From the Department of Insults: Wall Street employees get flu vaccine, you can just die.

In the last year, I have probably used some variation on the phrase “adding insult to injury” more than at any other time in my life.  I’m sure I’m not the only one.  The capitalist economic meltdown means joblessness, foreclosure, eviction, homelessness, poverty and misery to millions of workers here in the U.S., and poverty, starvation and death to millions around the world.  So there’s plenty of injury to go around.

But it seems there is no shortage of insults to dish out to the victims of the global collapse either.  Here in the U.S., the same banks that received billions in bail out money are foreclosing on mortgages and putting working people’s belongings out on the curb like it was trash.  Workers with decades of service are being laid so that their bosses – who created the crisis with their greed and arrogance – can continue to rake in huge bonuses and lucrative golden parachutes.  Politicians are fawning over the insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants, careful to ensure that any health care reform doesn’t hurt their profits, while lack of access to health care kills 45,000 Americans every year.

But some insults to working people seem so gratuitous that it is hard to imagine that they don’t have a special bureau somewhere that thinks this stuff up.  In that category is the news that the Center for Disease Control authorized the allocation of H1N1 flu vaccines to some of the largest firms on Wall Street even while millions of Americans who are in high risk categories, such as youth and the elderly, are unable to get the flu shot.  As the website of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington points out, several states have already expressed concern that those that need it most will not be able to get the vaccine, or that it will be available too late:

The head of Alabama’s Department of Public Health testified that 62% of the vaccines ordered by the state will not be available until after December 1, 2009

The director of Minnesota’s St. Paul Ramsey County Department of Public Health said he is expecting only 7,800 doses for more than 20,000 children

Los Angeles County’s three public hospitals ordered 110,000 vaccines, but have received only about 18,000 doses, and UCLA’s two hospitals received 1,000 doses for 10,000 staff and 35,000 patients

We already have heard, ad nauseam, that these companies are “too big to fail,” while the rest of us are too unimportant to bail out.  Now it seems that the Wall Street giants must be protected from the flu while children and seniors die from it.

Filed under: Economic crisis, They're Not Like Us

They’re not like us: Westport neighbors sue, spend $150,000 over stone wall

Neighbors in Westport, Connecticut are fighting over a stone wall. In court.   Not because the stone wall is on the neighbor’s property but because it may extend onto town property. And the neighbor is upset about that.

Says the New York Times:

. . . the dispute opens a window into life in a wealthy suburb, where neighbors have enough money to fight for years over an issue that may have been quickly resolved in a less well-off town.

Yeah, you could say that.

The couple who built the stone wall say they have spent $150,000 – yes, that’s one hundred and fifty thousand dollars – in legal fees so it stands to reason that the irate neighbor has spent as much.  And then there’s the Town’s legal bills.  But hey, when the median home price in your neighborhood is $970,000, who’s going to quibble over a couple hundred thou’.

The stone wall that's worth more than your house: the wall cost $170,000, the owner has spent another $50,000 modifying it and $150,000 in attorney's fees on litigation over it. (Photo: Wendy Carlson for The New York Times)

Filed under: They're Not Like Us

Candidate Simmons: I wouldn’t have voted to confirm Sotomayor because she didn’t rule the way I want!

Rob Simmons, who appears to be the lead Republican Party candidate running against Chris Dodd for his senate seat in 2010, announced this morning that he opposes the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomajor (with a confirmation vote expected this afternoon).  Now, I have no use for Chris Dodd.  I think he’s probably a crook, but even if he weren’t he’s still just another millionaire sitting in the U.S. Senate fiddling while working people are being thrown out of their jobs and their homes in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.  But I like Simmons even less, and I think his sudden, 11th hour announcement on this issue is the worst kind of opportunism.  Perhaps more importantly, his explanation stinks.

It seems Simmons is saying that if he were in the Senate he would vote against Sotomayor because she didn’t vote the way he thinks the court should have in the Ricci v. New Haven affirmative action case.

