Know This About Amazon and Jeff Bezos and Union Organization

Amazon: --World's 4th biggest company --$21 billion a year in profit --Owner Jeff Bezos is worth $184B, up $70B in a year

--Sends workers 5 anti-union messages a day --36,000+ employees are on food stamps and Medicaid --Cost to lift them from poverty? 2% of annual profit --Dan Price @DanPriceSeattle

Don't Look Now But a Town In Rural Missouri Just Got Hit. And Hard

I hadn't seen anything of this but it seems a hospital in rural Missouri, in the town of Kennett, is closing.

116-bed Missouri hospital to close 

next month

The website Axios simply and clearly points out three very big factors of all this:

• Many people are worried residents won't get care at all or will suffer from having to drive long distances for hospital care.
• "We have two nursing homes, and people are already talking about pulling their loved ones out because there's not a hospital close enough," one worker said.
• "This little town just lost its biggest employer...financially, a lot of businesses are going to suffer," another employee said.
• Kennett is a farming community in Dunklin County, whose residents are poor and have some of the worst health outcomes in the state. (The area overwhelmingly voted for President Trump in 2016.)

Get that.

Not only losing your town's only hospital but also it's biggest employer. Talk about a double, if not triple or worse "whammy."

Can you imagine even being elderly in that town, let alone in a nursing home, knowing your town is losing its hospital?

If you had a loved one in a nursing home there, would you keep them there?

Worse, if you were in that nursing home and in reasonably good condition otherwise, would you want to stay there, in that town, in that nursing home?

What do you bet the nursing home or homes in Kennett, Missouri will be losing patients, customers? And quickly?  I would be very surprised if, in only a couple to a few years, the nursing home or homes there don't also close, have to close. I certainly hope I'm wrong about that.

Then, can you imagine being an employee of the hospital? Thinking you had a job for life? And you're in rural Missouri, rural America. The nearest hospital is 50 miles away. Further, do you think they have many job openings? It's questionable, at least.

The heck of it is, this is not good for the town of Kennett but it's not good for that entire area. It's not good for that region, that part of the state. Simply put, it's no way good for Missouri.

It's not good for America. It's not good for the nation.

____________________________________________________________

More of the fuller situation that brought this about here, below:

When a rural hospital shuts down

Other links:

Sudden hospital closure gravely concerns Kennett doctors 

Wellington, Kan., hospital threatened 

like other rural facilities 

Possible shutdown of St. Francis hospital in Topeka

Closing of Kansas hospital adds to 

Medicaid expansion debate

America's Rural Hospitals Are Dangerously Fragile 

Health Care in America

From the New Zealand Nurses Organisation on Facebook. 

An American in our health care industry visits that country.

Quote of the Day -- On Our Future

With corporations making record profits yet hiring fewer and fewer people and in lots of cases, transitioning to robots and machines to do the work, this becomes more and more not just possible but important.

Quote of the day

""Profits come at the price of human misery. The best stock day ever will be the day before the world ends." --Kai M. Smith (friend)

I think we can officially say the "auto bailout" officially worked now

Breaking news today: GM posts its highest profit ever: $7.6 billion GM earns its highest profit ever in 2011 with $7.6 billion; overseas losses cut 4Q profit So can we now, officially end the conversations and questions about the need, sense and logic of having "bailed out"--or invested in--GM, Detroit, Chrysler and the American auto workers? Please. Sure, we didn't want to do it and we didn't want to need to do it but the fact is, if we hadn't bailed them out, we would have lost that industry, for the most part, almost completely. Link to original story: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gQQyKL1zj8FAOWVfwO1Et4tc1VOA?docId=7878364211444f549d5c2356de1fdce9

Quote of the day--what Capitalism and corporations do badly

"Your water, your health care, your kids' schools, they shouldn't be profit based. They should be community based. If, for example, a private enterprise takes over a prison, it will have to show growth from one year to the next. In other words, next year it will have to either have more prisoners or give the existing ones even worse services. Ditto for schools; ditto for hospitals. This is a major reason why the US has 5-10-50 times more domestic incarcerations than any other country that calls itself civilized. Profit."  


Yes, government-run institutions are often poorly-run. But you still have no choice but to re-organize them, since the only alternative is to lose control of what you really can't afford to lose control of. I don’t want to cover all services right here and now, but you don’t for instance want to let some private company uphold and police the law in your community. After all, what would be next? Let them make the laws too? What, we’re not close enough to exactly that yet? Really, you tell me, what's the difference between making the laws on the one hand versus interpreting the existing ones on the other? Blackwater, anyone?

"Outsource every public sector job possible", Mish? I don't think so. It's the road to hell, because the Carlyle Group and Blackrock and a bunch of Chinese and Arab multi-billion dollar enterprises and sovereign wealth funds will wind up telling you what you can do and say, what health care you can get, and whether or not you’ll have clean water in the morning. And the decisions between these options will be based on profit, not on whether your kids get a good education, or a good doctor, or whether they can drink their tap water or not. "Sorry, no profit in that."


--The Automatic Earth Blog, "The United States of Disintegration


You really should read about the debt and debts of states in the country and what it portends for the coming year.


That said, Merry Christmas


Link:  http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2010/12/december-20-2010-united-states-of.html

The gross unfairness and imbalance of corporations

A headline today points out one of the many inherent unfairnesses and imbalances created by the constantly-demanded profits of corporations. Here it is: FedEx 1Q profit doubles; will cut 1,700 jobs It's insane. They double their profit for the first quarter of this year but they slash jobs by 1700. Here's another insanity--these same corporations that do this still expect the great unwashed masses out here to buy and use their products and services. How can we do that, if we get pay cuts or, worse, fired or "let go"? When it used to be "mom and pop" businesses, people realized there were business cycles and we all lived with them. But now, in the modern, corporate world, these same corporations constantly demand profits and, worse, increases in profits, resulting in situations like this where, sure the business not only made money but made twice as much, during the quarter, as it did earlier. But that's not enough. It's never enough. So what do they do? Fire people. They "make them unemployed". It's ugly. It's incongruous. It makes no sense. And yes, I know I'm looking at a smaller, one-quarter of the year picture but the point is still very valid. This is a smaller microcosm of what happens in our corporate culture, in the broader view, absolutely. The trouble is, without a full collapse of Western society, there's no way to stop this process, either. The corporations will keep demanding ever-larger profits and, to make matters worse exponentially, they will also keep merging with other companies and devouring each other, which makes for less jobs due to duplication of work, once those companies do combine. In short, to summarize--we're screwed, you and I. Good luck out there today. Try to enjoy the weather. Link to original story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100916/ap_on_bi_ge/us_earns_fedex

Corporate America

The corporation, as it exists today in America, will be a direct cause of the fall of America, with its need for virtually constant profits and increased profits, to the downfall of the common man--the man on the street--unless American's attitudes and our laws change.

I don't get it

I don't understand people's enjoyment of and interest in horror movies.

In the first place, there is such beauty in the world.

You don't think so?

Photograph flowers. Any flower. Heck, a dandelion.

Then look at it and see if you don't see brilliant, temporary, exhilarating color and vibrancy.

In the second place, you want terror? Instead of some phony, nonsense, fiction fright someone dreamed up, go read everything you can get your hands on about Union Carbide and what they did to so many people in India.

Read what US President Andrew Jackson--and a whole lot of other people--did to the Native Americans.

There's terror for you. There's unimaginable fright.

Imagine a whole people whose religion, language, culture, way of life and spirituality is taken away from them.

That's terror. That's horror.

And that's what we did to Native Americans.

No wonder so many became alcoholic and were otherwise wrecked.

And then there's the burning and death and mutilation that came from Union Carbide's chemical plant explosion near poverty-stricken people in India.

Terror. Unbelievable, unexpected, unimaginable--nearly unreported--terror.

And then there's what the greedheads--from President George W. Bush on down--are doing to America and Americans for the last 7 years. The list is a long one.

From what has happened in Iraq for the last 5 years, to hundreds of thousands of people being either killed or maimed--both Americans and Iraqis--to the raping of the American public for profits, the lists--yes, lists--are long of wrongs, horrors and horrible things visited upon people.

But some want to spend what little time we have for "entertainment" with a horror movie.

It's a luxury I don't appreciate. It's a luxury I don't understand. It's a luxury I don't have any patience for.

It really makes me angry.