So Carl,
I suspect that most people on this list or anywhere else, for that matter,
don't have a clue as to what you and I are saying in different ways because we
are, believe it or not, old, which means that we are out of step with modern
life and we're looking at some of the really good things that have been shunted
aside in the mad march toward what everyone considers to be, progress. I'm
reading a book from BARD which is called, I think, "Jello Girls", which is
about the women of the family that invented Jello. It's actually about the
author's mother and how her life was affected by patriarchy, the family
wealth, and what Jello stood for. One of the things that the book describes is
how Jello was marketed, the ways in which the current ideas about family,
America, and the role of women, were used to market the producdt. And as the
times changed, the advertisers came up with new ways of trying to convince
people that Jello was indispensable to their lifestyles. If anyone wants a very
personal picture of how Corporate America attempts to manipulate people, this
is a good book to read. But this is basically a feminist book, not a a
political book or one about economics. Until I lived in a graduate co-op in Ann
Arbor Michigan, I'd never heard of Jello salad. Yuck! Someone there, tried to
convince me to eat lime jello with grated carrots in it. Insane! But my much
more culinarily sophisticated family at some point, did serve a dessert made
with lime jello that had been mixed with whipped cream before being put in the
frefrigerator to set. I thought that, that was acceptable. Yesterday I tried to
explain to my 46 year old daughter that until the early 50's, all of the eggs
sold in the stores here were, what is now called organic, andno one had to pay
a premium price for them. That's because up through the 1940's, laying hens
were raised in the old fashioned natural way. They wandered around outdoors,
eating insects, as well as being fed. The people who owned the farms, went out
each morning and gathered the eggs. Some breeds of chickens laid brown eggs and
some laid white eggs. The color of the shell had no relation to the quality of
the eggs. Some genius of efficiency and profit, turned reality on its head,
ensured that the majority of people are eating poor quality eggs from laying
hens raised in God awful conditions and that if you want good quality eggs laid
by healthy chickens, you pay a higher price. That genius helped destroy family
farming. I spent my childhood summers on my grandmother's chicken farm and
visited my uncle's chicken farm after her farm was sold. Everyone in the family
would help candle the eggs if they happened to be visiting. That means, holding
each egg up to a special light to ensure that it doesn't contain blood spots in
it and is of good enough quality to sell. I remember that we used to hand
inspect peaches on a family friend's peach farm in Maryland, as well. The
peaches that didn't pass inspection were our snacks, or they were saved to use
for homemade ice cream. When you handle lots of peaches, you get peach fuzz all
over you and it itches. So then you dive into the swimming hole which is on the
property, to wash off the fuzz.
And then there was the New Yorker article. When they instituted the new
computer program in the hospital which would link with other hospitals and make
sharing patients' records throughout many hospitals, medical offices, and
insurance plans easier, not to mention, allowing patients to know at a glance,
what all their doctors have written about them, it increased the working hours
of the doctors to such an extent that not only did it cut into the 20 minute
slots allocated to face to face encounters with patients, but it required
doctors to take home two or three hours worth of work each night. Office
assistance couldn't help because the system does not give them access to the
same screens as the doctors. To solve the problem, in some places, they hired
medical students to be present in the exam room to take charge of the computer,
making all of the entries for the doctor as he told them what he wanted to say
and looking things up for him. But there aren't enough of these students
available and they're not fully qualified doctors. The grand solution in some
hospitals is to have medical doctors in under developed countries be hooked up
by computer during each medical examination. So this doctor, from another
country and culture, knowing English, perhaps well, perhaps superficially, is
observing and writing down everything crucial in the patient's record and, get
this, being sure that the information will meet the requirements of the medical
insurance company. And the big summary statement toward the end of the article
is that we should remember that basically, this is all for the benefit of the
patients, not the doctors, and it means that the patient has easy access to all
of his records on the computer.
This is a world in which there are no longer weekends when everyone can just
stop, relax, and stay at home. It's a world where, at least here in the NY
metro area, you can't call most of your doctor's offices directly because all
of the doctors are now affiliated with big corporate hospital complexes. You
reach a call center. You can't talk with your doctor on the phone. You can't
get an emergency appointment. Dentistry is going the same way, just not quite
as fast. This is the efficiency expert's dream. No direct human relationships,
just interchangeable parts. I'm not an individual. I'm a record in a computer,
whether I'm talking to the medical office, the cable company, the bank. And if
I call, as I wait on a cue, I'm urged to go to the website instead so I won't
have to wait. Well, so the corporation can employ fewer people, use more
rechnology to replace them, amd make more money for shareholders. But it is a
lie that what they're giving me for my money is equally as good because human
intelligence and concern and empathy are irreplaceable, just like the food from
industrial farms, the tomatoes, the strawberries, whatever, are not at all what
they once were or what they're supposed to be.
Miriam.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2018 2:40 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Robert Reich: Amazon Is Everything That's Wrong
With America
If Amazon is everything that's wrong with America, then we've been wrong for a
very long time.
