Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Economics Page 9 of 89

Consequences Of Silicon Valley Bank’s Failure

By

On March 13, 2023

Comments

The best explanation for why SVB failed I’ve read is here.

The bottom line is that as interest rates rose after they’d been low for a long time bonds, including Treasuries, lost value putting strain on balance sheets, and if a bank didn’t handle it right by making the correct bets, they could get slaughtered. Even so SVB might well have survived in a pre-internet banking era and/or if it didn’t have so few depositors, with so many of them depositing so much.

As at the end of 2022, it had 37,466 deposit customers, each holding in excess of $250,000 per account. Great for referrals when business is booming, such concentration can magnify a feedback loop when conditions reverse.

The $250,000 threshold is in fact highly relevant. It represents the limit for deposit insurance. In aggregate those customers with balances greater than this account for $157 billion of Silicon Valley Bank’s deposit base, holding an average of $4.2 million on account each. The bank does have another 106,420 customers whose accounts are fully insured but they only control $4.8 billion of deposits. Compared with more consumer-oriented banks, Silicon Valley’s deposit base skews very heavily towards uninsured deposits. Out of its total $173 billion deposits at end 2022, $152 billion are uninsured.

The Fed appears to have effectively said that from now on all customers in bank failures will be made whole. They’re going to do it for SVB, and once they’ve done it they have to do it for everyone. I suspect a lot of this is because of who SVB’s customers are: Silicon Valley tech firms, including startups. Letting them be wiped out would be a massive blow and rich people are always made whole.

However, it’s a terrible precedent. If there is no risk, if “heads we win, tails the Fed picks up all the pieces” is the case, then why not gamble all to hell? The 2008 bailout was terrible in exactly this fashion, but this is worse. Banks will compete on terms and gamble even more on securities and since customers know they’ll be made whole no matter what, why not go to the bank which offers the most, even if that most is based on vast risk taking?

Back in 2009/10 I wrote repeatedly that the Dodd-Frank financial services bill would be inadequate. It’s ironic really: the banks and brokerages hate the bill, and Dodd, as a result, gave up a very lucrative retirement, but it’s not good enough (or bad enough, if you’re a bank.) Glass-Steagall should have been reinstated with some updates for the modern era, and banks should be have been broken up en-masse. The US now has 4 mega banks and the concentration keeps increasing.

But zero interest rates and quantitative easing were also insane. Tons of free money+shitty bonds with no returns make an odd combination, but like any drug high, coming off it was going to be horrific. As I pointed out years ago, QE did cause inflation, it’s just that it showed up at the high end, since almost all the money was going to already rich people. But the money wasn’t based on actual increases in America’s real economy and that was bound to have consequences.

Most of the money corporations got was spent on stock buy-backs, since that’s a guaranteed return. It was not spent on expanding business.

So here we are. One of the most important banks in America, because it specialized in supporting a key sector and startups has gone under. Concentration has increased. Other banks are suffering from the same basic issues: a bond collapse caused by increased interest rates, making all those Treasuries and so on they hold, supposedly the “gold standard” a bleeding hole.

If the Fed drops interests rates without significant changes to fiscal and operational policy (Congress and Presidency, respectively) then inflation will go even higher. If they don’t drop them, banks continue to bleed. If they raise them…

There’s no such thing as free money. If you increase the money supply faster than the real economy is increasing, and you do that for too long, there will always be ugly consequences. Yes, the pandemic was the trigger, but there’s always going to be another crisis: history does not stop.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Britain’s Bare Produce Shelves

By

On March 9, 2023

Comments

The Daily Mail had an article on this, and it’s worth reading.

A dig down in this reveals two main factors (the Daily Mail was pro-Brexit and discounts that factor).

First, increases in energy prices.

Tony Montalbano, a director of Green Acre Salads in Roydon, Essex, typically produces a million kilograms of baby cucumbers a year, but his glasshouses were empty last month.

He delayed growing his crops to avoid rocketing winter fuel bills of up to £500,000 a month. He expects his production to be cut by up to half this year.

‘It’s sad and frustrating but I can’t afford to grow,’ he said. ‘I must make a profit. If I don’t, there’s no point in me going on. Lots of growers are closing their doors and selling up.’

