The myth of competition

I don't think I need Thomas Piketty to point out that massive conglomerations of  Capital and the drive toward monopoly are one of the failure modes of Capitalism in which consumers have not only fewer choices but less money to fuel the system.  Perhaps it's a bit like Stellar evolution where using up all the hydrogen causes bloat and eventual implosion. 

The traditional anthems sing about competition and opportunity, but in truth any capitalist enterprise wants to stifle competition and give competitors as little opportunity as possible and when the enterprise in question is control of information and opinion and even of desire and ambition in the public -- well the prospect of  media consolidation  in a country that depends on that industry for its information and opinion is simply frightening.   We might as well just hand over the keys to the Capitol along with our proxies when elections here become as much of a one party farce as those we used to laugh at in other countries.

AT&T plans to buy out DirecTV in a 67 Billion dollar deal and while current DirecTV customers like me will probably start to worry that my current $170 a month bill will escalate further and my service will decline to U-verse levels of not giving a damn, our real worry should be, as Professor Picketty would doubtless agree, that it's beginning to look a lot like Orwell.

Isn't it time to suggest that all this blather about Obama the Socialist is a smokescreen put up by interests with no other interest than to monopolize the country and reduce us all to penury, inescapable debt and serfdom? struggling to pay for what they want to sell us?  I think it is and I think our biggest danger as a free and prosperous country is to protect what they, the media, the voice of monopoly tell us is our freedom. 

McRussia

The 31st of January dawned cold but clear in Moscow in 1990. It had been two years since the Communist Party had given their permission to open the first McDonalds in the former Soviet Union. Located in Moscow's Pushkin Square, the largest McDonalds restaurant had 28 cash registers and seating capacity for around 700 people.

That capacity was quickly exceeded, as people stood in line for up to six hours for their first taste of Western fast food. The Moscow restaurant broke a record for first-day sales for any McDonalds in the world - they served 30,000 people that day alone.



They remain popular in Russia almost 25 years later: McDonalds controls 70% of the Russian fast-food market, and the flagship store in Pushkin Square still serves 20,000 people per day. Ironically, it wasn't the American headquarters of the McDonalds Corporation which had pushed the new branch of the franchise. It was the head of McDonalds Canada, George Cohen, who had opened the twelve-year-long negotiations with the Soviet Union.

But within 8 months of the first McDonalds restaurant opening, the Berlin Wall fell. And within two years, the Soviet Union was dissolved.

So the next time someone tries to tell you that Ronald Reagan toppled the USSR, you can tell them that, no, it was Ronald McDonald that killed the bear.

Beer, Bigots and Business

My Nietzschean opinions about religion are no secret although I really don’t believe, as some do, that religious belief is the root of all evil.  Bigotry doesn’t  kill people after all:  bigoted people do.  Is the current attempt by some Republican legislators to revisit the arguments of the 50’s and 60’s really best handled by signs and chants and proclaiming just how nasty their ignorant beliefs are?  Do we try to outlaw speech?  Make hate illegal? Do we party like it's 1964?

The civil rights movement didn’t depend on changing people’s minds, it was about forbidding practices that are not in the best interests of  our fellow Americans. The Fed has the power to regulate trade in the best interests of the nation after all. It’s funny you don’t hear it couched in those terms but I suggest that’s really what this is all about. It's about what nearly everything is about: money and power.

 Segregation was bad for business.  Bigotry stifles the free flow of capital. The south began to prosper only after segregation ended and the extension of equal protection to all improved.  Republicans are aware of this. Like some religious leaders, they only use the "government is the enemy of freedom" argument to generate votes.  They use a fictitious attack on religious freedom to rally the fringes who would otherwise never be a part of the democratic process,  making a devil’s bargain perhaps by ignoring Lovecraft’s warning never to call up what they can’t put down.  I think this effort will be stillborn except as a last ditch to use the power of evil to win one last round of elections. It just might drag them all right down to hell with the crazies they riled up.  I hope so.

That they are really only using the small-minded for that purpose is illustrated, perhaps by the attempt a few years back to pass a county law forbidding merchants to advertise in or describe their wares in anything but English. It was applauded by the anti-Immigrant crowd.  It had much sound and fury behind it, but  It simply faded away and likely as soon as the phones began to ring at Republican headquarters  -- because no merchant is going to kiss off 25% of his potential customers and if he has to use Urdu to sell groceries or cars, he’s going to do it. Bigotry is bad for business, se habla español attracts it.

 The proposition was probably intended to portray the Party as defenders of some obscure American value like fear of immigrants and probably did so as far as the run of the mill Florida lowlife was concerned, but  preventing people from spending money is a hard sell when you’re selling it to Capitalists. 

