Center on Capital & Social Equity
Exploring economic inequality – Advocating for the bottom 50%
After Appalachian Hospitals Merged Into a Monopoly, Their ERs Slowed to a Crawl – KFF Health News
Facility Fees 101: What is all the Fuss About? – HealthAffairs
More examples of monopoly power sucking the marrow out of the US health care system. And how “capitalism” – valuing profit over all else – does not result in well-functioning markets.
Find out why your health insurer denied your claim. – ProPublica
Why We Risk a Cartoon Version of Capitalism – WSJ
Jack Welch, The Man Who Broke Capitalism – Forbes
“I’m not an academic who has studied inequality in a deep way. But those who have, including most famously Thomas Piketty, draw a direct line between executive compensation and its absolutely relentless upward trajectory over the last decades, and the widening gap between the haves and have-nots.
“Welch’s own enormous executive compensation was immense. He was on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans simply for being a people manager. He didn’t invent anything. He didn’t own the company. He was hired help. And yet, he became something close to a billionaire. By doing so, he set a precedent for hundreds of other managers over the past several years to do the exact same thing. Now we don’t even blink when a CEO is rewarded with a $20- or $50 million-a-year pay package.
“As all that is happening, what’s happening to his workers? They’re getting laid off en masse. He’s outsourcing them to contractors who don’t pay nearly as good of wages as GE once did. He’s sending jobs overseas in search of low wages and taxes. At the same time, look at what’s happened to the American minimum wage: It’s stuck at $7.25 an hour. If it had just kept pace with inflation over the last 20 years, it would be closer to $25. But we live in this world that was shaped by Jack Welch’s priorities. And we’re still trying to dig out of that hole.”
Welch preached the primacy of increasing stock value over all else. When his lieutenant took over Boeing, cost cutting trumped the quality of engineering and safety:
Killer software: 4 lessons from the deadly 737 MAX crashes – Fierce Electronics
Sunday, March 24, 2024
13 This is why I speak to them in parables:
“Though seeing, they do not see;
though hearing, they do not hear or understand.
14 In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:
” ‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
15 For this people’s heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears,
and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs: ‘US is complicit in Israeli genocide’ – Al Jazeera
Day by day, Israel’s actions expose its primary goals: 1) reducing the size of the Palestinian population through violence and starvation in Gaza, and 2) continuing its conquest of the West Bank through land seizure and settlement. More evidence:
The Netanyahu government’s stated objective of “destroying Hamas” provides cover. The longer it takes, the more time Israel has to displace, kill, and conquer the Palestinian people.
Warsaw Burning: The German Response to the Warsaw Uprising – National WWII Museum/New Orleans
“Many Nazi leaders, including Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, considered the uprising a pretext for destroying the Polish capital once and for all. According to his own recollection, in describing to Hitler how events unfolded, Himmler stated:
“‘The moment is a difficult one. [But] from the historical point of view, the action of the Poles is a blessing. We shall finish them off…Warsaw will be liquidated; and this city, which is the intellectual capital of a sixteen to seventeen million-strong nation that has blocked our path to the east for seven hundred years, ever since the first battle of Tannenberg, will have ceased to exist. By the same token, the Poles themselves will cease to be a problem for our children and for all who will follow.'”
Social Security program failed to properly notify people of huge fines, report finds – msn/WaPost
“The Social Security Administration’s internal watchdog office failed to properly notify some poor and disabled Americans before levying huge fines on them, an investigation by an independent watchdog agency found.
“The two-year probe into a little-known anti-fraud program discovered particularly stark due process violations starting in 2018, with investigators finding no evidence that the government ever sent written notice to some of those hit with massive penalties, which at times reached more than $100,000. Even when the inspector general’s office, which runs the program, did send notification letters in previous years, investigators found it often failed to properly serve people with notice of the proposed fines.”
Latest wrinkles from Washington, D.C. “suits”: Compare how government lawyers hammer low-income Social Security beneficiaries (above) with kid-glove treatment given to high-earning tax cheats (below).