Jack Ward, chief executive of the British Growers Association, added: ‘Up and down the country, we’ve got empty glasshouses. People who would grow two or three crops of cucumbers a year may cut that to just one, because they want to avoid using more expensive energy.’

Eggs are also being rationed as farmers cannot afford the costs of keeping laying hens warm in energy-guzzling sheds.

Second, crop failures due to poor weather (aka. climate change) in Spain and Morocco have had a big effect, as Britain imports a lot from them.

Now, the thing about energy prices is that they have been raised far more than fuel prices have. The UK system has producers of energy, suppliers (the people who run electricity lines and ship fuel to retail customers) and the retail customers of energy.

Let’s take oil:

Unveiling its latest results, Shell said the price of the barrels of oil it sells rose from $62.53 a year ago to $101.42. Gas prices rose from $4.31 to $13.85 per thousand standard cubic feet over the same period.

So, their costs increased about 62%, and they about tripled the prices they charge.

In electricity, there is a price cap. The companies are not allowed to earn more than thirty-five pounds more than they sell the electricity to households. That cap, however, only applies to households, it doesn’t apply to business. So on the business side, they’ve been massively raising prices.

Thus the empty green (glass) houses, which grow far more than just cucumbers. Likewise vertical farms have been hit hard. If you want produce during the non-harvest season you have to buy from other countries or you have to grow in controlled environments. Add in climate fluctuations from climate change and high energy prices making it impossible to make a profit growing produce and you have shortages.

Price increases from Russia, in other words, are only an excuse to raise prices, not the reason for most of the price increase.

The solutions have been discussed even by the mainstream press: either re-nationalize the energy sector or put in a windfall profit tax so they don’t get to keep excess profits. And it’s worth noting that many energy companies did go under due to increased costs when they were regulated to be unable to pass them on. Some companies made way more than their increased costs, while others went under.

In the post-war liberal era private utilities were highly regulated, but a cornerstone of proper regulation was that they would always make a decent profit: enough for proper maintenance, which had to be done (remember all the fires in California because the privately owned utility won’t maintain power lines and poles), and to expand capacity as necessary. Utility stocks were “widow and orphan stocks” because they would make the same every year. Genuine price increases were passed on, but profits could not either rise or fall.

So, if you want to keep them private the best way isn’t so much a windfall tax, which is a response to a crisis, but proper regulation. Or you can just make them public again.

Energy prices in France have risen far less than in Britain for the simple reason that France owns its own generators and grid.

The other obvious factor is that if you have a cap on households for political reasons (they vote) you need a cap on the costs to farmers and to industry. But if you’re going to put all these caps in place, it’s better to just move to proper regulation, and a flat cap makes little sense, it should always be in percentage terms. When prices went up 60%, someone has to pay that. That either means end-users, or it means the government subsidizes. Those subsidies could be broad, if the increase is expected to not last long, or they could be targeted at specific industries and people with low income.

While generally means targeted subsidies are a bad idea, there are specific cases where they make sense, and this is one of them.

Anyway, Britain doesn’t have bare produce shelves “because of Russia” it has bare produce shelves because energy companies gouged the customers they could gouge using Russia as an excuse and because the government refused to step in and ensure prices which allow the “free” market to work properly, because there is no free market and never has been, and it always requires intervention to keep it working.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Essence of Capitalism

By

On February 21, 2023

Comments

Eric Anderson wrote an excellent post on how late-stage capitalism engenders mental illness. I thought I’d follow it up with a simple post on capitalism.

As the name implies, capitalism is the accumulation of capital. This doesn’t mean money, primarily, that’s not what the early theorists meant by capital: they meant the means of production: land, workers, resources and capital goods: machinery in particular.

Capital is the ability to make and grow items. Because of economy of scale, if you concentrate capital it is easy to increase how much you make: Adam Smith’s famous pin factory.

But to concentrate capital you have to take it from a large number of people and put it in the hands of the few. This has been covered by a number of authors, and it involves taking away the commons rights of people in Europe (their right to use the land, which had existed for about a thousand years or so). We demonize serfs and peasants, and they had to engage in demeaning acts of servility, but they had strictly defined obligations to their lords for a certain amount of work, crops and animals and once that was taken care of they were able to spend their time as they pleased and they could grow crops on land they had right to; pasture their animals and so on.

