Brazilian President Lula da Silva Halts Privatization Of State Owned Companies

azerbaycan24  |  The national oil giant Petrobras will remain under government control © AFP / Carl De Souza

Brazil’s newly returned President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has scrapped plans to sell off eight state-run corporate giants, including the oil company Petroleo Brasileiro, known as Petrobras, Brazilian news website G1 reported on Monday.

Lula, who was at the helm from 2003 through 2010, was sworn in as Brazil’s president on January 1. Imprisoned for graft in 2018, Lula’s convictions were overturned in 2019, allowing him to defeat Jair Bolsonaro in October’s election.

The decision to remove state corporations from the list of state asset sales was one of the first official acts by the left-wing politician.

Aside from Petrobras, the order includes Pre-Sal Petroleo, the state firm responsible for the supervision and sale of the government’s share of oil and gas from production-sharing contracts, along with the postal service Correios, and the Empresa Brasil de Comunicacaooperator, which manages the federal government’s broadcast network.

The Brazilian social welfare system’s IT services enterprise Dataprev, state-owned nuclear company Nuclep, IT services corporation Serpro, and the Agriculture Ministry’s National Supply Company are also off the privatization list.

 The national oil giant Petrobras will remain under government control © AFP / Carl De Souza

Brazil’s newly returned President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has scrapped plans to sell off eight state-run corporate giants, including the oil company Petroleo Brasileiro, known as Petrobras, Brazilian news website G1 reported on Monday.

Lula, who was at the helm from 2003 through 2010, was sworn in as Brazil’s president on January 1. Imprisoned for graft in 2018, Lula’s convictions were overturned in 2019, allowing him to defeat Jair Bolsonaro in October’s election.

The decision to remove state corporations from the list of state asset sales was one of the first official acts by the left-wing politician.

Aside from Petrobras, the order includes Pre-Sal Petroleo, the state firm responsible for the supervision and sale of the government’s share of oil and gas from production-sharing contracts, along with the postal service Correios, and the Empresa Brasil de Comunicacaooperator, which manages the federal government’s broadcast network.

The Brazilian social welfare system’s IT services enterprise Dataprev, state-owned nuclear company Nuclep, IT services corporation Serpro, and the Agriculture Ministry’s National Supply Company are also off the privatization list.

The returning president has called for “ensuring a rigorous analysis of the impacts of privatization on the public service or on the market,” adding that state banks and major oil companies such as Petrobras would play a “key role” in the new economic cycle.

On Monday, the Sao Paulo stock index shed 3.24%, while Petrobras shares dropped around 6% as Lula’s inauguration speech sparked investor fears of interventionist government policies. The national currency – the real – saw its value slide by 1.5%.

Lula’s predecessor, the populist far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, led an administration mired in controversies ranging from corruption to environmental devastation. Lula’s own government was brought down by massive corruption in Petrobras, which led to the impeachment of his hand-picked successor in 2016.

 

Finance Won The Darwinian Struggle On The Corporatist Evolutionary Threshing Floor

theatlantic |  Of course, the U.S. is unique. And just as we have the world’s most advanced economy, military, and technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy.

In a primitive political system, power is transmitted through violence, or the threat of violence: military coups, private militias, and so on. In a less primitive system more typical of emerging markets, power is transmitted via money: bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts. Although lobbying and campaign contributions certainly play major roles in the American political system, old-fashioned corruption—envelopes stuffed with $100 bills—is probably a sideshow today, Jack Abramoff notwithstanding.

Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

One channel of influence was, of course, the flow of individuals between Wall Street and Washington. Robert Rubin, once the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served in Washington as Treasury secretary under Clinton, and later became chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee. Henry Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs during the long boom, became Treasury secretary under George W.Bush. John Snow, Paulson’s predecessor, left to become chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, a large private-equity firm that also counts Dan Quayle among its executives. Alan Greenspan, after leaving the Federal Reserve, became a consultant to Pimco, perhaps the biggest player in international bond markets.

These personal connections were multiplied many times over at the lower levels of the past three presidential administrations, strengthening the ties between Washington and Wall Street. It has become something of a tradition for Goldman Sachs employees to go into public service after they leave the firm. The flow of Goldman alumni—including Jon Corzine, now the governor of New Jersey, along with Rubin and Paulson—not only placed people with Wall Street’s worldview in the halls of power; it also helped create an image of Goldman (inside the Beltway, at least) as an institution that was itself almost a form of public service.

Wall Street is a very seductive place, imbued with an air of power. Its executives truly believe that they control the levers that make the world go round. A civil servant from Washington invited into their conference rooms, even if just for a meeting, could be forgiven for falling under their sway. Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly remember a meeting in early 2008—attended by top policy makers from a handful of rich countries—at which the chair casually proclaimed, to the room’s general approval, that the best preparation for becoming a central-bank governor was to work first as an investment banker.

A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. Alan Greenspan’s pronouncements in favor of unregulated financial markets are well known. Yet Greenspan was hardly alone. This is what Ben Bernanke, the man who succeeded him, said in 2006: “The management of market risk and credit risk has become increasingly sophisticated. … Banking organizations of all sizes have made substantial strides over the past two decades in their ability to measure and manage risks.”

Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn’t. AIG’s Financial Products division, for instance, made $2.5 billion in pretax profits in 2005, largely by selling underpriced insurance on complex, poorly understood securities. Often described as “picking up nickels in front of a steamroller,” this strategy is profitable in ordinary years, and catastrophic in bad ones. As of last fall, AIG had outstanding insurance on more than $400 billion in securities. To date, the U.S. government, in an effort to rescue the company, has committed about $180 billion in investments and loans to cover losses that AIG’s sophisticated risk modeling had said were virtually impossible.

Wall Street’s seductive power extended even (or especially) to finance and economics professors, historically confined to the cramped offices of universities and the pursuit of Nobel Prizes. As mathematical finance became more and more essential to practical finance, professors increasingly took positions as consultants or partners at financial institutions. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, Nobel laureates both, were perhaps the most famous; they took board seats at the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1994, before the fund famously flamed out at the end of the decade. But many others beat similar paths. This migration gave the stamp of academic legitimacy (and the intimidating aura of intellectual rigor) to the burgeoning world of high finance.

How Can The U.S. Maintain Prosperity If It's Lost Its Capacity For Wealth Creation?

globalresearch |  GR: I think that resolving Ukraine is sort of like a short-term deal, but the longer term is going to be in fact shaking Europe away from NATO and the United States degree of influence.

MH: United States is thoroughly in control of European politicians. The only opposition to NATO and the US in Europe is the right wing. The nationalist wing. The left wing is fully behind the United States and has been ever since, really the National Endowment for Democracy and other US Agencies really took control of the left-wing parties throughout Europe. They’ve Tony Blairized the European left, the Social Democratic parties in Germany and the rest of Europe, the labour parties in England, these are not labour and not socialist, they’re basically pro-American neoliberal parties.

GR: I know that Russia is very rich in mineral deposits, its rich in oil and gas as well. Russia and Ukraine form part of the breadbasket of the world. And as they control the important minerals like lithium and palladium and so forth, so they’re dealing with Ukraine, part of that plan, as a result you’re going to see, as I mentioned, a lot of impacts worldwide including food, and we’re probably going to start to see even food shortages pretty soon.

MH: That is the intention, You have to realize that this was anticipated. Without gas, already German fertilizer companies are going out of business because fertilizer is made out of gas, and if they can’t get their Russian gas, they can’t make the fertilizer, and if you don’t have the fertilizer, the crops are not going to be as prevalent and abundant as they were before. So all of this, you have to assume that, it’s so obvious, they knew this would happen, and they expect the United States to benefit from the cost squeeze that it’s imposing on food importers to the US benefit.

GR: I just want to get a sense of what the United States has to fight back with. I mean, they had the prestige of the dollar in their ability to make up things, but they also have control, through using, confiscating, for example, the gold and the deposits of the Russian government, the Russian Central Bank. Are these efforts going to be, is that the sort of thing that they have, I mean we could also talk later on about the actual military, but could you talk about those sorts of tools that the United States has to fight back against Russia?

MH: Well, the obvious tool is that’s used for the last 75 years has been bribery. European politicians especially are very easy to bribe. And most countries, just simply paying them money, and backing their political campaigns, meddling in other countries by huge financial support of pro-US politicians is the obvious way. Targeted assassination ever since World War II when the British and Americans moved into Greece and began shooting all of the anti-Nazis because they were largely socialists, and England and America wanted to restore the Greek monarchy. You have Operation Gladio in Italy, you have the targeted assassinations from Chile all the way through the rest of Latin America and its wake. So, if you can’t buy them, kill them.

Then there are various military forces. And the main tool that the US has tried to use is sanctions. If they can’t get their oil, or finance it in gas or food from Russia, then America can simply turn off their food supply. And turn off critical raw materials and interrupt their economic processes because there are so many different components that you need for almost any kind of economic activity…

The United States was looking for pressure points. And it is going to try to work on the pressure points, sabotage certainly, is another tool that’s being used, as you see in Ukraine. So the question is whether this attempt on pressure points is going to force other countries to, certainly it’s going to cause suffering. In the short term for these countries.

Over the longer-term, they’re going to see, we’re going to have to become self-sufficient in the main pressure points. We’re going to have to produce our own food. Not import our wheat. We’re going to have to shift away from growing export plantation crops and have our own grain, maybe return to family size farming to do all this. We’re going to have to produce our own arms, we’re going to have to have our own fuel sources, and that would include solar energy and renewable energy to become independent of the American-dominated oil and gas and coal trade. So the longer-term, even medium-term effect of all of this is going to make other countries self-sufficient and independent.

There will be a lot of interruptions, even starvation, a lot of property transfers and disruption, but over the long term, the United States will, is destroying the idea of a single interconnected globalized order because it’s separated Europe and North America from the whole rest of the world.

GR: How is… When it comes to dealing with the oligarchs in Russia, and what they’re facing with these sanctions, do they want the sanctions to be ended so they can get involved with the United States, or are they taking to Putin and a “let’s do it on our own approach?”

MH: In the past, the oligarchs were very western oriented because when they transferred Russia’s oil and gas and nickel and real estate into their own hands, how did they cash out? There wasn’t any money in Russia because it was all destroyed in the, after 1991 in the shock therapy. The only way they could cash out was by selling some of their stocks to the west. And that’s what Khodorkovsky wanted to do when he wanted to sell Yukos to, I think, the Standard Oil Group. And now that they realize that the United States can simply grab their yachts, grab their British real estate, grab their sports teams, grab the assets they hold in the west, they’re realizing their only safety is to hold it within Russia and its allied economies, not US-based economies where whatever they have in the west can be grabbed.

