A Cautionary Tale: Privatization and Its Toll

Ever wonder what happens when huge, allegedly non-profit corporations gobble up community based medical facilities in the name of increasing efficiency and providing better care? Wonder no more. In case after case (as is true in many other areas) these corporations promised that they would better serve the community because of the resources they have available, and in case after case those promises proved to be lies. 

A few years ago, Novant Health (a "not for profit" conglomerate with 15 hospitals & more than 350 physician practices in North Carolina) offered to buy the New Hanover Regional Medical Center, a large and excellent facility owned by the citizens of New Hanover County, North Carolina. After a glitzy campaign featuring the head administrators of the hospital (who probably stood to benefit from an huge increase in pay when Novant took over) and a number of local politicians (one can only speculate their motivation), the NHC Board of Commissioners "sold" the hospital for $1.5 billion, with a promise that Novant would provide $3.1 billion more to upgrade the facility. The sale was completed in March of 2021, despite considerable community opposition.

Almost all of the $1.5 billion was put in an endowment, which is controlled by Novant and not the citizens of the county. As far as I can tell, not $1 has been used to benefit the community in the year since the "sale", although I recently saw a notice that a 5 person board had been created to "study" how the money should be used. The article did not say how much these board members will be paid out of the endowment.

Now comes the kicker. In one year since the sale, the quality of care in the hospital has plummeted, primarily because of lack of adequate staffing. Note that during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, while the hospital was still owned by the county, nothing like the issues now surfacing ever occurred. 

Those opposed to the "sale" of the hospital predicted that it would be a disaster for our community. We pointed to what had happened in other communities when Novant "bought" their hospitals, but to no avail. And now, as the article from the Port City Daily below demonstrates, our community is paying the price. As if to add insult to injury, the County Commissioners are pushing a deal, known as Project Grace, to replace our main library and the Cape Fear Museum with a public-private project, which will cost hundreds of millions in taxpayer money, far more than it would cost to upgrade these spaces and keep them under public control.

Those who fail to learn from history, condemn all of us to repeat it.

Read and weep for our community.

https://portcitydaily.com/deep-dives/2022/08/26/fed-report-confirms-novants-insufficient-staffing-nurses-detail-problem-extends-beyond-er/

Big brother is coming and its NOT the government.

In 1967, sociologist William Domhoff published a best selling work, Who Rules America. It was based on extensive research and on previous works, such as C. Wright Mills The Power Elite. It concluded that there was a dangerous concentration of power and wealth in the American upper class. More recent editions have brought the discussion up to date and include the rise of Donald Trump, and the trend toward overt appeals to white supremacy by the Republican Party. 

The book was widely read by adherents of the New Left, and helped many to understand that capitalism inevitably led to the concentration of wealth, and therefore power, in the hands of fewer and fewer very rich white men. I imagine that it was also read by corporate CEOs, bank presidents and their flunkies in academia. They saw the need to counter these ideas in order to crush the left and preserve the benefits (to them, that is) of their economic and political system.

The Powell Memo, written in 1971 by Lewis Powell to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was a blueprint for maintaining corporate domination of American democracy in response to the modest working class gains of the New Deal and Great Society. Linking up with the continuing resistance to school desegregation and revived white supremacy, it laid the basis for what has come to be known as neoliberalism.

The very rich, led by the Koch brothers, began funding all kinds of "academic" institutions to promote their economic, political and social perspective and change the narrative on issues from government regulation, anti-poverty programs, taxes, etc. They revived some of the core ideas from 19th century liberalism (often taken out of context), fell back on red baiting from the 1950s (in slightly more nuanced ways) and promoted the idea that the unfettered market should rule. They attacked unions as a major source of political opposition to their plans and moved to "privatize everything". And in the late 1970s they found the perfect shill for their neoliberal program in a grade B movie actor, Ronald Reagan.

Neoliberalism refers to market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating prince controls, deregulating capital markets and lowering trade barriers, and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, government influence in the economy. It was put forward as the solution of the economic problem of the 1970s, stagflation (the persistence of high inflation during a period of economic stagnation). 

Neoliberalism came to dominate US politics after 1980 as the Democrats joined with Republicans in accepting its basic premises. Neoliberals talked about "freeing" individuals from the yoke of government and how this would allow from massive productivity growth with the benefits "trickling down" to the working class.

The truth is that exactly the opposite has occurred over the past 40+ years. Productivity continued to grow at approximate the same relatively slow rate as it had in the 1960s and 70s (for reasons that I hope to write about soon) and the working class reaped none of the benefits of this meager growth. Instead the rich got richer and richer (runaway inequality) and the poor got mass incarceration and deaths of despair. And, as if it was throwing a finger at the neoliberals, the economy began experiencing deeper recessions (or depressions) primarily as a result of speculative growth in the now dominant financial sector. 

