Just a few months ago I posted a link to Dave Pollard’s 56-item How to Save the World Reading List. Today, Pollard has an expanded 80-item list. The new list seems to have more anti-corporate books. Good.
Archive for the ‘Corporate Power’ Category
How to Save the World Reading List #2
Friday, April 14th, 2006Compulsory Corporate Health Insurance
Tuesday, April 11th, 2006Boston IMC: on The Threat Of Compulsory Insurance:
The precedent of compelling drivers to purchase private auto insurance is bad enough, but one can opt out. One doesn’t have to drive, they say. The only way to opt out of compulsory health insurance, however, would be to die.
….in Massachussets, unless one is really poor, one will be compelled by tax penalties etc to patronize private health insurance businesses! This is no one’s idea of Universal Health Insurance…and it sure isn’t Single Payer. It’s more like Universal Compulsory Customer.Do Bay Staters realize that this also would compel them to pay for insurer advertising, CEO bonuses, redundant administrations, campaign contributions, corporate jets and headquarters maintenance, legal suits, conventions, etc? Do they realize that money spent on such non-health-related things is money taken from their health care? Do they ask what possible Public Interest justification there is for compelling such support of non-health related things?
Do they also realize that they would be compelled to simultaneously supply funds for insurers’ Wall Street investments in businesses the insurance customers may not even know about or that they may disapprove of for any number of moral, religious, political, or business reasons?
If their health insurer is Cigna, for instance, they may be inadvertently and unknowingly supplying millions of dollars in investment money for top cigarette manufacturers….if Cigna hasn’t divested since the PBHP report on this scandal. Would our “anti-smoking” friends agree to help support Big Cig in this way? (Same applies to Prudential, MetLife, Aetna, Travelers, etc.)
[Links to Physicians for a National Health Program]
That a state may compel patronage of any private industry is what Mussolini preferred to call Corporatism—at its worst. It raises serious Constitutional questions regarding Freedom of Speech by requiring speaking, with words and/or money, to insurers or any entity.This is a serious assault on the idea of Single Payer…of getting private insurers out of the way of a Public Health System. Not much is being done to stop this because, for one reason, many like the sound of “universal insurance”. If private insurers co-opt that term, we need to change our rhetoric. The distinction must now be clearly between Corporate Insurance and Public Insurance.
Long-distance fast-food orders
Tuesday, April 11th, 2006The Long-Distance Journey of a Fast-Food Order – New York Times:
Ms. Vargas seems unfazed by her job, even though it involves being subjected to constant electronic scrutiny. Software tracks her productivity and speed, and every so often a red box pops up on her screen to test whether she is paying attention. She is expected to click on it within 1.75 seconds. In the break room, a computer screen lets employees know just how many minutes have elapsed since they left their workstations.
The pay may be the same, but this is a long way from flipping burgers. “Their job is to be fast on the mouse — that’s their job,” said Douglas King, chief executive of Bronco Communications, which operates the call center.
The center in Santa Maria has been in operation for 18 months; a print-out tacked to a wall declares, “Over 2,540,000 served.” McDonald’s says it is still experimental, but it puts an unusual twist on an idea that is gaining traction: taking advantage of ever-cheaper communications technology, companies are creating centralized staffs of specially trained order-takers, even for situations where old-fashioned physical proximity has been the norm.
The job? Taking your McDonald’s drive-up order. Seems that’s faster for the big Mac than because they don’t waste time waiting for the car behind you to drive up.
The call-center system allows employees to be monitored and tracked much more closely than would be possible if they were in restaurants. Mr. King’s computer screen gives him constant updates as to which workers are not meeting standards. “You’ve got to measure everything,” he said. “When fractions of seconds count, the environment needs to be controlled.”
Something needs to be controlled, but I doubt this is the direction most people think we should be headed. Not that we actually have much say about corporate decisions about our lives.
(Thanks again, Eliot.)
Shopping Mania
Thursday, January 5th, 2006My regular column in today’s Brookline TAB:
I wasn’t going to rant again this year about shopping. With the Christmas/Hanukkah gift-giving frenzy finally behind us, I figured I’d skip the diatribe about materialism and gluttony, capitalism and fashion, consumerism and guilt. Besides, complaining about something I’ve been known to dabble in myself from time to time can get pretty weird.
Three news stories changed my mind.
The first, in last week’s TAB, describes a new Brookline Village eyeglass shop. Now, I don’t mean to pick on the owner. Really. I applaud the Brookline High School graduate’s effort to build a small independent business in defiance of larger chains. I appreciate her enthusiasm. I’ll even wander inside the next time I need glasses.