So yes today, or yesterday, Chubais left Russia for good and went to the west, and you’re having the oligarchs choose. Either they remain in Russia and look at their wealth by creating Russian means of production or they leave Russia, they take their money and they run and hope that the west will let them keep some of what they stole.

GR: Among the countries that are not going to be supporting the sanctions against Russia or China, India, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kurdistan, I mean all those countries in the Central Asian region. And that seems to be benefiting the Belt and Road Initiative, I think.

MH: You’d think so. The big question mark is India. Because it’s so large. And India has already positioned itself to be the intermediary for a lot of financial trade financing with Russia. India is also prone to be pro-American. And Modi in the past politically has been very pro-American. But the fact is if you’re looking at India’s implicit national economic interests, its economic interests lies with the region it’s in. With Eurasia, not with the United States.

So the question is, I think within the Pentagon and the state department, their big worry is, how do we keep control of India in the US hands? That’s going to be the big crisis areas for the next few years.

GR: Maybe I’ll, maybe get you to put on your glasses to sort of looking ahead into the future. Maybe a couple of years from now. Given the prevailing trends, how is this going to play out? Is this, is it going to have one side advanced more than the other or is it going to be a nuclear husk? What is your thinking?

MH: I don’t think it’ll be nuclear, although it could, given the crazy neocons with their Christian fundamentalists in Washington, people like Pompeo thinking that Jesus will come if you blow up the world. I mean, these people are literally crazy.

I worked with National Security people 50 years ago at the Hudson Institute, and I couldn’t believe that human brains were as twisted as they were, wanting to blow up much of the world for religious reasons. And for ethnic reasons, and for personal psychology reasons. And these are the people that have somehow risen to a policy-making position in the United States, and they’re threatening not only the rest of the world, but of course the US economy as well.

But I don’t think atomic war is likely. I think that the United States is going to try to convince other countries that neoliberalism is the way that they can get rich. And of course, it’s not.

Neoliberalism impoverishes. Neoliberalism is a class war against labour by finance, primarily, and a class war against industry. A class war against governments. It’s the financial class really against the whole rest of society seeking to use debt leverage to control companies, countries, families and individuals by debt. And the question is, are they really going to be able to convince people that the way to get rich is to go into debt. Or are other countries going to say, this is a blind alley. And it’s been a blind alley really since Rome that bequeathed all the pro creditor debt laws to western civilization that were utterly different from those of the near east, that, where civilizations take off.

GR: And just maybe a final thought, I mean, I’m based in Canada, and it seems when I’m hearing about de-dollarization at the sinking of the US economy and how things are going to go for ordinary individuals, and I’m wondering if Canada can somehow escape that trajectory next to me or are we kind of manacles at the wrists, where the United States goes, we’re going there too?

MH: Canada is completely controlled by the banking sector. I wrote an article for the government’s think-tank, Canada and the New Monetary Order, in 1978, detailing how Canada was dependant. It’s very debt-financed, financially controlled, and its government is utterly corrupt. The neoliberal party, the liberal party there is fairly corrupt, and so are most of the other parties, and they look at the United States as protecting the corruption and economic gangsterism that enables them to control Canada.

GR: Well, Michael Hudson, I guess we’ve got to go now, but thanks for that very large and interesting discussion on our survival, how we survive this war, and what the consequences will be. Thank you very much for being my guest on Global Research.

MH: It’s good to be here.

Google "Frist HCA" If You Want To Appreciate The Irony Of Frist Interviewing Faulkner...,

LATimes  |  Ridiculous, seemingly arbitrary price markups are a defining characteristic of the $4-trillion U.S. healthcare system — and a key reason Americans pay more for treatment than anyone else in the world.

But to see price hikes of as much as 675% being imposed in real time, automatically, by a hospital’s computer system still takes your breath away.

I got to view this for myself after a former operating-room nurse at Scripps Memorial Hospital in Encinitas shared with me screenshots of the facility’s electronic health record system.

The nurse asked that I not use her name because she’s now working at a different Southern California medical facility and worries that her job could be endangered.

Her screenshots, taken earlier this year, speak for themselves.

What they show are price hikes ranging from 575% to 675% being automatically generated by the hospital’s software.

The eye-popping increases are so routine, apparently, the software even displays the formula it uses to convert reasonable medical costs to billed amounts that are much, much higher.

For example, one screenshot is for sutures — that is, medical thread, a.k.a. stitches. Scripps’ system put the basic “cost per unit” at $19.30.

But the system said the “computed charge per unit” was $149.58. This is how much the patient and his or her insurer would be billed.

The system helpfully included a formula for reaching this amount: "$149.58 = $19.30 + ($19.30 x 675%).”

You read that right. Scripps’ automated system took the actual cost of sutures, imposed an apparently preset 675% markup and produced a billed amount that was orders of magnitude higher than the true price.

This is separate from any additional charges for the doctor, anesthesiologist, X-rays or hospital facilities.

Call it institutionalized price gouging. And it’s apparently widespread because the same or similar software is used by other hospitals nationwide, including UCLA, and around the world.

The Real Culture War Is A Battle Between What People Need vs What Money Wants

GodsSpies |   “The news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class—the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn’t want you to know something, it won’t be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.”
— George Carlin, quoted here

It's going to be interesting to see, in the next five to fifteen years, the methods the rich must use to keep their power when the climate crisis hits with full and majestic force. The coming chaos and revolutionary fervor that suffering millions and billions will bring to the table will each be world-historical in scope. What under those conditions will the powerful do, the very very few, to keep the very many from taking control? Whatever the result, none of our governments will survive in their current form.

