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Brand Name Deadpool

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , July 12th, 2010 @ 11:06 am

This post at the financial news website 24/7 Wall St. tries to emulate Paul The Octopus by predicting which companies and/or their well-known brand names will face the Vuvuzelas of Death in the next year. Among the likely octopus chow:

  • Radio Shack
  • Reader’s Digest
  • T-Mobile
  • Blockbuster Video
  • and, big surprise, BP

Some of their picks are simply going out of business, like Reader’s Digest and Blockbuster, while others are acquisition targets likely to be swallowed by some bigger corporate cephalopod (like T-Mobile), and some are just getting a makeover (BP, Kia Motors). Back in December, they correctly predicted doom for Newsweek, and before that they called it right on Saturn, but they have been premature on several others, so you might not want to bet your World Cup winnings on these picks, but it will be interesting to follow up on this six months from now to see how they’re doing.

A Brief Lesson On Neoliberalism

By Brian Filed in Videos Tagged with , , , , February 18th, 2010 @ 10:52 am

Rethinking The World

By Brian Filed in Links, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , , , December 11th, 2009 @ 2:10 pm

Three seemingly unrelated articles for anyone interested in seeing the world from a perspective a little bit broader than the pushme-pullyou game of American politics:

British historian and NYU professor Tony Judt recently gave a lecture in his role as director of the Eric Maria Remarque Institute looking at the successes and failures of social democracy in Europe. The New York Review of Books has an edited transcript of the lecture, which also considers why America is ambivalent toward social democracy: he points to the heterogeneity of our society and to the human tendency to discount the dangers of anything sufficiently far away (physically or in time). Given the current fascination in this country with what is or is not “socialist”, it’s worth having the historical overview about the very nature of the ideas of social democracy. Here is link to a video of the lecture (QuickTime), if you’d rather listen to it than read it.

The political humor website Political Irony has this post today with a short excerpt from a recent interview with Noam Chomsky as a commentary on the ironic situation that Big Business finds itself in as it tries to simultaneously convince Americans to both love and hate our government. On their own, these couple of paragraphs are quite illuminating (as is most everything Chomsky has to say about politics), but the whole interview itself is even better. The interview is ostensibly about the past successes of labor political action and how it could/should be renewed in our present times, but the conversation does drift into this bigger context of how corporations and corporatist government has been able to successfully convince most Americans that big business is good for them. Seen in juxtaposition to the Judt lecture, both pieces take on added layers of meaning when considering the long, slow march away from the social reforms of the mid 20th Century.

So, thirdly, there’s this modern take on Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” from the New Deal 2.0 blog at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. You may recall that Swift sarcastically suggested that the solution to systemic famine in Ireland was to start eating the Irish children. So, with tongue in cheek and eyes pointed quite firmly at conservative pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the author of the post suggests that the solution to our crumbling economy is to deport the poor until we reach 100% employment. Even though the author, Marshall Auerback, is being as sarcastic as Swift, it is not at all difficult to imagine some right-winger coming up with this idea and running with it sort of the way Lou Dobbs has done with the bugaboo of immigration. I think this post actually goes very nicely with the Chomsky interview as an example, if exaggerated for effect, of exactly how our power brokers work overtime to undermine notions of social justice and economic equality.

But It’s Still A Bloodsucking Parasite

By Brian Filed in News, Politics Tagged with , , , November 9th, 2009 @ 11:41 am

lesser-of-two-weevils

As I’m sure you know, the House of Representatives very narrowly passed the Democratic health care reform bill in a late-night session on Saturday. The House bill did manage to include the so-called public option and doing away with pre-existing condition exclusions, but otherwise is very little more than what President Obama himself famously called “putting lipstick on a pig” in terms of making any substantive changes to the system.

Thirty-six Democrats voted against the bill. The New York Times offers this excellent infographic about the “nays” and concludes that 22 of the 36 are freshman representatives in districts that normally go Republican, and those who aren’t are the infamous “Blue Dog” Democrats. But standing alone among these is Dennis Kucinich.

Congressman Kucinich voted against this bill for one very good reason: IT IS JUST ANOTHER HANDOUT TO A CORPORATE CONSTITUENCY. Just in case you can’t be bothered to read Kucinich’s entire statement, I’ll share a couple of points with you:

Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. They are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care. Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick…

During the debate, when the interests of insurance companies would have been effectively challenged, that challenge was turned back. The “robust public option” which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million. An amendment which would have protected the rights of states to pursue single-payer health care was stripped from the bill at the request of the Administration. Looking ahead, we cringe at the prospect of even greater favors for insurance companies….

