Free Markets Solve Everything

On July 28, to much fanfare, the Development Finance Corporation (DFC), a government entity formed from USAID in 2018, announced a commitment to loan $765 million to Kodak to have them start manufacturing base chemicals used for pharmaceuticals.  Gross incompetent Peter Navarro was deeply involved, blathering some nonsense that I won’t bother to repeat.

Today’s Kodak is just a shell of the former company.  It employs a mere 1,300 people (when it had up to 100K employees years ago).  Over the years as their film business burned out, they sold off every profitable division, leaving one large, old industrial complex in the center of Rochester, Kodak Park.  Imagine everything that the word “park” conjures up, and invert it — Kodak Park is dirty, old and polluted.  The story around Rochester is that when it rained near Kodak Park, the raindrops would burn the paint off of parked cars.

Still, Kodak owns a plant that can manufacture chemicals.  So, I guess it is a candidate to make pharma chemicals, and perhaps some startup costs and time could be saved by using their existing infrastructure.

But, there’s more than just a chemical cloud over Kodak Park and this deal.  In June, while negotiations were happening, Kodak’s grossly overcompensated CEO, Jim Continenza, bought 46,737 shared of stock as part of his compensation plan.  So, when the stock went from ~$2 to $30 on the day of the announcement, one might wonder if someone grabbed the invisible hand and forced it to shove $1.3 million into Continenza’s pockets.

Shockingly, even the Trump Administration’s SEC is investigating, and now the whole deal is up in the air.  I’ll wager it will never happen, because the “deal” signed on July 28 was a couple vague paragraphs that aren’t even a letter of intent.

This is of a piece with getting GM to manufacture ventilators.  It’s as if someone who had been in a coma since the 70’s suddenly awoke and was asked to name two big US companies:  “GM and Kodak.  Now get me a Tab and a Hostess Fruit Pie – it’s almost time for Bonanza!”

Kodak Non-MomentPost + Comments (289)

Today I called the company that dumps chemicals on my lawn to get more chemicals dumped on my lawn. (I know, I’m a bad human.) It was a low quality experience. I was on hold for a loooong time listening to their pre-recorded excuse making and entreaties to log on to their website or use their app to change my plan. No, and fuck no, were my thoughts on those requests — I knew that signing up for the website or, Yahweh forbid, the app, would require me to jump through a dozen hoops that would probably include my account number or some other piece of info that I don’t have. I wanted to talk to a human to hear my alternatives for getting cancer from the chemicals leached through my front lawn, pick an alternative, and not think about it again for a few years.

When I finally talked to the harried customer service representative, she just didn’t do a very good job, probably because she was out of context. My guess is that she normally drives to some call center, sits in a tiny cube in front of her company-issued computer, talking on a company-issued phone, where she deals with idiots like me who call to talk about their lawns once every 5 years (which might severely underestimate how long it’s been since I interacted with this company other than to write them a check.) Doing that from home clearly didn’t allow her to put her best foot forward.

I think I know why: Most of the companies with whom I do business have an online site that I use to do so, but there are a few times when I want to get on the phone and deal with a human. Generally, that person is low paid, and one of the main requirements for their job is that they park their ass in a chair in some God forsaken business park for 8+ hours per day. In our gleaming new post-COVID future, the theory of the case is that these people will embrace working from home due to the convenience and savings of not having a commute.

Perhaps, but just as it is a burden to expect an employee to transport themselves to a call center, it is a much greater burden to expect them to have a reliable Internet connection, a quiet and secluded place to work, and the minimal technical wherewithal to fix minor issues with their company computer, if the company deigns to provide them one. The ability to work from home requires that the employee has a home from which they can work efficiently. And this is often not the case for employees paid $12.50 per hour, or whatever the lawn service is paying.

In other words, if you want people to work from home, you can’t pay them shit wages. You need to pay them enough so that they can maintain some kind of home office. And the fuck-the-poor salaries and benefits that these miserly enterprises dole out just aren’t enough to support a home office. So I predict as soon as this crisis has passed, these companies will pack the cubicles in their office parks, because we all know that the invisible hand just doesn’t allow a living wage.

