Looking after our elderly, pensioners etc.

https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B84AE1564647494A

In this set of four home-made videos, an American man expresses his outrage at a recent incident in Michigan where a 90-year old man was found frozen to death in his home, the electricity having recently been cut off by the electricity company. The 90 year old man was a veteran of WWII and as the commenter says, he had paid taxes all his life yet at the end of it he is administered a twisted form of euthanasia by a utility company interested in nothing more than the bottom line.

Understandably the man is outraged at the wider community and the society and the system in which this old man died. Thankfully in this country we look after our aged population in respect of this but how long could it be before harsh cuts are made that do something similar here?

Perhaps the story is less simple than that some electricity company was looking at the bottom line and negligently killed a man - perhaps its a failure of our community to look after our elderly who live alone. The Government I'm sure could be beaten into investing in renewables which would cover the costs of the electricity demand of our population who are given it for free after a certain age. There's more to caring for the elderly than simply giving them free electricity though.

Quote :

BAY CITY, Michigan: A 93-year-old man froze to death inside his home, an autopsy has determined, just days after the city limited his flow of electricity for not paying his bills.

Marvin E. Schur died "a slow, painful death," said Kanu Virani, Oakland County's deputy chief medical examiner, who performed Schur's autopsy.

Neighbors discovered Schur's body on Jan. 17. The indoor temperature was below 32 degrees (0 Celsius) at the time, the neighbors told The Bay City Times for a story Monday.

Schur had no children, and his wife passed away several years ago.

The man had almost $1,100 in unpaid electric bills, said neighbor George Pauwels Jr., who discovered Schur's body.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/01/26/america/NA-US-Frozen-Indoors.php

Freezing death of Mich. man in house sparks anger
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/01/28/america/Frozen-Indoors.php

It is shocking how atomised a society we are, if you compare it with a more normal extended family structure as you would get in earlier agrarian or nomadic society. Two working people are expected to be 100% responsible for their own children and maybe their elderly parents as well.

An African friend was telling me that he was called uncle by every child in the place he lived, and that generally all adults were responsible for all children. Older children take a lot of responsibility for younger children too.

Reducing everyone down to a supposedly self-sufficient individual entity is a miserable way of doing things.

And what do we put this decline down to? Lack of interaction between age groups, presumably?

I was brought up at and still attend regularly at a Church. There we have a congregation of old people, babies and everything in between. The young people are always expected to interact with, but respect all the older people. I suppose you just don't get that interaction when the only place you see an older person is a supermarket unless you willingly engage in some form or organisation in which both older and younger people are involved.

johnfás wrote:

And what do we put this decline down to? Lack of interaction between age groups, presumably?

I was brought up at and still attend regularly at a Church. There we have a congregation of old people, babies and everything in between. The young people are always expected to interact with, but respect all the older people. I suppose you just don't get that interaction when the only place you see an older person is a supermarket unless you willingly engage in some form or organisation in which both older and younger people are involved.

In my great grandmothers generation', aunts and uncles as well as grandparents shared the family home. In my grandmother's day three generations still lived together but in the second half of the 21st century people more and more started living in very fragmented households. Its the nuclear family: a unit of consumption. With more marriage break ups, there are more one person and single parent households. Its only the unmarried young who have extended their social scope - house shares and strongly bonded peer groups of friends.'

How in the name of ath would a society think that a single alcoholic woman could take charge on her own of six children?

Sure even on the road I live on you have the 60% of families who have lived on the road for all my life. I would drop in and say hello to some of the older people from time to time. My parents would have them over for dinner. We'd be sent over to cut their grass etc. Then you have the people who have moved in recently, put up gates and you never see them except the odd wave.

It's the ugliness of capitalism! Capitalism hates family bonds, community bonds, social bonds of any kind. Those things require decency, fairness and selflessness - all of which mitigate against optimising profits.