Keep in mind, revolutions are not orderly, and this one almost certainly won't be well led. Yes, from time to time, the world kicks out a George Washington, fit for the challenge of his time, a man who willing to fortify the republic he helped to build rather than just profit from it.

And yes, from time to time the world kicks out a Napoleon or Vespasian, a man fit to rule his time well, at least for the most part, even if that rule is decidedly autocratic.

But most of the time the world kicks out masters of chaos, egomaniacal destroyers and opportunists, people like Alcibiades of Athens, or Ronald Reagan, people who gain power in disgruntled times, and through their actions make the world worse for everyone. Reagan took a struggling country, the proto-neoliberal nation of the Carter years, a nation steeped in stagflation, and set in fatal motion the wealth machine that will soon destroy us all, including the machine itself.

If we don't get off of fossil fuel in time, the rich will suffer with the rest of us the destruction they will cause. Our leaders won't contemplate any measure that reduces their power, and we won't contemplate forcing them to leave. Under those constraints, the problem has no solution.

The rich won't stand down. Will the people stand up? On that one question hangs all of the rest of this tale.

 

Multipolarity: Money And Debt As Public Utility Vs. The Vampire Squid

nakedcapitalism |  The important characteristic (of Russia and China) is that banking and finance are public functions. 

In modern (Anglo-Judeo-American) geopolitics, “democratic” means financialized. It is still, as Aristotle described, pre-oligarchic. But this dynamic is creditor-driven. And creditors not only control the supply of money and credit, but also the legal system governing creditor privileges (“rights”) to appropriate the assets and income of their debtors.

This financial dimension is the main characteristic neglected by modern political theory and popular language. It is important to stress that the antonym of “democracy” is not well described by pejorative words such as “autocracy” or other journalistic terms. 

There is no single term for a socialist state in which banking and debt laws are public utilities. But some term needs to be proposed – and “enlightened despotism” or “philosopher-king” state sound anachronistic. Or perhaps de-financialized state, social-credit state (problems with the SocCred movement), or social-creditor state.

Then Scoops The Liminal Perspective On The Current Political Moment

CTH |  Everything from within the DC system is designed to lie to you.  Accept that and you begin to realize how events are NEVER what they appear on the surface.

The owner of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is Jeffrey Sprecher.  Remember the position of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in regards to Senator Loeffler?  Well, Mr. Sprecher is the husband of former Senator Kelly Loeffler.

Kelly Loeffler’s seat was purchased by their elite status and position.  Why would a billionaire run for an elected office paying a few hundred thousand?

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell positioned Loeffler with committee assignments based on that status of influence and affluence.

Jeffrey Sprecher and Kelly Loeffler entered politics for their elite interests.

The ruse of the DecptiCons is always that a motive to the benefit of the republic lies behind their candidacy. This is the same ruse that lay behind Mitt Romney, another DeceptiCon.  There are no purely altruistic motives behind these politicians, particularly in the Senate.

Their motives are all about status, power and greed.  They are not representatives of the people; they are representative of their own elite fellowship and interests, and this crosses both parties.  Everything else is chaff and countermeasures to ensure their position.

That is the brutal and uncomfortable reality to accept.  The entire system is corrupt.

The swamp is deep and filled with DeceptiCons who will strike at any given moment once they attain a useful position. President Trump went to Georgia to campaign for Senator Kelly Loeffler. Simultaneous to President Trump’s visible support, Loeffler’s husband Jeffrey Sprecher, owner of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), announced the NYSE will not blacklist Chinese telecommunications firms outlined in Trump’s executive order.

 

Conservative Treehouse Does An Exceptionally Fine Job Explaining The Gamestop Situation

CTH |  It started with a bunch of smart ordinary Wall Street market watchers assembling on Reddit and noticing that hedgefunds were making millions destroying the stock value of GameStop (GME) -and others-  by short selling the stock and trading the position.

[Short Lesson to Understand Short-Selling Here]

The hedgefunds were so greedy the short-sellers borrowed more than 140% of the total number of shares of stock of GME (GameStop) in order to destroy it.  The stock value dropped from $20 to $4 as the sharks made millions in the short-sells.  That’s when the Reddit investment community,Wall Street Bets, noticed an opportunity.

One of the issues with short-selling is that short-sellers must always eventually purchase the stocks they borrowed.  That means if the stock value increases you are committed to buying it, you will lose money, and you cannot get away from the loss in your short-sell position so long as the stock value is high.

Knowing the borrowed shares were more than the total number of outstanding shares of the entire GME stock, the rebellious alliance knew the short-sellers (hedgefunds) would have to eventually buy them.  So the independent group, mass numbers of individual investors, started purchasing shares and driving up the GameStop stock value.

Parasitically Fsucked Your Economy, Your Daughters, And Your Way Of Life - Yet - Free As A Jaybird

nytimes |  Apollo grew out of the ashes of Drexel Burnham Lambert, the investment bank that collapsed in 1990 amid a trading investigation that sent the since-pardoned Michael Milken to prison.

Although Mr. Black started Apollo with his younger partners — Mr. Harris is 56 and Mr. Rowan 58 — he has been long been the face and voice of the firm.

In building Apollo into a global financial powerhouse, Mr. Black has made himself and his co-founders immensely rich: His personal fortune is estimated at more than $8 billion, and he owns a massive private art collection — including a version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” — and is the chairman of the Museum of Modern Art.

