Colorado climate crisis hypocrisy

Three C's instead of three K's, as in Kolorado Klimate Krisis hypocrisy, but we're firing away.

Couldn't help but notice the license plate below on my last full day of vacation. Before I get into the "why," let me say that it was on a public site, in fact, in the parking lot for National Forest land that serves as de facto city parkland on the south side of the lake, Dillon Reservoir, that abuts Frisco. Because of that and the seeming hypocrisy on a personalized plate, I chose not to blur it out.

The hypocrisy? That's on a Dodge Charger. A sports car. AND, not just ANY Dodge Charger, but per the branding fine print? 

A police interceptor Dodge Charger.

"Go Carbon Neutral" for thee but not me, eh, Charger guy?

Teh Google indicates the vanity plates (and it IS vanity in this case) go to help fund an organization called the Colorado Carbon Fund.

The license plate part? You order them via donation and certificate to these folks, not directly from the state. (You still pay the state vanity plate fee.) Per the webpage for that, you pledge a "carbon offset donation." But of course! Neoliberal climate change bullshit.

This is going to get better, because the contact email is not with them, but with an org that is, I was first guessing, was National Capture Solutions. But, it's better yet! The "natcap" in the URL, as it loads. says "National CAPITALISM Solutions." Oh, fuck, we're REALLY in the world of Gang Green.

IT was founded by Hunter Lovins, ex-wife of Amory and co-founder with him of the Rocky Mountain Institute. RMI? Full of salvific technologism bullshit for 20 years or more. That includes, per this post, peddling the hydrogen economy. Joe Romm, per my review of his book, called out that bullshit 15 years ago.

Colorado Carbon Fund? Includes the oil-drilling Southern Utes (who belie the "noble savage, environmentally attuned" legend) among its clients.

Folks, this is a greenwashing outfit, with the license plates, like tree planting and other "offsets," being another form of neoliberal carbon indulgences without actual penitence.

Does the US need a full-blown British National Health System (updated)?

I've regularly berated Dear Leader for not pursuing single-payer national health care. As part of that, I've regularly mentioned the lack of cost controls in Obamacare, including stating that electronic patient records may have been a neoliberal's techie idea of what might work as cost control, but actually don't, at least not so far. I've also talked about cost controls as an issue in general, such as when Vermont decided to end the idea of a state-level single-payer system.

And now we have a new president, determined to undercut Obama's idea, and with Obama himself having given him the tools to do so. And Democrats defending O-care instead of promising single-payer.

That said, I'm now ready to think that, if we'd had a president with both balls, and convictions, back in 2009 (the only conviction Obama has is for being worse than Bush in the War on Terror, as I see it, along with being worse than Bush in thinking technology + capitalism will solve anything), we should have gone to a "Medicare for All" or other single payer system.

And, beyond.

To exactly what my header says.

A full government-run health care provider system. And, not just one that makes doctors, nurses and other medical staff into government employees, but one that nationalizes for-profit hospitals, which are their own type of vulture, and (since the NFL is a non-profit organization) carefully controls non-profit hospitals.

We need to drop a neutron bomb on the entire current U.S. health care system, raze it to the ground, and make it publicly controlled. (Just like Obama should have taken over banks in 2009, but there you go.)

What's brought me to this point?

A column by Chris Tomlinson noting that within Wall Street's own "1 percent," it's led by two industries: High-tech (no surprise) and health care.

And, this piece showing one health care company CEO getting $100 million, in 1 year. Back in 2009, when Obamacare was being discussed!

And, per my patient records link, not only is it not saving money, it's costing money and the companies who make programs for such record-keeping are making a killing.

And, as of early 2017, a second issue has brought me even further to this point. American hospitals offering spa-type luxury, pseudomedical treatments, or both, are wasting insurer dollars, and would waste taxpayer dollars if we had single-payer national health care without attacking this as well.

We should have had a president with balls and convictions enough to say something like this:

Dear Americans: The only way I can reasonably see to take full control of spiraling health costs, to not only cover all Americans with medical insurance but also to keep that cost from spiraling onward and upward, is to create a true National Health System, like Great Britain has.

Therefore, I am asking Congress to pass complete overhaul legislation where doctors, nurses and other professionals who want to be paid by our Medicare for All program will become government employees. In turn, we will provide generous assistance with medical education tuition, financial stability and speed in cost reimbursement and more.

