How extreme weather will affect the insurance and energy sectors - By Matthew Wright, Matthew Priestly, originally published by The Conversation May 29, 2024
"...Insurance companies evaluating risks must account for a combination of the most extreme weather systems, and those affecting built-up, developed areas. The most risk-prone areas are quantified by examining historical events and assessing other possible scenarios that are generated by models. Risk experts also consider what impact historical events would have today. Increases in risk may be due to increases in population, density of the built environment, or GDP. For example, Hurricane Katrina’s impact would be $40 billion higher if it occurred today..."
Neoliberal economics is killing the arts
By Tim Lutton, originally published by Red Pepper May 28, 2024
"...As a society, we must resist art-as-capital, where it is reduced to pure exchange value in a market of commodities. There, any politically-charged and counter-hegemonic content is rendered powerless, constituted as a stable harmonisation of the dominant socio-political order and drowning out all contradictions.
...In the present era, the tendency towards total marketisation of artistic production accompanies perpetual austerity and an atomised rentier economy that is shrinking public and social life. Without a rupture from neoliberal capitalism in general, the means to make new, generative and disruptive art disappears, and much else that is meaningful in our lives will follow after. The rest is silence."
Markets - Where did all the stocks go?
Public Companies In Decline
The number of public companies has fallen fast by Matt Phillips, David Crowther 4/28/24
"...After analyzing the effects of mergers, private-equity investment, and regulatory costs, the paper suggests that M&A is the main culprit. (Though they do theorize that higher costs associated with regulation could be a less important contributing factor.)
“Mergers seem to be the biggest driver of this trend,” Ali Sanati told Sherwood. Sanati is a finance professor at the American University in Washington, DC, and a coauthor of the 2023 paper.
The authors categorized mergers according to various financial metrics, noting that mergers motivated around financing and innovation “are the ones that effectively reduce the number of U.S. listings.”
Apple workers are striking at a store in Maryland by Millie Giles 5/13/24
"...In the aftermath of its outrage-inducing object-crushing advert, Apple has been dealt another PR blow, as it faces its first retail employee strike in history.
...While Apple is currently in the firing line for its employee practices, with labor unions like the Communications Workers of America accusing the tech giant of union-busting, collective strike action has been gaining traction across the US more widely..."
I think there are tons of people who would love a regular car, an EV or Hybrid, without all that other electronic junk. Purposefully making transitioning to cleaner options too expensive is a stupid policy.
This is why it feels like it’s getting harder to live on our wages. This was done on purpose by big business. The Democratic Party wants to fix this. The Republican Party created this situation and wants to block all efforts to fix it. #politics #economics #PredatoryCapitalism #VoteBlue
The modern predatory capitalist society completely ignores normal and natural cycles of nature and human biology. This expectation that people work like machines, this plantation mentality, is destructive and must be eliminated. We have to learn to live WITH nature, not in spite of it.
One of government's main responsibilities is to protect citizens; from outside enemies, to be sure, but on a day to day basis the protection most needed is from predators who call themselves capitalists. Instead of providing that protection, government collects its pay and takes its marching orders from them. #PredatoryCapitalism #Oligarchy
Some notable reviews given (via Waterstones website) to newly-published “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy” by investigative journalists Claire #Provost and Matt #Kennard.
Noam Chomsky: “This wide-ranging inquiry-based on intensive on-the-ground investigation-unearths 'a parallel world, outside of scrutiny...with very real consequences. An ugly world, out of control, unaccountable, but with overwhelming power. It ranges from investor-state legal systems to intricate systems of corporate welfare that aid elites and investors. Always concealed in elaborate devices of seeming to do good. Silent Coup is a highly revealing expose of the hidden real world.”
Jayati Ghosh: “Silent Coup is a crime story: a gripping description of the murky legal, and regulatory structures and policy changes that privilege big corporations. It's a tragedy, outlining the terrible consequences for people and nature, for democracy and accountability. It's a lesson in economics, providing fascinating and important insights into the functioning of global capitalism today. But finally it's also a story of hope, about apparently powerless people resisting these trends in the struggle for better and more just futures. Don't miss this.”
Vadana Shiva: “Silent Coup is investigative journalism at its best. It shows us how corporations rule the world: suing sovereign, democratic governments in invisible courts to erode constitutions and the democratic rights they enshrine-and writing laws and treaties to privatise the earth's resources and public goods. Sovereign communities and countries are being displaced by sovereign companies and the supranational systems they have built to establish their control, creating in the process our age of corporate colonialism. The book is vital reading for all who care for human freedom, human rights and democracy.”
“When COVID-19 hit, hospitals owned by private equity firms were among the first to cut their workers’ pay and benefits because their operations could no longer generate profits on elective surgical procedures delayed due to the pandemic.”
Excerpt From
These Are the Plunderers
Gretchen Morgenson & Joshua Rosner
“The growing sophistication of the nursing home industry has enabled some owners to leverage and direct assets in a manner that maximizes profits without meaningful accountability for nursing home quality.”
