Browsing PBH By Articles

Corporate Welfare, Alive And Well

The Article: Corporate welfare, alive and well by Michael Hiltzik in The Los Angeles Times.

The Text: As a developer of shopping malls, including 22 in California, Westfield Group clearly takes its responsibilities to the consumer economy seriously.

The Australian company’s malls are typically well-designed and anchored by the finest department stores, such as Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom. The firm spends gobs of money to refurbish its older malls.

As a California taxpayer, you should be proud of Westfield’s efforts. That’s because you’re paying through the nose for them.

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Oprah’s Big Lie At Harvard

The Article: Oprah Lied at Harvard by Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic.

The Text: There is something special about the optimism of the very privileged. At Harvard not long ago, Oprah Winfrey spoke to the graduating class and, “address[ing] my remarks to anybody who has ever felt inferior or felt disadvantaged, felt screwed by life,” uttered this memorable sentence: “There is no such thing as failure.” She immediately explained her strange assertion: “Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.” The experience of defeat, in other words, is an error of interpretation. Nothing is bad that is followed by something else. Nothing is bad unless you call it bad. Only death, on this account, is a defeat, since it is followed by nothing, though I suppose that in her quackery Winfrey believes in an afterlife in which she dwells for eternity between Tom Cruise and Maya Angelou at God’s Oscar party. As an example of the unreality of failure, Winfrey told a tale of personal adversity. When she launched her television network, it did not do well. “I was stressed and I was frustrated and quite frankly I was embarrassed.” But somehow she rose from the ashes. “I’m here today to tell I have turned that network around!” The audience in Harvard Yard must have fought back tears.

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Everything You Know About Immigration Is Wrong

The Article: Everything you know about immigration is wrong by Ezra Klein in The Washington Post.

The Text: Everything you know about immigration, particularly unauthorized immigration, is wrong.

So says Princeton University’s Doug Massey, anyway. Massey is one of the nation’s preeminent immigration scholars. And he thinks we’ve wasted a whole lot of money on immigration policy and are about to waste a whole lot more.

Massey slices the history of Mexico-to-U.S. migration in five periods. Early in the 20th century, there was the era of “the hook,” when Japan stopped sending workers to the U.S. and the mining, agriculture and railroad industries begged Mexican laborers to replace them. It’s called “the hook” because laborers were recruited with promises of high wages, signing bonuses, transportation and lodging, most of which either never materialized or were deducted from their paychecks.

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Part-Time Is The New Full-Time

The Article: 97 percent of new US jobs are part-time by Shannon Jones in the Worldwide Socialist Website.

The Text: Behind the job figures of recent months lies an underlying reality of continued hardship for millions of unemployed and partially employed workers in the United States.

US employers added 162,000 nonfarm jobs in July according to the government’s Establishment Data Survey, an anemic number considerably below predictions. However, a closer look reveals another serious problem.

“Over the last six months, of the net job creation, 97 percent of that is part-time work,” said Keith Hall, a senior researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center quoted by McClatchy Washington Bureau. Hall was head of the US Bureau of Labor (BLS) Statistics from 2008 to 2012.
Citing the BLS Household Survey, Hall said that over the past six months 963,000 more people reported that they were employed while 936,000 of them reported they were in part-time jobs. Hall continued, “That is a really high number for a six-month period. I am not sure that has ever happened over six months before.”

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8 Ways Privatization Has Failed America

The Article: 8 Ways Privatization Has Failed America by Paul Buchheit in The Contributor.

The Text: Some of America’s leading news analysts are beginning to recognize the fallacy of the “free market.” Said Ted Koppel, “We are privatizing ourselves into one disaster after another.” Fareed Zakaria admitted, “I am a big fan of the free market…But precisely because it is so powerful, in places where it doesn’t work well, it can cause huge distortions.” They’re right. A little analysis reveals that privatization doesn’t seem to work in any of the areas vital to the American public.

Health Care

Our private health care system is by far the most expensive system in the developed world. Forty-two percent of sick Americans skipped doctor’s visits and/or medication purchases in 2011 because of excessive costs. The price of common surgeries is anywhere from three to ten times higher in the U.S. than in Great Britain, Canada, France, or Germany. Some of the documented tales: a $15,000 charge for lab tests for which a Medicare patient would have paid a few hundred dollars; an $8,000 special stress test for which Medicare would have paid $554; and a $60,000 gall bladder operation, which was covered for $2,000 under a private policy.

As the examples begin to make clear, Medicare is more cost-effective. According to the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, Medicare administrative costs are about one-third that of private health insurance. More importantly, our ageing population has been staying healthy. While as a nation we have a shorter life expectancy than almost all other developed countries, Americans covered by Medicare INCREASED their life expectancy by 3.5 years from the 1960s to the turn of the century.

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