This is how you force cost control through the whole system.

Doctors and hospitals would have to tell pharmaceutical companies: Sorry, we can't afford anything but generics until you lower your costs. Ditto for makers of medical devices. And, don't boo-hoo that that might cost a lot of American jobs. The pharmaceutical companies have international plants already; ditto for device makers.

Insurance companies like United Health and its $100M CEO could make money only by charging rich individuals cash. But, that would be true under a single-payer system even without the NHS. It's just that an NHS would start at the python's mouth and force the pig of cost control into the whole health care python.

And, if even some Democrats had opposed that, you could have negotiated down to "Just" a single-payer system, with doctors remaining private employees, but with rates and charges under more control than now.

Beyond all the above, Obamacare's been as much clusterfuck as success. And, enough of "Obamacare" has actually had its implementation delayed that we don't even have it, not fully.

Of course, that's another one of Dear Leader's biggest problems — he has consistently negotiated "compromises with himself" in public before ever bringing legislation to Congress. It started with the stimulus bill in 2009.

And, if you think using Twitter as a callout is the modern version of TR's "big stick," that further shows the technie-neolib cluelessness/sellout.

Per the one label on this post, I have long called such stupidity "salvific technologism."

And, we need it more than ever.

Pro Publica has some of the best evidence yet on how doctors and hospitals, just like insurers and Big Pharma (and medical device makers, etc.) rip off the hypercapitalist health care system.

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Update, 2017: A basic version would put a government medical clinic in every county in the United States. It would also let national standards trump state ones on what medical professionals could treat what; ie, a lot of it could be done by physician's assistants and nurse practitioners. Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar shows how bad the doctor shortage is here. At a minimum, a partial NHS, with a government health clinic in every county, is a sine qua non.

We could then combine that with some version of national health insurance. But, having national CARE for basic and preventative services would immediately start the ball rolling on de-capitalizing our current system.

And, THAT is how you do things bottom up. People get used to the government taking care of their kids' vaccines, their own routine physicals and other preventative care, and basic medicine, and they get OK with it. States realize that non-MDs are doing this just fine and accept because they have no other choice.

The US government already runs TWO hospital systems. The VA is not bad, though certainly not perfect. Most its current problems stem from the government not adequately increasing its funding in light of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The other? The Indian Health Service hospital systems have quietly chugged along for decades.

If we had a free clinic in every county in the US, we could then mix and match otherwise.

We might have universal insurance coverage at private hospitals paid by either the government, private insurers or a mix. Many countries with national health care use a two-tier system like that. Government insurance covers all basic medical and surgical needs. You buy private care for elective and experimental surgery and other things.

And thus, per a Vox piece, throwing aside the code phrase of "Medicare for all," I would be OK with a single-payer system with copays and deductibles IF we got the free clinics along with it. Beating for-profit medicine over the head will help make things less expensive than Vox frets.

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Update 2, 2017: Tomlinson links to another Chronicle business-section staffer who reports how, here in Texas at least, ER doctors are deliberately ripping off patients with insurance shenanigans and how their hosting hospitals are basically ignoring it. And, yes, Tomlinson himself notes that that's basically what hospitals are doing.

(That also brings to mind a fault with Texas' medical system in general, of how doctors technically aren't employed by the hospitals at which they work. And, I think most other states have similar arrangements.)

Beyond that, insurers do have some fault.

The system as a whole has the biggest fault, though, and doctors, who would benefit more from a universal-payer system, even if not an NHS, still aren't fighting enough for change.

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Update 3, May 31, 2019: Arguably, per a longform by Ed Yong on what the next possible plague could do, an NHS would leave us better prepared to fight said plague.

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Update 4, June 27, 2019: And, we're now almost at 2020, and while more Democrats say they favor some version of Medicare for All, NONE of them favors making doctors and hospitals take a haircut. And, if you don't, the government goes broke on health care costs, not individuals, but somebody still does go broke. We're not addressing the capitalist camel inside the tent. Kick all of it out, including the nose.

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Update, Aug. 12, 2023: Pseudo-socialist Jacobin and PNHP reps talk about a National Health System, but without once mentioning the phrase "fee for service medicine." Nice head fake and I told them that.

