A new member of our local EV family
The Komen debacle and the mandate to cover prescription contraceptives have something in common (other than the hostility towards women’s reproductive health). Both cases highlight the tension between the liberal notion of healthcare being a public good and the conservative drive to make health a market commodity.
The contraception mandate is the more obvious example. The Catholic Bishops are framing this as an attack on religious freedom; it isn’t. Nothing in the law dictates what Catholics, or anybody, must believe in their faith or practice in their churches or personal lives. Any such mandate would surely have been struck down as unconstitutional after the EEOC first ruled that failure to cover prescription contraceptives was in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
But when Catholic Charities sued California for requiring that it cover contraceptives for its secular employees, the court found no Free Exercise clause violation. When operating in the private club of a faith community, it can certainly set its own rules for membership and conduct; but when operating a public accommodation, a church is subject to the same laws as any other group or organization. A church cannot discriminate against pharmaceutical coverage for women any more than it could ban unmarried couples from church-sponsored public housing or discriminate against a Jewish applicant for an office job.
The conservative echoes of the Bishops’ outcry are not about faith. The church is not protecting its religious freedom here, it is attempting to impose its religious dogma on the secular world, by claiming that it is exempt from the laws everyone else must follow because it doesn’t believe in them. They wanted to impose their ideology on the public accommodation they provided.
Which is similar to what Komen did. I don’t buy into the narrative that conservative ideologues joined Komen in order to defund Planned Parenthood; they had had years of pressure from Americans United for Life and other anti-abortion political groups and wanted the threat of boycott to go away. Now if Komen wanted to avoid controversy, they should have told the ideological pressure groups to lay off. Instead they thought they could appease the critics by inventing an arbitrary rationale that allowed them to cut off Planned Parenthood while avoiding an explicit stand on abortion rights. This was a failure, but that’s not the point.
The point is that the public outcry was due to Komen’s betrayal of their role as a public good. People expect nonprofits like hospitals and medical research to serve broad societal interests, even when focused on a specific domain. That’s why they are granted tax-free status under 501(c)(3): because they are not trying to compete in the marketplace but serve the community.
And we feel taken advantage of when an organization that claims to be doing a public service wants to have the benefits of a nonprofit but act in its private interest, or claim to serve the public but imposes the dogma of its faith on those it serves. It mocks the commons.
Extreme libertarians (and some vocal conservatives) think that there’s nothing wrong with this; in fact, it should be the model. We the People should not strive to agree on what serves the public good; instead, private charities, foundations, and philanthropists should serve the community in a marketplace of beneficence. Government’s only role would be to encourage charity in general, not to determine or direct it. The same invisible hand that ensures that buyers find their prices will ensure that needs are filled by givers.
This is anti-democratic and really pretty misanthropic. It leaves the basic science of medicine and the basic provision of care to the whims or success of the funders. The “popular” diseases get funded; people in the larger religions get healed; but if your are on the margins of society or have an unappealing condition, too bad. Sucks to be you. That’s the essential nature of the market economy.
In both the contraceptive and Komen cases there are accusations that healthcare is being “politicized.” The fact is that in both cases, the problem is that it’s being depoliticized: removed from the mechanism of political resolution and left to the biases, prejudices, and whims of private organizations operating under cover from the government, but serving their self-interest.
A political process would serve the public better by dealing with breast cancer, contraceptives, and abortion democratically as public health issues, rather than pawning them off to private charities and constraining health care and medical science to the biases of the generous.
UPDATE: Allen West confirmed the GOP stance at CPAC today: “It is not the public good that matters, it is the personal good.” And when Obama forced the hands of the Catholic Bishops by giving them what they demanded (freedom from paying for contraceptives), they revealed what they actually wanted: that even secular, for-profit employers be exempt from the law. If you want a working definition of an establishment of religion, exempting members of a chosen faith from compliance with a public law couldn’t come much closer. What the Bishops want is to impose their notion of “sin” on the health choices of the nation.
Really, I haven’t seen such a solid week for Obama, the Democratic party, and the cause of liberalism since the summer of 2008. The GOP message that Obama is driving us into a ditch just vanishes when people see that the car is making progress down the road.
The Eastwood spot underlined the economic fact that the bailouts and stimulus were (slowly) dragging the economy out of the recession induced by the financial meltdown of 2008. Eric Holder’s settlement of mortgage fraud charges starts to make whole the defrauded mortgage holders and bring (some) accountability to the financial industry. And new regulations and Dodd-Frank are tamping down the excesses of the surviving banks and brokerages.
