Keeping the Boot on Your Throat, One Policy at a Time

Capitalism: It's like this, only with more screaming.

Today, I would like to discuss credit checks during job applications. I don't bother to check my credit. Whatever the lowest score is, I've earned it. I've earned it, not through irresponsibility, most people don't, but through misfortune: illness, job loss, circumstance. I tried to pay my bills, I just couldn't. Because no matter what the finger waggers like to say, anyone faced with the choice of paying the credit card bill and eating will choose to eat. Unless you've starved yourself to death to pay off your student loans, don't lecture me.

The reason I got my present job through a temp agency is that temp agencies, at least around here, don't do background checks. Everyone else does. I applied for a bank teller position and was told that my credit score was the only thing preventing me from getting the job. Then I had the humiliating experience of explaining each and every entry to the interviewer, in detail. That was so much fun.

Good credit scores are for the wealthy, the healthy and the lucky. If you're poor, you don't have a good credit score. You couldn't. You will pay your bills late, and if you've been poor more than 6 months, you know exactly how long each utility will wait before shutting you off- and you pay your bills accordingly. I've heard the advice not to get a credit card, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Gas has gone up, electricity has gone up, water has gone up, food prices have skyrocketed, but you know what hasn't gone up? Wages.

More and more people are living one paycheck away from absolute ruin and part of the problem is credit scores. It wouldn't do me much good to finish college, because I couldn't pass a credit check anyway.

And what's the logic? I have no idea. There's no correlation that I could find between poor job performance and poor credit, and what sort of people do they think are desperate to get a bank teller position paying a little over minimum wage?

It's just another way to keep the boot of the plutocracy to my throat and make sure I, and millions more like me, don't ever climb one rung up the ladder. The more of the pie I have, the less they have, and if you have to go through life with only three gold-plated yachts, what's the point, really?

Welfare Is Totes Okay for Businesses (Necessary, Even)

When I first read this article about how cutting government services, in this case cutting bus schedules, hurts both the poor and businesses, my initial reaction was, as a bus rider myself, "it never ends". There's no end to the abuse the poor endure, there's no end to the calls to reduce the services the poor rely upon, there's no end to the poverty itself.

Waiting for the bus this morning, something else about the article hit me.

Across Milwaukee County, workers want jobs, and businesses want workers. Eric Isbister is the chief executive of GenMet, a metal fabricator located one block north of Milwaukee county. He needs new employees -- the expansion of his business depends on it -- but he can't get them.

The nearest bus stop is more than two miles from his factory. He advertises in newspapers, and regularly interviews prospective employees, but he continually runs up against the same problem. Often, he said, he'll see an interviewee's friends or family waiting in a car outside, ready to give the person a ride home. When he sees that, he knows he won't be able to hire the worker.

Isbister said he'd hire a dozen new employees on the spot, if only he could.

"I would welcome them with open arms," he said. "And we can train. We're well known for being the place that trains. You don't have to be a metal fabricator, you don't have to be a welder. We can teach you.

"But you have to be able to drive."

My immediate reaction to that is, gee, it's funny how affecting one portion of society affects another. It took several days for me to realize something else.

But you have to be able to drive. That's an odd way of putting it, isn't it? Why would you need to be able to drive to be a metal fabricator or a welder? What Mr. Isbister means to say isn't that you need to be able to drive, it's that you have to be able to afford a car.

Where I live, bus riders are divided fairly evenly between three groups: people too young to drive, people too old to drive and people too poor to drive. Mr. Isbister isn't talking about the first two groups, he's talking about the third group, and all of those people are fully able to drive. I have a driver's license. I know how to drive a car. I just can't afford to own, maintain, repair and gas a car. That's expensive and I just don't get paid enough.

Neither, I would guess, do Mr. Isbister's employees. And that's the problem. Henry Ford was a racist asshat, but he did get one thing right: he paid his employees enough to afford the product they were producing. He was only doing that to create a demand for his product (can you imagine a time when you had to create a demand for cars?), but the point still stands.

In order for businesses to be able to pay low wages, they depend upon our tax dollars to provide services to their employees that their paychecks just won't cover. Low wages won't cover the cost of owning a car, so your tax dollars pay for public transportation to get employees to work. Low wages won't cover the cost of food, so your tax dollars pay for food stamps and WIC*. Low wages won't cover the cost of housing, so your tax dollars pay for housing assistance*. Low wage and part time jobs don't cover, or even offer, health insurance, so your tax dollars pay for health insurance for their children. And on and on and on.

Nobody says a word about this. They just rip away more and more assistance from the truly desperate and stand about in confusion as the economy crumbles. Welfare for businesses is never called such, but without it, they can't even exist. But, hey, boot straps and self made men and all that, right?

*Yes, contrary to GOP talking points, many people receiving such assistance are working.