So Simmons’ “position” is this: An otherwise qualified judge ruled in a way that I didn’t like, once.  So in retribution for not doing what I want, I would have voted against her as a Supreme Court nominee.

Does this sound familiar?  Isn’t it what we’ve been hearing from every conservative white crybaby in the last few weeks?

Sergeant Crowley: Professor Gates hurt my feelings when he yelled at me, so I arrested him.

Officer Barrett:  It’s not fair that I got suspended (with pay!) just because I called Prof. Gates a banana-eating jungle monkey!  And anyway I apologized so that means you can’t punish me!  It’s not fair!  I’ll sue!

“Tea Baggers”: I don’t like what the Democrats are saying about health care reform so when they speak I’ll scream really, really loud so no one can hear them.

Firefighter Frank Ricci: When affirmative action helps me get a job because of my ‘learning disability’ then that’s good…but if it helps other people instead of me, then I’ll sue!

Ironically, the people who are fronting for these clowns have been talking for years about self-reliance and standing on your own two feet, and criticizing people who have suffered worse treatment than they can even imagine for supposedly “playing the victim.”  Now they’re screaming bloody murder – not for being victimized but simply being held accountable.

Filed under: They're Not Like Us

Executives, highly compensated employees make one-third of ALL WAGES PAID in the U.S.

It’s the kind of figure that should be a serious reality check to every progressive who talks about “the middle class” and every liberal who worries that taxing the rich would be unfair . . . and for the rest of us it should remind us of just how deep the divide between haves and have-nots in the U.S. really is. Here’s a quote from the Wall Street Journal:

Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total U.S. pay in 2007, the latest figures available. The compensation numbers don’t include incentive stock options, unexercised stock options, unvested restricted stock units and certain benefits.

The pay of employees who receive more than the Social Security wage base — now $106,800 — increased by 78%, or nearly $1 trillion, over the past decade, exceeding the 61% increase for other workers, according to the analysis. In the five years ending in 2007, earnings for American workers rose 24%, half the 48% gain for the top-paid. The result: The top-paid represent 33% of the total, up from 28% in 2002.

That’s right…that’s one third of all paid compensation but NOT including stock options, a figure that would likely inflate the 33% figure.

The article goes on to explain how this rise in the percentage of wealth earned above the social security ceiling wage will lead to further underfunding of social security and cause the collapse of the existing social security system four years earlier than previously projected.

So it’s not just that the rich are getting richer…or even that everyone else is getting poorer…but that the rising wages of top wage earners are actually damaging the system that pays subsistence-level benefits for working people when they are no longer able to work.

Filed under: Economic crisis, They're Not Like Us

Swine flu and capitalism

Marxists like to say that capitalism is irrational.  We sometimes refer to this as “the anarchy of capitalist production,” but some anarchists get offended by that and anyway it tends to create confusion.  So for the moment, at least, let’s stick with “irrational.”

Usually I might illustrate the idea of the irrationality of capitalism by pointing out that in the U.S. right now, we are experiencing a shortage of housing that has been created by…too much housing.  That is to say, the home construction boom sparked a crisis of overproduction and now there is “too much” housing that can be sold at a profit, but not enough housing to meet human needs.

But yesterday’s comments during a White House press conference on the swine flu crisis are perhaps an even better example.  Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano stated that:

the government can’t solve this alone.  We need everybody in the United
States to take some responsibility here. If you are sick, stay home. 
Wash your hands, take all of those reasonable measures; that will help
us mitigate, contain how many people actually get sick in our country.

Now, the main reason to stay home if you are sick is so that other people don’t get sick, right?  And other people getting sick is bad because, among other things, the more people get sick the more that it affects economic productivity.  In fact, if you are an employer, the last thing in the world you should want is for your employees to be coming to work sick with swine flu, passing it on to co-workers, and having lots of people lose work time because of it.  Even those who can “work through it” shouldn’t because they may infect co-workers who will wind up being incapacited by it.  Instead of a handful of workers losing a couple of days each, you could end up with ten times that number of workers all losing time from work.  And it will cost a lot of money.

