Sunday, September 6, 2009

Monopoly Capitalism in Medical Care


In 1945, Senator Pat McCarran (NV) sponsored a bill giving insurance companies an exemption from Federal anti-trust laws. The McCarran-Ferguson Act gave states the right to regulate insurance; in reality it allowed insurance companies the power the fix prices and deny care to its customers with limited repercussions. Today, health insurance companies make billions of dollars through monopoly capitalism and denying care to its sick customers through rescision.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

American Casino


American Casino is a new movie detailing the mortgage and foreclosure crisis that were part of the latest world economic downturn. The movie explains, for example, that corporations like Wells Fargo pushed working class people into subprime loans because they had significantly higher profit margins. These loans disproportionately affected people of color, including many who could have been eligible for more conservative fixed rate mortgages. This latest crisis, however, is only one event in the much longer war against the US working class. The evidence from my timeline is compelling--a pattern of corporate and government actions to extract more from workers.