This health care bill continues the redistribution of wealth to Wall Street at the expense of America’s manufacturing and service economies which suffer from costs other countries do not have to bear, especially the cost of health care. America continues to stand out among all industrialized nations for its privatized health care system. As a result, we are less competitive in steel, automotive, aerospace and shipping while other countries subsidize their exports in these areas through socializing the cost of health care.

In the spin cycle that has followed the bill’s passage, the apologists for the Democratic leadership and the administration have argued that something is better than nothing, but that’s like saying instead of putting two dog turds in your hand, they only put one. There’s no serious reform aimed at the insurance companies at all, least of all the notion that the existence of the “public option” will force the insurance companies to give up their profit-driven denials of care and stonewalling of payments. Instead, what really happens is that the Democratic House leadership gets to score some questionable points, even when the Senate inevitably rejects their version of the bill, and Obama gets to avoid the blame for not being able to deliver on one of the most important domestic issues facing the country. So I guess that’s a “Win”, right? Bah.

The Slippery Slope

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , February 9th, 2009 @ 1:39 pm

You might have seen the graph on the top already — it was posted on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s blog yesterday (by a staffer, of course…you don’t think Nancy actually does those sorts of things herself do you? She has a person for that, dear) and subsequently appeared all over the political blogs and even ended up on BoingBoing. I saw it first at David Isenberg’s blog.

Pretty effin’ scary. The red and blue lines represent job losses after peak employment for the 1990 recession (Bush I) and the 2001 recession (Clinton-Bush II). The green line headed straight for the bottom is the current recession. As Pelosi’s blog points out, it represents a loss of 3.6 million jobs.

Like a lot of graphs, though, it’s a little deceptive. It doesn’t take into account the differences in the size of the labor markets in each period. That doesn’t mean the loss of 3.6 million jobs isn’t significant, because that’s a pretty scary number, it just doesn’t give you an idea of how that relates to the overall job market. It has also been pointed out that Pelosi’s graph is comparing the current situation to two relatively mild recessions for the sake of over-emphasizing the plunge of the green line.

So observe the second graph, which comes from economists Susan Woodward and Robert Hall. Their graph compares the current recession to the recession of 1981 (Reagan), which was the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s…until now. This graph re-indexes the 1981 numbers to the present size of the labor market to present a more realistic comparison.

Still, pretty effin’ scary because, as they point out in the text of the post, if the February job loss numbers continue the downward trend, Reagan’s Recession will get bumped down to Third Worst of All Time. We still have quite a bit of depth to plumb to get to the ~25% unemployment at the worst of the Great Depression, but even this graph makes it pretty evident we haven’t bottomed out yet.

Buddy, Can You Spare $18 Billion?

By Brian Filed in Links, News Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , February 5th, 2009 @ 3:04 pm

A few links about the neverending clusterfuck we have gotten ourselves into economically:

Harvard professor and darling-of-the-right Niall Ferguson gave this interview to Vanity Fair, where he asserts that the United States really has no choice but to walk away from its colossal foreign debt, because the only other option is complete collapse. He makes a few other salient points along the way, most notably that China is also completely fucked because of us and can’t really do anything about it economically, but absolutely has the upper hand on any diplomatic disputes that might arise for a long, long time to come. Coincidentally, he’s plugging his new book The Ascent of Money, which he says he planned to have published just as the entire world economy fell into the shitter, since that’s a GREAT way to sell books.

But it looks like he’s not talking out of his ass on this. This article on a financial news website called Seeking Alpha offers pretty much the same conclusions as Ferguson’s, albeit in more technical financial jargon (via Polymeme). The whole damn country is about to miss its mortgage payment, and when that happens you’ll be using your 401(k) statements for toilet paper. So don’t go calling Cash4Gold.com just yet.

Meanwhile, I think a lot of people are still trying to pick their jaws up off the floor over the reports of $18 BILLION dollars being handed out to Wall Street executives using our precious “bailout” money. Not to mention the daily stream of stories about banks spending millions on stadium naming rights, the BofA CEO with the multimillion-dollar decorating bill, and other such rubbing-your-nose-in-it shenanigans. At The Seminal, contributor Chris Edelson did a little quick math to come up with some of the other things we could have done with that $18B besides piss it away on the bailout. For example, the S-CHIP bill, which was passed by both houses of Congress last week (and was vetoed TWICE by George Bush) will add $32 billion per year to a program that already costs $25 billion per year. The bailout bonus money could have paid for that increase for two years running without the increase in cigarette taxes which will be the funding mechanism.

