Doug Henwood's Blog, page 68

Fresh audio product

Just uploaded to my radio archives:

March 28, 2013 Terry Kupers on the psychological effects of prison • Haley Sweetland Edwards, author of this article, how Wall Street took over Dodd-Frank

March 21, 2013 Yanis Varoufakis on the economies of Australia, Cyprus, and Greece • Jonathan Westin of Fast Food Forward on organizing fast food workers in NYC

 

Fresh audio product

Just uploaded to my radio archives:

 March 14, 2013 Özgür Orhangazi, author of this paper, on the economics of Venezuela under Hugo Chávez • George Ciccariello-Maher, author of the imminently forthcoming We Created Chavez, on the politics of Venezuela under Hugo Chávez

Fresh audio product

Just uploaded to my radio archives:

March 7, 2013 Robert Gordon on the end of growth (paper here) • Adolph Reed, author this review essay, on some recent “race” movies (Django Unchained, etc.)

Clarification on crappiness

I want to make it clear that my characterization of the health insurance that Stop & Shop has been providing some of its workers, which Obamacare is causing the company to want to drop, as “crappy” was entirely mine, and not Lara Shepard-Blue’s. She’s a much more responsible and measured person than I, and sorry if it looked like I was putting words in her mouth.

Give to KPFA, get this premium

If you like my radio show, Behind the News, then please give some money to KPFA, which in the closing days of a fund drive. I wouldn’t do the show if it weren’t for KPFA, and they’ve been very generous in giving me not only a show but one in a nice timeslot. For a pledge of $75, you can get a CD containing 37 interviews I’ve done since 2002. The CD is a collection of MP3 files, not an audio CD, to you can’t pop it into every CD player. But it’s a lot of stuff, and it makes me feel good to look over the list.

Pledge to KPFA here:

And here are the interviews on the CD (dates in parentheses are dates of first broadcast):

Amiri Baraka (1/11/07) poetry in New Jersey, politics in Newark
Frank Bardacke (11/29/12) Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers
Moustafa Bayoumi (8/14/08) being Arab in the US
Ian Bone (3/15/07) anarchist organizing and the hideousness of the rich
Dennis Brutus (12/31/09) poet and activist on South Africa (includes some poems)
Alexander Cockburn (8/27/11) on the media, the media criticism racket, and the devolution of politics
Hamid Dabashi (4/12/07) history and culture of Iran
Jodi Dean (12/18/10) the political psychology of blogging
Mark Dery (5/26/12) pop culture, beheading, David Bowie
Robert Fatton (1/21/10) on the history and politics of Haiti (includes excerpts from two 2004 interviews)
Barbara J. Fields (2/14/13) "racecraft": the ideology and practice of race and racism in the the U.S.
Cordelia Fine (11/27/10) the questionable science of gender
Robert Fitch (2/9/06) corruption and ossification in American unions
David Frum (8/9/12) partial conservative renegade on the right and his roman a clef about life in DC
Adolfo Gilly (3/13/08) Mexican history, on Latin America and his revolutionary pessimism
Melissa Gira Grant (9/13/12) sex workers and their self-appointed rescuers
David Graeber (8/13/11) money and debt
Ursula Huws (10/2/03) work today
David Cay Johnston (9/3/11) how the rich don't pay taxes
Carrie Lane (4/9/11) how unemployed tech workers see themselves
Catherine Liu (1/28/12) education, testing, anti-intellectualism, and the bogus politics of “anti-elitism”
James Livingston (4/28/12) speaks up in favor of the consumer culture as a liberatory thing
Jane McAlevey (12/6/12) how to revive organized labor
Terry Moe (5/28/11) right-wing school “reformer”
Bethany Moreton (6/6/09) religion and Walmart
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (9/27/12) the emergence and structure of the U.S. empire
Christian Parenti (7/2/11) climate change, state collapse, war
William Pepper (1/23/03) MLK assassination
Frances Fox Piven (11/19/11) OWS in the context of social movements
Diane Ravitch (4/8/10) the monstrosities of education reform
Adolph Reed (4/9/11) politics and race
Corey Robin (10/1/11) the conservative mind
Gary Shteyngart (9/23/10) on his novel Super Sad True Love Story, and American decline
Joseph Stiglitz (8/15/02) U.S. economy, IMF
Matt Taibbi (4/23/11) where all that Fed bailout moey went
Gore Vidal (5/16/02) war on terror
Richard Walker (11/13/10) the wreckage of California

Workers with crappy health coverage now facing none at all

My Facebook friend Lara Shepard-Blue, a union organizer in Western Massachusetts, just posted this grim bit of news:

The contract covering 42,000 Stop & Shop workers in MA, CT and RI expired last night with no agreement. The problem is the company’s Obamacare-prompted proposal to eliminate medical insurance and prescription coverage for part-timers. Because caps on coverage aren’t allowed under Obamacare and the current plan for PTers has a $20K cap, they say the cost of coverage for part-timers will increase to the same cost as for full-timers when this part of the law goes into effect.

 

That’s evade, not drop, though they’ll probably drop too

I wrote that last post when I was in a hurry to get out the door and pick up my kid. I said employers will “drop” coverage when Obamacare takes effect. I should have said they’ll evade the mandate by paying the penalty rather than the insurance premium. Most victims of this evasion don’t have health insurance now, so “drop” is clearly the wrong word for the set of workers that the FT article reported on.

But the original McKinsey survey was about employers who now offer health insurance who are likely to drop coverage when the scheme takes full effect next year. Quoting from my first post on the topic (Bye-bye employer health insurance): “30% of respondents to McKinsey’s survey ‘will definitely or probably stop offering ESI in the years after 2014’—but 50% of those with ‘high awareness of reform’ will do so.” Why? Because when employers without high awareness were informed of the government subsidies available for uncovered workers to buy insurance on the exchanges, they felt a lot better about dropping coverage and paying the penalty instead.

