Tag: Monopolies

 A friend once told me that the wealthy elite didn’t want to just “roll back” the New Deal, they wanted to roll back the entire 20th Century. His point was that all the social gains of the 20th Century were granted to us in order to combat global communism, and that with the collapse of communism the wealthy elite is going it take it all back.

  I didn’t fully appreciate his sentiments until recently.

  The recent upsurge in global piracy seems strange and exotic in today’s world, but in fact it is rather appropriate in the full context of national events.

  Below is a list of trends which show the 21st Century is going to look a lot more like the 19th Century than the 20th Century.

Big Labor

 Can we finally stop saying “Big Labor”? Last year labor union membership had shrunk to 11.8% of the total workforce and only 6.6% of the private sector.

  You have to go all the way back to 1900 to find such a small union footprint in the private sector.

The New Asylums

 50 years ago people were horrified that the mentally ill were being “warehoused” in mental institutions. So the government turned the mentally ill out to live in the street. Now we have come full circle and the mentally ill are being warehoused again, but this time in dangerous prisons.

 The most vulnerable in our society have been completely abandoned by our society.

It appears that the lessons in humanity that people learned 150 years ago have been forgotten.

The country’s three biggest jail systems-Cook County, in Illinois; Los Angeles County; and New York City-are on the front lines. With more than 11,000 prisoners under treatment on any given day, they represent by far the largest mental-health treatment facilities in the country. By comparison, the three largest state-run mental hospitals have a combined 4,000 beds.

  “In every city and state I have visited, the jails have become the de facto mental institutions,” says Esteban Gonzalez, president of the American Jail Association, an organization for jail employees…

  Two centuries ago, reformers were disturbed to find large numbers of the mentally ill in jails, paving the way for the development of state-run institutions.

  Those days have returned.

  For four years, since the start of the financial crisis, people have been asking the question, “Why is the economy so sluggish?”

 There are all sorts of reasons, all sorts of reforms that could be implemented, but weren’t. However, one of the most important reasons seems to have been forgotten by almost everyone.

   The experts keep telling us not to worry because “America has the most dynamic economy in the world.” Roughly translated, that means “Companies can lay off people at will.”

  Those experts have forgotten that there are two factors in a “dynamic economy” and only one of them is labor. The forgotten factor is – competition – and the primary enemy of competition is monopolies, not labor.

With all the other HCR news, you may have missed this important tidbit. (I know I did.)

House Votes To Repeal Antitrust Exemption for Health Insurance Firms

Thursday, February 25, 2010

On Wednesday, the House voted 406-19 to end a 65-year-old antitrust exemption for health insurance companies, part of Democrats’ broader strategy to revive their health reform efforts ahead of Thursday’s bipartisan health care summit, Roll Call reports (Dennis, Roll Call, 2/25).

The bill (HR 4626) would amend the 1945 McCarran-Ferguson Act, which exempts insurers from federal antitrust law if they are regulated by the states.

http://www.californiahealthlin…

Granted it’s NOT the Public Option, BUT still it’s important to finally putting the brakes on the run-away rising costs of Health Care, hopefully …