New data shows IRS’s 10-year struggle to investigate tax crimes – ICIJ
“The U.S. Internal Revenue Service’s sprawling civil divisions referred just 157 tax cases for criminal investigation last fiscal year — out of more than 200 million tax forms filed with the agency annually, according to new federal data. IRS criminal investigators accepted just 104 of such cases for further action in 2023, the fewest in the 10 years of data obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
“The IRS’s civil divisions, which comprise the vast majority of the agency’s workforce, are supposed to flag egregious tax cases for potential prosecution from the volumes of returns they process and audit. These referrals are often associated with large dollar figures and wealthier taxpayers, who in recent years have seen weak enforcement from the depleted tax agency.”
“‘The abuse of these high-value trusts is a clear-as-day example of how there’s a special set of tax rules that allows the ultra-wealthy to pay what they want, when they want, and oftentimes nothing at all,’ Senator Wyden said. ‘This is a garden-variety tax dodge in which a billionaire signs some papers and moves some money around, and suddenly they have to pay little or no tax on appreciating assets worth tens of millions of dollars.'”
“For many decades, there has been a ‘bipartisan consensus’ on foreign affairs. Tragically, that consensus has almost always been wrong. Whether it has been the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the overthrow of democratic governments throughout the world, or disastrous moves on trade, such as entering the North American Free Trade Agreement and establishing permanent normal trade relations with China, the results have often damaged the United States’ standing in the world, undermined the country’s professed values, and been disastrous for the American working class.
“This pattern continues today. After spending billions of dollars to support the Israeli military, the United States, virtually alone in the world, is defending Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing extremist government, which is waging a campaign of total war and destruction against the Palestinian people, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands—including thousands of children—and the starvation of hundreds of thousands more in the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, in fear-mongering around the threat posed by China and in the continued growth of the military industrial complex, it’s easy to see that the rhetoric and decisions of leaders in both major parties are frequently guided not by respect for democracy or human rights but militarism, groupthink, and the greed and power of corporate interests. As a result, the United States is increasingly isolated not just from poorer countries in the developing world but from many of its long-standing allies in the industrialized world, as well.”
The IMF, Georgieva and Keynes – Michael Roberts
“She said the major economies are experiencing slowing and low real GDP growth and, according to her, the reason for this is soaring inequality of wealth and income. ‘We have an obligation to correct what has been most seriously wrong over the last 100 years – the persistence of high economic inequality. IMF research shows that lower income inequality can be associated with higher and more durable growth,‘ she said.
“It’s a new argument. Until recently, the IMF reckoned faster growth depended on higher productivity, free flows of capital, globalization of international trade and ‘liberalisation’ of markets, including labour markets (meaning weakening labour rights and unions). Inequality did not come into it. This was the neo-liberal formula for economic growth. But the experience of the Great Recession on 2008-9 and pandemic slump of 2020 seems to have delivered a sobering lesson to the IMF’s economic hierarchy. Now the world economy is suffering from ‘anemic growth’.“
Why the Apple Antitrust Suit Matters – Matt Stoller/BIG
“To understand the importance of the Apple antitrust suit, it helps to start with the location of Tim Cook on the day of the announcement. On a day where the Federal government announces it wants to fundamentally reorganize your business, most CEOs would be at headquarters, figuring out how to push back, do media, talk to big shareholders or confer with legal. But Apple CEO Tim Cook was doing none of these. He was in Shanghai, where Apple makes most of its phones, trying to both shore up his relationships with the Chinese leadership, and deal with collapsing sales of the iPhone in China.
“Why is Cook in China on such a big day? The answer is that in China, unlike any other market he has to deal with, Apple must actually compete for market share.”
Turns out the commies are running a much more competitive market for phones than the U.S. An example of how “capitalism” does not necessarily result in well-functioning markets. Monopoly facilitates capital formation but saps incentive for investing in new technology and product improvement.