But when Apollo held its most recent earnings call in late October, there were already signs his dealings with Mr. Epstein were causing ripples, both in the firm and among investors. In an unusual move, Mr. Black read a brief statement about the Epstein matter before handing over the meeting to Mr. Harris and Mr. Rowan.

Apollo has long specialized in buying up distressed companies and retooling them, but it also boasts large credit, infrastructure and real estate businesses. Mr. Rowan was the driving force behind Apollo’s thriving insurance business and its insurance subsidiary, Athene Holding, which has fueled the Wall Street’s firm earnings in recent years.

At one time, both Mr. Rowan and Mr. Harris were seen as the heirs apparent to Mr. Black. But with Mr. Rowan’s decision to pull back from day-to-day affairs, many on Wall Street assumed the job would fall to Mr. Harris, who has the run the nuts and bolts of Apollo’s vast buyout operation.

Mr. Harris, who is an owner of the Philadelphia 76rs basketball team and the New Jersey Devils hockey team, said he would “fully support” Mr. Rowan as chief executive. “I will focus on expanding our global search for investor returns, which is at the core of our success,” he said in a statement.

As the only three members of Apollo’s executive committee, the founders hold considerable sway over the company. As of now, the decision to name Mr. Rowan as Mr. Black’s successor does not need approval of the company’s board. And all three men — who have much of their net worth tied up in the company — have a vested interest in the stability of the firm.

 

Louis Proyect Puts Hands On Matt Taibbi And The Weinstein Bros.

counterpunch |  In the opening moments of their conversation, Taibbi repented for not making a big stink over Weinstein’s ostracism and eventual resignation from Evergreen over student protests. Suing the school for $3.8 million in damage, Weinstein walked away with only a half-million.

One wonders if Taibbi looked into the case against Weinstein made by three Evergreen professors that year on Huffington Post titled “Another Side of The Evergreen State College Story”. One of them was Zoltan Grossman, who has written dozens of articles for CounterPunch over the years. The three make an essential point:

In order for a propaganda campaign to succeed, it needs a Big Lie. At Evergreen, the Big Lie is that Evergreen’s Day of Absence demonstrated “reverse racism” as whites “were forced to leave campus because of the color of their skin.” It is stunning to us how often this “alternative fact” has been repeated until it has become unchallenged truth. The truth is that the Day of Absence has long been an accepted — and voluntary — practice at Evergreen. On the Day of Absence, people of color who chose to do so generally attended an off-campus event, while whites who chose to participate stayed on campus to attend lectures, workshops and discussions about how race and racism shape social structures and everyday life.

Once they got past the Evergreen business, Weinstein and Taibbi settled into a litany of how bad things have gotten in the U.S. because of uppity anti-racist students dragging the country down. They struck me as two middle-aged men ready to write a book titled “The Decline of the U.S.” after the fashion of Oswald Spengler. They probably could make good money writing such a book since there is always a market for screeds against political correctness, identity politics, and that sort of thing. Usually written by conservatives like Allan Bloom (“The Closing of the American Mind”), they also have their liberal counterparts like Todd Gitlin, who wrote “The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars” in 1996.

Gitlin, who signed the Harper’s letter, described himself in the book as sympathetic to blacks but was distressed by their retreat into what he felt were self-absorbed, symbolic politics, according to a N.Y. Times review. He wrote that “few political campaigns are launched against the impoverishment of the cities” and that “The diversity rhetoric of identity politics short-circuits the necessary discussion of what ought to be done about all the dying out there.” He had come to the same conclusions as Adolph Reed Jr., who also got the red-carpet treatment from Taibbi and Halper.

Weinstein gushed over Taibbi’s long record of courageous journalism as if writing take-downs of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump risked a jail term. Yes, Taibbi is entertaining, but how far can you go stating the obvious, even if scabrously. I’d prefer a little less scabrousness and a lot more economic analysis. That’s one of the reasons I stopped reading Taibbi after the good old “vampire squid” days ended.

Smart Cities? REALLY?!?! Mr. Greene And SPECTRE Are Coming For Your Water Peasants!!!

truthout |  Is Chester, Pennsylvania, the proverbial canary in the coal mine? Sure does look like it.

The Philadelphia suburb is trying to sell its drinking water system. “The city’s fiscal issues have been greatly exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis,” Mayor Thaddeus Kirkland wrote in an April letter to residents. “It is our hope that the fiscal problems will be of a limited duration, however, as there is a path to financial stability on the horizon.”

That “path to financial stability” is to hand over the Octoraro Reservoir and the surrounding 1,358 acres of public land to a private corporation. Water bills would almost certainly go up, because, on average, private water utilities charge 59 percent more than public utilities. The system’s public workers would be outsourced (and almost certainly paid less). And all that land could be fenced off from public use.

For what? Somewhere around $200 million. A nice chunk of change, given Chester’s longtime budget issues. But add up the headaches and rate increases that often come with privatization, plus the loss of public control and land access, and it wouldn’t be worth it.

“A lot of people around here take ownership of [the reservoir],” a nearby resident told Lancaster Online. “We’re proud of it. It would be a crime.”

Why should anyone care outside of Chester? Because vulture capitalists might be coming your way soon.

Like during the Great Recession, state and local revenues are cratering. State governments are looking at a $765 billion budget shortfall over the next three years. Rainy day funds are woefully inadequate. States can raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy — and they should. But the federal government has to send aid to states and localities rather than continue to overwhelmingly help large corporations.