A One Page Essay to Earn $1 More Than Minimum Wage

First of all THIS. McDonalds promises to add 50,000 new jobs and all I have to say is fuck you, Evil Empire. Fortunately, someone else said it a little more eloquently than I could manage given the provocation:

McDonalds, and so many other companies offering jobs, offer low paying, part-time jobs, without benefits, so that such companies can make mind-numbing profits. They are not interested in providing jobs to the people, they are interested in making as great a profit as possible. Creating new jobs creates new money-making markets; but they want to have these markets run by people who are paid as little as possible, an insignificant amount of money for the work they do and the money they help generate. The lower the salary and benefits they can get away with, the greater the profit. The average worker is being used by them as servile servants, and they are told if they are not willing to accept this fact, many others will be willing to take their job, and so they should just be quiet and not cause any problems. We are told that they should be willing to be paid little and be grateful for the crumbs they are being given. Hard work, after all, pays off – just, of course, we often forget who benefits from the hard work is often not the one who does it! [emphasis added]

Exactly. Ex-fucking-actly. I type until my joints swell and ache and who makes the money around here? The same guy who took away my sick days because he could. Don't ever forget that. Unless you work for yourself, working harder isn't benefiting you. It's benefiting your boss. And if you think, given the evidence of just the last two years alone, that you're going to get something out of it- a raise, a promotion, job security- I have a lovely bridge in Brooklyn you can have for the low, low price of $500.

I would also like to share something so twisted and ridiculous, I can only assume the local McDonalds franchises are run by an evil genius whose house should be searched for the world-ending laser it no doubt contains. I know someone who works at a local McDonalds*. He has been recommended for the position of crew trainer. Unlike normal shift workers, crew trainers get 40 hours per week guaranteed, rather than the oh-so-clever not quite enough hours to require benefits, and crew trainers make $1 an hour more than minimum wage, so $8.75. Whoo!! Living the high life right there! Working at McDonalds and making a little more than $18,000 per year! Be still my heart!

You know what he has to do to earn these fabulous riches? Write a one page essay about why he would be a good crew trainer. Don't worry, it's one page double spaced. Yes, typed. On a computer. And printed out. On a printer. Isn't that fucking speshul? (For the privilege blind: generally speaking, an adult desperate enough to find working at McDonalds full time a good deal probably doesn't have a computer or a printer. Those things cost money.) Don't worry, I got done writing, typing and printing it out for him an hour ago, but fucking really? That much hoop jumping to make $8.75 at fucking McDonalds?

I guess simply holding your boot to someone's throat gets boring after a while. And desperate groveling is so entertaining.

*McDonalds are franchises, which means that different McDonalds under different ownerships may have different policies, so this may only be true for the McDonalds where I live, which are all owned by the same person. Also note that unemployment in my area is so high that jobs typically held by teenagers, such as part time worker at McDonalds, are all held by adults. Desperate, poor, at the end of their ropes adults.

At Least They're Honest About Their Hatred of the Consumer

So, I had a little Christmas money yesterday, and some seriously ragged hair, so I thought, "well, how much training or talent does someone need to trim 1/2" off the ends, anyway?" As it turns out, not much, the haircut went fine, but what led up to the haircut makes me think naked capitalism isn't always a good thing.

This was one of those low end strip mall hairstyling chains people work at for the first year or two out of beauty school. They have names like . . . Awesome Eddies, shall we say. A shampoo, haircut and blowdry is $17.99. (Keeping in mind that they have to wash your hair because it's easier to cut hair wet and whatever leftover styling gunk you had in your hair would dull their scissors, but whatever.)

Yesterday, December 26, in Pennsylvania, the receptionist asks me if I want the $9.99 special. Hey, I like saving money as much as the next person so I ask what the $9.99 special is. A wash and haircut. No blowdry. In December. In Pennsylvania. It was 22F (-5.6C) without the wind chill. Yeah, I'll be happy to pay $8 for you to blow dry my hair.

Seriously, I can see this as an option in the summer, though not for my supreme frizziness, but midwinter? That's like prefacing surgery by asking someone if they'd like to save $500 by not having the wound sewn shut. It's like some sort of evil marketing ploy to make me beg the hairstylist to charge me an outrageous sum of money for 5 minutes of blow dryer time.

No, wait, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what it is.

How Many Times Do We Need to Learn This Lesson?

This is, or was, Alisa Wilson. She could have been saved. She wasn't.

Here's the thing about health insurance companies: they're in the business of making money. Full stop. Finis. Done. That's it.

Health insurance companies are not in the business of keeping people healthy or saving lives or anything else other than making money. They take your money in the form of premiums and in order to keep that money, they have to pay as few claims as possible. By "claims", I mean "procedures or medicines that keep people healthy or alive."