It's getting worse day by day. The "leadership" of the Democratic Party (local, state and national) has declared war on the progressives, despite the fact that it is the rightwing which is doing everything to thwart even modest reforms that the Party leadership supposedly wants. This war, combined with the failure to implement campaign promises (cancelling all student loan debt, for example) is leading to more and more young people and people of color to leave the party. The leadership seems to think that taking a stance on abortion rights will be enough to win in November. I'm afraid they are in for another surprise, just like in 2016.

All this as a lead to the article below. On my Facebook post I titled it "Danger Will Robinson, Danger" but since I already used that title twice for blog posts, I left it off this time.

From the Wilmington StarNews (with minor edits for brevity)

From what you buy online, to how you remember tasks, to when you monitor your doorstep, Amazon is seemingly everywhere. And it appears the company doesn’t want to halt its reach anytime soon.

In recent weeks, Amazon has said it will spend billions of dollars in two gigantic acquisitions that, if approved, will broaden its ever growing presence in the lives of consumers.

This time, the company is targeting two areas: health care, through its $3.9 billion buyout of the primary care company One Medical, and the “smart home,” where it plans to expand its already mighty presence through a $1.7 billion merger with iRobot, the maker of the popular robotic Roomba vacuum.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a company known for its vast collection of consumer information, both mergers have heightened enduring privacy concerns about how Amazon gathers data and what it does with it. The latest line of Roombas, for example, employ sensors that map and remember a home’s floor plan. “It’s acquiring this vast set of data that Roomba collects about people’s homes,” said Ron Knox, an Amazon critic who works for the anti-monopoly
group Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

“Its obvious intent, through all the other products that it sells to consumers, is to be in your home. (And) along with the privacy issues come the antitrust issues, because it’s buying market
share.”

Amazon’s reach goes well beyond that. Some estimates show the retail giant controls roughly 38% of the U.S. ecommerce market, allowing it to gather granular data about the shopping preferences of millions of Americans and more worldwide. Meanwhile, its Echo
devices, which house the voice assistant Alexa, have dominated the U.S. smart speaker market, accounting for roughly 70% of sales, according to estimates by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Ring, which Amazon purchased in 2018 for $1 billion, monitors doorsteps and helps police track down crime – even when users might not be aware. And at select Amazon stores and Whole Foods, the company is testing a palm-scanning technology that allows customers to pay for items by storing biometric data in the cloud, sparking concerns about risks of a data breach...

Even consumers who actively avoid Amazon are still likely to have little say about how their employers power their computer networks, which Amazon – along with Google – has long dominated through its cloud-computing service AWS.

And Amazon – like any company – aims to grow. In the past few years, the company has purchased the Wi-Fi startup Eero and partnered with the construction company Lennar to offer techpowered houses. With iRobot, it would gain one more building block for the ultimate smart home – and, of course, more
data....

For companies like Amazon, data collection is for more than just data’s sake, noted Kristen Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame. “You can almost see them just trying to paint a broader picture of an individual,” Martin said. “It’s about the inferences that they’re able to draw about you
specifically, and then you compared to other people.”

Amazon’s One Medical deal, for instance, has sparked questions about how the company would handle personal health data that would fall into its lap. Lucia Savage, a chief privacy officer at the chronic care provider Omada Health, said that (could allow) One Medical to be able to get data from other arms of Amazon’s business that could help it better profile its patients.

Unlike Meta and Google, whose focus is mainly on selling ads, Amazon might benefit more from collecting data because its primary goal is to sell products, said Alex Harman, director of competition policy at the anti-monopoly group Economic Security Project. “For them, data is all about getting you to buy more and be locked into their stuff."

Why the Democrats will lose in November, unless ...

The Problem

The 2022 midterm election is shaping up to be one of the most critical elections in our history given the multiple crises the US and the world face. Note that many commentators said that of the 2016 and 2020 elections. How can each one be more critical than the one before it? Easy. What has happened is that after each of these earlier elections little was done to resolve the crises we face, and often new layers were added to our problems. We are “waist deep in the big muddy” and we are told that “all we need is a little determination” and to “just push on”. (Pete Seeger)

The November election comes at a time when the country is more ideologically divided than it has been since 1860 and in the midst of several crises, any one or combination of which could lead to disastrous consequences and even the end of society as we know it.

We have a proxy war being fought between the two largest nuclear powers that is slowly, inexorably escalating. That proxy war is part of a broader political and economic struggle between the dominant imperial power (the US’s Empire of Liberty and its NATO partners) and the rising economic power of China, with the support of its junior partner, Russia. The Chinese are responsible for the economic challenge, the Russian, with their nuclear capabilities, the threat of military muscle. Is it coincidental that, at the same time as the US is sending massive amounts of military equipment to Ukraine, it is conducting naval maneuvers of unpresented scope in the Pacific and challenging China? And you thought that Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was the problem.