Quote :

As the Canadian lawyer, Joel Bakan, has commented, corporations are driven by essentially psychopathic motives. It is literally illegal for corporate managers to prioritise concern for human suffering over the maximisation of shareholder profits.

In such a world, what chance do most of us have?

I believe this would have not happened under the older nonmarket regulated system where poorer domestic consumers were looked after. Under the new system only those with large purchasing power (big industry) have the low prices.
It's time the utilities were brought to book, and all their financial details made open and transparent.

I think a Robert Putnam quote is appropriate here.

There is no longer any doubt that "the social fabric is becoming visibly thinner, we don’t trust one another as much, and we don’t know one another as much" in Putnam's words.

And to ignore the major economic institution of our lives would be to engage in doublethink sophistry methinks.
The atomising effect of markets as they spread into more and more areas of our lives bears a major responsibility for this trend.

another quote, this time from "The ABCs of Political Economy" by Robin Hahnel

http://onebigtorrent.org/torrents/3802/ABCs-of-Political-Economy-Modern-Primer-Robin-Hahnel-pdf

Quote :

"Of course, we are told we can personally benefit in a market system by being of service to others.
But we know we can often benefit more easily by tricking others.
Mutual concern, empathy, and solidarity are the appendices of human capacities and emotions in market economies – and like the appendix, they continue to atrophy as people respond sensibly to the rule of the market place – do others in before they do you in."

Veterans freeze to death all the time on the street back here

youngdan wrote:

Veterans freeze to death all the time on the street back here

One of the good aspects of India and similar is that you can sleep on the road side and not freeze. Any society that allows the poor and elderly to starve or freeze has a very questionable set of priorities.

youngdan wrote:

Veterans freeze to death all the time on the street back here

I'm sure people freeze to death here too on streets but this man's electricity was cut off because of unpaid or late bills. Even here people get free electricity at that age, I believe. It was a kind of murder.

Do older people get free electricity? I thought they got a payment which went part of the way towards meeting their bills.

I think we get lots of free stuff after the age of 66 if you're on a social welfare pension? Maybe it's not full esb paid although I don't know fully - what you say sounds familiar.

It might be that if you earn below a certain amount you get your electricity free whereas everyone over a certain age gets a payment?

In many parts of the world 3 and 4 generations still live in the same abode or if not in the same village. The people I was staying with in Algeria had a very elderly lady and her great great grand children. Everyone lived around a central ryad and it seemed to work.

In other places you have employees also on the premises. It is almost a feudal set up or it could be a collective. It is a strange entity in the modern context because if you have a substantial farm and have other people living there then you have an extended responsibility to those people beyond normal working relations. They are an extended family. The farm is their home as well as yours.

The elderly feel the cold more acutely and many have failing ability to cope with basic tasks. Physically and mentally they are in decline. You really need to ask why anyone turned the electricity off. May as well have went round with a gun.

In the UK all elderly get a winter fuel allowance of £250 which is increased for those over 80 to £400. But again if someone is elderly they may still forget to pay bills and get confused and believe that the bill is already paid.

Squire wrote:

In many parts of the world 3 and 4 generations still live in the same abode or if not in the same village. The people I was staying with in Algeria had a very elderly lady and her great great grand children. Everyone lived around a central ryad and it seemed to work.

In other places you have employees also on the premises. It is almost a feudal set up or it could be a collective. It is a strange entity in the modern context because if you have a substantial farm and have other people living there then you have an extended responsibility to those people beyond normal working relations. They are an extended family. The farm is their home as well as yours.

The elderly feel the cold more acutely and many have failing ability to cope with basic tasks. Physically and mentally they are in decline. You really need to ask why anyone turned the electricity off. May as well have went round with a gun.

In the UK all elderly get a winter fuel allowance of £250 which is increased for those over 80 to £400. But again if someone is elderly they may still forget to pay bills and get confused and believe that the bill is already paid.