Economists call the concentration of capital “primitive accumulation” but what it was was taking away property rights from people so they couldn’t support themselves. This forced them to go to cities and work in factories and so on, where they lived shorter lives, worked a hell of a lot harder (6 1/2 12 hour days were pretty common) and were sick a lot more often. The freedom of capitalism is the right to sell your labor, not the right to control how you spend your day. Unlike serfs and peasants, who were tied to the land, you could choose your master, but for most of the population, that’s what it was, a choice of masters, at least when there weren’t enough workers.

In the rest of the world European capitalism was about conquering land and into the 19th century, about taking slaves. The only thing better than workers who are desperate being workers who you didn’t even have to pay.

Capitalism, again, is about concentrating the means of production, capital, in the hands of the few. It is justified by the idea that concentrated capital is more effecient and therefore everyone has more. There’s a lot of arguments about whether that’s true and we now know, for example, that land clearances didn’t increase agricultural productivity much more than on communal lands, and in the case of some crops, communal lands were more efficient.

But it’s hard to make the case for the path not taken. Perhaps communal forms could have worked, I think they could have, and would have produced more prosperity in time, since they didn’t involve impoverishing people and two-thirds of the non-European globe, but… the water is passed and the argument is important not for what might have been, but for what might be in the future.

But all systems are made up of means and ends. Capitalism justifies removing the ability of most people to support themselves without working for others beyond what amounts to taxation by the violent authorities (that’s all governments. Don’t pay your taxes and eventually the big men with guns will show up, just like the knights did when a peasant didn’t meet his feudal contract.)

The means of capitalism in the modern world amount to “wage slavery,” something well  understood by they yeoman farmers who were being forced off their land in the 1800s, and who seem to have coined the phase. You will have a master and if you can’t find one, you will starve.

It’s important to separate “capitalism” and “industrialization”. Because we industrialized under capitalism we think of the two as the same thing, or perhaps as co-joined siamese twins, but it’s not hard to imagine industrializing, which is about machines and assembly lines, in different ways: perhaps with communal organizations co-owning the means of production. This is distinct from Soviet communism, in which the government effectively owned everything, leading to the normal problems of totalitarian organization. Plurality and capitalism and synonyms.

This is something you need to think through; to imagine, for yourself. Try and come up with different ways industrialization and technology could have advanced, and don’t be caught up in historical inevitability. If you think that the past could not have been any different, then you effectively believe the future is determined.

This is one of the issues of Marxism: historical determinism. When it turned out (at least so far) that the historical dialectic didn’t work out how Marx and Engels envisaged, well, the house of cards collapsed. You have to give up inevitability to have choice and the ability to adapt.

We have plenty of options for the future and do not have to make the mistakes of the past. The first principle is that if your means are bad, no matter how good your ends, your society is going to have huge problems. You can’t routinely do evil, day in and day out, and expect the some invisible hand to lead to a good world for all.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Core Of Class Struggle From Below

By

On February 15, 2023

Comments

Is just “all our lives will be good, or yours won’t be.”

Since there’s always some idiot who reads these posts and thinks they’re smart, no this doesn’t mean everything turns out identical or that some people won’t get cancer.

It means everyone gets enough if society has it, and gets treated fairly. It means that if a rich or powerful person gets cancer they get the exact same treatment the poorest and weakest person in society does. It means money and power can’t get you anything that actually matters: not education, not health care, not food when other people are going hungry.

“No one gets seconds until everyone has had firsts.” And no one gets thirds till everyone who wants them has had seconds.

The job of actual class struggle is to make it so that the rich and powerful can’t enjoy their wealth and power until everyone is taken care of and treated the same.

This is why the gays got Obama to support gay marriage by the way. It seems to be forgotten by Obama was an anti gay marriage bigot who recorded a call against gay marriage and whose chaplain for his inauguration was anti-gay marriage. So the gays, a lot of whom had carried water for  him during the election did two things: they cut off the donations, hard, and they went after his wife: broke into a fundraising party and made her life miserable.

Oh, the squeals. The hand-wringing.

But it was pretty mild, she gets to be famous and rich because of her husband and she carried  his water, for sure. She can take a little screaming and if she can’t, too bad.