Until then, companies like Aqua America — the front-runner in Chester — and the entire infrastructure privatization industry will be licking their lips. Global Water Intelligence, an industry insider rag, writes, “The inability to raise water rates … [and] an instant reduction in tax revenues for many municipalities on the back of job losses brought about by COVID-19 could accelerate acquisition opportunities for investor-owned [i.e., private] water utilities.”

And Not A Single American Physician In This Bailed-Out Beezie....?

Prospect |  On March 22, the Steward hospital chain sent a letter to Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, saying it would close Easton Hospital, in the state’s Lehigh Valley, on March 27 unless it received a government bailout to keep it operating.

Steward’s letter read: “If the Commonwealth has no interest in assuming all operating expenses and liabilities of Easton Hospital, Steward Health Care will proceed immediately on planning to close the facility.” The threat paid off: On the 27th, the state guaranteed Easton $8 million for April and a likely $24 million through the month of June. The bulk of the funds, Wolf said, would be covered by the federal bailout package that President Trump had signed into law that very day.

How Easton had descended to such dire straits is a good question, inasmuch as its owner—the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management—is hardly a candidate for taxpayer-funded assistance, and is responsible for loading down the hospital with an unpayable level of debt.

The Easton story is likely to be just the first of many. After compelling hospitals to take on huge piles of debt through leveraged buyouts, private equity firms—currently sitting on $1.5 trillion in uninvested cash from investors—are poised to line up for taxpayer bailouts.

Steward has claimed that Easton Hospital has been financially distressed for months, that competition from other larger hospitals is fierce, and that the postponement of all elective surgeries has further cut into revenues. It had worked out a deal to sell the hospital to St. Luke’s University Network, but the deal has slowed down due to the COVID-19 crisis.

But why is Easton Hospital struggling so much more than other hospitals?

After compelling hospitals to take on huge piles of debt through leveraged buyouts, private equity firms are poised to line up for taxpayer bailouts.

Size matters, but its private equity buyout history matters more. In March 2017, Cerberus acquired Easton, along with seven other hospitals, in a leveraged buyout for an undisclosed amount from Community Health Systems (CHS). While we don’t know how much debt Steward took on in order to buy out Easton, the typical private equity buyout includes debt financing in the range of 50 percent to 70 percent of the purchase price, which the acquisition, in this case Easton Hospital, is expected to repay. We do know that at the time of the sale, Steward sold the property of all eight hospitals to a real-estate investment trust, Medical Properties Trust (MPT), and pocketed $304 million in return.

Since then, Easton Hospital has had to pay rent on property it had owned for the 127 years of its existence. How much of Easton’s revenues have been used to pay down debt Steward incurred to acquire it and to pay rent on its facilities—revenues that could have been used to financially stabilize the hospital?

How Private Equity Drives Surprise Billing

Prospect |  Surprise medical billing has quickly become a small but critical flashpoint in health care reform. Because doctors and hospitals negotiate separately with insurance companies over reimbursement rates, it's possible for a patient's insurance to cover hospital charges while failing to cover the fees of some doctors in the hospital who are “out of network.” Patients who visit an emergency room (ER) or are admitted to an in-network hospital by an in-network doctor may find that some of the professionals who treat them are not covered by their insurance. That is because hospitals have outsourced ER, anesthesiology, radiology, or other specialized services to outside physician practices or staffing firms. Patients often find themselves on the hook for thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars in surprise medical bills.

Twenty-five states have passed laws with limited protection for patients from out-of-network bills, usually for emergency room or urgent-care services; 20 more states are considering legislation. But these laws do not cover self-insured employer plans, which can only be regulated by the federal government. These plans cover an estimated 61 percent of workers who have private insurance, up from 44 percent 20 years ago. That means Congress must step in to protect insured patients from unfair and unexpected medical charges.

And that puts lawmakers up against the powerful and influential private equity industry, which plays a major role in supplying hospitals with physicians. They have aggressively bought up large national staffing firms or “physician practice management” (PPM) companies, as well as emergency providers that hospitals and other health organizations have outsourced, such as ground and air ambulance companies. And they are using the typical tools to protect their investments from a legislative onslaught: lobbying cash, dark-money front groups, and allies in Congress pushing loopholes and half measures.

The Role of Private Equity: Driving Market Concentration

Private equity funds use substantial debt to acquire doctors' practices through leveraged buyouts, and to finance mergers of practices into large staffing firms. Emergency medical and specialist practices are a prime buyout target, because patients who need emergency care cannot haggle over price, and third-party payers guarantee payment. This satisfies the private equity business model of promising “outsized returns” to investors.

Private equity firms buy up small specialty physician practices that have begun to consolidate and “roll them up” into umbrella organizations to gain local, regional, and ultimately national market power. Researchers at the Kellogg School of Management found that most individual acquisitions were below the dollar threshold that would have required the transaction to be reported to antitrust regulators.

Do Healthcare Professional Staffing Firms Specialize In Pimping H1-B Replacement Negroe Physicians?

laprogressive |  About a third of hospital emergency rooms are staffed by doctors on the payrolls of two physician staffing companies—TeamHealth and Envision Health—owned by Wall Street investment firms. Envision Healthcare employs 69,000 healthcare workers nationwide while TeamHealth employs 20,000. Private equity firm Blackstone Group owns TeamHealth, Kravis Kohlberg Roberts (KKR) owns Envision.