I only spent some time in Morocco but there seems to be a great sense of community despite the different 'standard' of living. You'd hardly die alone in places like those although it's probably warmer for a start unless you're in the mountains. Still, there always seems to be people around everywhere hanging out with each other which is more important the older you get.

That man in the news item had the money stapled onto the bill ready to go. It could have been that way for months.

If it were not for socialism the guy would not freeze. This man was 90 and is in the same position of many like him.

Pay good attention as it is in your future and you do not realise it. He most likely worked through the 50s for 70 dollars a week. He may have saved like a squirrel and put 30% of his wages toward retirement. Not many can do that. So after 10 years graft he had a huge pile of cash of 10000 dollars. Unfortunately for him he did not understand that his electric bill would one day be 1000 dollars after it being inflated away to piss.

He did not know too much about fiat currency and central banking and he got a good shaft.

But of course to some it was all the electric companies fault.

youngdan wrote:

If it were not for socialism the guy would not freeze. This man was 90 and is in the same position of many like him.

Pay good attention as it is in your future and you do not realise it. He most likely worked through the 50s for 70 dollars a week. He may have saved like a squirrel and put 30% of his wages toward retirement. Not many can do that. So after 10 years graft he had a huge pile of cash of 10000 dollars. Unfortunately for him he did not understand that his electric bill would one day be 1000 dollars after it being inflated away to piss.

He did not know too much about fiat currency and central banking and he got a good shaft.

But of course to some it was all the electric companies fault.

And the arsing about with utilities that first began in the US and has spread like a contagion to other countries whose governments were equally vicious in their indifference about what it would do to the poor. Traditionally utilities were seen as something that should be protected - run at cost in everyone's interest - business and public sector alike - because they were so fundamental. But there was a killing to made by the same crowd of absolute ****ers that have just done the banks in. There was only one thing our governments could do in the face of these conniving spivs: roll over and let them shaft us all. The money is all in the upfront 'risk capital', subsidies, tax breaks and other scams which private 'investors' are given in order to take the utilities off the governments hands. Our electricity price hikes in the last couple of years are all part of the same process going down here in Ireland. Words like 'efficiency' get thrown around. It is all indeed an extremely efficient and unscrutinised means of diverting massive amounts of public funds into private hands.

http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/art-562458

Here's a pro-privatisation report from the OECD.

Quote :

Evidence on privatisation experience to date has consistently shown that a change in ownership has
improved performance considerably at the firm level, both in terms of productive efficiency and
profitability. In terms of financial objectives, such as fostering the development or further expansion of
equity markets, privatisation has been a great success. In terms of economic objectives, privatisation has
generally had a positive effect on consumer welfare as the separation of commercial from the noncommercial
functions has allowed for a more transparent allocation of resources, thereby diminishing
rents. The degree of success, however, has depended on the post- privatisation market structure, and the
introduction of competition; or the existence of effective regulatory regimes, where introduction of
competition was not possible and natural monopolies persisted.

Indeed, the equities markets have made a killing. But 'generally' speaking the effect on consumer welfare is, well, something of a fudge and in so far as it has failed it's got nothing to do with privatisation. Other people are to blame for that. This report, written before the economic crisis hit, should make sane people want to scream:

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/48/24/1929700.pdf

Once the sharks started eyeing up utilities (having run out of other potential markets to savage), these are the sort of bare-faced lies that were and are used to soften people up for what lay ahead:

Quote :

This has meant that alleviating poverty through a redistribution of wealth has to a large degree been replaced as a priority
goal with the need to advance consumer welfare, through lower prices, better quality and increased choice.
While the provision of universal services remains in many OECD members a constitutionally protected
right, it is also an objective that has been largely attained and the recipients are now looking for better and
cheaper provision of utility services.

A neat strategy for making this claim appear to be true has been to ratchet up the prices very sharply pre-privatisation - as has happened in Ireland - so that when the private companies come in and introduce reductions the appear to be demonstrating efficiencies. But they never go back to the relative levels they were at. Why do we let these people do this stuff to us?