But although my trifocals still work just fine, the store’s owner already thinks I need another pair. As she put it, in words the TAB repeated in “Quips & Quotes,” “Glasses are one of the most important things you wear. People have 10 pairs of shoes but only one pair of glasses. People should have just as many glasses. They change your expression. They change your face.”
There’s more: “When you work during the day, you don’t wear the same outfit out at night. Why would you want to wear the same eyeglasses?”
I’m not as completely out of it as I sometimes seem. Despite advancing age and crankiness, I’m not against people trying to look nice, even though I don’t always bother myself. I know that non-dorky eyeglass frames matter to people who care about fashion. I even let my daughter talk me into buying her frames our insurance plan doesn’t completely pay for. But one pair. Not 10.
Even here in high-income Brookline, there’s got to be a limit.
That brings me to last Sunday’s Boston Globe, which informed us that 1 in 20 Boston-area households now consist of millionaires. That percentage rises to 20% in Chestnut Hill, which straddles Brookline and Newton, and to 26% in Lincoln and Weston. Although “a million dollars isn’t what it used to be” and can’t buy private planes or private chefs, the story tells us, Boston’s millionaire-profusion is drawing even more high-end stores and restaurants.
At the new Back Bay Smith & Wollensky’s Steakhouse, I learned, the average diner spends $72, almost an order of magnitude above my own usual restaurant tab. If I had $72 to spend on dinner, would I? Or would the price make me gag? I don’t know.
I do know that my family falls somewhere between the two emerging classes the Globe described: “One earns above the region’s median family income, about $75,000 in the Boston area and lives in comfort, with job security, stock holdings, and little debt. The other half earns below the median, has far less job security, and worries about credit card debt and student loans.” Brookline remains economically varied, but its tilt toward the upper end shapes its economic base beyond the new eyeglass store and distorts the values transmitted in school and on the streets.
The conglomeration of excess and class and inequality and waste makes me appreciate the third news story, which appeared just before Christmas. The evangelical group American Family Association is asking people not to buy Christmas presents for other adults next year and to send the money to charity instead. As AFA president Tim Wildmon says, “We want people to get back to what Christmas should be about.”
I’m not sure what Christmas should be about, but as a Jew I’m glad to see Tikkun Magazine’s Rabbi Michael Lerner join the call. Lerner’s Network of Spiritual Progressives demonstrated outside shopping centers against consumerism during last month’s Christmas/Hanukkah shopping rush, part of a broader effort to focus attention on values beyond what money can buy.
I hope AFA extends its anti-buying appeal to gifts for kids, too, even though I’m not sure how successful that would be given popular culture’s fascination with the new and the fashionable, the impact of corporate advertising, and the mixed-motive determination of so many families to spend to excess whether they can afford it or not. Reining in shopping mania may seem quaint, but it’s worth the effort.
“Ethical” Investing
Friday, April 29th, 2005“Socially responsible investing” became a buzzword when high-income baby boomers with unexpectedly bulging stock portfolios began wondering how to apply their politics to their money-making. It’s good to see Paul Hawken’s criticism of this so-called “ethical investing“:
When you invest in such SRI funds as Domini, Calvert, Sierra Club and Pax, you are investing in American corporations that fight against environmental regulation; whose trade associations lobby against living wages or increases in the minimum wage; that lobby for and receive corporate welfare from Congress in the form of pork-barrel tax breaks and subsidies; create non-profit organizations to fight claims that junk food causes obesity; prevent people from getting price breaks on pharmaceuticals, whose CEOs raise millions of dollars for the Bush administration’s assault on human rights and the environment, and more. You would never know this because you invest in the “language” of social responsibility, not the reality.
I’ve criticized this ethical-investing notion several times while focusing on corporate power, especially in a 1996 psychology journal article criticizing the concept of “corporate personhood” and in an opinion piece in 2000 that asked this question: “How can we satisfy our own legitimate needs without strengthening the capitalist system that prevents egalitarian social institutions from developing?”
Unfortunately, I was better at describing the dilemma than resolving it. Indeed, when I ended up with some unexpected money of my own from an insurance settlement, I just dumped it into a “socially responsible” Domini fund. But I still think my conclusion makes troubling sense:
The truth is we have no good options. The left has been out-maneuvered by a structural adjustment of the US economy that’s muddied the line between capitalists and the rest of us. Worse, to the extent that our personal finances really do depend on the health of corporate institutions, we’re not likely to create alternatives. We may still march in Seattle or DC against corporate-designed structural adjustments imposed by the IMF on Third World nations. But people whose minds are on their readjusted portfolios may find it hard to work up much enthusiasm.