Calling #hyperbole on 80-hour work ... and Gravity Payments and Dan Price and bounty wages (updated)

I applauded Dan Price and his plan to raise all wages at Gravity Payments, a credit card processing service company, to $70,000. I didn't think about all of the fallout he'd face, from customers (even in Seattle!) calling him "socialist," or grumbling among longer-term employees about the amount of raises this gave to newbies.

At this point, we should cue Jesus' parable of the wages and the vineyard, arguably even more socialist, on one reading, than Acts 2, though, sorry liberal Xns, or worse, New Atheists and SJWs trying to sow tares among the wheat it's not about that. The parable is mentioned near the end of the story, in fact.

But ...

Do people really put in 80-hour weeks in something like customer service, actually visiting people? That would be 9 a.m.-11 p.m., Monday-Saturday, with 45 minutes a day for lunch.

Time to call the hyperbole police, workforce division. Sorry, Leah Brajcich, but I just don't believe it.

As for Price? The story makes him out to be more interesting, too.

Update, Dec. 17: A Dec. 1 story by Bloomberg makes him out to be hypocritical, not just "interesting." The big pay raise came only after a lawsuit against the company. He was, and arguably still is, overpaid as CEO for a company his size, even within the US's generous allowance of CEO pay. And his ex-wife, in a pending book, alleges spousal abuse.

BIG NEW UPDATE from the author of that same piece, now with the New York Times, on Aug. 18, 2022: After further probing, including charges that he's a Rohypnol, or "roofies," date-rape dude, and Karen Weise's asking questions for her story, Price has resigned as Gravity Payments' CEO. Read the full story. It also adds many other details to the other bullshit that popped up when I first blogged this.

Back to the original.

Yes, there's a measure of altruism. It seems like, given his citing of "Acres of Diamonds" by Russell Conwell, founder of Temple University, and namesake of Gorden-Conwell Theological Seminary, that there's a fair amount of prosperity gospel, too.

And it has deep roots:

Every day he and his four brothers and one sister rose as early as 5 a.m. to recite a proverb, a psalm, a Gospel chapter and an excerpt from the Old and New Testaments. Home-schooled until he was 12 and taught to accept the Bible as the literal truth, Mr. Price also listened to the Rush Limbaugh show for three hours a day — never imagining he would one day be the subject of a rant by the host. Then it was time to help his mother with organic gardening, composting and recycling.

Price said he's no longer that religious, but, at the same time, that this is in his cultural DNA now.

He's also at least a bit of a libertarian:

He did not actively oppose Seattle’s minimum-wage increase, but a reason he urges other business owners to follow his lead on pay is to avoid more government regulation.

Which, then, undercuts any real liberal gospel thought, contrary the SJW blogger linked above, making her wrong twice.

And, judging by one of the longer-term employees who eventually quit, it sounds like he's a pretty strong taskmaster on working long hours.

You say Zuckerberg, I say Hucksterman, part two (updated)

I blogged on Wednesday about the magical PR pixie dust that has led some people to think Mark Zuckerberg's new for-profit LLC is really a charity and will do all sorts of magic stuff.

Marky Mark, Priscilla Chan and daughter Max.
Who could resist such cuteness? I could.

Well, other than pixie dust inhalers calling me a cynic, and naive PR readers thinking Zuck's done so much good, others have claimed that a California benefits corporation, which is the type of LLC this is in California, will keep him in line.

And, an alleged skeptic should know better. After being given a lawyer's explainer of what such a corporation is, as he attempted to refute a Pro Publica piece from my original blog post, and referenced again below. I Googled to find the actual law instead.

It's true that 30 states have some sort of benefits corporation, per Wiki. It's also true that every one of them was created this decade, when the man and the hour of neoliberalism met nationally in Barack Obama. That alone should be ground for pause. Nobody has any real empirical evidence on how these babies operate.

Specific to Zuckerberg and where Facebook is?

Per California's enabling statute, I don't see it that way; I don't see California's law having any real teeth to making Zuckerberg do anything that he doesn't want to do, period and end of story.

The only way to "enforce" whether such a body is living up to its charter, etc., is through a "benefits proceeding."

