There's a novel by a French writer that I read a few years ago about an elderly
French woman who is living in an old house that she loves, back in the
Napolianic era. She's happy in the house, located on this tiny lane in Paris,
where she knows all of her neighbors and all of the storekeepers. But the city
is being modernized. The boulevards are being widened. Her little lane, the
house she lives in, all of it will be eliminated. Everyone in the neighborhood
has been ordered to leave because of this urban renewal project. There's a date
by which the neighborhood must be evacuated. Everyone goes except this woman,
and a younger woman who cares about her and feels similarly to her about the
changes. The old lady has stated that she will resist. She will not leave. And
she doesn't leave. Her life is ended when her house is destroyed.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2018 7:41 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Robert Reich: Amazon Is Everything That's Wrong
With America
Yup. All true and all interesting. Once I would have said, "Sad", but now I
understand that it is just me, longing for my youth and the familiar ways of
years gone by. We are adaptable, if nothing else.
At least our children are. And their world will one day be nothing but a
longing deep inside, just as mine is today.
For me, the real difficult thing for me to come to grips with is the nagging
fear that you and I are just one or two generations away from the end of
civilization...possibly even of life on Earth. And all we worked for will have
been for nought.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/13/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.