But as I said, this is mild. Things will be serious when people start saying “if you make one of us dead or homeless, we make one of you dead or homeless.”

We’re all in the same life raft, or we aren’t and if we aren’t, then the only solution is to put us in the same raft and make the powerful bail and drown with the rest of us.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Dog Bites Man: The US (With Foreign Allies) Did Blow Up The Nord Stream Pipelines

By

On February 9, 2023

Comments

I mean, I feel kind of lame for even posting about this because unless you were stupid (or on the payroll) you knew it was either the US or an ally, and if an ally the US was involved.

Turns out it was the US and Norway. Seymour Hersh.

Of course he had to post this on his substack because not a single mainstream outlet will publish it.

A Dalek commented how surprising the CIA’s competence was in this operation, but what I find interesting is how effective media control is now: if no one will cover it, did it even happen? The level of control over the media is astounding, and the majority of it is tacit, I doubt the CIA had to call outlets and say “don’t publish Hersh”, the people in charge know what their job is and do it without any threats, then see themselves on the same side as the CIA and if a truth is too inconvenient, well, it isn’t important.

It really does remind me of the early post 9/11 and Iraq War period, where you just couldn’t tell the truth and be heard on anything mainstream, and trying was a career death sentence.

And yeah, I do think this is worse than it was in the past. The old media was corrupt and often complicit, too often, but it wasn’t this bad. A combination of almost every media asset being owned by just a few companies and the Ivy League takeover of journalism jobs, which used to be working class, has made the vast majority of the media little more than collaborators with the powers that be.

I’m a bit of a broken record on this, but I still find it extraordinary that they lied about Corbyn about 80% of the time. Amazing.

Anyway, Norway (who made 40 billion more a year from taking sales from Russia) and the US who has also made a mint selling Europe natural gas, turn out to be the nations responsible for destroying Nord Stream, which I’d say was an act of war. Turns out the nations with the most to gain were the criminals. What a surprise. (Though I did think Poland might have been involved, as they had other things to gain. Turns out greed was the primary factor, not ideology.)

Dog bites man. It is tedious that this had to be proved. The amount of cycles wasted by intelligent people proving what is obvious to anyone who isn’t a moron or dishonest is pathetic. (And this nonsense is why I rarely bother proving the obvious any more. It’s just meant to waste cycles and anyone asking for proof of the obvious is not an honest interlocutor.)

Note: corrected “cover” to “publish”, which was my original intent.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Britain Stops Making Vaccine Available (But the Rich Will Still Get It)

By

On February 1, 2023

Comments

So, here we go:

Now, I want to point out again, that at Davos, where the rich and powerful meet to decide the fate of the world, everyone has to be vaccinated, and has to be tested and if they aren’t or they test positive, their badges are deactivated.

In other words, the rich get vaccinated. Current vaccines are pretty shitty, because they haven’t been keeping up with the mutation speed, but they’re still better than nothing, and do reduce the seriousness of cases.

But that’s not really the point: the point is that for the rich the cost of vaccine (Modern is raising it from $26 to $110 to $130 in the US) is meaningless to our lords and masters: they don’t even notice $120: they spend more, much more, for lunch. But to ordinary people such a price can be the difference between eating or paying the rent. If it has to go, it goes.

One policy for the rich, who can afford bespoke medicine, and another for the plebes.

This is also terrible public health policy. While the vaccines don’t prevent spread, they do reduce viral load in infected individuals, and thus reduce the odds people around them will get infected. Mass vaccination (note that it is voluntary) is a good thing.

Leaving aside the whole “death” thing, there has been so much disabling due to Covid that the Bank of England, hardly touchy-feely compassionate sorts have noticed it with alarm, so even if you, like our lords and masters, are functionally a psychopath, this is going to continue to cause disaster in the economy.

But then labor shortages and supply chain problems have been used as an excuse to raise prices much higher than cost increases, so from the point of view of the ruling class, who is this their problem? They’re getting richer; they make sure the people around them are tested and vaccinated and most of them can work from home and even before Covid lived inside carefully vetted bubbles. And if they do get sick, they’ll get the best care, far better than you will.

So, really, Covid continues to be win-win-win for the ruling class and who cares if it’s a mass death, mass disabling event of the sheep they rule over?

