Not That It Will Make Any Difference
Marcy ‘Wheeler has the report that shows what I have known for years: Privatization is more expensive than government workers.
Politicians believe that outsourcing and privatization of public services saves money because the people who are actually hired by the corporations are paid much less than government worker. They don’t factor in the profit or the salaries of the corporate management. Recently a local sheriff in a Florida county threw out the contractor who had been operating the county jail, and saved his cash-strapped county major money.
Fallenmonk looks at the latest IMF study: Austerity causes economic contraction. Duncan has the the short version.
The BBC had a story a couple of days ago that the Conservative government’s austerity program is going to reduce the standard of living for most Britons about 10%. This is not how you get out of a severe recession, and never has been.
Yves looks at the latest Census ‘Bureau reporting on the nation that shows that we are poorer than we have been in decades, and that includes people with jobs. Corporations are raking in records profits, but nothing is going to their actual workforce, i.e. the people who actually produce the value of companies.
There was a special election in New York that proved once again that if you give people a choice between a Republican running as a Republican, and a Republican running as a Democrat, the Republican will win. Democratic voters in New York are not going to show up for a Blue Dog. This was another Zero, Inc. own-goal [a football term indicating a player put the ball into his own goal, rather than the opponent’s goal].
4 comments
The facts have a liberal bias and thus should be ignored if you’re a good right-winger with an ideology to flog. Reality is something they have no conception of beyond “reality is what my Party commissars tell me to believe”. They truly think that if Rush Limpmember and Shawn Hammity tell them the sky is a fine shade of fuchsia, it has to be true, because Rush or Shawn wouldn’t lie to them, right? The whole notion of “trust but verify” for right-wingers apparently died with Ronald Reagan, and was only used for dealing with overseas bad guys anyhow…
– Badtux the Reality-based Penguin
It’s like the Solyndra problem. They have a good product, but they introduced it into a rotten market, and everyone panicked. Having been in the tech game for a long time, we both know that the best product design for any particular function is rarely the winner. The IBM PC is a prime example of a mediocre product that dominated its market based on nothing more than its nameplate. ‘Betamax vs VHS is another example.
Hell, they just received loan guarantees, and the patents have that kind of value.
No one in Washington knows anything about the real economy in which the other 99% of the country lives.
Solyndra made a number of interesting bets that at the time made perfect sense. They bet that commercial buildings would install whiteroofs and solar panels to meet “clean energy” mandates (it didn’t happen in the quantities they expected, the market instead moved to solar farms or to individual residential rooftops, neither of which were ideal for Solyndra’s technology). They bet that silicon-based solar panels would remain in short supply due to the global silicon-wafer shortage and thus production of their non-silicon technology could be ramped up to undercut the price point of silicon-based solar panels. They bet that they could figure out a way to automate the production of their new technology that would allow them to produce mass quantities. All of those bets had to be won by Solyndra for them to be a viable concern. None of them came true — commercial buildings didn’t install solar panels on whiteroofs in any large quantities, the collapse of demand after 2008 at the exact same time that several wafer factories came online means there is a *glut* of silicon wafers on the market meaning that makers of traditional silicon-based solar panels can buy wafers for pennies on the dollar compared to when Solyndra made their bet, and Solyndra never had sufficient sales to ramp up automated production of their product. Still, if Solyndra had won their bets — and look, startups make those kinds of bets all the time here in the Silicon Valley, out of every 1000 startups, you’ll have one EMC or Google make it because all the stars align just right in their favor — they would have been trumpeted as a triumphant success story, rather than as a disaster. But it’s just business, done the way business *always* is done here in the Silicon Valley.
But as you say: no one in Washington knows anything about the real economy in which the other 99% of the country lives. And, I might add, the same is true of the punditry, which is well paid to tell us what the economy is in their fairy tale world of pink unicorns and cotton candy trees…
We do a lot of solar down here on new construction, but it requires that the lot is big enough to provide a major South-facing roof panel, or it won’t pay off. Even the billboards are solar powered these days, because they can use a separate panel installation above the board and set it for due South.
Reading the blurb, if it was mostly true, it would have really been a welcome product. These are new construction installations, and not retrofits, so they are more efficient and better designed than most of the add-ons. Some of the solar tile installations are really well done.
The only thing I would have really objected to on their assumptions was the business conversions. Most people are not buying their real estate these days, they are leasing, and the property owners won’t benefit from the retrofit. Of course, down here there is so much vacant commercial, that no one is doing much in the way of upgrades. There won’t be any ROI for a decade or more it you do anything.
If they had been a couple of years earlier, it might have made it, but those are the breaks. Capitalism is all about risk.
If they want to look at a flaky deal, they should examine the Koch contract to fill the oil reserve when the price of crude was at an all-time high. Now that was a questionable expenditure.
The process started under Bush and was pushed by the Waltons, so I fail to see how it’s an Obama screw-up, beyond the fact that Zero hasn’t been setting the record straight. Of course, Dems won’t react, they would rather be doormats.