Excerpt From
These Are the Plunderers
Gretchen Morgenson & Joshua Rosner
“A 2021 nursing home study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research [..] showed nursing homes owned by private equity firms experienced 10 % more resident deaths than occurred in facilities not owned by private equity. Some twenty thousand additional lives were lost at private equity–backed nursing homes during the years studied of 2005 to 2017..”
1988 RJR Nabisco $25 buyout: “Everyone knew LBOs [Leveraged Buyouts] meant deep cuts in research and every other imaginable budget, all sacrificed to pay off debt. Proponents insisted that companies forced to meet steep debt payments grew lean and mean. On one thing they all agreed: The executives who launched LBOs got filthy rich.”
These Are the Plunderers
Gretchen Morgenson & Joshua Rosner
"Why are so many doctors being forced to take out payday loans to make ends meet? Trying to answer this question led us to a giant monopoly that's been slowly plundering every part of our health care system."
It's expensive to be poor. It's ironic but true. You get charges and fees for everything. Higher interest rates. Overdraft fees. Late fees. Having only enough to buy what you need right now instead of buying in bulk. Losing your job because you can't afford to get your car fixed. Losing your car because you don't have a job. Even your mental faculties are drained, as you are forced to continually eat low-nutrition foods, "sleep" in miserable conditions, and be exposed to toxins and lack of medical treatment. The lack of liquidity wipes you out. Life really does kick you while you're down.
You can't tell someone trapped in that vicious cycle to "just" get a job or "just" make responsible decisions. Sometimes, no amount of good decision-making can stop the vortex sucking them down. So the next time you are tempted to place moral judgment on someone who lives in poverty, think twice.
Signed, someone who has been both a Have and a Have-Not.
@hosford42 This is such a great description of how our system treats those who are less fortunate. It's a trap. And there are industries that thrive on exploiting the poor. The fact I live in Los Angeles makes the car scenario particularly easy to understand. I'm retired, but how people who depend on a low paying job can afford to commute is beyond me. #PredatoryCapitalism#Poverty
A new and silent land grab is underway – we must stop it - By Ian Scoones, Angela Serrano, originally published by Open Democracy May 20, 2024
“For us peasants, land is not just an investment or something we own, but is part of our lives and our existence”, said...the Network of Farmers’ Organisations & Agricultural Producers of West Africa at a meeting co-convened by the Land Deal Politics Initiative...and activists concerned about the rise of land, water and green grabs.
...Participants of the meeting agreed that policy debates on land have...been stuck in the hallowed halls of the UN or government bureaucracies, where they are captured by market demands, such as offsetting. The subsequent ‘solutions’ then end up incompatible with local livelihoods, failing to consider food-provisioning, as well as people’s cultures, histories and intimate connections with nature..."
"...But the main problem...is simple: They’re no longer getting paid enough to stay in business. In the multifront battle to cut costs in America’s expensive health care system, pharmacies say they are shouldering a disproportionate...burden.
“That traditional model of that corner drugstore that is just dispensing prescriptions is very difficult, if not impossible, to make work these days,” says Oftebro, adding that at his pharmacies, “reimbursement on the majority of prescriptions is now at or below the acquisition cost of the drugs.”
For this, many blame the middlemen: the pharmacy benefit managers. The three largest PBMs are owned by or affiliated with insurance companies—CVS’s Caremark (which shares a corporate parent with Aetna), UnitedHealth’s Optum Rx, and Cigna’s Express Scripts—and together they control how 80% of all U.S. prescriptions are processed..."
By Mary Wildfire, originally published by Resilience.org May 14, 2024
"...A sociopath is by definition selfish, concerned only about getting what he or she wants and unconcerned about anyone else’s needs. And what is it that they want? Usually wealth. Some—the narcissists—also want the spotlight, want fame and adulation. Some crave power for its own sake, aside from the need to use power to get more wealth. Some don’t care about either of those. But mostly, it seems, what the billionaires want is more money. They have more money than they could spend in twenty lifetimes but they still are willing to sacrifice our children’s future to get even more money. This is remarkably narrow thinking, a fascination with numbers—you might even call it machinelike..."
The concentrated ills of concentrated agribusiness, By Bart Hawkins Kreps, originally published by An Outside Chance May 31, 2024
"...Now that American consumers have learned to buy fresh – albeit nearly tasteless – fruit twelve months of the year, it’s essential for Driscoll’s to have suppliers in countries with different seasons. ...Frerick writes: “the Driscoll’s model is based on shifting farming out of the country to companies that don’t...worry about US minimum wage laws or environmental regulations.”
"...It matters not whether these products are truly nutritious. What matters is whether the products are cheap and, in line with WalMart’s directives to suppliers, cheaper year after year. Still, French explains, not cheap enough for WalMart’s own employees to afford – WalMart employees in many states require govt assistance just to feed their families..."