WIN! From WIN to WIN. That’s what it’s like to be in the ruling class. Even a pandemic that kills millions is just another profit opportunity.

Too bad you aren’t a member.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Know Thine Enemy

By

On January 27, 2023

Comments

I want you to ask yourself this question: what makes someone your enemy? Really think about it for a bit before continuing. Have an answer.

An enemy is someone who is doing you you harm, or intends to do you harm. If they have the ability to do you harm, they will act on it.

Note what this definition does not include. It says nothing about hate or anger or emotional state. It does not matter why someone is or wants or intends to harm you, all that matters is that they do.

It does also not matter if you are collateral damage: if they don’t even know you personally exist. If they’re willing to harm you to get what they want, without caring one way or another about you, they’re your enemy.

If a political leader passes a law or regulation which takes away your health care or your house or your food or your life, it doesn’t matter that they weren’t thinking about you, specifically, when they made that decision. They deliberately harmed you, and they were OK with it. They certainly knew, if they thought about it all, that it would harm some people, and that wasn’t a problem for them.

When healthcare execs raise the prices of medicines like insulin or care, they know that means some people who need that medicine or care will do without, and they know some people will die. If they don’t need to make the decision “If we don’t do this, we’ll go bankrupt and no one will get care” then they’re good with a bunch of people suffering or dying. They are, therefore, those people’s enemies, and they are a potential enemy for anyone who might one day not be able to afford care.

Your greatest enemies, that is the people who are most likely to make decisions which harm you, are almost always your politicians and corporate leaders. These are also the people who could be your greatest allies, if they chose, as FDR did for most Americans (though he was an enemy of the rich, and both he and they understood that.)

If you are thinking about politics this is the most fundamental concept you need to understand and emotionally internalize. People with power are your greatest enemies or your greatest allies, and your job is to make them your allies. If they are your enemies, and almost all of them in the current world are, then you must treat them as an enemy, and never think of them as a friend or ally.

For about 50 years, politicians and private wealthy individuals have deliberately pursued policies which have impoverished you. If your income had increased at the same rate as productivity, you’d have about twice as much income. Think about that. The reason you don’t is they took all of that (and more) and made sure it went to people who were already rich.

People who intend to or do harm you are your enemies.

This means, by the way, that unless you are a Ukrainian, Putin is not much of an enemy to you. Your own politicians and rich people are almost always the greatest threat to you if you live in a developed country, and if you live in an undeveloped country it’s sometimes leaders of foreign nations, the IMF, foreign corporations and so on.

It isn’t any more complicated than that. At the World Economic Forum at Davos, everyone gets a Covid test and all rooms have HEPA filters and UV light to destroy viruses. That’s how they treat themselves. Our societies could afford to do that for everyone, but our leaders, and the media they control pretend that Covid is “over”, while protecting themselves.

Your enemies. (Well unless you’re reading this and in the charmed circle, in which case they’re your allies. Just remember, in 50 years your class will be reviled and hated more than we revile and hate Hitler today.)

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

A Story About How Health Care Privatization Happens

By

On January 25, 2023

Comments

So, as many readers know, I got cancer. (I’m fine. It’s treated, I won’t die of it (3% chance some years out), though I’m on hormone blockers (moderately nasty as an adult) for as much as another year.)

Anyway, I got cancer while Covid was on, so a lot of my visits were virtual, or just phone calls, unless they really required my physical presence. Three month followups: usually by phone. Faster for the doctor; faster for me, all good. But the last time I went in the waiting room was packed. I waited for hours, and the nurse apologized “the government won’t let us do followups by phone (or virtually) any more.”

Oh. Weird. Made no sense to me, but governments do stupid things all the time, and despite how I make my living I didn’t think about it much. (Doctor’s visits tend to focus my mind elsewhere.)

Ontario’s been in a deepening health care crisis for a couple decades at least. In a lot of cities, if you don’t have a family doctor, it’s essentially impossible to find one. If your current doc retires, too bad. Toronto, the largest city, is the worst. So lots of clinics sprung up, and you’d go to one of them when you got sick. They started offering virtual visits even before the pandemic.

All of this was covered by public health: you never paid for any of it. The provincial plan is called OHIP, and it’s still a sacred cow.

