Is Bigger Better?

The story of the “unification plan” for Memorial Hospital got me thinking about bigger. There will be a vote in November to decide whether to “unify” the local board with Maine Medical Center and it’s 8 subsidiaries, into one single board. The local board would continue to function for the next five years, and after that, any decision would require a 2/3 majority. A 2/3 majority – and they have 8 subsidiaries. How is one little hospital going to fare in that power scenario? They also say there are no plans in development to reduce services at Memorial.

Not at this moment. Plans can change, quickly. If anyone can think of a situation where giving up local control worked out well, please let me know.

I have the same checking account I opened nearly 30 years ago, in North Conway, in a small bank that was locally owned. The bank was swallowed up, repeatedly by ever-larger banks, and is now owned by a bank that is one of the 10 largest in the US.

The branch I do my banking in is populated by a constantly changing group of employees. It’s impersonal. The website of the branch doesn’t even list the name of the manager, as I learned recently when I wished to lodge a complaint about the service. It’s a much bigger bank than it was 30 years ago. Bigger is publicly traded and has shareholders, and that’s what matters, not customer service. Bigger is not better.

Nearly any company you call will have you wrestling with an automated menu that purports to direct your call. None of the choices will be what you want, and you’ll have to listen to the menu about three times to make sure of that. It sucks up a lot of your time, and it’s lousy customer service, BUT it means that no one need be hired to answer the phone and direct calls, so the company is saving money. The bigger the company, the more impenetrable the menu. The bigger the company, the less transparency and accountability there is.

The bigger the company the less they care about whether or not you do business with them. Customer service is not a priority. Look at what we tolerate from airlines.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 paved the way for the giant media monopolies we see today. How do you like your options for cable? For phone service? How is your internet speed? Do you have lots of choices? The best customer service I ever had from an internet company was with a small company that served part of VT and part of northern NH. If something happened to my service, people would show up at my house within hours. They answered their phone themselves, too.

 How is bigger working out? We see this playing out in newspapers, where some corporate media group has mostly swallowed up the small, weekly papers in the top half of the state. In these scenarios the bottom line is the main concern. The news itself is in second place, and the employees a distant third. They all look the same and have the same bland tone.  

We see this playing out in radio. At the recent NHAB Granite Mike Awards, WMUR picked up most of the television awards, which isn’t all that difficult when you’re the only network station in the state. The big radio conglomerates won most of the radio awards. Congratulations to WMWV/WVMJ on their awards, and for surviving as the endangered species they are; independently owned commercial stations.

The more stations the company has, the more they all sound the same. I was spoiled by listening to WMWV for so many years, a station where, sometimes (in decades past) things could get a little unruly. It was not cookie cutter radio. The big corporate stations all sound mostly the same, with loud morning hosts bellowing inanities, and a lot of hyper compressed voices pitching ads. They are big. Are they better? Is money really all that matters?

Insurance is another area where we have corporate monopolies, especially health care. No one has ever told me how much they love their health insurance company. Health insurance is the greedy middle-man that drives up costs while providing nothing useful in the way of services. They often make your medical decisions – not you or your doctor. Because of them, doctors see patients on an assembly line, spending between 13-16 minutes with each of them. A study from 2016 showed doctors spending 27% of their work day with patients. The rest of their time is spent on documentation and paperwork. Health insurance companies and HMO’s have created an enormous, impersonal industry. They’ve also built monopolies. The relationship we have with our doctors and our hospital should be personal.

Memorial Hospital is of vital importance to the community. Think long and hard before surrendering local control.

This was published as an op-ed in the October 27 issue of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper 
  

Treason's Greetings

New Hampshire’s junior US Senator has been in the news lately, full of outrage at the new budget deal being struck. Sadly for us all, she’s not outraged about it for the right reasons. Senator Ayotte is all puffed up about cuts to military pensions. The NH mainstream media, in their role as GOP stenographers, trumpeted the outrage with no critical analysis and little fact. They howled their horror that Senator Shaheen would vote for this! OMG!!

The abhorrent “bipartisan” budget deal trims military pensions by about $6 billion over a 10-year period. It’s a reduction in cost of living increases for retirees that applies only while they’re still of working age. These are frequently retirees on their second careers – many working for defense contractors. This isn’t taking food out of the mouths of the poor grunts stuck in Afghanistan. Like many things, it sounds bad, until you know the details.

Our Kelly counts on an uncritical media, and she is rewarded for her devotion most of the time. The GOP media panderers have failed to point out that she hasn’t voiced any objection at all to cutting off benefits for the long term unemployed – many of whom are also veterans.

Ayotte, in her explanation of why she wasn’t voting for this budget wagged a finger and said that surely we could find $6 billion elsewhere. She’s absolutely correct about that. One aspect of the budget she agreed with is increasing defense spending by about $22 billion. Take that increase away, and there’s no reason to commit austerity against any veteran. The Pentagon doesn’t need an increase. Their budget should be shrinking, and Ayotte should be fighting against Pentagon waste. The F-35 fighter plane that doesn’t fly is still being lavishly funded with our tax dollars. The M1A1 Abrams tanks are still rolling off the assembly line and going straight to storage, because the Army doesn’t want them. The C-27J Spartan cargo planes are still being built, and going right to boneyards. The Air Force doesn’t want them. There have been 16 built, and five more scheduled to be produced in 2014, at an estimated waste of $432 million.

