Bidder 70

From Bill Moyers & Company:

Tim DeChristopher, an environmental activist who, in 2008, went to an auction during which drilling rights for the natural gas and oil beneath stretches of pristine Utah wilderness were being sold off. DeChristopher decided he couldn’t stand by and watch the process, so he signed on as a bidder. He purchased plot after plot, knowing he had no way of paying for them, in order to keep the land out of the hands of the oil and gas companies. His act of protest landed him in jail.

A film has been made of DeChristopher's struggle.  Here is the trailer.

Some great photos from the National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest

There are tons of them here.

Water Balloons Can Kill

North Carolina is well aware of the dangers of water balloons, particularly when in the hands of high school seniors. Enloe High School took the requisite action to prevent a calamity. The administration called in the police who arrested seven seniors for this crime.




This was the second incident this month for which police had to be called to arrest a dangerous high school student.

From The New Yorker

A nation of fear

Stephen Walt comments about the AP imbroglio (my emphases):

The greater but more subtle danger, however, is that our society gradually acclimates to ever-increasing levels of secrecy and escalating levels of government monitoring, all of it justified by the need to "keep us safe." Instead of accepting that a (very small) amount of risk is inevitable in the modern world, our desire for total safety allows government officials to simultaneously shrink the circle of individual freedoms and to place more and more of what they are doing beyond our purview.

All over the globe

We now have more than 1,000 military bases outside of the U.S.A.  Some are relatively small, housing a few hundred troops.  Others are huge, such as the latest in Italy.  It includes a brigade headquarters, two sets of barracks, a natural-gas-powered energy plant, a hospital, two schools, a fitness center, dining facilities, and a mini-mall.  The total cost of construction and supplying this one base should amount to a half billion U.S. dollars.  When you add in the costs of all our overseas bases, you're talking about $200 billion per year.

Does the above give you any ideas for lowering the deficit?

Maybe she is serious

Elizabeth Warren seems to be living up to her reputation.  Her latest salvo is a letter she wrote to the Fed, SEC and Justice Department asking them for evidence on how a settlement that doesn't require a bank to admit guilt would be better policy than taking the bank to trial.  She comments, "if a regulator reveals itself to be unwilling to take large financial institutions all the way to trial - either because it is too timid or because it lacks resources - the regulator has a lot less leverage in settlement negotiations and will be forced to settle on terms that are much more favorable to the wrongdoer.  
 
The consequence can be insufficient compensation to those who are harmed by illegal activity and inadequate deterrence of future violations.  If large financial institutions can break the law and accumulate millions in profits and, if they get caught, settle by paying out of those profits, they do not have much incentive to follow the law."

She sent the same basic letter to OCC without getting much satisfaction.  Will she get a decent response from the three agencies listed?

Place your order now

If you plan on going to Gaza soon, you can feel comfortable knowing that you can get your KFC fix there.  Residents of Gaza are now able to order Kentucky Fried Chicken from Eqypt.  Just dial 2889797.  It will be delivered via the same tunnels that supply a vast array of goods that avoid the Israeli blockade.

We don't have enough programmers and other technical and scientific workers

That's been the cry from companies that employ science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers.  That's why any talk of immigration includes exceptions for these workers.  We give temporary visas to foreigners in these fields and green cards to every foreign graduate of an American college with a master’s or PhD in a STEM field.  Yet, studies consistently find that the US produces several times the number of STEM graduates than can get jobs in their fields. NIH, NSF and other organizations report that hundreds of thousands of STEM workers in the US are unemployed or underemployed. 

Why is that?  On one hand the workers are not organized, and their story is being largely ignored in the debate over immigration reform. On the other hand, companies and universities benefit from this foreign help. Temporary visas allow employers to pay skilled workers below-market wages, and these visas are valid only for specific jobs. Workers are unable to take another job, making them akin to indentured servants. Universities also use temporary visas to recruit international graduate students and postdoctoral scientists, mainly from China, to do the gruntwork for professors’ grants. 