Now, some regular visitors here don’t much like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, but I think he’s one of the best representatives any state in America could ask for. Like a lot of us, Bernie is simply PISSED OFF about the bailout and the flagrant contempt with which the Wall Street criminals are raping this country. Last week, Bernie sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry “Gutless Wonder” Reid demanding that the Senate begin investigations into the disbursement and use of TARP funds. President Obama’s “salary cap” proposal is a first step, but a laughable one when you consider the scope of the fraud being committed, and nothing short of an investigating committee with a freshly-sharpened guillotine is going to have any real impact.

Regular readers know that I have posted a couple of times about the economic disaster as it has played out in Iceland, and you probably heard that the government there fell, as well as the story about the new prime minister being a lesbian (which, like Obama being black is all well and good but not particularly relevant at this moment in history). But next on the chopping block is Latvia, where rioting nearly brought down the government last week. The problems in Latvia are strikingly similar to those in Iceland, but a compounding issue for the Balkan country is that a third of the population is Russian, and they are agitating over what they call discrimination against them. That, in turn, could give Russia an excuse to cause trouble, if it so chose.

And while those two cold northern countries are struggling, so is the “Las Vegas of the Arab World”, Dubai. Unlike Iceland and Latvia, though, Dubai’s troubles all come from their overheated real estate speculation. This post at The Daily Clarity outlines the heart of the problem, which has manifested itself in the rapid departure of hundreds of ex-pat workers and businessmen who were fueling the Dubai land grabs. They point to this Times of London article about the recent phenomenon of luxury cars being abandoned at Dubai’s international airport by businessmen getting out while the getting is good. I’m actually a little surprised that American businessmen haven’t started pulling the same shit, but maybe they’re waiting for those bailout bonus checks to clear first.

The Unfriendly Skies

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , August 5th, 2008 @ 1:02 pm

This has been the year of nickel-and-diming airline passengers to death by charging for in-flight amenities that used to be free. Everything from luggage to snacks to beverages. Anything to keep those CEO compensation packages sky-high, eh fellas?

The latest announcement comes from JetBlue, which will start charging $7.00 for a pillow and a blanket. As that story says, the company is trying to put an eco-friendly spin on it by saying it will encourage people to bring their own pillows and blankets and will cut down on spreading germs from shared use, but a fee is a fee.

Also on tap for JetBlue: a surcharge for non-crash landings!

For the time being, the folks from the Gestapo haven’t found too many ways to wring a few extra bucks out of your wallet…except of course for the extortion money that they allow this company to squeeze out of business travelers in exchange for not being hassled by a TSA goon at the security checkpoint. However, they have discovered a potentially lucrative sideline in seizing laptops without reason or cause and then selling them off (they haven’t tried selling them yet, but they will take them if they feel like it).

There are a couple of little victories for the average airline passenger, though. Check this out:

It’s called “paper shampoo”. It’s dried shampoo formed into thin sheets that reconstitute when you get them wet. No more 3-ounce bottles in clear plastic bags to threaten our American freedoms!

Similarly, male travelers might want to invest in one of these:

It’s a belt that does not have a metal buckle or any other metal on it, so you no longer have to try to walk through the metal detector holding up your pants with one hand and carrying your shoes in the other. That web vendor says that this belt is the largest-selling item they carry, so it seems like word is getting out.

I realize that air travel is an unavoidable part of doing business for millions of people in this country, and I do not expect either McCain or Obama to change a single thing about the clusterfuck that our air transportation system has turned into, so you have to take the small gains where you can find them.

UPDATE This just in: Authorites at San Francisco’s airport report that a laptop was stolen from the TSA and that the laptop contains the entire unencrypted database of all the personal information of 33,000 people who signed up for the aforementioned “Clear” extortion service. Poetic irony, is it not?

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE Now the self-same agency charged with protecting Our Beloved Homeland says that they found the laptop…in the same office where it was supposed to be all along! To beef up their efforts in the wake of this embarrassing incident, the TSA will now require ALL airline passengers to strip naked at the security checkpoint. It’s the only way they can ensure our safety.

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