Civil rights grinds on with a plain-language confirmation that voters can’t discriminate against gays for no good reason. And Washington becomes the next state to recognize that if you want to strengthen marriage, don’t bar couples from marrying.
An insidious effort to blackmail a (mostly) noble charitable institution into doing political dirty work backfired in a huge way, strengthening Planned Parenthood and leaving its enemies licking their wounds. And meanwhile, Secretary Sibellus used the power of the Affordable Healthcare Act to reverse a huge absurdity of modern life: that most women’s health insurance doesn’t cover prescription contraceptives. When the Catholic Bishops raised specious “religious freedom” concerns about paying for something they morally objected to, Obama deftly neutered their argument and laid bare their main objective: to control everybody’s access to birth control.
And the net result of this is that Obama’s approval rating is above 50% and he leads both Romney and Santorum in head-to-head polling. What’s better is that the improving economy and the pivot to social issues helped Santorum win 3 states on Tuesday and pull even with Romney nationally, helping to ensure that the damaging fratricide of the Republican primaries will continue through at least Super Tuesday if not beyond.
A good week indeed.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has introduced a new cultural idiom: the 1% versus the 99%. It’s effective because it’s simple; it resonates with the anti-authoritarianism of the left and the anti-elitism of the right; and it points directly to inequitable distribution of wealth as a key problem in the American system.
But it is simplistic. It suggests that the problem is simply income inequality, which pits the avarice of the few against the covetousness of the many, as some op-ed writers believe. The problem is not just haves and have nots. It’s the disequilibrium, the mathematical, social, and structural forces that are continually widening the wealth gap and threaten to fracture or eliminate the American middle class.
The mathematical forces are the easiest ones to describe. Basically, in your household budget,
Surplus = income – ( fixed expenses + taxes + debt payments + discretionary expenses)
For much of the 99%, this number is actually negative. Stagnant wages and the compounding interest of credit card debt are actually taking families backwards. A significant expense like a hospital stay, auto accident, or natural disaster can wipe out all savings and lead to bankruptcy, homelessness, and poverty. This is how almost a third of America lives: in a poverty trap.
Those who have succeeded in small business or risen in their careers so to escape the credit card trap may have a surplus, and with that surplus they can save and invest. Perhaps they can save up for a down payment and buy a house, maybe have a CPA do their taxes and find some deductions that save them money. Auto and health insurance keep them from being wiped out by an unexpected event. These families can invest in a 401(k) for retirement and get a solid 10% per year appreciation on it. This is the middle class ideal, but a poor job market and the rocky housing market have made this riskier in this recession.
The next echelon, though, is where wealth starts to accumulate. Not only do incomes rise, but the tax rate is only negligible higher and the fixed expenses are constant, so managing the discretionary expenses allows much more surplus for investment–like a rental property, for instance. Plus, slightly higher fixed expenses in the form of regular doctor visits, auto and home maintenance, etc. reduce the incidence of expensive illnesses and accidents.
You can see how this plays out. The mathematics of the relationship between credit card interest rates and investment return rates create a knife edge that divides those who will get richer from those who will get poorer. And while conservatives like to say that hard work and discipline (controlling income and discretionary spending) are the tests of character that divide the rich from the poor, the truth is that starting out on the right side and being lucky are much more important.
This is the argument for progressive tax brackets, and why the wealthy should pay a higher percentage of their income, and the poor should pay nothing. It’s because taxation can bring equilibrium to this equation and slow the widening gap. With no taxes (or credits), the poor may have a small surplus to invest and possibly reach the middle class. And even Eisenhower-era top bracket taxes won't make the rich poorer; they just compensate for the logarithmic effects of income opportunities.
Those who argue that a flat tax is a fair tax miss this mathematical fact. A flat tax accelerates the fall into poverty of the lower middle class by increasing fixed expenses so that a surplus is impossible, and it falls into the noise of the fixed expenses of the wealthy and simply shifts the floor, but not the steepness, of the logarithmic wealth curve. It would cut the middle class in two.
