Category: Corporate Statism

Meet the new boss

~ susie

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Robert Parry on Ukraine’s new IMF regime:

It’s a safe bet that most of the Ukrainians who flooded Maidan Square in Kiev in February did not do so because they wanted the International Monetary Fund to make their lives even more miserable by slashing subsidies for heat, gutting pensions and devaluing the currency to make everyday goods more expensive.

But thanks to the U.S.-backed coup that ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych and replaced him with a regime including far-right parties, super-rich ”oligarchs” and technocrats with little sympathy for the suffering of average people, that’s exactly what happened. Although lacking legitimacy that would come from national elections, the coup regime pushed through the demands of the Washington-based IMF.

The process began just 10 days after the violent Feb. 22 coup that forced Yanukovych to flee for his life. IMF officials landed in Kiev on March 4 to hammer out a deal that acting Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, himself a chilly bank technocrat, has acknowledged is “very unpopular, very difficult, very tough.”

What is also striking about the IMF plan is that it puts virtually all the pain on average Ukrainians. There is nothing in the economic “reform” package that extracts some of the ill-gotten gains from Ukraine’s ten or so “oligarchs,” the multimillionaires and even billionaires who largely plundered Ukraine’s wealth after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

There is no plan for demanding that these “oligarchs” kick in some percentage of their net worth to help their own country. Instead, hard-pressed citizens of the United States and Europe are expected to carry the financial load.

Cuomo sells out DeBlasio

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Gov1

Andrew Cuomo may be short, but that just means he’s even more suited to giving blowjobs to monied interests. He is and will always be a whore who would suck the chrome off a bumper to get ahead:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has struck a budget deal with Republican legislators that includes unprecedented new giveaways to charter schools, particularly in New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio had threatened to modestly rein them in. 

Diane Ravitch sums it up:

The private corporations that manage charter schools in New York City will never have to pay for using public space.

The de Blasio administration must offer space to all charters approved in the dying days of the Bloomberg administration. De Blasio had previously approved 14 of 17; now he must approve all 17. Whatever Eva Moskowitz wants, Eva gets.

The charters located inside public school buildings may expand as much as they wish, and the mayor can’t stop them. If this means pushing out children with severe disabilities, so be it. If it means taking control of the entire building and pushing all of the students out of their public school, so be it.

If a charter chooses to rent private space, the New York City public schools must pay their rent. Where will the money come from? Well, the public schools can always increase class size, or they can lay off social workers and counselors and psychologists. Or they could cut back on the arts. That’s their problem.

So the privately run schools that serve six percent of the students in the city get to make decisions over the city’s elected mayor and the best interests of the other 94 percent of students. These are chains that pay their executives more than the city’s education chancellor. Chains that achieve their testing success (when they achieve it) by pushing out special needs kids, back into the public schools that the charters are taking space from; those public schools are also educating the homeless kids and English Language Learnersthat charters disproportionately do not educate.

This is the system that Cuomo is working not just to protect but to expand, giving private companies rights over public property, giving schools that exclude the kids they don’t want to educate rights over the schools that educate all kids. It’s appalling.

H/t Attorney Kush Arora.

‘Deeply held principles’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Emergency Contraceptive Pills (ECPs), more commonly known as "the morning-after pill" or Plan B, help to prevent pregnancy after unprotected sex. Unlike “the abortion pill,” ECPs simply interfere with ovulation and cannot induce an abortion if conception

You’re shocked, right?

When Obamacare compelled businesses to include emergency contraception in employee health care plans, Hobby Lobby, a national chain of craft stores, fought the law all the way to the Supreme Court. The Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, the company’s owners argued, forced them to violate their religious beliefs. But while it was suing the government, Hobby Lobby spent millions of dollars on an employee retirement plan that invested in the manufacturers of the same contraceptive products the firm’s owners cite in their lawsuit.

Documents filed with the Department of Labor and dated December 2012—three months after the company’s owners filed their lawsuit—show that the Hobby Lobby 401(k) employee retirement plan held more than $73 million in mutual funds with investments in companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, and drugs commonly used in abortions. Hobby Lobby makes large matching contributions to this company-sponsored 401(k).

Several of the mutual funds in Hobby Lobby’s retirement plan have holdings in companies that manufacture the specific drugs and devices that the Green family, which owns Hobby Lobby, is fighting to keep out of Hobby Lobby’s health care policies: the emergency contraceptive pills Plan B and Ella, and copper and hormonal intrauterine devices.

Thanks to Jason Kalafat.

Department of the really obvious

~ susie

Walmart Escondido!

Imagine! Not having enough workers actually affects your business:

Walmart will begin adding worker hours this year as part of an effort to address complaints about empty shelves at the company’s understaffed stores. The retail giant’s top executives said that fixing the chain’s stocking problems could be worth $3 billion per year, a tacit acknowledgment that Walmart’s notorious efforts to wring productivity out of skeleton crews have hurt its bottom line.

Executives announced “plans to add labor hours as part of an effort to bolster ‘in-store execution’” at the company’s annual Year Beginning Meeting in March, Bloomberg reports. The news service did not offer specifics on how the plan will work, but Walmart has historically preferred scheduling workers for part-time hours to avoid paying them benefits required for full-time hours. Walmart workers around the country have gone on strike repeatedly in recent years, often listing the need for more staff hours among their reasons for protesting.

Regardless of how the company goes about staffing up, the decision to foreground in-store personnel issues at a major annual meeting confirms that Walmart is reconsidering the relationship between its workforce and its profits. Despite opening more than 600 new stores over the past five years, Walmart now employs 20,000 fewer people than it did in 2008. That aggressive decrease in staff eventually left stores unable to do the most basic thing for any retail company: putting merchandise on the shelves.

