Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Our Corporate Society

A letter from someone on Thom Hartman's Blog:

We have a corporate society right now: It isn’t a bumper sticker!

we have lead painted toys that are given a deadline on the shelf – not a destruct date
we have labels that don’t tell us that a drug was made in China – or an option to get one made in the USA instead
we had over a hundred people die due to the bad heparin formula – it gets a small article in mainstream media
we have carcinogens dumped into our air and water but too little regulation to clean up or stop it
we have BPA in plastic while Europe does not because our laws protect corporations instead of people
we have clean coal commercials when it doesn’t exist because its ok to lie in american media without being called out
we have decades in which states have been competing with each other to get a corporation in their area
we have decades in which states have been competing to give up revenue, give up consumer protections,
and offering special protections for the corporation, including some liability exceptions
we have local, state and federal levels giving tax cuts, tax exemptions, write-offs, and special perks,
we have local, state and federal levels being blackmailed into giving up rights and protections for people as consumers and workers but the media, 85% owned by 5 corporations, does not report the effects on american citizens
we have local, state and federal levels losing revenue from corporations keepin their profits outside the USA to avoid their share of taxes which is picked up by regular citizens and goes unreported as the cause
small businesses are overwhelmed by special privileges given to their big competitors
small businesses are overwhelmed by red tape that is easily handled by big competitors which encourage its implementation
we have farmers being sued because copyrighted seeds were dropped by birds or blown by the winds onto their farm
we have farmers unable to use their own seeds because a corporation was allowed to copyright them
we have corporations putting in copyrights for plants and trees unmodified by science
we have seen the housing market bubble and burst, where good loans were bypassed, oversight removed, and then repackaged to fleece even more investors
we have seen wall street and bankers get bailed out and give billions in bonuses while allowed to continue their gambling practices
we have seen corporations commit first degree murder and get fined – the only punishment available
we have seen corporations use their erroneously given rights to knowingly harm people
we have seen the media go from vibrant to silly because the reporters checks are signed by a corporate CEO who tells them what to say, backed by a court saying there is no law requiring reporters or journalists to be truthful.
we have seen monopolies increase and debt charged to the entity that was purchased putting it in jeopardy
we have seen out sourcing of American manufacturing and jobs to cheaper locations, not for superior products
we hear that America needs to be RESTORED to a third world country status – for workers
we have seen vibrant businesses bought up, their assets sold, and their doors closed by profiteers
we hear that Americans need to give up privacy to be free, to give up rights to private email, internet and phones
we hear that privatization is required for jobs once done by the military, so we can pay more for less
so no draft is setup that would make people take notice of this change, so we can be fleeced by bad service,
crimes, leaks of sensitive information all while based in tax havens or OFC (Offshore Financial Centre) to avoid
paying taxes to the USA while paid by the USA.
we have corporations dumping thalidomide, which caused birth defects, because any drugs can be dumped in a disaster area and written off
when mexican truck drivers were allowed into the US – there was no screaming heard from American truckers in the American press because the corporate media benefitted from that action
we have farmers in foreign countries forced to compete with dumping by American corporations getting subsidies, which undermines the economy, jobs and self-sustaining abilities of places like Haiti, Mexico and other places too poor to fight big money
we have a Superfund set up to clean up air and water pollution, which has been modified so it is paid by taxpayers instead of the companies that caused the problems
we are told by propaganda that regulation is communism – not that it protects consumers – citizens – from criminals
we are told by propaganda that union are evil – a good worker needs no rights – but the CEO has a contract!
we get propaganda from the Chamber of Commerce that American workers are lazy and overpaid – becasue their are many ‘front’ groups that protect corporate views and profits in our front yard.
we have GATT/WTO, NAFTA and G20 treaties that give corporations rights that override the Constitution and allow a corporation to sue a government
while Unions have been fighting for Americans against foreign dumping it gets little to no notice in our corporate media. When the unions win a case it is put on the Presidents desk to react – the presidents choice to act or not.
we had a company making magnets requried in smart bombs sold to the chinese and the manufacturing plant packed up and sent to China along with the copyright – not stopped by Democratic or Republican presidents
while corporations have an interest in profits, it is not in their scope to protect the USA, but their money determines if a politian gets elected – so we have fewer and fewer politicians interested in protecting America, fewer voting to pass legislation required to protect America – a myopic condition threatening our country right now
while corporations have seen greater gains in rights and power, Americans have seen wages lowered for most
illegal aliens are used as scapegoats to fuel hatred – so they are blamed for the lower wages
legal aliens are brought in thru the front door helping to keep American wages low, legislation renewed
we’ve seen mr greenspan apologize for believing that the market would level itself – when it destroyed all the small fish instead and created corporations ‘too big to fail’
we’ve seen mr greenspan explain that keeping workers number high keeps the wages low = protecting corporations – through numerous presidents
illegal aliens can be paid less to keep costs low, corporations getting caught claim they didn’t know – repeatedly
legal aliens can be brought in to keep costs low – H1B Visas – used in fields that can’t be outsourced
we are told Americans won’t do that job – when Americans won’t do that job for below poverty wages but will be poop scoopers and anything else it takes to make a living
we are told that fast food places aren’t hiring our teens because the minimum wage is too high when they are hiring Dad instead who is much more reliable and can’t find a job after being out-sourced to China, India or elsewhere
we are told that we must compete with third world nations – because we cost to much to pay when it is because …