Work At Home Only Works When You Pay People A Decent WagePost + Comments (40)

Ending the lockdowns isn’t going to happen. Next week we will probably have 2 or 3 thousand people die in New York City, which is horrific, and we’ll also probably have a continue decrease or at least stabilization of deaths in Italy, which is great. Obviously, fight like hell to keep the lockdown going, because we are talking about millions of lives here. But I just don’t see how these fuckers are going to end it.

As much as I hate to heh indeed David Frum it’s hard to improve on this commentary on Trump’s higher (but still shitty) approval ratings:

About Trump's poll numbers https://t.co/IWJ5mXADFu

They won't last pic.twitter.com/OmOb26JICE

— David Frum (@davidfrum) March 25, 2020

If any of us is still alive in November, we can pick up a lot of seats.

Tha CarterPost + Comments (119)

As Betty mentioned in her post, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have decided to cooperate, and all gyms, casinos and movie theaters will be closed. Restaurants and bars will be takeout only. Good! More to come, I’m sure. So, in our states’ rights utopia, little clusters of states will make their own healthcare policy to address a nationwide threat, while Trump alternates between shaking every hand in sight, and pushing Pence out in front of the public so mother’s husband can be scapegoated later. It’s much better to have our precious rights than our precious lives, so I can only say “keep up the good work” to Team Trump.

We can’t do much about this now, other than perhaps the changes Cheryl suggested today, but I have a couple of thoughts about what we need to do in the mid- and long-term, and what I’m storing away in my anodized titanium grudge carrier for later examination.

First, the bankers never got what they deserved after 2008, and goddamit, the fucking Republicans need to pay for all the cuts and other anti-science bullshit that caused us to be the last place country in virus testing. There should be no “bygones being bygones” on this fuckup. There will be an especially fervent effort by FoxNews to tell us that the response to this pandemic was as good as we could have expected, because it was a natural catastrophe that nobody could have predicted (except for the smart government officials that Trump fired or replaced with stupid toadies). Nope! We need a reckoning.

Second, we need to start advocating for mail-in elections, and that’s going to be a fight. Trump would prefer to have no election, so it’s in his interest to throw as much sand in the gears of changing election procedures as he possibly can. Josh Marshall has a good post on this.

Third, James Fallows makes some good points in this essay about the chaos that Trump caused at the airports, but his point is more generally applicable:

You probably can’t see this from seat 23D on United or Delta, but every commercial-flight airport has its own fire station, within a few seconds’ drive of the runway. A fire crew is standing by, every time you take off or land. That’s based on What if? thinking. What if five minutes from now, a plane comes in hard, and has a post-touchdown fire, which could threaten the passengers trapped inside? What if an airplane’s engine catches fire on the runway, and a hundred passengers have to get off all at once?

[…] I’m sure there are airports where the “equipment” has never been used in a real emergency, or not in many years. But it’s there and ready, every minute, because: What if?

Fallows makes a distinction between grinding efficiency, which keeps airlines profitable at the expense of making the experience sometimes unpleasant, and the What if? culture underlying safety systems in airplanes and airports. Our hospital system has been run on grinding efficiency, to maximize corporate profits and perhaps decrease the cost of patient care, but not so you’d notice, if you’ve received a bill lately. So we have no spare beds, we’re going to run short on protective gowns and masks because they’re sourced from China, we’re short of nurses, and so forth. When this is over, we need to What if? hospitals and the health care system in general. We need some slack in the system, some stockpiled supplies, some extra beds, increased pay for nurses and educational incentives and student loan repayments just like doctors get, and a recognition that we may “waste” some money on preparedness (just like we “waste” $800K on each of the airport fire trucks pictured). Because the What if? just happened, and we’re woefully unprepared.

The Conservative Paradise Continues to ProsperPost + Comments (224)