The situation with water worldwide is looking dire - especially in countries where water is scarce. The 'water barons' have been sewing the situation up for themselves:

http://projects.publicintegrity.org/water/

There is a good argument to be made for a public ownership of electric utilities in the old days. There is an even better argument nowadays for local production of energy by co-operatives. Anthing from a village windmill to a nuclear powerplant for 500000 people...

The problem is 3 large parties that are more worried about Europe than Ireland. Even with things the way they are Cowen jetted off to Davos to get his orders. . It should be plain that he is a Benidict Arnold

youngdan

I wouldn't mind hearing what Ron Paul would have to say about the situation with this man in terms of Fiat currencies depreciating over time and the state's responsibility towards its long-term tax-contributing members. Would his opinion be the same as yours? "People need to get real and vote the right way"

If it is I suppose I'd have to agree with it to some extent - I'm thinking that in Ireland for example, if the State wants to provide some free electricity for people who paid tax for years then it could do so through alternative energy. The promise by the State to fulfill this promise to the elderly obliges it to future payments - liabilities - which it could meet by sticking up a few windfarms lets say, to provide for this.

As far as the Machine of Society and the State goes, I think if you have paid tax during your life and have contributed then that is worth a fortune to a society and you deserve to be looked after to some degree as you have enriched the society you've worked in.

It's a kind of pension return composed purely of a current (rather than currency) that directly meets a persons basic needs. In the diagram below of a person's Hierarchy of Needs I think governments should have to provide for the lowest tier (and a bit of the next one - social stability) and that this can happen without major cost through the mechanism of society. "Shelter" means "shelter from the elements" in the case above, from the cold.

youngdan wrote:

If it were not for socialism the guy would not freeze.

But this is matched by the breaks that the likes of the corporate world get and their all consuming greed. They can really fleece an economy.

Agree that local production and ownership should be encouraged, but when it comes to care for the elderly, no one knows what the future has in store for them and some simply do not have the opportunity to squirrel away anything. It could be due to serious illness or an accident, and those that do may not have the mental ability when they retire to manage those savings and pay bills etc. I am not exactly for a free ride for one and all through life, but everyone can be hit by misfortune and our health and old age should be a collective responsibility. We insure each other and some of us contribute more because we can. I think that is fair. We can argue about the level of basic care and how it is delivered. I do have real grievance as to how the public services are run and the spiralling cost.

Auditor #9 wrote:

I only spent some time in Morocco but there seems to be a great sense of community despite the different 'standard' of living. You'd hardly die alone in places like those although it's probably warmer for a start unless you're in the mountains. Still, there always seems to be people around everywhere hanging out with each other which is more important the older you get.

That man in the news item had the money stapled onto the bill ready to go. It could have been that way for months.

Audi it can be cold enough in winter and especially at night. The threat, certainly in Algeria, is of the young and able leaving to find work in Europe. So you end up with 3 or 4 generations of women. However people do send money home and there is some social cohesion. The people I was with also lost 3 members of the family to extremists and that has been a severe threat. When we consider the front line against terrorism it is not in Manhattan but in places like Tamanrasset.

Electricity prices have been deliberately pushed up in Ireland by the Regulator as part of privatisation to "make privatisation viable". Even youngdan could not say that that kind of privatisation is anything to do with a free market.

In a free market, no company could be viable out of supplying a good and affordable electricity service in Ireland. The country is too small and the population too dispersed, and there is little heavy industry. That is why they were pushing the price up articificially.

When it came to Broadband, Ireland left it to the open market for a critical period in the early 2000s - there were a lot of promises and expressions of interest from private companies and they nearly all dropped out.

Brown in the UK has committed to ensuring every household in the UK has broadband fast enough to run video by 2012. That won't happen through the free market.

We need a strategy based on wind and wave to make Ireland a net contributor to european energy supplies on the new grid. Then we could afford to provide free electricity to everyone over the age of 65, when hypothermia risks kick in.