You can also see the effect that social services have on the wealth gap. Once a family on the not-wealthy side of the divide is hit with unemployment, catastrophic loss, or significant medical expenses, it can be impossible for them to ever regain their standard of living—the compounding debt makes any setback permanent. Again, for the wealthy, the same economic event has a very different effect; the investment income keeps on generating wealth and they can regain their former level fairly quickly. That’s why a single-payer healthcare system, paid out of general income taxes and insuring basic healthcare at the same level for all, would have little noticeable effect on the wealthy (who can and will always pay as much as they want for their health) but could literally save hundreds of thousands of lives of people who die because they cannot afford basic healthcare or insurance. We have death panels today: they're insurance companies and banks.
As income increases, fixed expenses become irrelevant and even discretionary spending is in the noise because people who have in excess of $50 million can't really spend it fast enough to offset the income (a hundred thousand dollars a week). And that income does not come from wages. It comes from capital gains, investment funds, bonus payouts, and windfalls from mergers and acquisitions, and investment opportunities not available to retail investors, all of which is taxed at a rate lower than ordinary income.
Of course it’s a myth that the CEO who makes 185 times the average worker’s pay earns it by working 185 times as hard—it takes almost no work at all. The classic phrase is that they’re “making their money work for them;” the economic term is “rent-seeking.” The increasing wealth of the 1% comes largely from the 99%: the mortgage, credit card, and auto loan interest, the gap between corporate profit growth and wage growth, the arbitrage on the ups and downs of the 401(k) accounts of the majority of Americans is the almost effortless source of wealth for the 1%.
Which is why the political power of the wealthy is the greatest cause of income inequality. Through the personal power to influence politicians, the media power to control the public discourse, and the financial power to fund the election campaigns of pliant candidates, the wealthy are driving the public policy discussion towards social structures that benefit them directly. It’s not just the poppycock that decreasing taxes on the wealthy leads to job creation (it doesn’t); it's the falsehood that market forces are more efficient than governmental bureaucracy, so Social Security, Medicare, health insurance, education, welfare, prisons, even poverty relief should be privatized instead of collective.
The more economic activity that is funneled through the “free market,” the more the 1% can collect in rent-seeking off of the 99%, and the greater the wealth gap will grow.
Somebody going through a file folder of old documents found this and asked if I recognized it.
There are twenty names listed and I know most of them:
The building had four quadrants: Marketing/Admin, Engineering, Manufacturing, and a large empty space that we did not know what to do with when we moved in. That’s why it’s labeled “Tennis courts?” Needless to say that within two months it was our warehouse, and within six we had leased a building across the street and the one next door to expand into.
“Advent” was not a religious sanctuary, it was the demo room with the $3,000 projection TV that we used for demos to Important People.
Hat tip to Louise for unearthing this document!
Update: Bill Fernandez identifies Clive Twyman as our first Industrial Designer. Hi, Bill!
Om Malik, who is an actual Internet tech blogger and journalist, did the respectable thing and asked Amazon for comment on my notion that they could track browsing patterns through Silk. His blog post contains the reply:
“Is Amazon able to peer into its customer usage behavior and use that to offer services based on that data. For instance if you see thousands of your customers going to buy SeeVees shoes from say a store like James Perse at a certain price, can you guys use that data to specifically tailor the Amazon store and offer up deals on those very same pair of shoes?” – the answer is no, as you can see in our terms and conditions, URLs are used to troubleshoot and diagnose Amazon Silk technical issues.
I’ll take that as definitive, although my reading of their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy doesn’t seem to limit their ability to perform analytics on aggregate data. But they seem to be denying interest in using your Silk browsing history in the same way they already use your browsing history on the Amazon site itself to make recommendations and offers.
I don’t comment on Apple products or development here, but I’m absolutely fascinated by the Amazon Fire announcement today, and it has nothing to do with the iPad.
Lost in the “Is it an iPad Killer?” hype is the audacious introduction of the Silk browser. Under the guise of increasing speed (on WiFi; there is no 3G Fire where download speed would be a larger issue), Amazon is performing astonishing jujitsu on Google. The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence. And all of this on Google’s dime. They use a back-revved version of Android, not Honeycomb; they don’t use Google’s web browser; they can intermediate user click through on Google search results so Google doesn’t see the actual user behavior. Google’s whole play of promoting Android in order to aggregate user behavior patterns to sell to advertisers is completely subverted by Amazon’s intermediation. Fire isn’t a noun, it’s a verb, and it’s what Amazon has done in the targeted direction of Google. This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a privatized merchant data-aggregation network.(9/28 8:45 PST Removed “privacy and.” The piece is about data mining and aggregation, there’s no argument about privacy concerns at all, but people are reading that into it.)
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