Care of the sick is not the mission of these companies; their mission is to make outsized profits for the private equity firms and its investors. Overcharging patients and insurance companies for providing urgent and desperately needed emergency medical care is bad enough. But it is unconscionable to muzzle doctors who speak out to advocate for the health of their patients and co-workers during the global pandemic that is rapidly spreading across the US.

Yet, that is what Blackstone-owned TeamHealth just did. Why would an experienced ER doctor be fired in the middle of a pandemic? One clue may be that Blackstone’s CEO, Stephen A. Schwarzman, is part of President Trump’s inner circle. He may not want to risk that relationship by allowing TeamHealth’s doctors to inform the public about Washington’s mishandling of the allocation of supplies and protective gear. The President might conclude that TeamHealth doctors didn’t appreciate him enough, and where would that leave Schwartzman?

PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center may have the distinction of being the first hospital to have a doctor outsourced from a physician staffing firm unceremoniously fired for telling the public the truth. But it won’t be the last. Hospitals are now telling doctors treating coronavirus patients they will be fired if they speak to the press.

Should the Rentier Class Pay the Costs to Control SARS-CoV2?

taxresearch |  I have already discussed the potential economic implications of coronavirus this morning. The purpose of this blog is to summarise the underlying economic logic of what I have said.

We will have an economic crisis in 2020 as a result of coronavirus. There can now be no doubt of that; the likelihood that this epidemic can now be contained seems to be very low indeed. The evidence from China is that the impact on productivity and the economy at large is enormous. Whether we can survive the impact of this epidemic without major economic consequences arising is largely dependent upon the effectiveness of the planning that the government undertakes now. What is apparent is that at present there are a few signs that this planning is taking place. We can hope for it in the forthcoming budget, but the signs are, so far, not good.

The key issue that the government has to decide upon is who will bear the economic consequences of what is to happen. I have already indicated in my first post on this issue that I think that the consequences of this epidemic will fall upon three clearly identifiable groups, which are individuals, businesses and government. However, when appraising who will bear the cost the criteria are slightly different.

It is unacceptable that individuals bear the cost of this crisis. There is simply too little economic resilience within the population as a whole for that to be the case. Far too many people have too few savings to survive major periods of economic inactivity without massive prejudice to their short-term and long-term well-being.

In addition, it is unacceptable that many businesses should fail through no fault of their own but that is what will happen unless the government steps in to prevent the major economic downturn that might happen this year. Cash flow issues will cripple many companies.

In that case it would seem that consequences of what might happen will fall, in the first instance, on the government.

Bloomberg: Vampire Squids Are My Peeps - Defending The Squid My First Priority

independent |  Michael Bloomberg called Goldman Sachs bankers his ‘peeps’ and promised to defend them, leaked tape reveals. Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is being criticised for telling bankers he would have defended them as president in a leaked audio from a private Goldman Sachs event in 2016.

At the event, Mr Bloomberg first described the audience as his “peeps”, and said that had he run for president that year, his “first campaign platform” would have been “to defend the banks.”

But, he added, “you know how well that’s gonna go down in this country”.

Mr Bloomberg then defended the banks more seriously: “Somebody's gotta stand up and do what we need. A healthy banking system that's going to take risks because that's what creates the jobs for everybody. And nobody's willing to say that.”

The audio was uploaded to hosting platform Soundcloud and sent to CNN and several journalists. The sender used the email address and username “CancelGoldman”, and claimed to have worked at Goldman Sachs for 14 years.

The Bloomberg campaign has confirmed that the audio is real. In an email to CNN, spokesperson Stu Loeser said that much of what Mr Bloomberg said was in jest, and that his remarks were of an analytical standard almost unheard of in current politics.

Calling Things By Their Real Names

charleshughsmith | In last week's explanation of why the Federal Reserve is evil, I invoked the principle of calling things by their real names, a concept that drew an insightful commentary from longtime correspondent Chad D.:

Thank you, Charles, for calling out the Fed for their evil ways. We have to properly name things before we can properly address them. I would add that the Fed's endless creation of "money" to hand out to connected bankers (not all bankers) is just one facet of the evil. The evil also manifests itself as extraordinary political-economical power in a system that allows legalized bribery disguised as free speech.

One does not need money to speak/write to convey one's thoughts, but what money does allow is the drowning out of speech of those without money by those with a lot of money. In essence, the ultra-rich (i.e. the top .01%) get a huge megaphone to blare their thoughts, many of which are deliberately used to disorient and confuse the common man through the major media and so-called higher institutions of learning. Hence, we get common folk actively fighting for policies and laws that are against their own personal interests, such as promoting "free trade" agreements that are really managed trade agreements, whereby domestic workers are forced to complete with workers in other countries who make a pittance and are not protected by labor or environmental laws.

These agreements are part of a legal, yet unjust, framework that gives unfair, competitive advantages to large, multinational businesses at the expense of their smaller domestic and international competitors, which includes the abridgment of basic rights to settle disputes in a real court of law, not some kangaroo arbitration process with biased "judges".

And we must not forget the bailouts, lack of prosecution for economic crimes, such as fraud and monopolistic and deceptive trade practices, and tax loopholes, all of which are bought in one way or another from the compromised "representatives" and "public servants" within the system.

Trump Impeached for Interfering with A System of "Woke, Self-Serving, Lying and Looting"

mattstoller.substack |  If the goal of economics were to ascertain truthful views about the world, if economics were as its proponents offer, a ‘science,’ then one would remark on the lack of self-policing within the profession. Of course, given that there is limited self-policing at best and the top practitioners in the field are routinely wrong about fundamental questions, we can conclude that uncovering truth may be an incidental outcome of the practice of economics, but it is certainly not the goal of the discipline.

Methodological Biases in Economics

There are three main problems with economics as a ‘science’ that can guide public policy choices. The first is that it is a post-mortem discipline. Economists often assert we need data before drawing conclusions. Economist Thomas Phillipon noted this in his book on the institutional basis of markets that an economist was like that of Sherlock Holmes, asserting ‘data data data, I cannot make bricks without clay.” And yet, there was no data in 2000 when the U.S. changes its policies vis-a-vis China, because the consequences were in the future. There’s nothing wrong with being a study of the past that has a specific quantitative framework, as long as there is a genuine acknowledgment that there’s no science here and projections have no scientific validity whatsoever. 

The second is that using economics to make judgments about the world can be extraordinarily costly and exclusionary. This may or may not be a big deal when considering macro-economic forecasting, but when economics becomes a key part of institutional legal arguments it shades who can use the law to protect their rights. For example, showing that someone robbed me by breaking into my house requires evidence and common sense. But bringing an antitrust lawsuit showing someone robbed me by excluding me from a market often requires millions in economics consulting services. If you don’t have that money, the law becomes meaningless.

The third is that an obsession with quantifying leads to political control by those who have access to data. A well-known example is famous economist Alan Krueger, who was paid by Uber and then wrote widely circulated scholarship based on internal Uber data about the corporation’s wage setting terms. But it’s broader than just one company, most of the big tech platforms work with economists, giving these powerful corporate entities a measure of political control over lines of research. Beyond tech, it’s actually quite hard to get information on a whole host of practices in the economy. For example, the Trump administration had to battle hospitals just to get them to disclose their official price list for different procedures (which isn’t even real considering the extent of secret discounts and rebates throughout the industry).

Not Even Valodya Is Allowed To Directly Criticize Those Who Rule...,

thejewishvoice |  Speaking to a group of US ambassadors, Putin referred to a group of “powerful” people who can “force-feed people their stories that would be hard to digest”,

“We see that there are forces in the United States that put their own group and narrow partisan interests above the national ones,” Mr. Putin said. “Our renowned satirists once wrote very well about such people: ‘Pathetic, paltry people.’ But this is not so in this particular case: These people are not pathetic and not paltry. On the contrary, they are quite powerful and strong if they can, excuse my crudeness, force-feed millions of their people various stories that are hard to digest in normal logic.”

Going off script and speaking personally, I’d like to say a few words,” the Russian president said. “We see that there are forces in the US which are prepared at the drop of a hat to sacrifice Russian-American relations for the sake of their internal political ambitions in America,” he said.

“They are prepared to sacrifice the interests of their own businesses” and “the interests of their allies in Europe and the Middle East,” as well as “their own national security,”

Putin said. Putin suggested that decades old issues can not be solved with one short Summit between the US and Russia ansd that is was important step for him to talk to Trump directly. “The path to positive changes has all the same begun,” Putin said, according to Reuters. “It’s important that a full-scale meeting has finally taken place allowing us to talk directly.”

Trump also tweeted similar sentiments.

The Fake News Media wants so badly to see a major confrontation with Russia, even a confrontation that could lead to war. They are pushing so recklessly hard and hate the fact that I’ll probably have a good relationship with Putin. We are doing MUCH better than any other country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2018

Putin goes ‘off-script,’ slams US ‘forces’ undermining Russian-American relations pic.twitter.com/VInqUSlZhR

— Ruptly (@Ruptly) July 19, 2018

We Are Collectively Aware Of The Parasite But Too Cowardly To Kill It...,

Edge |  I'm thinking about collective awareness, which I think of as the models we use to collectively process information about the world, to understand the world and ourselves. It's worth distinguishing our collective awareness at three levels. The first level is our models of the environment, the second level is our models of how we affect the environment, and the third level is our models of how we think about our collective effect on ourselves.

Understanding the environment is something we've been doing better and better for many centuries now. Celestial mechanics allows us to understand the solar system. It means that if we spot an asteroid, we can calculate its trajectory and determine whether it's going to hit the Earth, and if it is, send a rocket to it and deflect it.

Another example of collective awareness at level one is weather prediction. It's an amazing success story. Since 1980, weather prediction has steadily improved, so that every ten years the accuracy of weather prediction gets better by a day, meaning that if this continues, ten years from now the accuracy for a two-day weather forecast will be the same as that of a one-day weather forecast now. This means that the accuracy of weather prediction has gotten dramatically better. We spend $5 billon a year to make weather predictions and we get $30 billion a year back in terms of economic benefit.

The best example of collective consciousness at level two is climate change. Climate change is in the news, it's controversial, etc., but most scientists believe that the models of climate change are telling us something that we need to pay serious attention to. The mere fact that we're even thinking about it is remarkable, because climate change is something whose real effects are going to be felt fifty to 100 years from now. We're making a strong prediction about what we're doing to the Earth and what's going to happen. It's not surprising that there's some controversy about exactly what the outcome is, but we intelligent people know it's really serious. We are going to be increasingly redirecting our efforts to deal with it through time.

The hardest problem is collective awareness at level three—understanding our own effects on ourselves. This is because we're complicated animals. The social sciences try to solve this problem, but they have not been successful in the dramatic way that the physical and natural sciences have. This doesn’t mean the job is impossible, however.