8,500. Also, the current plan covered just two doctor’s visits per year.

But in the California insurance exchange (that ol’ debil Obamacare) which Hiltzik helped Cavallaro check, she could get a “silver” plan for $333 per month — $40 more than she’s currently paying.

But the kicker is this: the new plan has only a $2,000 deductible and maximum out-of-pocket expenses at $6,350. Plus all doctor visits would be covered. Hiltzik writes, “Is that better than her current plan? Yes, by a mile.”

So the real story here is this: the tootie-fruitie fruit loop Cavallaro was suckering TV shows into letting her slobber all over the tube an untrue sob story about how Obamacare was hurting her – because she didn’t have brains enough to check things out herself – when the reality is Obamacare is saving her little tooshie money and getting her better health coverage to boot.

Or how about a woman named Dianne Barrette?

She shows up on a CBS News (that bastion of news credibility) report in which she bitched and moaned that her $54-per-month insurance plan had been “canceled” under Obamacare.

Then a woman named Nancy Metcalf at Consumer Reports looks into Barrette’s sob story and found that her current policy was a “textbook example of a junk plan that isn’t real health insurance at all.”

“According to Metcalf, if Barrette had ever tried to use her insurance for anything more than a sporadic doctor’s visit, “she would have ended up with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt,” according to the CNN report.

Do you still trust CBS News, the fabled “news” network “that Murrow built”?

Metcalf also found that Barrett’s plan, for instance, only pays for hospitalization in cases of “complications of pregnancy.”

“Instead, Metcalf found that Barrette could get a “silver” plan in the state insurance exchange for $165 per month that would actually cover Barrette in the case of any sort of serious or even moderate illness. Which is the very definition of insurance, isn’t it?,” says the CNN report.

Editor’s Note 11/9/13: A few days after this story was published, CBS News was forced to make a very public and embarrassing retraction of an “exclusive” news story it broadcast on the CBS news magazine show “Sixty Minutes,” about ten days ago as of this writing.

Why did the network have to retract it? Because much like the Dianne Barrette incident noted in this story that left egg on their newsie faces, the great journalists at CBS simply took somebody’s word for something without thoroughly checking that somebody out.

For the sordid truth about how CBS checks its sources go here .

Or how about this item from the same CNN report:

“According to a report by Dylan Scott at Talking Points Memo, a Seattle woman named Donna received a cancellation letter from her insurance company regarding her current plan. The letter steered Donna and her family into a more expensive option and said, “If you’re happy with this plan, do nothing.”

The letter made no mention of the Washington State insurance exchange, where Donna could find plenty of other more affordable choices, because the company wanted a convenient excuse to jack up Donna’s rates.

Had Donna “done nothing,” she would have ended up spending about $1,000 more per month on insurance than the cost of insurance she ultimately chose through the Obamacare exchange. In fact, the practice of trying to mislead customers has become so widespread that Washington state regulators issued a consumer alert to customers.”

You can find more such stories in that CNN report here .

Reuters ran a story recently about Mark Sullivan, a 31-year-old Texan who says he managed to sign up for coverage on the screwed up Obamacare website HealthCare.gov, and he says his new policy will save him enough money that he’ll l be able to start a new web-based business.

“A lot of reporters want to talk about the problems with the website,” Sullivan told Reuters. “I can understand that focus, but a lot are missing the bigger story” that many people in Obamacare will save money on their insurance.

Ah yes, the bigger story. What we called “the rest of the story” at the start of this piece.

Here is another part of that rest of the story. You’ve heard complaints from some people that their insurance companies are jacking up their rates or canceling their policies and blaming it on the Affordable Care Act?

The fact of the matter is insurance companies can do whatever they want in regards to raising your rates at the moment because the part of the Affordable Health Care Act that protects you from things like that will not come into fruition until 2014.

At that time the law will protect you from your rates being raised arbitrarily by an insurance industry that is not exactly known for looking out for consumers. (Look up the fun health insurance industry practice known as “rescission” – for years an industry secret – for an eye opener about this industry).

THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT: NOT A CURE ALL FOR A LONG SCREWED UP “THING”

And finally, it is good to remember that the Affordable Care Act does not fix every little thing that is wrong with a long screwed up, long out of control patchwork health insurance/health care thing (it’s not really a “system”) in this country. Far from it.