I must say that there really was a shortage of programmers in the 20th century.  At one point, we imported some from Russia.  But in the 21st century programmer salaries have not escalated as they had in the 1900s; they are flat or have declined. Supply and demand are still relevant.  By increasing the number of STEM workers we are lowering the costs of companies and universities and damaging native Americans who made the mistake of studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Will he ever get upset?

There are virtues in maintaining one's cool when others are going off the deep end.  But only sometimes.  Obama does it just about all the time. He seems to have an inability to get  really emotional or to accept blame.  No matter what the issue, the buck should stop with him, as Harry Truman said.  He needs to use the bully pulpit.

Yes, the Benghazi issue is basically politics.  The IRS and AP issues are not.  They are attacks on our freedom. Obama is not speaking up or doing anything about that freedom.  As Dana Milbank writes, he has become President Passerby.

Part D for Dumb?

Medicare Part D helps people pay for drugs.  However, there is no attempt made by Medicare to see that the drugs prescribed are actually related to the patient's condition and may actually benefit the patient.  ProPublica has analyzed four years of Medicare prescription records and found that some doctors and other health professionals across the country prescribe large quantities of drugs that are potentially harmful, disorienting or addictive. Sadly, federal officials have done little to detect or deter these hazardous prescribing patterns.

Some drugs increase the risk of death in some cases.  Others are used in situations where there is little scientific support.  Soma, a muscle relaxant, is banned in Europe; yet in 2010 more than 500,000 prescriptions were written for the drug to patients 65 and older.

The Inspector General at HHS has criticized the failure of medicare personnel to police the use of Part D, but without getting any changes in procedures. State Medicaid programs police their programs. Medicare does nothing with providers who have been suspended or disciplined by other regulatory authorities.

Oh, well.  It's only our money and our lives.

Big Brother

The Obama administration really wants to keep things secret.  Thus far, it has has brought six cases against people suspected of providing classified information, more than under all previous presidents combined.  Its latest affront to freedom is the seizure of two months of telephone records of AP reporters who worked on a story about the successful prevention of a plot by terrorists. 

Normally, the government informs the news organization that it wants phone records and they negotiate about it.  However, this Justice Department is above the law. It claims that AP's revealing anything about the plot "pose(s) a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation" as to who revealed the information to AP.  

The AP had already delayed reporting the story at the request of government officials who said it would jeopardize national security. Once officials said those concerns were allayed, the AP disclosed the plot, though the Obama administration continued to request that the story be held until the administration could make an official announcement. 

I guess we should be thankful that the Justice Department informed AP of the seizure.  Perhaps, next time they won't.

Student Loans Today

Joe Stiglitz outlines some statistics re student loans today:  

• 13% of student-loan borrowers of all ages owe more than $50,000
• 4% owe more than $100,000 
• 17% of student-loan borrowers were 90 days or more behind in payments
• three-year default rates exceeded 13%
• total student debt, around $1 trillion, surpassed total credit-card debt last year.

The job market is not getting better.  Salaries for the average worker are not increasing.  Do we have a problem?  What are our leaders doing about it?

Is Rust Consulting the most inept company in America?

Rust is a company hired by the OCC to handle much of the foreclosure settlements.  The company is not doing the job very well.  First, they sent out checks that in many instances bounced.  Then, they shortchanged many of the recipients; for example, 96,000 of 217,000 borrowers serviced by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley had to be sent a second check because the first check was too small.  They have been unable to clean up clerical errors, such as checks sent to the wrong addresses or issued to deceased borrowers.

The OCC is not exactly without stain in this. First of all, determining who got what was inherently arbitrary.  The settlement money from the banks was inadequate to compensate most of the people for the damage they suffered due to the banks' incompetence.

A cute commercial

More Toilets = Fewer Rapes

That seems to be the case in the state of Bihar, India.  Eighty-five percent of the homes in the state do not have a toilet.  So, when girls or women go out in the fields to defecate, they are liable to be raped.  Authorities think that at least 400 rapes in Bihar would not occur if toilets were generally available.  Some 85% of the rural households in the state, one of India's poorest, have no access to a toilet.

While Bihar is the poorest state in India, more than half-a-billion Indians lack access to basic sanitation.

TPP keeps moving ahead

It's been almost a year since I found out about the TransPacific Partnership, which is an attempt to create a trade agreement between the U.S. and a number of countries which surround the Pacific Ocean.   

The negotiations are being held in secret between unelected government officials and representatives from more than 600 of the world’s most powerful corporations; our elected representatives are not involved and not informed.  Perhaps that's because the TPP “will create binding policies on future Congresses in numerous areas,” including “those related to labor, patent and copyright, land use, food, agriculture and product standards, natural resources, the environment, professional licensing, state-owned enterprises and government procurement policies, as well as financial, healthcare, energy, telecommunications and other service sector regulations.”

Foreign corporations operating in the United States would no longer be subject to our laws regarding protections for the environment, finance or labor rights.  If we try to make the companies comply, they can appeal to an international tribunal made up of lawyers specializing in corporate law. 

Talking with the elephants

Elephants can follow verbal commands from people.  That's the conclusion  of a study by Think Elephants, a Thailand-based organization that promotes conservation through education.  Can your dog or cat do that?

Perhaps even more surprising the resulting academic paper was coauthored by middle school students living and studying at the East Side Middle School in Manhattan. The students communicated with the principal authors in Africa via Skype.


The founder of Think Elephants, Dr. Joshua Plotnik, arranges for three to four elephants in the camp to hang out with the students while the handlers feed them. The students can ask questions, see inside the elephants’ mouths, watch an impromptu veterinary check, etc. The publication of the paper paper capped off a “three-year endeavor to create a comprehensive middle school curriculum that educates and engages young people directly in elephant and other wildlife conservation.”

Through his experiments, Dr. Plotnik has shown that elephants have cognitive abilities on par with or that exceed dolphins, primates and even approach humans. Elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror, joining other animals that have self-awareness, express empathy and lead socially complex lives. They can lend a helping trunk and cooperate with one another in fulfilling complicated tasks. Sometimes they even cheat.

21st Century Government

A cabinet member, Kathleen Sebelius, is asking people affected by the Affordable Care Act to donate money to help implement the law.  Congress passed the law, the President signed it but in these days of austerity and dystopia not enough money was appropriated to make the law reality.  Is this any way to run a country?

According to the Justice Department cabinet members are allowed to solicit donations in their capacity of private citizens as long as, “you do not solicit funds from a subordinate or from someone who has or seeks business with the Department, and you do not use your official title”.  Since Sibelius has called health industry executives as well as others, how can these executives not feel that they are being asked for money even if the subject comes up?

I think the next step should be to ask defense contractors to help pay for our weapons or farmers to pay for their subsidies.  Where does this stupidity stop?

We have to protect our honor

The furor around the burial of Tamerlin Tsarnaev will take a while to die out.  The politicians of Caroline County, where Tsarnaev was buried, are up in arms over the burial in their hometown.  They want to be sure that all laws were followed by the Islamic Funeral Services.  They have disavowed any knowledge of the burial and want everybody to know it was not their fault.  They'd be better Americans if they paid attention to the statement of the Islamic Funeral Services,"What Tsarnaev did is between him and God. We strongly disagree with his violent actions, but that does not release us from our obligation to return his body to the earth.’’

Protecting the World

That seems to be the job of our military.  And it's a job that keeps growing.  Since the mid-20th-century we have had bases in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and the UK.  In the 21st century we have built bases in Bahrain, Djibouti, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Kyrgyzstan.  We also have a military presence of some kind in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, U.A.E., Uzbekistan, and Yemen.  

Since 2001, the US defense budget has increased by more than a trillion dollars, not including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  How much is the sequester cutting from the budget?