TW3 — coming and going
This is a short post — I’ve been star-crossed this last week; yesterdays effort disappeared when I tried to post it, with nothing saved in my drafts. As well, Tuesdays post didn’t show up in my inbox … this occasionally happens with my little Mom/Pop ISP — but if you didn’t get it either, go to the blog to pick it up.
There are real issues on the horizon that I don’t have time to get into today — like the useless Blue Dogs, and the endangered Employee Free Choice Act; perhaps, if the incoming blizzard … CNN’s calling it ‘epic’ and it’s moving through Kansas, our next-door-neighbor … doesn’t mess with my electricity, I’ll hop on that this weekend.
So here’s The Week That Was, a gabby one, and … IMHO … an example of what makes us all frustrated. Lots of talk, not much else — and so late in the ‘consciousness game,’ the last thing we need is the Pope trying to save us from witches and Michael Steele telling us that there’s no global warming.
The bonus read is by Ted Rall — he’s calmer than usual, but point on. I’ll share a little personal information to put a larger face on it.
I exist on so little income that people don’t believe its possible; on some occasions, I’ve had to prove it. Most, if not all of that goes to cover the essentials. The one bit of assistance I allow myself is to apply for a sliding scale for medical services at the village clinic, sponsored by the hospital in the next county. A few months ago, I was in need of meds, so I called for an appointment, asking the receptionist to check my paperwork and verify that I was still covered; she said yes and scheduled me. I paid my co-pay, saw the Nurse Practitioner and got two scrips — one generic I could afford, another I couldn’t … and didn’t. Essentially, this was only half helpful.
I started receiving notices that I owed what amounts to a distressing chunk of money shortly after. When I called the hospital, I was told I wasn’t covered, my paperwork had expired and I’d have to reapply; meanwhile, I was responsible for the total. They made arrangements for a payment schedule — but life being what it is, I couldn’t pay on time.
The letter I got was very interesting, expressing the hospital conglomerates “disappointment” that I hadn’t honored our agreement. They’ll get their money, bit by bit — and a letter from me, cc’d to their CEO, expressing MY dissapointment … that the error made by their personnel put me in this position, and that their business model passes responsibility on to the consumer in much the way that Wall Street maximizes its profits with no thought to the human life behind the client number, and expects to be subsidized when it fails because it blackmails us into thinking we can’t do without it. Capitalism isn’t dead … but it needs a looooong period in rehab.
I realize that this is tricky landscape — if I piss them off, I might not have access to another prescription I can’t afford to fill. But I do mean to write that letter … just as soon as I can afford an ink cartridge for my printer.
These are the kinds of experiences, and choices most of us are making these days. Don’t get me wrong — I’m grateful that I’m not living in a tent and that I have the skills to maximize my good. But the system itself is configured to bleed us, coming and going, dearhearts — and ‘guilt’ us into taking responsibility it never means to reciprocate. That’s never been clearer to me … how about you?
Jude
HARPER’S WEEKLY REVIEW
March 24, 2009
The House of Representatives, reacting to a plan by AIG to
pay its executives as much as $218 million in bonuses,
voted 328 to 93 in favor of a 90-percent tax on executive
bonuses at firms that receive $5 billion or more in
federal funds. Eighty-five Republicans voted for the bill
despite their party’s traditional opposition to tax
increases. “The American people,” explained Mark Kirk (R.,
Ill.), “are all watching here.” “The first thing that
would make me feel a little bit better towards them,” said
Senator Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) of the AIG executives,
“if they’d follow the Japanese model and come before the
American people and take that deep bow, and say I’m sorry,
and then either do one of two things–resign, or go commit
suicide.” The Congressional Budget Office announced that
the Obama Administration’s budget proposals will create
$9.3 trillion in deficits over the next decade, and First
Lady Michelle Obama planted a vegetable garden. President
Barack Obama appeared on Jay Leno and described his
bowling as so poor that it was “like the Special Olympics
or something,” and released a video to the Iranian people,
timed to coincide with Nowruz, the Persian New Year. “Let
us remember the words that were written by the poet
Saadi,” said Obama, “so many years ago: ‘The children of
Adam are limbs to each other, having been created of one
essence.’” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supreme leader of Iran,
responded to Obama’s call for a “new beginning.” “They
chant the slogan of change,” he said, “but no change is
seen in practice.” The Iraq war turned six.