Ayotte an only pay lip service to Pentagon waste, because actually looking into it won’t make Senator Ayotte popular with her supporters or her financial backers. Ayotte’s #1 donor industry is the securities and investment sector. Goldman Sachs is her fifth largest donor. Many of the same investment companies that back Senator Ayotte also fund defense contractors. Goldman Sachs touts their socially responsible investment practices, while loaning money to nuclear weapons manufacturers. Fidelity, another Ayotte funder also is very generous in loaning to big defense contractors. A closer look also reveals that BAE Systems, Honeywell International, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon are also Ayotte donors. They all have the distinction of being the recipients of the largesse of the big banksters like Goldman Sachs and Fidelity. It’s a nasty little circle, and to keep all of them filling her campaign coffers, Ayotte has to continue to increase the defense budget. A cynic might also add that she has to continue to increase the number of veterans as well.

Senator Ayotte would much rather take food away from low income children, which is rather short sighted, given that some of them will grow up to be the kind of cannon fodder required to fight the endless wars that she and her ilk would like to inflict upon us.

The uncritical, GOP toadies of NH media continue to fail us, by not even bothering to look at the reasons behind Ayotte’s vote.

They’ve failed us a lot lately. The wheels are coming off the clown car known as the NHGOP, and that, too is going unreported. The freedumb/libertea faction is at war with the more traditional members of the party. The traditional Republicans are aware that they don’t have any kind of a bench, and that the people signed up to run against Senator Shaheen are silly candidates. The campaign of Jim Rubens was over the same day he announced his candidacy. The campaign of former Senator Bob Smith is an embarrassment to the party. They’re working to recruit and squeeze as much out of former Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts as they can. He’s got name recognition and he’s got money. That interests them. That he was only able to finish out a term before getting kicked to the curb doesn’t seem to be an issue. He was elected in current century and doesn’t have a bad toupee, which makes him a star already.

The freedumb and libertea crowd hates him, because he’s actually in favor of putting some restrictions on gun ownership. Brown was scheduled to be appearing at a fundraiser, even as the NH media debated whether or not he’d run for Senate, if he was moving to NH, and if they could hang his picture in their lockers. This led to State Rep. JR Hoell of Dunbarton talking about how Brown was unacceptable, and it might be time for armed insurrection, just like “it happened in the Revolutionary War.” Even the worst students are aware that the Revolutionary War was not fought over a political candidate that a faction of the Republican Party objected to. This is the equivalent of a toddler having a tantrum because he is told he can’t have candy for dinner. The NH media did not report this story. It was mentioned by out of state news groups, and even reported internationally, but the only NH media outlet that reported Hoell’s rather treasonous threats was the online Patch news group. 

Hoell has since gone on to bellow that Scott Brown has BROKEN HIS OATH to uphold the Constitution at least 3 times. In Hoell speak, that means that Brown discussed banning some semi-automatic rifles. Try as I might, I can’t find any mention of semi-automatic rifles in the 2^nd Amendment. In fact, I can’t find the right to own as many guns as one wants in that rather brief amendment. Brown, at least, was a part of a well-regulated militia, which is more than we can say for Rep. Hoell.

It’s generous of the NH media to gloss over Ayotte’s vote, or give Hoell the gift of not reporting on his lunatic pronouncements. It’s also deeply unfair to voters who deserve to be well informed. A simple explanation of the $6 billion in cuts to military pensions should have been included in the news stories. And everyone who lives in NH should be aware that there is a dangerous faction of the NH GOP that threaten “revolution” every time they don’t get their way.

© sbruce 2013  published as biweekly column in the Conway Daily Sun newspaper. 

TD Bank: Greedy Bastards

When I was a wee lass, my father was a banker. It was a far more honorable profession back then, in the early 1960's. 

After we the people bailed out the banks in 2008, to show their gratitude, they refused to give loans to small businesses, and foreclosed on homeowners. Another way they've chosen to say thank you, is by adding numerous fees and charges to our accounts, our credit cards, and our debit cards. 

I recently received a letter from my bank to inform me of a change to one of those fees:

When I opened this checking account, it was at a small locally owned bank: North Conway Bank, in North Conway, NH. It was repeatedly sold up the corporate banking food chain till it went from TD Bank North to plain old TD Bank. 

Now, despite years of customer loyalty, unless I have a daily balance of $250, the bank is going to charge me a monthly "maintenance fee" of $10.  

How much work can it be to "maintain" the bank account of a poor person? Is my account dirtying the  carpets or getting fingerprints on the windows? 

I'm barely employed. I don't have $250 in that bank account as I type this. Is my poverty  INCONVENIENCING them, somehow? It sure as hell is inconvenient for me! 


Banking: Second Most Hated Industry:

The overall negative ratings for this industry has increased significantly from 20% in 2001 to 53% this year. The percentage of positive ratings has also declined by nearly 50% since 2001. The poor image of the banking industry is fairly straightforward, having “been involved in major issues since Lehman brothers in 2008, and it still looks like a problem,” Newport says. In addition, Americans’ perception may be affected by the high fees banks charge consumers.The high volume of scandals both in the U.S. and in Europe exposes flaws in the industry and undermine the public’s confidence in its effectiveness.Bank of America has built an infamous public image with false foreclosures, property seizures, misleading mortgage adjustment programs, and other controversial conduct. Scandals like these could be fueling the perception that the banking industry is only profit-oriented and functioning at the expense of the average American.

It's not a perception. It's reality. They're shameless greedy bastards.