Clearly, if the mandate were to mean anything, the penalty would have to be a lot higher than $2,000. And equally clearly, a lot of costs are going to be shifted onto the government—more, it seems, than the architects of this crazy plan assumed.

Yeah, lots of employers are going to evade health coverage

Back in the summer of 2011, McKinsey released results of a survey they’d done of employers showing that many would not offer health insurance coverage when Obamacare* takes full effect. The liberal establishment united in loud criticism of the consulting firm’s report—but it’s looking like they were right. I wrote up the original report (“Bye-bye employer health insurance”) and experienced some of the loud criticisms, prompting a follow-up (“McKinsey: more right than wrong”) based on reading the full survey, something that some of the critics, including apparently Paul Krugman, hadn’t done.

Ah, vindication. Today’s Financial Times has has a front-page piece (“US business hits out at ‘Obamacare’ costs”) confirming the central point of the McKinsey survey: for many employers, it will be much cheaper to pay the penalties than cover full-time workers, and cut the hours for others so they fall under the definition of full-time and then don’t have to be covered. Retailers and fast-food chains are the most likely to do that, but there’s no reason that many other employers wouldn’t join in.

David Dillon, CEO of Kroger, put it succinctly: “If you look through the economics of the penalty the companies pay versus the cost to provide coverage, the penalty’s too low, or the cost of coverage is too high.” The penalty for not covering a worker is $2,000 a year—less than half the cost of covering a single worker ($4,664, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation), and less than a fifth the cost of covering a family ($11,429). Uncovered employees will be forced to buy coverage on the new insurance exchanges—with a government subsidy if their income is low enough—or pay the penalty themselves. You don’t need an MBA to figure out the math on that one.

As I said in my first post on the McKinsey survey: “In the short term, this could provoke a real social emergency, as scores of millions are thrown onto the private individual insurance market and forced to pay $1,000 a month for crappy coverage. But this could vastly increase the constituency for a single-payer scheme, such as Medicare for All—assuming our rulers don’t destroy Medicare first.” Still true.

__________

*Usage note: Liberals hate the term “Obamacare,” given its prominence in the right-wing playbook. But he’s the one responsible for this monstrosity. Obamacare. Obamacare. Obamacare.

Fresh audio product

Newly posted to my radio archives:

February 14, 2013 Barbara Fields, professor of history of Columbia and co-author (with her sister Karen Fields) of Racecraft, on the ideology of race in the U.S. and its relation to material practice

February 7, 2013 Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute makes the corporate libertarian case for immigration (paper here) • Joel Schalit on the complexities of a cultural boycott of Israel, and the rise of theo-fascism there

Note that the KPFA version of the February 14 show was a fundraiser for the station. If you like these podcasts, please contribute to KPFA. Without the credibility and reach of terrestrial radio there’d be no “Behind the News.”

The State of the Union: an old fartish complaint

[From my radio commentary this week.]

A few words on the State of the Union address. What a plodding, tedious affair—enlivened only by its unresolved contradictions. Obama spoke against austerity—“we can’t just cut our way to prosperity,” the qualifier “just” being a tipoff that a confidence trick was being perpetrated—but quickly made it clear he wanted to cut Medicare and Social Security, lest, as he put it, “our retirement programs…crowd out the investments we need for our children, and jeopardize the promise of a secure retirement for future generations.” In the euphemistic language is Washington, you see, cuts to these popular and successful programs are portrayed as “strengthening” them.

Obama approvingly dropped the names of Simpson and Bowles, the austerity-minded co-chairs of the deficit reduction commission he created and staffed. He devoted a couple of paragraphs to climate change, which almost sounded like he was taking it seriously—but then celebrated the rise in domestic oil and gas production, which means fracking. He talked about making college debt “sustainable”—but of course he’d never want to make college free, which we could easily afford. He promoted quality education for all, yet touted his Race to the Top program, which is a way to force states to adhere even more passionately to the testing agenda that both parties are in love with, despite its lack of results. And so on.

And what rhetoric. Obama is a highly literate and thoughtful guy, yet this speech adhered to the depressingly low standards of American public discourse.It was written at a 10th grade level, slightly below the 11th grade level of his 2009 speech, and even more below the 12th grade level of Clinton’s 1983 state of the union. At least it was above George W’s 9th grade level speech in 2001. (See here for the texts of all State of the Union addresses; see here for the grade level analyzer.) Remember, 87% of Americans over the age of 25 have a high school diploma or more, and over 30% have college degrees (Census source), so the president isn’t addressing a nation of dropouts.

How we’ve come down in our expectations. As recently as 1961, when only 41% of Americans had completed high school, John F. Kennedy’s 1961 address was at a reading level associated with a year of college. Back in 1934, a time when fewer than 20% had completed high school, FDR’s first state of the union was at a level associated with three years of college. In 1861, when 20% of the population was illiterate, Lincoln’s first State of the Union (which admittedly was written and not spoken) was composed at a level comparable to a college graduate’s.

As for content, a devolution there as well. Imagine a modern president saying this, as Lincoln did in his 1861 address: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” Certainly our Kenyan socialist would never say such a thing.

Ever since Reagan, it’s become de rigeur to conclude the State of the Union with a “God bless America,” as if the nation were experiencing a recurrent sneezing fit. What a change from the conclusion of Warren Harding’s 1921 State of the Union: “A most gratifying world-accomplishment is not improbable.” No doubt that would not play well on TV.