tariffs used to protect American workers in America and pay for government funding to keep taxes non-existent or low
tariffs are now villified as harming America – when it is corporations that benefit from this change – not workers
tariffs are still high for imports in countries that protect their own workers – like China, Japan, Germany, etc.
buy american was removed from the ‘reinvestment’ plan in america — but not the plan in CHINA
VAT – value added tax – was also used to keep American jobs safe — now we export resources, not products

we have foreign corporations dumping products in the USA to destroy our existing business and only an action by the president can be taken to stop it, Bush received 5 cases but took no action, Obama has reacted to the first occurrence (tire industry). Why should it take presidential action? Why should ‘business’ overrule government?
Can you fight Exxon? Walmart? General Electric?

Teabaggers — the original tea partiers were fighting against a law that allowed only one company to sell tea within the colonies. A monopoly given by Great Britain to the East India Company was used to fleece colonists. So many businesses in the USA today are near monopolies that this is a current horror story in all our lives. Fleecing America and Americans!

Now the corporations have MORE power! MORE! Now foreign nations can use subsidiaries to have their very own ‘free speech’ in American politics!

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Wednesday, January 20, 2010


Dear humble Robert.
I have been in the Thar Desert and can personally attest that the sunlight is brutally hot there. I was on the Pakistan side of the desert, just 3 miles frrm the Indian border. visiting tiny remote villages whch already had PV systems installed. The NGO that had done the installations wanted me to check them out to see if they had been installed correctly. I have attached a photo of one of the installations. Everythign had been done correctly except for the tilt angle of the PV module. The had blindly followed directions and had exactly the correct tilt angle for Islamabad, not the Thar desert, which is way south of there. I showed them how to adjust the angle.
In my calculations I uses 5.9 Kw-hours per day of insolation per square meter, rather than the 6.2 in the article which is the max in March. Notice that whoever wrote the article made the very common mistake of calling it Kw per hour instead ot the correct expression. maybe that isw why you were having trouble understanding the article. The major problem with that areaas a large solar power source is that India and Pakistan are always arguing about who should control the Desert, and no invester would put in any money in a war zone. The villages have both small Islamic mosqes and Hindu temples and the people go back and forth between India and Pakistan all the time. They told me they have lived in peace together for centuries.
The villages have a real water problem, all the wells have brackish water for several months in the dry season. The NGO I was working with wants me to come back and introduce the photovoltaic still which will desalanate the water while it makes electricity. However, I have not heard a work from them since I left the Thar Desert so I don't know what is happening.
Sincerely,
Rich

Friday, January 01, 2010

Is The US Becoming a Third World Country?

Here's something I found while looking up how much it would cost for a kid from Maine to go to college in Europe.


Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Is the US Becoming a Third World Country?


https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html

http://mapscroll.blogspot.com/2009/04/is-us-becoming-third-world-country.html

The simplest way to say whether a country is rich or poor is to add up its cumulative wealth, which is usually stated in terms of GDP. Sometimes this number is divided by the number of people in a country to say what the average wealth is: GDP per capita. And for a lot of purposes, including the overall economic strength of a country in an international context, that's a useful definition of wealth. But it's not a sufficient criterion for determining whether a society is wealthy. For instance, it's theoretically possible that a country could have a larger per capita GDP than any other country on the planet, but also for all that wealth to be controlled by a single autocratic leader to whom everyone else is enslaved. In the crudest economic terms, that society could be considered wealthy, even though all but one person would be utterly impoverished. So to determine whether a society is truly wealthy, some account needs to be taken of the distribution of wealth.

Here's a map I made of income inequality in the US.



This map is based on numbers from the US census (pdf). It uses the Gini index to measure income inequality. Gini
indicates how much the income distribution differs from a proportionate distribution (one where everyone would have the same income; for example, 20 percent of the population would hold 20 percent of the income, 40 percent of the population would hold 40 percent of the income, etc.). The Gini index varies from 0 to 1, where 0 indicates perfect equality (a proportional distribution of income), and 1 indicates perfect inequality (where one person has all the income and no one else has any).
So the higher the number, the more wealth inequality there is. For most advanced industrial economies, the Gini number is pretty low. According the the CIA World Factbook (table compiled here), the lowest Gini score in the world is Sweden's, at .23, followed by Denmark and Slovenia at .24. The next 20 countries are all in either Western Europe or the former Communist bloc of Eastern Europe. The EU as a whole is at .307. Russia has the highest number in Europe (.41); Portugal is the highest in Western Europe (.38). Japan is at .381; Australia is .352; Canada is .321.