The Affordable Care Act is, after all, a huge compromise and one that was painfully made to satisfy Republicans and hard core conservatives who wanted nothing whatsoever done to fix America’s out of control health care nightmare, ergo their never ending false tales of “socialized medicine” and “death panels.”

You see by keeping the health insurance nightmare as it was, some people made a fortune off the misery of others.

Those people and corporations who made a fortune then spent lavishly on the campaigns of lawmakers who would in turn fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo — and make sure that millions of Americans never got access to affordable health insurance, even though they desperately needed it.

America is the only modern nation in the world where we make health care a game of winners and losers.

When all those European nations looked around at how to construct a health care/health insurance package for their citizens, it is telling that not one of them chose the system of winners and losers that was made famous in America

Not one.

Some think that if sensible minds had prevailed Democrats would have disregarded the GOP assault on health care reform and, when they had the votes in both houses, pushed through a simple, single payer system much like they have in Europe and that alone might have ended a good portion of the nightmare of health insurance in this country.

But even though it is a vast compromise, the Affordable health Care Act does make a huge difference in terms of offering better coverage to far more people and particularly women — such as eliminating co-pays for cancer screenings, adding in additional detection and prevention services such as mammograms and providing guaranteed treatment to women with preexisting conditions.

Many consider the Affordable Health Care Act as simply a first step, one of many, toward reforming health care in America so that it works for everyone — not just the rich, not just those who can afford it or have it supplied to them by an employer.

And in terms of women, over 45 million women have already taken advantage of the services provided to them since Obamacare was signed into law.

And for those who truly have lost a good health insurance plan they wanted to keep and will need to spend a bit more money due to requirements of the Affordable health Care Act – and there are some in that boat – President Obama has apologized that people are, “Finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me… we’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them, and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.”

“We didn’t do a good enough job in terms of how we crafted the law,” Obama told NBC News.

THE LOWDOWN

Most people buying insurance through the state run health exchanges will be eligible for federal subsidies in the form of tax credits.

Taking into account these subsidies, the administration has said a family of four with an income of $50,000 will generally be able to buy a silver-level plan for $282 a month, while a 27-year-old with income of $25,000 will be able to get such coverage for $145 a month.

The government says in Washington State for example, 758,004 people (91%) of Washington’s uninsured and eligible population may qualify for lower costs on coverage in the Marketplace, including through Medicaid.

Here in Washington State the insurance-exchange marketplace went online October 1st as theWashington HealthPlanFinder which is designed to be a one-stop shopping site to help and guide those that need affordable insurance but are not covered by a health plan where they work.

RATES

A chart produced by the New York Times on costs of the plans, state by state, shows a 27-year old individual who makes $45,960 a year in Iowa will be able to afford to buy a quality health insurance plan for $189 a month and a family of four in the same state that has an annual income of $50,000 a year and getting subsidies will be able to cover the entire family with health insurance for $282 a month.

That state by state chart can be found here .

However there are some exchanges across the country that won’t be fully operational for weeks and in some cases months.

Any insurance coverage that is purchased through the exchanges won’t actually take effect until January 1, 2014 when the health care law starts requiring most Americans to have insurance or pay a tax penalty.

To be covered starting Jan. 1st, people need to sign up for coverage through the exchanges by Dec. 15th.

The first open enrollment period runs from Oct. 1 to March 31.

Gary Cohen, Director of the federal Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight said premiums will be generally lower in states with strong competition in their insurance markets.

In the 36 states where the federal government has primary responsibility for the exchanges Cohen said people will be able to choose from an average of 53 health plans.

More on how the new health care exchanges operate can be found here .

The Seattle Times has a comprehensive “users guide” to the changes that are going into effect today that you’ll find here .

– To the original story: ➡

‘Uncomfortable’ climates to devastate cities within a decade, study says

Monday, November 4th, 2013

– This is what John Roach of NBC News has to say on October 9th, 2013

– But this has all been coming, writ large, for a long time.

-It’s been coming since:

Lyndon Johnson discussed the CO2 we were putting into the atmosphere in 1965.