However, such proceeding is all "inside baseball":

(a) No person may bring an action or assert a claim against a benefit corporation or its directors or officers under this chapter except in a benefit enforcement proceeding.
(b) A benefit enforcement proceeding may be commenced or maintained only as follows:
(1) Directly by the benefit corporation.
(2) Derivatively by any of the following:
(A) A shareholder.
(B) A director.
(C) A person or group of persons that owns beneficially or of record 5 percent or more of the equity interests in an entity of which the benefit corporation is a subsidiary.
(D) Other persons as have been specified in the articles or bylaws of the benefit corporation.
(c) A benefit corporation shall not be liable for monetary damages under this part for any failure of the benefit corporation to create a general or specific public benefit.

So, that would mean the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative corporately, or any shareholders or directors named Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg or cronies thereof, of such persons unlikely to hold more than 5 percent of the Initiative's stock, are the only people who can do anything about its performance. Let's remember that, although Cal law, and in most states, technically allows an incorporated, publicly traded company to also reincorporate as a benefits corporation, there's been no rush to do so. Why would they, at least when any shareholder can raise eyeballs, at least "derivatively," which is never really explained.

As for whether such incorporation is better than a traditional 501(c)3 nonprofit? I think not.

True that they don't have tremendous amounts of oversight, either. However, theoretically, the IRS can come down on nonprofits more than these LLCs. The fact that IRS enforcement is bupkis in reality doesn't refute the theoretical angle. And, I'll take even minimal IRS enforcement over this.

And, places like Charity Navigator do annual reviews of charity performance, but, I assume, not of for profit LLCs, even if they're allegedly for a vague "public benefit."

As for the idea this boosts stakeholder value rather than shareholder value? Well, theoretically, but only if your LLC's board isn't a fount of nepotism. Which is why publicly traded corporations aren't rushing to do this.

Speaking, what is a “public benefit”? In California’s enabling law, it says it is:

(D)efined as a material positive impact on society and the environment, taken as a whole, as assessed against a 3rd-party standard, as defined, that satisfies certain requirements. 

But, that “third party standard” is undercut by lack of third-party enforcement.

Wikipedia’s article itself notes this, too:

Benefit corporations need not be certified or audited by the third-party standard. Instead, they use third-party standards solely as a rubric a company uses to measure its own performance.

A “rubric.” Is that like a “goldbrick”?

And, yep, California's statute specifically says an outside audit is not required.

So, what we have is a for-profit company that says, "This is what we think is a 'public benefit.'"

Let's see how this spells out in detail. 

It can then say: "Our cronies agree that we're doing a pretty good job of meeting that benefit."

It can then say: "Now move along, nothing else to see here."

But, I didn’t yet answer what that “specific public benefit” is. Hold on, we’re there:

(e) “Specific public benefit” includes all of the following:
(1) Providing low-income or underserved individuals or communities with beneficial products or services.
(2) Promoting economic opportunity for individuals or communities beyond the creation of jobs in the ordinary course of business.
(3) Preserving the environment.
(4) Improving human health.
(5) Promoting the arts, sciences, or advancement of knowledge.
(6) Increasing the flow of capital to entities with a public benefit purpose.
(7) The accomplishment of any other particular benefit for society or the environment.

OK, more analysis time.

No. 1? Zuckerberg's fake free Internet in India could fall under that.
No. 2? Former San Francisco Mayor, now Cal Lite Guv Gavin Newsom's pothole Donkey Kong ideas would fit.

No. 3? Sounds straightforward, but wait until Facebook promotes "Virtual reality National Parks" or something.

No. 4? Straightfoward.

No. 5? Facebook in K-12 classrooms certainly falls here. The tech-neolib wet dream combined with tax deductions for doing so, as Pro Publica explained. (Yes, yes, he gets tax deductions. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. If they try to claim otherwise, tell them to read the piece precisely, then go argue with Pro Publica. If they try to claim you're saying tax deductions "now" or similar, tell them the same thing.)

No. 6? "Money laundering" is what this is called. For example, Sergey Brin starts something. Let's call it the Elgoog Foundation. The two foundations start swapping money like bacterial DNA-transfer sex. (Or like David Brock playing shell games with Hillary Clinton money.) And, trust me, this one WILL happen in the future.

7. WTF? That's not just a Mack truck sized loophole. I can take Patton's Second Armored Division through that.

Remember, on that point 7, there is no third-party auditing, and a third party definition is just a "rubric."

Back to that tax issue: