ARTS & FARCES internet

Ask the managers of the Fortune 500 about the economy and they’ll tell you that ours are the best of times in a generation. Look around your neighborhood and you know that’s not true. It’s clear that the peculiar flavor of U.S. capitalism has soured; gone well past its best used by date. Capitalism - at least the way it’s practiced in the U.S. - has clearly gone off the rails. Today’s New York Times has a small example that tells a bigger story.

In his story, “Selling to Poor, Stores Bill U.S. for Top Prices,” Robert Pear reports 7.7 million woman and infants are fed each month by exchanging vouchers for approved food - infant formula, juice eggs, milk, cheese, cereal, dried beans and peas, peanut butter, canned tuna, and carrots - through the government’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, commonly known as W.I.C. In a typical American capitalistic twist, W.I.C.-only stores have begun to appear in most cities. The twist is that the stores don’t accept any form of payment other than W.I.C. vouchers and carry only W.I.C.-approved food items. And they charge up to twice the market price. It works because, after all, how price sensitive can one be when exchanging vouchers - not cash - for the food.

The states set the prices for the W.I.C.-approved food items, but the price ceilings tend to get set relatively high to ensure that isolated rural residents can obtain the food they need. As a result, the W.I.C.-only stores tend to set prices that are at or near the state’s ceiling. Some of the W.I.C.-only stores provide incentives like free transportation, baby clothes, pots and pans, diapers, bicycles, and soap and some actually send recruiters to the local hospitals to sign up new mothers as customers.

That’s all indicative of a broken system in need of a relatively easy fix, but it’s not the real story here. The real story is the alarmingly high number of babies served by the program:

“About four million births occur each year in the United States. W.I.C. serves nearly two million infants in the first year of life, plus 5.7 million pregnant women, new mothers and children age 1 to 4. Family income may not exceed 185 percent of the poverty level. For a family of three, the maximum income is $28,990 a year.”

That’s embarrassingly pitiful; we can do better. We have to do better, but it’s a much harder fix.

You think they would have learned after Nixon.

CBS News has obtained tapes of Enron energy traders conversing among themselves about how badly they were sticking it to consumers back in the heyday of California’s experiment with a deregulated energy industry. The tapes are from Enron’s West Coast trading desk and prove that Enron’s traders deliberately drove up prices by ordering the the temporary shutdown of power plants.

To date, former Enron chairman Ken Lay has been Mr. Untouchable, the only high-level Enron employee who hasn’t been indicted. That should change soon based on the CBS tapes:

“Government Affairs has to prove how valuable it is to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling,” says one trader.

“Ok.”

“Do you know when you started over-scheduling load and making buckets of money on that?

Before the 2000 election, Enron employees pondered the possibilities of a Bush win.

“It’d be great. I’d love to see Ken Lay Secretary of Energy,” says one Enron worker.

That didn’t happen, but they were sure President Bush would fight any limits on sky-high energy prices.

“When this election comes Bush will f———g whack this s—t, man. He won’t play this price-cap b———t.”

Crude, but true.

“We will not take any action that makes California’s problems worse and that’s why I oppose price caps,” said Mr. Bush on May 29, 2001.

Only one question: how much longer before we institute the model uniform code for corporate responsibility?

Last night Ralph Nader, addressing the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, called for America to withdraw from Iraq—both corporate and military—by the end of the year, replacing U.S. forces with a United Nations peacekeeping force. Nader also called for the impeachment of President Bush: “To say Bush has exaggerated the threat of Saddam Hussein is pretty much commonly accepted. The fabrications, deceptions, and prevarications rise to high crimes and misdemeanors and warrant impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives.”

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry has never called for U.S. troop withdrawal, instead puppeting President Bush’s call for U.S. forces to remain in Iraq indefinitely, citing “strategic interests.” Kerry also mimics Bush’s policies of indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without legal access and the USA PATRIOT ACT.

What I don’t understand is why the American anti-war contingent isn’t flocking to Nader’s campaign in droves.

Anne C. Mulkern reports in “When advocates become regulators” in the Denver Post that President Bush has appointed more than 100 officials in his administration who were once lobbyists, lawyers, or spokespeople for the industries they now oversee on behalf of the citizenry.

Although a White House spokesman said that administration officials “must abide by strict legal and ethical guidelines…” Mulkern points out that six administration officials have been subjects of ethics investigations or resigned after being charged with conflicts of interest and that at least 14 more are singled-out by public-interest groups.

I’ve angered close friends and my sister by rejecting their offers of a kidney donation. When confronted about why, the best I’ve been able to manage is to mumble something incoherent about “ethics” and “not a cure anyway.” It’s been a very interesting self-exploratory journey, and it doesn’t mean that I won’t change my mind next year; hell, I’ve completely reversed my position on embryonic stem cell research after deconstructing the spin from both sides. Larry Rother’s “Tracking the Sale of a Kidney on a Path of Poverty and Hope” in this morning’s New York Times doesn’t offer much insight into my situation, but it does provide some solid numbers that help solidify my present feelings.

Brazilian organ brokers used to pay a decade’s wages—US$10,000—for a kidney, but now the market rate has dropped to about US$3,000, presumably because supply is starting to catch up with demand in a multi-million dollar black market. The Brazilian market is getting quite sophisticated, with Israeli organ traffickers orchestrating medical exams to eliminate unqualified donors and providing transportation to South Africa where the transplant actually takes place. Gone, apparently, are the mythical days of Western tourists waking up minus a kidney in ice-filled Bangkok bathtubs. Still, nobody bothers to tell the donors that what they’re doing is illegal.

The most disturbing revelation of Rother’s piece is that the profiled kidney recipient “described herself as deeply religious and concerned with the ethics of transplants.” That and the fact that a disturbing number of the Brazilian donors lost both their kidney and their money.