And then there is the United States, sandwiched between Cote d'Ivoire and Uruguay at .450. Not counting Hong Kong (.523), the US is a complete loner among developed countries. In fact, as you can see from the map above, there is no overlap between any single US state and any other developed country; no state is within the normal range of income distribution in the rest of the developed world. Here's a list of the states with their Gini index numbers, and the country where income distribution is most comparable in parentheses:

Alabama - .472 (Nepal)
Alaska - .417 (Cambodia)
Arizona - .454 (Jamaica)
Arkansas - .460 (Ecuador)
California - .466 (Rwanda)
Colorado - .450 (Uruguay)
Connecticut - .480 (Venezuela)
Delaware - .434 (Guyana)
District of Columbia - .537 (Honduras)
Florida - .467 (Rwanda)
Georgia - .461 (Mexico)
Hawaii - .438 (Nigeria)
Idaho - .421 (Thailand)
Illinois - .462 (Malaysia)
Indiana - .432 (Guyana)
Iowa - .424 (Burundi)
Kansas - .441 (Kenya)
Kentucky - .460 (Ecuador)
Louisiana - .475 (Madagascar)
Maine - .428 (Singapore)
Maryland - .433 (Guyana)
Massachusetts - .461 (Mexico)
Michigan - .444 (Philippines)
Minnesota - .430 (Iran)
Mississippi - .471 (Nepal)
Missouri - .449 (Cote d'Ivoire)
Montana - .426 (Singapore)
Nebraska - .430 (Iran)
Nevada - .434 (Turkey)
New Hampshire - .417 (Cambodia)
New Jersey - .458 (Uganda)
New Mexico - .457 (Uganda)
New York - .495 (Costa Rica)
North Carolina - .458 (Uganda)
North Dakota - .434 (Guyana)
Ohio - .449 (Cote d'Ivoire)
Oklahoma - .460 (Ecuador)
Oregon - .444 (Kenya)
Pennsylvania - .455 (Jamaica)
Rhode Island - .442 (Philippines)
South Carolina - .462 (Mexico)
South Dakota - .439 (Nigeria)
Tennessee - .468 (Rwanda)
Texas - .474 (Mozambique)
Utah - .410 (Russia)
Vermont - .420 (Thailand)
Virginia - .456 (Uganda)
Washington - .443 (Kenya)
West Virginia - .447 (Cameroon)
Wisconsin - .424 (Burundi)
Wyoming - .413 (Senegal)

Obviously, the US is far wealthier than any of the countries to which states are being compared on this list; but it's striking to see the US fit a pattern which, outside of the US, is exclusively a phenomenon of the underdeveloped world.

But does that mean that the US is on the road to Third World-dom? Well, not necessarily - and not yet, at least. But it should give some context to comparisons of wealth between societies. For instance, the GDP per capita in the US is one of the highest in the world. But more of that wealth is concentrated in the hands of relatively few people, meaning fewer people (relative to that high per capita GDP) are well-off.

Matt Yglesias posted this chart the other day:

So even though a lot of wealth has been created since the 1970s, the typical family isn't much better off. And as Yglesias points out: "Another country with a lower GDP but less inequality could still be a country in which most people are richer than most Americans, and I believe there’s pretty compelling evidence that that’s now the case in a number of European countries."

I would add this: to the extent that wealth matters, it's because wealth increases the well-being of individuals. But there's undeniably a law of diminishing returns: a billionaire is not going to be a thousand times happier than a millionaire just because he has a thousand times as much money. In fact, I would argue that beyond some modest threshold - maybe below an income of $100,000/year - having more money simply doesn't affect one's well-being in any significant way. People certainly desire more wealth, mainly as a positional good - a billionaire has a higher status than a millionaire. But jockeying for positional goods is a zero-sum game; the billionaire's gain is the millionaire's loss, and so overall well-being is not increased by creating more wealth if that wealth just ends up getting shuttled up the income ladder into those stratospheric heights. In other words, if a country becomes wealthier because rich people are getting richer while everyone else treads water, that country is no better off than it was before. And if that's the case for a given country while more wealth is being created in other countries where it isn't being concentrated solely in the hands of the very rich, then that country's well-being, relative to other countries, decreases. That's what's been going on in the US for the last few decades. It's a sign of decline.

But not an irreversible one; the US doesn't have to become a third world country, where the majority of the population struggles to take care of basic needs while a minority controls a huge proportion of the nation's wealth. And an economic crisis, in large part brought about by wealthy elites mishandling their economic power, might be just the thing to start turning the trend around.

Posted by Chachy at 4:34 PM
Labels: economy, inequality, united states, wealth

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