Pope Benedict XVI visited Africa. In Angola he warned
against witchcraft, corruption, and condoms, and two girls
were trampled to death at a stadium where he appeared. “I
entrust them to Jesus,” he said, “so that he welcomes them
into his kingdom.” Pygmies in Cameroon built a ceremonial
hut outside the apostolic nunciature in Yaounde and
presented the Pope with a basket, a cloth mat, and a
turtle. A 34-year-old army-backed DJ, Andry Rajoelina, was
inaugurated as president of Madagascar, dissolved
parliament, and promised to hold elections within two
years. A pink baby elephant was discovered in Botswana. A
massive earthquake off Tonga triggered an underwater
volcanic eruption that unleashed a 13-mile-high plume of
smoke. “We are quite lucky,” said Tonga’s chief
seismologist, “not to get a tsunami.” The Environmental
Protection Agency submitted for White House approval a
proposal finding that global warming endangers public
health and welfare, and transcripts emerged from a March 6
radio appearance by Republican National Committee Chairman
Michael Steele in which he discussed climate change. “We
are cooling,” explained Steele. “We are not warming. The
warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am
using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the
cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice,
it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland,
which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this
planet is all about.” Floods in Namibia killed 92 people,
and Turkish police dispersed protesters at a global
water-shortage summit in Istanbul by spraying them with
water cannons.
Somali pirates freed an Indian ship carrying rice and
wheat and captured a Greek cargo ship carrying iron. A
plane carrying 17 people, many of them children, to a ski
holiday crashed next to a Montana cemetery, killing all
aboard. Actress Natasha Richardson, 45, died from a head
injury sustained while learning to ski, and 27-year-old
British reality-TV star Jade Goody died of cervical
cancer. “She was a courageous woman,” said Prime Minister
Gordon Brown. The United Kingdom released documents
showing that, between 1987 and 1993, it was officially
concerned with UFOs; one document described a woman
meeting an extraterrestrial with a slight Scandinavian
accent. Egyptologists in Bonn, Germany, were hoping to use
computer tomography to recreate the perfume worn by
Egypt’s Queen Hatshepsut in 1479 B.C., Canadian
paleontologists found that tiny velociraptor-like
dinosaurs smaller than housecats roamed North America 75
million years ago, and physicists at Fermilab in Illinois
announced a new particle, Y(4140), but could not explain
how it came to be. “Y(4140),” said one physicist
unaffiliated with Fermilab, “is part of this whole class
of objects which people don’t really understand.” Sylvia
Plath’s son, evolutionary biologist Nicholas Hughes,
hanged himself in Alaska.
– Moira Weigel
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/03/WeeklyReview2009-03-24
bonus
WHY WE HATE THEM
Mistreated Customers Fuel Populist Rage
Ted Rall, Yahoo
Thu Mar 26
NEW YORK–”Populist anger in America is the anger of dispossession,” writes Newsweek’s Rick Perlstein. “The delinking of effort and reward has become all too manifest. That always makes Americans angry. We do not like to reward those who do not produce.”
That’s not it. This is about abused customers. After decades of insults, they can’t believe they’re being made to save companies that treat them like crap.
I’m a calm person. Yet my most recent bank statement featured three items that brought my blood to a fast boil. One was a $10 “income wire transfer fee.” A newspaper that publishes this column paid for it by wiring the money to my account. The bank charged me ten bucks–for depositing money! Money that, by the way, they invest in what the banking industry calls “the overnight call float.”
The same statement included a $3 fee for using an ATM that belongs to a different bank. Compared to my bank, loan sharks are sweethearts. If I take out $20 every day and pay three dollars each time, that’s 15 percent interest a day–or 5,475 percent a year. Did I mention that the fee was a mistake? I never use ATMs at other banks. To straighten out this $3 fee, I’ll have to waste my time explaining myself to someone at a call center in India, typing my account number into a keypad so I can repeat it by voice after waiting on hold.