 Minorities of all kinds aren’t really insignificant in numbers anymore.  More gay people are open about it and if you add up all the people  the Hard Right objects to, they are actually a majority.  If you’re the grocer, the restaurant, the bank or the  taxi company in town and you don’t want to do business with  “those people,” no matter who your religion tells you to hate, someone else will.   Of course it’s pretty hard to identify gay people unless they're forced to wear pink badges, but the better you are at it, the smaller your customer base will be. The bigots won't buy extra groceries from your store, but the gay people and those who think they should be treated like Americans won't buy any.  In most cases, your competition will eat you alive. Money talks and if you turn away business, it will walk elsewhere and talk to somebody else. 

Now that’s not an argument for just letting Arizona businesses stomp on the law and American values in the name of God.  It’s an argument that this has nothing to do with religion or the free exercise thereof.  That should be obvious from the prospect of some oh-so-devout Christian refusing a drink of water to a thirsty traveler on Christian grounds.  And yes, that groaning sound you hear actually is Jesus.  

The argument that forcing some self righteous, anti-Christian casuist to feed Adam and Steve for having a David and Jonathan relationship is a violation of religious freedom is vapid.  Republicans, or the people who pull their strings and finance their campaigns care about business not religion or individual rights.  It’s about the free, unregulated exercise of business and it’s the ability of the Government to regulate trade that’s in their gun sights.  Hands off business, no more regulation, no more responsibility for the dire consequences to the public your business causes. No health care, no minimum wage, no unions, no sick pay no vacations.  No more EPA, no more OSHA, no more FDA.  Nobody on the Right cares about who eats at  the lunch counter,  it’s the toxic waste, the air pollution, the environmental disasters they want to perpetrate and they sell it as a question of our freedom because people only consider the facts they are given and don’t look at the wider picture.   

The low information voters buy it.  The religious fanatics buy it and all the other classes of people who have been trained to salivate at any hint the government is curbing their freedom buy it, but it’s those who hate your freedom  behind it.

Want them to listen?  Don’t appeal to their sense of morality, speak to their greed.  Let them know we are not going to eat their chicken, drink their beer or do anything  that profits the people that sell to segregated, anti-American businesses.  We won’t visit their states, watch their football teams or buy their products and watch those bigoted blowhards shrivel up and blow away and when I say we, I think I’m speaking for a Majority.  It’s easy for them to resist what them “Libtards” are forcing them to do. Easy for them to claim persecution but damned hard for them to thrive without money.  Don’t talk to Arizona, talk to Budweiser and it will be a dry and dusty day in East Shithook Arizona  when the beer truck don’t stop there no more.

How Best To Consider the Current Election Cycle?

I keep hearing that "no president has been re-elected since the 1950s with unemployment rates this high," or words to that effect, but I think a different pattern may well apply to the 2012 elections – 1936 and 1940.  People voted FDR back in even though the country was still suffering through the Great Depression and unemployment (though down from 1932-34's stunning over-20% figures) remained distressingly high.  They probably voted for FDR because they had memories extending back at least a bit more than, say, five minutes, and they understood that the Republicans had nothing to offer except soup lines and a return to the policies that had at least in part resulted in the Great Depression, which was a worldwide phenomenon, just as the economic distress today is global.  When you have la merde smeared all over your tie, you can't get away with telling everybody it's chocolate ice cream.  At least not for a while, anyway.

Current polls show clearly that a big majority of Americans (something like 67%) do NOT blame the president for the economy.  It is stupid to toss a president out on his ear solely because of how the economy is performing, unless you have rock-solid evidence that his policies are contributing to the problem.  Presidents' control over the economy is limited in spite of the claims they feel compelled to make when they're running for election, so the question is whether the current leader is doing the only things that can be done, given the circumstances.  In the present case, that pretty much means advocating intelligent policies since, of course, congressional cynics, liars and knaves have blocked most of what the president has tried to do.  They have disregarded just about every known ameliorative strategy since the advent of modern economics, for a reason it's hard to construe as anything other than the thoroughly despicable one of ensuring President Obama's failure.

But on the whole, what I'm suggesting is upbeat: we may be looking at an election in which millions of voters make their decision and carry it out more along the lines of the 1936 and 1940 cycles than anything we have seen recently.  That would make sense because the downturn we have been going through is widely acknowledged to be the worst economic trouble the country has suffered since the Depression itself.  Mitt Romney is a poster child for the sort of predatory capitalism that scares the hell out of a lot of working people.  He seems to me to be ideologically sympatico with the ultra-privileged Wall Streeters who caused our troubles in the first place.  What's not to not like about such a candidate?  The more people know about him, the less they're taken with, or taken in by, his usually genteel manner and always elegant appearance. 

There are some signs that the Obama campaign is a lot tougher than some previous Democratic ones: the Bain ads strike some people as mean (mostly whiny disingenuous Republicans and mush-mouthed otherpundits), but they're exactly the sort of thing successful candidates do: define opponents as something unflattering before they know what hit them, and then it's too late for them to define themselves. 