So it makes sense that you would want your workers to stay home, right?

Only, if you don’t give them sick pay then they can’t.  And why don’t you give your workers sick pay?  Because it would cost a lot of money.  And many employers have a policy that if you can’t come to work – sick or not – you’ll be fired.

So we have the federal government telling people to stay home from work, but they can’t because if they do they may lose their jobs.  So they come to work like their boss told them . . . and in so doing harm the boss’s interests by infecting other employees.

Good move, boss.

Filed under: They're Not Like Us

Class perspective: Socialism or capitalism?

It’s all about your class perspective.

An editorial in this week’s socialist newspaper Workers World poses the question “Socialism or capitalism?” and points to a recent Rasmussen Reports poll showing that only 53% of Americans believe that capitalism is a better system than socialism. Interestingly, while the poll shows that only 20% of the 1,000 people interviewed preferred socialism, among people under the age of 30, the results were about evenly divided between those that preferred socialism, those that preferred capitalism and those that were undecided.  The WW editorial points to these poll results as an indication that working people are questioning a system that has left millions of us in free fall.

This only makes sense, right?  Even if you disagreed with socialist ideas you’d at least be able to comprehend that when the unemployment in your community runs to 20% or 25% with worse to come on the horizon, you might question whether the system that produces such horrors really reflects the best that we can hope for.  Even a devout believer in the wonders of capitalist production (and its cycles of boom and bust) could at least understand that many working people have reason to be skeptical.

Interestingly, some corporate media see just the opposite.  One newspaper’s coverage of reaction to the Rasmussen Report poll characterized Americans as “clueless about capitalism” and suggested that the poll shows that we lack “financial literary.”  I guess this is in contrast to the brilliant financial literacy demonstrated by the analysts at AIG or Bank of America or Citi who didn’t see the global economic crisis even while it was looming in front of them.  Another newspaper editor sees the poll results as a sign of “degeneracy” and claims that it shows that 47% of Americans are  “ignorant of our democratic principles, economics, history and what’s going on in much of the world today.”

Of course these interpretations of the poll are premised on one simple assumption: what’s good for the people who run this country is good for working people too.  Yet we live in a time when we are losing over 600,000 jobs every month and home foreclosures are at a record high.  No doubt if you are one of the very few whose earning power is in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars a year, you, too, feel the bite of the recession into your bank accounts.  The difference is that the boom and bust of capitalism won’t leave you homeless or unable to take your kid to a doctor.  And whether you live with that fear, the fear that is felt by every working person in a time of severe economic crisis, is determinative of whether you can reasonably and logically conclude that the continuation of the capitalist system is in your interest.

Filed under: Economic crisis, Must read, They're Not Like Us

Unemployment rises, corporate economist says “At least it’s not getting worse.”

Put this in the category They’re Not Like Us – right alongside stories of divorce battles about how many millions per month does it take for one person to live, CEO’s who spend tens of thousands of dollars remodeling their office bathroom, and politicians who want to “shrink big government” in the middle of the worst recession in seventy years.

This morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirmed that unemployment in the month of March rose from 8.1% to 8.5%, reflecting that a total of 5.1 million jobs have been lost in the recession since it started in December 2007.  The BLS also released statistics showing that January job losses were higher than originally stated, that there are now 3.2 million long-term unemployed people (folks who have been out of work for more than 27 weeks and are still looking), and that the percentage of workers who have either given up looking for work altogether or who are working in part time jobs because full time is not available rose from 14.8% to 15.6% – the highest since they began keeping records.

These job losses just look like numbers in a report but they reflect a drastic increase in human suffering as more and more families are thrown into joblessness, homelessness and poverty.

But here’s how one corporate economist, Pierre Ellis, senior economist at Decision Economics in New York, responded to the news:

“Employment will not turn on a dime and certainly there’s no sign of strength, but at least it’s not getting worse and worse and worse.”

Filed under: Economic crisis, They're Not Like Us