Besides the threat of nuclear war, the proxy war in Ukraine is threatening the world’s food supply, particularly that of many Global South nations, which are already dealing with various effects of climate change. Wide spread famines in these countries will result in political destabilization; Sri Lanka is undoubtedly the first of many such destabilizations. (As I write we are already hearing about others.)

Global climate warming is threatening to reach a tipping point, yet the US is failing to meet even its modest goals and instead is pouring hundreds of billions into the war machine, one of the key sources driving the climate crisis, with its massive production of greenhouse gases.

I could go on, but I imagine my readers are familiar with much of what is happening. In this context, if the Democratic Party loses control of Congress, we will face 2 years in which the national government will be totally dysfunctional, that is, even more dysfunctional than it is right now. Manchin and Sinema will be yesterday’s news. The Republican party, which is fundamentally opposed to government period, will be able to prevent any advances designed to meet the challenges we face. And, to quote an old Chinese saying, “Where the broom doesn’t sweep, the dirt won’t go away by itself.”

Will the Democrats lose in November?

It’s no surprise that Democrats are up against it this fall, both in terms of history and economic conditions. The president’s party generally loses ground in midterm elections, which in this case will mean losing both the House and the Senate. Inflation is at a 40-year high, crime is up. And the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda has been torpedoed by united Republican obstruction — and a West Virginia Democrat, although at this point it appears that a very watered-down version may pass before the November election (but not in time to have any real effect, other than to give the Democrats a talking point – see, “we are trying”).

But a critical factor was revealed in a recent New York Times-Siena College poll: Though they enjoy a huge 20-point advantage over Republicans among white college-educated voters, the Democrats have a working-class problem, and it is not just a white working-class problem (Note that I am using that term, white-working class, because it is in common usage, but in reality, it is not accurate. The working class is probably the most integrated aspect of American society.) The GOP leads the Dems by a 12% margin among ALL non-college educated voters. Despite its racist and anti-immigrant platforms, the GOP is in the process of consolidating a multiracial working-class base, as is evidenced by the defection from the Democratic Party of a significant portion of Hispanic and even Black voters in 2020 and 2021. This does not take into account traditional Democratic voters, particularly young people, who stay home rather than vote for what they see as the lesser of two evils. A bit harsh, but in my experience, an accurate assessment.

Who or what is to blame? The party establishment trains its guns on the left. The gerontocracy that runs the Democratic Party (says someone who will be 80 years old in less than a month), the centrist thinktanks, and the big money donors all agree that, as Ruy Teixeira argues, problem is that the left has poisoned the “party brand”. “Wokeness,” according to James Carville, “is a problem and we all know it” or, as a local party official here in Wilmington put it, the problem is those damn “Bernie bros”. Their solution to overcoming the ominous clouds of defeat in November is to focus on campaigning for more gun control and against the assault on abortion and Donald Trump’s “big lie” about a stolen election as the way to save Democrats this fall.

Now it is true that the Republican party seems to be doing its best to hand the election back to the Democrats, and I’m certainly not advocating looking this gift horse in the mouth. But by limiting their appeals to the social issues that garner support from suburban whites and their big corporate donors, the Party will continue to bleed. Add to that the attacks on the left, which alienate many younger voters (and even old farts like me), the Party is doing a poor job of incorporating into its ranks the 4 million young people who turn 18 each year. Democrats ought to be concerned that the activists of their base — the young, African Americans, climate activists, Hispanics — are demoralized by what the Party is doing and not doing.

It's not that the party has moved to the right, it’s that the voting age population has moved to the left, in part because of the looming crises, in part because of the work of the progressives and in part because of the influx of young voters. Just check out the support for issues the left is advocating – universal healthcare, taxing the rich, the Green New Deal, cancelling student debt, establishing tuition free college and so on.

Add to that the continuing assault on working Americans standard of living, particularly in rural areas and in the Rust Belt states of the Midwest, which has alienated the working class (and not just white workers) and provided a fertile ground for the extreme right to organize. It doesn’t help when centrist Dems (yes Hillary, I’m talking about you, but also the rest of the crowd) refer to Trump supporters as “deplorable” and (yes, Barack, you too) when you talk about those who “cling to guns and religion”. It’s little wonder that many working-class Americans view the Democratic Party as a party of the economic and social elites – because in many respects that’s what it’s become.

What needs to happen between now and November?

·         The Democrats, starting with the top leadership, need to STOP trashing the left and STOP supporting DINOs against progressive challengers (although, since the primary season is about over, there won’t be much opportunity to do the latter).