Besides, the heart of the matter with regard to Romney's tenure at Bain isn't SEC forms or anything like that, it's the fact that the man wants to take credit for the experience he had with that firm, but only selectively.  And why is he doing that?  Well, because, like all market mythologists, he's eager to acknowledge all the good stuff a person can say about capitalist enterprise, and determined to disavow any connection with the not-so-good stuff.  These guys treat capitalist economics like a god, and of course that means you give "god" all the credit for positive outcomes, and lay the blame at somebody else's door for negative or disturbing events.  The deeper implication of the above is that the GOP isn't in the least concerned to face up to reality: as usual, they're selling snake-oil as a cure for serious ills and mocking their detractors because those detractors won't extend full faith and credit to their preposterous quack prescriptions for nirvana.

All that said, I might as well admit that every election these days seems to be a referendum on just how uninformed we are as a nation, so all we can do is donate some dino dinars or cephalodupois sterling (or that human-made green paper everybody swears by in this degenerate geological epoch), help out physically if possible, and keep whatever kind of digits we have crossed. 

Finally, keeping abreast of the voter-disenfranchisement efforts being carried out all across the country also seems vital: if the devious right-wing faction in various states get their way, they will outright steal this election, disenfranchising potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of overwhelmingly Democratic voters on the pretense of preventing "voter fraud," which phenomenon is beyond sane doubt almost non-existent in America.  What's being attempted now, I believe, goes far beyond any ordinary attempt to confuse and abuse the electoral process and the voting public: I view it is a sinister attempt at taking down the entire system of representation by specifically preventing massive amounts of voters in one political party from voting.  A viable republic cannot allow that to happen.

WORMWOOD - The BP Apocalypse

By Octopus

And the third angel sounded the trumpet, and a great star

fell from heaven, burning as it were a torch, and it fell 

on the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of 

waters: And the name of the star is called Wormwood.

- The Apocalypse of St. John -

(Note: Chernobyl in Russian means 'Wormwood.)

Here is the latest update on the Gulf oil spill from American Progress:

Based on "sophisticated scientific analysis of seafloor video made available Wednesday," Steve Wereley, an associate professor at Purdue University, told NPR that the actual spill rate of the BP oil disaster is about 70,000 barrels -- or 3 million gallons -- a day, which is 15 times the official estimate of BP and the federal government.  Another scientific expert, Eugene Chiang, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, calculated the rate of flow to be between 840,000 and four million gallons a day.  These estimates suggest that the Deepwater Horizon wreckage has already spilled about five times as much oil as the 12-million-gallon Exxon Valdez disaster.  The new figure exceeds the "worst-case scenario" offered by Transocean, BP, and Halliburton officials, who told Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) last week that the maximum possible flow would be "60,000 barrels a day."  Markey said in a statement on Thursday that "an underestimation of the oil spill's flow may be impeding the ability to solve the leak and handle the management of the disaster," adding that, "If you don't understand the scope of the problem, the capacity to find the answer is severely compromised."  BP, meanwhile, has not endorsed the new estimate. It has also declined to take "off-the-shelf instruments routinely used" in deep sea research down to the gusher to measure the rate.  A BP spokesman said that the company "has decided to focus on stopping the leak rather than measuring it."  BP's CEO Tony Hayward sought to downplay the scope of the disaster, telling the Guardian that "the amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume [of the Gulf of Mexico]." The edges of the massive oil slick are expected to begin hitting shore in Mississippi by Sunday, although bits of "tar balls" from the spill have already been found on the beaches of both the state's mainland and barrier islands.

The "Minerals Management Service gave permission to BP and dozens of other oil companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico without first getting required permits from another agency that assesses threats to endangered species," including the Deepwater Horizon site that just exploded.  Under current law the agency is required to get these permits.

Bottom line: This is the worst environmental disaster in history. It is no longer regional or national but international in scope. The entire Atlantic basin will be effected, and ocean gyres will move this mess around the globe.  Meanwhile, BP executives equivocate while tempers burn.

This disaster is in my backyard. It will impact our food supply, our local businesses, the livelihoods of neighbors, our coastline, our environment, our quality of life ... and there will be no fix within my lifetime.

When I read about 29 miners killed in the worst coal mine disaster in 40 years, and how Massey Energy bought off politicians and ducked safety standards, I say: "How's that laissez faire bullshit working out for you."

When I read of defective consumer products imported from abroad, of adulterated pet food that killed the family dog and defective wallboard that caused health hazards, I say: "How's that laissez faire bullshit working out for you."

When I read about the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and how corrupt Wall Street bankers paid themselves bonuses from taxpayer-funded TARP money, I say: "How's that laissez faire bullshit working out for you."

When I think of this GOP right wing crap, their raving insanity over free-market capitalism, and their steadfast refusal to support banking reform, environmental protection, consumer product safety, and healthcare (because reform is bad, big government is bad, and what’s good for business is good for America), I say: "How's that laissez faire bullshit working out for you."

Damn idiots!  These corrupt business interests and their crooked politicians have gridlocked our government and crippled our ability to respond to crises.  As far as I am concerned, bipartisanship is dead.  Civility is dead.   There is more than a culture war being waged in this country.  We are locked in a struggle for survival itself.