It began with the railroads stringing out their webs of steel across the
continent. Then came the network of US Highways. Airplanes morphed into jets
and then into super jets. Meanwhile, that little neighborhood Hardware grew
into a national chain.
Local shops gave way to the likes of Sears, Penney's, Wards, and they all moved
over for Walmart and Amazon. Shopping malls became deserted as on-line
shopping took away the hustle and annoyance of the crowded shopping centers.
So Amazon is not everything wrong with America. Amazon is just the next step
in a never ending search for better and easier living. Of course, it's the
Corporate dream, and we've just been suckered into it. It is both exciting and
frightening to wait for the next leap into a "better way of life".
You know, Donald Trump's return to our Glory Days might not be such a bad idea.
Not that they were all that glorious for the working folks, but that slower
pace, the family gatherings, the meeting and greeting as we went about our
business or our shopping. That was not so bad a life, after all. We just
needed a bit more respect...and a bit more money.
Carl Jarvis
11-13-18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Robert Reich: Amazon Is Everything That's Wrong With America
Stock Catalog / Flickr
While America was fixated on the most tumultuous midterm election in
modern history, Amazon reportedly decided that its much-vaunted
"second headquarters" would be split between Long Island City in
Queens, and Crystal City, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.
What does Amazon's decision have to do with America's political tumult?
Turns out, quite a lot.
Amazon's main headquarters is in Seattle, one of the bluest cities in
the bluest of states. New York and metropolitan Washington are true-blue, too.
Amazon could have decided to locate its second headquarters in, say,
Indianapolis, Indiana. Indianapolis vigorously courted the firm.
Indianapolis is also a Republican city in a bright red state.
Amazon's decision wasn't based on political partisanship, but it
reveals much about the real political and economic divide in America today.
Amazon's business isn't just selling stuff over the Internet. It's
getting consumers anything they want, faster and better. To do so, it
depends on a continuous flow of great new ideas.
Like the other leading firms of the economy, Amazon needs talented
people who interact with each other continuously and directly - keying
off one another's creativity, testing new concepts, quickly discarding
those that don't work, and building cumulative knowledge.
Technology isn't a thing. It's a process of group learning. And that
learning goes way beyond the confines of any individual company. It
happens in geographic clusters, now mostly along the coasts.
As the Times' Emily Badger has reported, the digital economy has been
great for places like Seattle, New York, metropolitan Washington, and
the other big talent hubs like San Francisco, Boston, and LA. But it's
left behind much of the rest of the country.
The result is widening inequalities of place.
For most of the last century, wages in poorer parts of America rose
faster than wages in richer places, as inventions were put to work in
the hinterlands. After Henry Ford invented the Model T, for example,
workers on assembly lines all over the Midwest built it.
Now it's just the opposite. Bright young people from all over America,
typically with college degrees, are streaming into the talent hubs of
America - where the sum of their capacities is far greater than they'd
be separately.
The invention sparked inside these hubs is delivering streams of new
designs and products to the rest of the world - including to other
global hubs.
In return, the money pouring into these places is delivering high
wages, great living conditions (museums, restaurants, cafes,
recreation), and unbounded wealth.
Yes, corporate rents and housing costs are skyrocketing, as are the
costs of sending kids to school (even many "public" schools are in
effect private ones because nobody but the rich can afford to live in
the school district).
But the incomes and profits more than make up for it. Which is why
Amazon chose New York and metro Washington.
As money pours into these hubs, so do service jobs that cater to the
new wealth - pricey lawyers, wealth managers, and management
consultants, as well as cooks, baristas, and pilates instructors.
Between 2010 and 2017, according to Brookings, nearly half of the
America's employment growth centered in just 20 large metro areas, now
home to about a third of the U.S. population.
Relative to these booming hubs, America's heartland is becoming older,
less well-educated, and poorer.
The so-called "tribal" divide in American politics, which Trump has
exploited, is better understood in these economic and cultural terms:
On one side, mega-urban clusters centered on technologies of the
future. On the other, great expanses of space inhabited by people left
behind.
Another consequence is a more distorted democracy. California (now
inhabited by 39.54 million) and New York (19.85 million) each get two
senators, as do Wyoming (573,000) and North Dakota (672,591).
Even though Democratic Senate candidates in the midterm elections
received
12 million more votes than Republican Senate candidates, Republicans
still gained at least one more Senate seat.
The biggest talent hubs - like San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington
- also harbor large and growing populations of poor who have been
stranded by the turbo-charged gentrification. These gleaming cities
are becoming the most Dickensian locales in the land, where
homelessness and squalor mix with luxury high-rises and toney
restaurants.
So as the American middle class disappears, the two groups falling
perilously behind are white, rural, non-college Trumpsters, and the
urban poor.
It's not Amazon's business to know or care. That falls to the rest of us.
Robert Reich
Robert B. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the
University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum
Center for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in
the.