That is the goal of a health insurance company, to pay for as few medicines or procedures that keep people healthy and/or alive as possible. From the perspective of profit, an organ transplant is a cost, a waste of money, less profits. Therefore, an organ transplant is, like all other "claims", something to be avoided at all costs. Including human life.

That's why tragedies like this happen:

It was this practice of frivolous denials that ended up costing Jacksonville, Florida woman Alisa Wilson her life. For months, Wilson, her family, and the surrounding community had been pleading with her HMO to approve coverage for a liver transplant. Although Wilson was enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program, she was not guaranteed care because she was “forced to join a private plan as part of a Gov. Jeb Bush-era experimental overhaul of the program,” meaning she had to deal with a private, for-profit insurance company to get her care, not a government agency accountable to the public.

Alisa Wilson died because allowing her to die maximized profits. She died for money. Morally, I really can't see the difference between what happened to Alisa Wilson and a person who kills their spouse for the insurance money. Either way, a person died so somebody else could have more money.

Death panels, indeed.

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I Do So Love a Recession

This is not a role model, people.

This is what one partner said to the other, no less than 3' away from me:

Partner 1: Do you know they [the secretaries, etc.] get 4 sick days and 1 personal day?

Partner 2: Really?

Partner 1: It's a recession, they're lucky to have a job at all! I say we cut it down to 2 sick days and no personal days for next year.

Partner 2: It's not like they're going anywhere.

I swear to you, that is what was said less than 5 minutes ago. Capitalism, it's fucking awesome.

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Explain to Me Why Socialism Is So Very Bad Again

Colour me unsurprised* that American health care is killing Americans.

Americans die sooner than citizens of a dozen other developed nations and the usual suspects -- obesity, traffic accidents and a high murder rate -- are not to blame, researchers reported Thursday.

Instead, poor health care may be to blame, the team at Columbia University in New York reported.

They found that 15-year survival rates for men and women aged 45 to 65 have fallen in the United States relative to the other 12 countries over the past 30 years.

. . .

"But what really surprised us was that all of the usual suspects -- smoking, obesity, traffic accidents, and homicides -- are not the culprits," Meunnig said in a statement.

"The U.S. doesn't stand out as doing any worse in these areas than any of the other countries we studied, leading us to believe that failings in the U.S. health care system, such as costly specialized and fragmented care, are likely playing a large role in this relatively poor performance on improvements in life expectancy."

In June, the Commonwealth Fund, which advocates on and does research focusing on health care reform, reported that Americans spend twice as much on health care as residents of other developed countries -- $7,290 per person -- but get lower quality and less efficiency.

Muennig and Sherry Glied compared the United States to Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland.

Yeah, that socialism. It's awful. It allows people to live longer and better. How terrible! Seriously, tell me again why we're so opposed to socialism? Yeah, yeah, yeah higher taxes- and better health. Isn't that worth higher taxes?

Between 1975 and 2005, medical costs went up in all the countries, as did life expectancy.

But costs went up far more in the United States and life expectancy increased to a far lower degree.

Glied and Meunnig do not believe obesity accounts for the differences. While more Americans are obese, overall the populations in all the nations have been getting fatter, they said.

"For obesity to explain the decline in U.S. life expectancy or the increase in health spending relative to the 12 comparison countries, Americans would have to be becoming obese at a faster rate than people in the comparison nations over time," they wrote. But this has not been happening.

Americans are less likely to smoke, and while Americans are more likely to die in car crashes or be murdered, again these rates do not explain the lower life expectancy, the Columbia team said.

Wait, we can't blame the fatties? Well, now that is unAmerican.

So, how bad is the problem?

"In 1950, the United States was fifth among the leading industrialized nations with respect to female life expectancy at birth, surpassed only by Sweden, Norway, Australia, and the Netherlands," they wrote. At last count, the United States was 46th in female life expectancy; 49th for both sexes.

Wow, from 5 to 46. I'd ask how that capitalism is working out for everyone, but clearly, it's not.

*It's a shade of puce, in case you were wondering.

You're All Commies

communism, republican, democrat, capitalism

Lately, the Republicans have been partying like it's 1954, accusing liberals right and left of being communists. (Being a communist is entirely legal in this country, but I digress.)

The funny thing is, we're all communists. Every last one of us.

Communism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general.

Doesn't that pretty much describe your family? You don't all produce (earn money), but you all share equally in what is produced, each according to his or her ability, each according to his or her need. Nobody's shorting the baby on diapers because the baby isn't bringing in the benjamins, the baby gets diapers because the baby needs diapers. The wager earner who makes 73% of the family's income doesn't get 73% of the food at dinner, or 73% of the hot water in the morning. Dinner, hot water, heat, electricity are all shared for the benefit of the common good.

We're all communists, people. We just restrict it to people we happen to like or are related to.