No skills gap

~ susie

Visita de Paul Krugman

Wash, rinse, repeat. Remember, businesses used to hire people and train them. So if they weren’t lying (which they are), there’s nothing stopping them from training employees. But, as I’ve been saying for years, there is no skills gap. They’re simply working to suppress wages:

Yes, workers with a lot of formal education have lower unemployment than those with less, but that’s always true, in good times and bad. The crucial point is that unemployment remains much higher among workers at all education levels than it was before the financial crisis. The same is true across occupations: workers in every major category are doing worse than they were in 2007.

Some employers do complain that they’re finding it hard to find workers with the skills they need. But show us the money: If employers are really crying out for certain skills, they should be willing to offer higher wages to attract workers with those skills. In reality, however, it’s very hard to find groups of workers getting big wage increases, and the cases you can find don’t fit the conventional wisdom at all. It’s good, for example, that workers who know how to operate a sewing machine are seeing significant raises in wages, but I very much doubt that these are the skills people who make a lot of noise about the alleged gap have in mind.

And it’s not just the evidence on unemployment and wages that refutes the skills-gap story. Careful surveys of employers — like those recently conducted by researchers at both M.I.T. and the Boston Consulting Group — similarly find, as the consulting group declared, that “worries of a skills gap crisis are overblown.”
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Debt collectors are pursuing one in seven Americans

~ susie

Debt Collectors, Debt Complaints

So they don’t have to have the right person, the right amount and even the right debt — and they can do whatever they want without consequences:

Last month, Amrit Singh, an adjunct professor at Hostos Community College in the South Bronx, received a letter from the New York City Marshal, advising him that he owed $10,000, due within 20 days. If Singh did not pay, the letter said, money would be garnished from his paycheck. “It got me worried, because I knew I didn’t owe this amount of money,” Singh said.

Singh called the Marshal’s office, and they told him Atlantic Credit, a debt collection agency, secured a judgment against him for the $10,000. Singh had never heard of Atlantic Credit and had no contact with them in the preceding months. He was also told that the original debt came from HSBC Bank, for accumulated fees and interest on an account dating back to 2008. “This was more suspicious, because I had never opened an account with HSBC, neither me nor my wife,” Singh said. His credit report showed no record of him owing money to the bank, or any other credit incident matching this level of debt.

A colleague of Singh’s, hearing the story, had a theory. “He said, they probably told an intern, ‘Amrit Singh owes this money, go look up a name.’ And the intern found me.”

That’s not far from the truth. According to statistics from the Federal Reserve, one in seven Americans is being pursued by a debt collector, up from one in 12 just ten years ago. And substantial numbers of these Americans report being hounded for debts they do not owe. A new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau logged tens of thousands of complaints claiming just this—that the debt in question is simply not theirs.
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Coming attractions: Food shortages, violent conflicts

~ susie

APTOPIX Australia Wildfires

And this is the climate group known for being cautious and conservative! I suppose the PTB would rather use militarized police to stop hunger riots than to prevent hunger in the first place? Via ThinkProgress:

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued its second of four planned reports examining the state of climate science. This one summarizes what the scientific literature says about “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability” (big PDF here). As with every recent IPCC report, it is super-cautious to a fault and yet still incredibly alarming.

It warns that we are doing a bad job of dealing with the climate change we’ve experienced to date: “Impacts from recent climate-related extremes, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, cyclones, and wildfires, reveal significant vulnerability and exposure of some ecosystems and many human systems to current climate variability.”

It warns of the dreaded RFCs (“reasons for concern” — I’m not making this acronym up), such as “breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes.” You might call them RFAs (“reasons for alarm” or “reasons for action”). Indeed, in recent years, “several periods of rapid food and cereal price increases following climate extremes in key producing regions indicate a sensitivity of current markets to climate extremes among other factors.” So warming-driven drought and extreme weather have already begun to reduce food security. Now imagine adding another 2 billion people to feed while we are experiencing five times as much warming this century as we did last century!
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Obama to EU: Frack, baby, frack

~ odd man out
Ukraine ‘crisis’ is a business opportunity.

From Common Dreams:

Speaking after a meeting with European leaders at the [European Union]-US summit in Brussels on Wednesday, President Barack Obama suggested that the U.S. is open to exporting fracked shale gas, once promised as the source of American “energy independence,” to the EU and urged the EU to open up its own fracking reserves amid energy fears related to the crisis in Ukraine. Environmental groups have warned these policies will do nothing by way of energy security and everything for global environmental destruction and climate chaos.

I showed the whole story to Swamp Rabbit, who was sitting by the wood stove, filing his teeth with a reed, waiting for spring. It’s still too cold for him to jump into the swamp.

“I don’t know, rabbit,” I said. “It’s hard to believe Obama thinks Russia annexing Crimea was as bad as — was even in the same league with — the United States invading Iraq and blowing it to hell. Maybe he’s just looking for an excuse to open up new markets for the fossil fuel industry.”

The rabbit rolled his eyes, I think. It’s hard to tell, they’re like little black marbles.

He said, “You really think so, Odd Man? I’ll bet there ain’t nobody else in the whole world had such thoughts. You must be one of them strategic geniuses. A Richelieu, or somethin’.”

I ignored his sarcasm and opened a window in the shack. I said, “What’s really depressing is that Obama used to talk about boosting wind and solar power. He called climate change a fact. He made speeches against fossil fuels. Now he sounds like a cheerleader for the fossil fuel industry — a fracker backer. Who is this guy? I thought I was voting for a Democrat, not a closet Republican.”

“That’s what’s great about this here country,” the rabbit said. “These days, when you vote for the one party, you get the other party, too.”