Since the Club of Rome discussions and their paper on “The Limits to Growth” in 1972.

Since the World Scientists issued their warning to Humanity in 1992.

– But it is only just now beginning to reach the evening news as plausible news.

– We have just a few greedy, self-centered people and corporations to thank for the fact that their misinformation has been instrumental in delaying humanities waking up on these threats until it is virtually too late.

Most recently, Naomi Oreskes showed us this in her book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.

– Some of us remember how Mussolini ended up. I wonder, when the damages are finally appreciated, if these folks may fare the same. I won’t cry any crocodile tears for them; that’s for sure.

-By their actions many, many millions will die, cities and nations will fall, species innumerable will go extinct and most of our descendants will have less than optimal lives to look forward to; if they manage to live through the changes that are coming.

– dennis

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The world is hurtling toward a stark future where the web of life unravels, human cultures are uprooted, and millions of species go extinct, according to a new study. This doomsday scenario isn’t far off, either: It may start within a decade in parts of Indonesia, and begin playing out over most of the world — including cities across the United States — by mid-century.

What’s more, even a serious effort to stabilize spiraling greenhouse gas emissions will only stave off these changes until around 2069, notes the study from the University of Hawaii, Manoa, published online Wednesday in the journal Nature. The authors warn that the time is now to prepare for a world where even the coldest of years will be warmer than the hottest years of the past century and a half.

“We are used to the climate that we live in. With this climate change, what is going to happen is we’re going to be moving outside this comfort zone,” biologist Camilo Mora, the study’s lead author, told NBC News. “It is going to be uncomfortable for us as humans and it will be very uncomfortable for species as well.”

– To Read More of this article: ➡

– Still with the doubts, Sweetpea? Then please read this: ➡

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Capitalism & Corporations, Climate Change, Conflict, Corporate takeover of Government, Corruption, CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, CyberChaos, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Financial melt-down, Food Shortages, Fundamentalism, Human Rights, Immigration Stress, Mental Irrationality, Methane, Nuclear Waste, Ocean Acidification, Ocean Dead Zones, Pandemics, Politics - The Wrong Way, Pollution, Religion - The Wrong Way, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, Terrorism, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages, Wealth Disparity, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt

Tuesday, October 29th, 2013

– I don’t think the best of our idealists are going to be going out on Greenpeace ships any more to protest politely. Not when they stand to lose the most of their young lives sitting in Russian prisons for the crime of idealism and the crime of trying to wake people up to the stupidity and danger gathering all around us.

– The days or holding signs and protesting peacefully are withering away all over the world as people realize that none of that has been effective. And now it is become downright dangerous.

– I first read that an ecologically sane world and the world of Capitalism may not be compatible bedfellows on this planet back in 2008 when I read The Bridge at the Edge of the World by James Gustave Speth; Yale University. He is and has been a major leading light in all things environment in the U.S. and he’s been a team player all along. So, this was a hard conclusion for him to come to.

– In the article, below, Naomi Klein tells us that others up and down the line are coming to the same conclusions.

– If what we’ve been doing isn’t working and losing is not an option for those of us who love this world and our children, then quite simply, new measures will be needed.

– dennis

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Is our relentless quest for economic growth killing the planet? Climate scientists have seen the data – and they are coming to some incendiary conclusions.

In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.

But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).

Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.

Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people – along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street – represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved”, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, “if we’re thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem”.

Plenty of scientists have been moved by their research findings to take action in the streets. Physicists, astronomers, medical doctors and biologists have been at the forefront of movements against nuclear weapons, nuclear power, war, chemical contamination and creationism. And in November 2012,Nature published a commentary by the financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and “be arrested if necessary”, because climate change “is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence”.

– More: ➡

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Capitalism & Corporations, Climate Change, Conflict, Corporate takeover of Government, Corruption, CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Financial melt-down, Food Shortages, Fundamentalism, Human Rights, Mental Irrationality, Methane, Nuclear Waste, Ocean Acidification, Ocean Dead Zones, Pandemics, Politics - The Wrong Way, Pollution, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, Terrorism, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages, Wealth Disparity, Weather deterioration, Women's Rights | No Comments »

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