·         Joe Biden needs to mount the bully pulpit and demand that Congress act on his agenda right away. I’m sure it won’t have any immediate effect, but it will play well on TV and the internet and change his image. No more milk-toast Joe.

·         He needs to pressure the various agencies of the government (and even those like the Fed, that are not directly under his control) to support his agenda or do everything in his power to remove the people who are creating roadblocks.

·         Biden needs to do EVERYTHING that he can to implement the campaign promises he and the Dems ran on in 2020 that don’t require the do-nothing Congress to act. For starters he could declare a climate emergency and cancel student debt.

·         The Democratic Party needs to put forth and run on bold proposals that address working class issues – economic issues like the child tax credit, invigorating the labor laws and their enforcement, raising the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour, rural development – I could go on, but I think you should have gotten my point by now.

·         And Biden and the corporate Dems need to STOP feeding the Pentagon and its military-industrial complex, resources that Americans and others around the world need to survive the crises we are all facing. The bloated war machine does not make us safer; the truth is that it makes us less safe.

Will this be enough to reverse the Party’s declining support among the working class. No, but it might be enough to guarantee the Democrats 2 more years in power. After that, it will take a lot more to begin remaking the Democratic Party as the party of the working class, For now, it may be all we can hope for.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pelosi's visit to Taiwan - Who's provoking whom?

Below is an edited article from the Huffington Post on Nancy Pelosi's potential visit to Taiwan, which is heightening economic, political and military tensions between the US and China. 

One has to wonder at the gall of the US in warning China not to escalate tensions after the US, NATO and other US allies just conducted the largest naval war exercises in the Pacific since the Chinese revolution in 1949, which is being followed by Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. Is the US provoking the Chinese (rather than the other way around), just as it did, and continues to do, in Eastern Europe with regard to expanding NATO and supplying massive amounts of armaments so that the Ukrainians can "bleed Russia dry"? And as it is doing with regard to ramping up its nuclear arsenal and new deployments of nuclear weapons? And as it is doing with regard to the Iranian nuclear arms deal (will Joe Biden be the father of the Iranian nuclear bomb?) and the Middle East in general by cozying up to the Saudis, etc.

My first reaction is to credit all this bellicose activity to an attempt to provide Biden and the Democrats with a convenient distraction from their total failure to pass meaningful legislation to deal with the domestic crises (inflation, recession, renewed pandemic, etc.) we face. But the idea that milk toast Joe could reinvigorate the party as a "wartime President" seems a bit ludicrous.

No, these actions have a much deeper and scarier origin. The Empire of Liberty is facing an economic and political challenge to its system of "rules based order" and is responding by falling back on the one area where its power is still dominant - military force. It's what declining empires always resort to and the result is always the same - massive suffering for working people in both the "colonies" and the homefront. But, in our current situation, escalating military threats (and actions) present us with an even more dangerous path - to nuclear annihilation. If that's not enough, they divert resources which might be used to head off the other existential crises, climate change and  pandemics, not to mention rising poverty and hunger throughout an increasingly destabilized world.

For those of us who live in "the belly of the beast" we must focus our efforts at combatting this drive to use military force to protect the interests, not of the American people, but of those who profit off the continuing worldwide domination of the Empire of Liberty. We must stand in solidarity with those struggling to free themselves from the Empire; we must oppose military intervention in conflicts between the US and other Empires (while being clear that we do NOT support these rising empires, either) and we must fight to redirect the resources currently being provided to the war machine, aka the military/industrial complex, towards dealing with the crises the American people and the people of the world are facing.

From the Huffington Post

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s White House warned China on Monday not to use House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s likely visit to Taiwan to escalate tensions with the United States or the island that considers itself an independent nation.

“There is no reason for Beijing to turn a potential visit consistent with long-standing U.S. policy into some sort of crisis or conflict or use it as a pretext to increase aggressive military activity in or around the Taiwan Strait,” said John Kirby, the coordinator for strategic communications with the White House National Security Council, during a White House briefing room appearance. “And yet over the weekend, even before Speaker Pelosi arrived in the region, China conducted a live fire exercise.”

“Nothing about this potential visit — potential visit, which by the way, has precedent — would change the status quo, and the world should reject any PRC effort to use it to do so,” he said, referring to the People’s Republic of China. “We will not take the bait or engage in saber-rattling. At the same time, we will not be intimidated. We will keep operating in the seas and the skies of the Western Pacific as we have for decades.” (The US's "rules based order" give us the right to project our military power anywhere we chose to.)

Under China’s current dictator, Xi Jinping, mainland China has become increasingly aggressive in claiming sovereignty over Taiwan with military shows of force as well as bellicose rhetoric.

According to China’s state news agency, Xi warned against Pelosi’s visit during a phone call with Biden last week. “If you play with fire you get burned. I hope the U.S. side can see this clearly,” Xi reportedly said.