Then there’s what my bank calls AN IMPORTANT CHANGE CONCERNING THE PROCESSING OF YOUR CHECKS EFFECTIVE MARCH 20, 2009: “As checks you have written are presented to us for payment during the course of a business day,” they explain, “we will place a hold on available funds in your account of those checks, resulting in a reduction in your available account balance throughout that day.” This is Bankese for: “You will pay bounce fees even when you have enough money in your account for checks to clear.”
I won’t even mention the time they hit me with a $120 fine in a single month–twelve separate fees at $10 a pop–for being stupid enough to use the line of credit they once begged me to take.
I hate my bank. My bank is Citibank. Citibank sucks.
If Citibank wasn’t an evil, customer-hating band of fee vultures, I might not be quite so annoyed at the fact that its parent company, Citigroup, had just received $20 billion in direct investment plus $306 billion in loan guarantees from the U.S. government (i.e. us), of which I am a subsidiary. That’s $1,100 per American citizen, plus compound interest paid to Chinese investors who buy U.S. Treasury obligations. The fact that Citigroup “didn’t produce” has nothing to do with it. I would rather set $1,100 on fire than hand it over to Citigroup.
Which brings us to the American International Group. As you know, AIG executives sparked populist anger by paying themselves $165 million in bonuses after accepting a government bailout. “Take away taxpayers’ sense of ownership stake in an issue (especially, as with AIG, when taxpayers literally own the company) and their rage will not go away,” says Perlstein. “It festers…And that’s when the ‘bad’ kind of populism–the hateful kind; the violent kind; the demagogic kind–can flourish.”
Wrong again. Americans’ “ownership stake” in AIG isn’t why they’re in torches-and-pitchforks mode. Those bonuses only amount to 55 cents per person–no biggie. The Iraq War will cost us at least $10,000 each. The reason we’re enraged is that AIG is an insurance company.
We hate insurance companies.
Health insurers are the worst. They repeatedly deny claims they know are legitimate because many sick patients will give up fighting and eat the expense. They arbitrarily decide that tests, procedures, and even life-saving operations are “optional.” They literally murder their customers! Insurers even “make use of sophisticated data tools dubbed ‘denial engines,’ which are touted to reduce reimbursements by three to ten percent,” says U.S. News & World Report. But homeowner insurance companies aren’t better. State Farm’s refusal to pay victims of hurricane Katrina because their policies covered wind but not flooding is typical. “They said, ‘If a tornado came through and two days later the water came, it’s all flood,” remembers a Katrina victim in Louisiana.
They were lucky State Farm told them anything. Other storm survivors spent hours on hold, trying in vain to get through to companies that had happily collected their premiums for years.
Banks like Citibank and insurance companies like AIG may well be “too big to fail,” as Obama’s team at Treasury argues. So don’t let them fail. Nationalize them instead. And send their current and former executives to Bagram.
Also writing for Newsweek, Robert J. Samuelson calls our contempt for corporate leeches “a dangerous mindset” that “justifies punitive taxes, widespread corporate mandates, selective subsidies and more meddling in companies’ everyday operations.” Gee, how terrible that would be, what with them doing so well without meddling from the guvmint.
I have a suggestion for Mr. Samuelson and the high-flying captains of industry he champions: If banks and insurance companies want taxpayers to save their steak-fattened butts, let them accept some changes that will make Americans like them better. For banks, no more fees on checking or savings accounts. Period. For credit card companies, reset all interest rates at one percent over prime. Give customers a full month to pay their bills. No more unilateral changes in rates. For insurance companies, the presumption should be that all claims are legitimate unless proven otherwise. If a doctor approves it, pay out without being asked twice.
Oh, and one more thing: Get rid of phone trees. Fire the half-a-world-away call centers. Ban voice recognition systems–”say yes or no–I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.” Hire actual people to answer the phone. Make them pick it up on the first ring and transfer calls to the proper department.
I’d pay $1,100 for that. ++
“I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington … I’m asking you to believe in yours.”
~ Barack Obama
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