I saw it myself in Galway with the old woman being asked for 2.60 for the slice of apple tart and she turning away. The biggest theft is inflation and don't believe the figures given by the government because it is a lie. 40 years ago you could buy a house for 5000 and now it is 300000. Ron Paul would have money constant so a young person couls save for retirement.

Today a 20 year old does not realise it but they are guaranteed to stave for the slice if apple pie

Squire wrote:

In the UK all elderly get a winter fuel allowance of £250 which is increased for those over 80 to £400. But again if someone is elderly they may still forget to pay bills and get confused and believe that the bill is already paid.

Shouldn't it be easy to remotely monitor energy usage for the elderly and even get some in-house temperature readings?

Of course ideally all housing for the elderly (and everyone else) would be built to that German standard where you hardly ever need to turn the heat on (the passivhaus standard (which requires no heating system!)).

The energy should be provided for free, and usage levels and temperature monitored both remotely and by that quaint concept - the community and neighbours.

Another reason for this trend, is the separation from where we work and live. You can't go in for a cup of tea and a muffin with your Nan on your lunch break if we all live and work so far away.

In case people missed the thread below I posted a useful article on the increase in prices due to liberalisation and privatisation there


ESB - to invest 22 billion in renewables / Why isn't electricity cheaper ?
https://machinenation.forumakers.com/energy-transport-and-infrastructure-f43/esb-to-invest-22-billion-in-renewables-why-isn-t-electricity-cheaper-t145.htm#64112

The thing is, it is quite clear that (for instance in the UK and the US, but elsewhere too) the price of electricity was lower before privatisation. Also, the model actually originated in the UK under Thatcher even though trends towards moving away from the regulatory approach in the US was happening anyway.

In this regard, in the 70s -under the auspices or energy security and the early 70s oil crisis,- faux environmental loopholes were used to by large utilities to create 'green' front companies to punch through the regulatory system. This along with importing the Thatcher model, eventually led to the Enron style system in the US where Californian tax-payers lost 9 billion dollars, the price rocketed to +200% for consumers and blackouts and worsening environmental effects ensued.

Pax wrote:

Shouldn't it be easy to remotely monitor energy usage for the elderly and even get some in-house temperature readings?

Of course ideally all housing for the elderly (and everyone else) would be built to that German standard where you hardly ever need to turn the heat on (the passivhaus standard (which requires no heating system!)).

The energy should be provided for free, and usage levels and temperature monitored both remotely and by that quaint concept - the community and neighbours.

Another reason for this trend, is the separation from where we work and live. You can't go in for a cup of tea and a muffin with your Nan on your lunch break if we all live and work so far away.

In case people missed the thread below I posted a useful article on the increase in prices due to liberalisation and privatisation there


ESB - to invest 22 billion in renewables / Why isn't electricity cheaper ?
https://machinenation.forumakers.com/energy-transport-and-infrastructure-f43/esb-to-invest-22-billion-in-renewables-why-isn-t-electricity-cheaper-t145.htm#64112

The thing is, it is quite clear that (for instance in the UK and the US, but elsewhere too) the price of electricity was lower before privatisation. Also, the model actually originated in the UK under Thatcher even though trends towards moving away from the regulatory approach in the US was happening anyway.

In this regard, in the 70s -under the auspices or energy security and the early 70s oil crisis,- faux environmental loopholes were used to by large utilities to create 'green' front companies to punch through the regulatory system. This along with importing the Thatcher model, eventually led to the Enron style system in the US where Californian tax-payers lost 9 billion dollars, the price rocketed to +200% for consumers and blackouts and worsening environmental effects ensued.

That's it Pax about the passive house etc. People's pensions could go towards a fund which would be used to construct communities composed of passive houses for the elderly or something.

You'd have a hospitable home to move into towards the end of your days. I suppose we have 'old folks homes' now but nevertheless, I'd buy that for a dollar.