Bush and Kerry Both Wrong on Education
Thursday, October 14th, 2004At one point during the third presidential debate, John Kerry pointed out that George W. Bush failed to answer a question about job losses. After quickly advising laid off workers to go back to school, the president simply bragged at length about his public school education initiative, the so-called No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Bush never did explain how improving the education of young children helps their parents find jobs.
Kerry might have used his nuanced analytical abilities to make two needed comments. First, education is not the all-purpose cure that mainstream public figures claim it is. The individual pursuit of yet one more degree can’t compensate for structural economic inequality even if it enables one laid-off worker to beat another laid-off worker for one of the few remaining jobs. And second, instead of raising public school education to a higher level, No Child Left Behind is really designed to achieve the opposite. But Kerry made neither point.
Directly challenging the notion that more education is always a sufficient policy response would have run counter to America’s individualist ideology. And exposing No Child Left Behind as the elitist, corporate-initiated sham that it is would have been indelicate, given that Kerry himself voted for it. So the Massachusetts senator just repeated his routinely weak criticism: the problem with NCLB is that Bush never funded it as promised. Instead of pledging to end NCLB’s attack on public education, Kerry merely said he would make sure the law is fully funded.
Education is a wonderful thing, but different kinds of education lead to different results. Many parents want their children not only to learn the basics — to read and do math and obtain other skills they’ll need for college and jobs — but to learn how to think more effectively about complex issues. Indeed, advocates of public education have long argued that just such an outcome is crucial in a diverse democratic society.
Wrestling with complexity is a skill that schools can teach. It means letting students study topics in depth rather than skirt disconnected topics superficially. It means drawing connections between different areas of study rather than studying each in isolation. And it means acknowledging that some questions — particularly value questions — have no unambiguously right answers, only opposing positions with very different societal consequences.
Many parents and legislators support the federal No Child Left Behind plan and the many similar state plans that preceded it because they mistakenly believe drastic action is necessary to fix our schools. We’ve all grumbled at cashiers who can’t make change when the cash register breaks. Yet American public schools that receive adequate funding do well when compared with those in other countries. Our schools’ problems have more to do with drastic income gaps between rich and poor districts than they do with anything else.
The forces behind state and federal “education reform” know this very well. Indeed, they want to make sure public schools focus on basics so that more high school graduates can manage that cash register and read their job assignments when they show up for their shift at Walmart. But teaching public school kids to think critically about the world around them? That’s not on the corporate agenda. After all, that’s what private school does, for those who can afford it.
No Child Left Behind requires public schools (but not private schools) to test all students every year from third grade on. Every school must make “adequate yearly progress” toward 100 percent student proficiency by the year 2014. If even one subcategory fails (limited English-speaking, disabled, poor, racial and ethnic categories) or has fewer than 95 percent of its students take the test, the entire school fails. A second failure in a row — even by a different subgroup the second year — invokes sanctions ranging from letting students transfer to other schools (most of which will also soon “fail”) to firing teachers to replacing local school officials with state bureaucrats. According to education researchers, NCLB ensures that every state will eventually conclude its schools are so bad they must either be taken over or privatized. We’ll end up with back-to-basics public schools for the poor and middle class and a few elite public schools — and lots of private ones — preparing wealthier children to aim well above Walmart.
Kerry might have pointed this out.
——————–
This was first published today on eTalkinghead.com.
See my previous essays on high-stakes testing.
Corporate Assaults
Wednesday, October 6th, 2004Yesterday’s mail brought two book ads: Why is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? by Kathy Emery and Susan Ohanian, and Sickness and Wealth: The Corporate Assault on Global Health, edited by Meredith Fort, Mary Anne Mercer, and Oscar Gish. The ads remind me I haven’t yet ranted on this new blog about corporate power. I’ll have to remedy that soon.
As visitors to my regular website may have noticed, I have written about corporate issues on and off for some time. I recently joined the advisory board of the new Massachusetts group Center for Democracy and the Constitution, which aims to end the legal rights corporations never should have gotten in the first place. I first looked into this issue more than a decade ago, when I learned about the sorry process leading to the legal fiction that corporations are “legal persons.” I’m glad to see there’s now a large literature on the subject.
I have the Emery-Ohanian book, by the way (I keep getting things for free in the mail, I suppose because publishers think I’ll review them). Though I haven’t read it yet, I know Susan Ohanian from our common work against government-mandated high-stakes testing of public school students, a bipartisan corporate-pushed corruption of public education that began even before the Bush Administration’s so-called No Child Left Behind Act made things worse. Ohanian does good work, much of it on her website.