A spokesperson for the Deputy Premier and Minister of Health, Sylvia Jones, told CTV News Toronto, “It is against the law to charge for OHIP-covered services. If the ministry finds that a person has paid for an insured service or some component of an insured service, there is a mechanism in place for the ministry to ensure that the full amount of the payment is returned to that person. Ontarians who believe they have been charged for an insured service should contact the ministry by e-mail at protectpublichealthcare@ontario.ca or by phone (toll-free) at 1-888-662-6613.”

On Wednesday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he doesn’t want patients paying out of pocket for medical expenses.

“We also need to be clear, Ontarians will always access the healthcare they need with their OHIP card, never their credit card,” said Ford.

Sounds great, eh? The principle is that if it’s covered under the government plan physicians who take any money from the plan at all can’t charge: you’re either fully private or in the system. This is supposed to be true across Canada, and for a long time it almost always was. (Except in Quebec, where they use ethnic pride to allow extra lots of corruption. See “Brexit” for a recent high profile Anglo version of this.)

But about the same time I was sitting on my ass needlessly the Ford government in Ontario also changed another regulation: OHIP would no longer pay for virtual visits to clinics (or in a clinic with a telepresence doctor) if there hadn’t been a physical examination by that clinic or doctor in the last year.

THUD. People go to clinics because they don’t have a relationship with a family doctor. If they had a physical exam every year there’d be a relationship: that’s what family doctors do. Those “regular checkups”.

Have you seen the kicker?

If OHIP doesn’t cover it, then you can charge for it. Since virtual visits with doctors and clinics who haven’t phsycally examined you are not covered, they can be charged for.

Meanwhile, Galen Weston, probably the most influential and powerful Billionaire in Ontario, who owns both the most supermarkets (where he has clinics) and the biggest drug store chain (Shopper’s Drug Store, which he was allowed to buy a few years ago), had rolled out a virtual visit service. Don’t know how well it was doing, but I do know that the public health care line you call to be told what to do is now referring people to services like it.

It’s called Maple. Here’s the current pricing.

In my entire life I have literally never paid for a doctor’s visit. Not once. Not ever. Not even a virtual visit with an online clinic last year before this new regulation so I could renew some meds.

But this isn’t covered any more, so it’s legal.

And that’s one of the mechanics of stealth-privatizing healthcare.

Note that while it’s hard to get a family doctor, it’s a growing problem and most people still have them, so this is a boiling frog issue: a majority of people won’t be affected. Yet. And most people can afford $80. But this is how you do it, step by step.

And in a certain way, it’s a BIG step, because as I say, I’ve never paid. Neither have most Canadians. If I need healthcare I may have to wait sometimes (though usually not more than a couple hours), but it’s free.

This is a strike against that. You get people used to paying for some services and slowly expand which ones and pretty soon you’re paying for a lot more. Another similar step was to allow pharmacists to renew most prescriptions: but it isn’t a covered service and they can charge for it. Only $15, but I’ve never paid for a prescription in my life either. And phone renewals of prescriptions with doctors aren’t covered either, so most of them are now charging for them, though that’s been true for a while.

Step, by step. Meanwhile, under-fund the system, overwork doctors and nurses and technicians and make the quality of care worse and worse. Over decades don’t train enough doctors or nurses to start with, then use Covid to decrease supply even more and push doctors and nurses out of the public system into the private system where they don’t have to work 12 hour+ shifts over and over and aren’t expected to get Covid over and over. (In one previous visit three of the four radiation oncologists were out with Covid, another longer wait, because we refuse to ventilate, HEPA filter, use UV light and mandate N95 masks rather than cloth ones.)

I have quipped before that I’m very glad I got cancer now, because in 10 years I’m not sure I’d be able to get care. The system now is creaking, but it still more or less works if you’re really sick. But the real money in privatization is market pricing for the truly desperate, like people who have cancer.

One final point: these people make their fortunes, literally, by making you sick and making it more likely you die. That’s what they do. They are your enemies, wherever they are because anyone who is taking active steps which make it more likely for you to die, to not get healthcare you need or to become impoverished or homeless is your enemy if anyone is. We just pretend they aren’t our enemies, mortal enemies, in fact, because they operate through the system by the rules; rules they made.

More on that later.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Page 9 of 89

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén