Stewart on Inversion

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SIGAR's latest report

SIGAR is the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. He has just released his quarterly report to Congress. Elias Groll summarizes some of the findings.

• The United States has spent $7.6 billion on counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan, but opium cultivation there -- a key Taliban funding source -- has risen for the past three years, and helped push global quantities of the crop to a record level. The U.S. Department of Agriculture spent $34.4 million toward a soybean project in the face of scientific evidence indicating that the crop was "inappropriate for conditions and farming practices in northern Afghanistan, where the program was implemented." The United States Agency for International Development has pledged $75 million toward the ill-fated Kajaki Dam project, but the inspector general questions whether that project is at all economically viable. The United States has spent $626 million to provide weapons and equipment to Afghan forces. That aid includes 465,000 small arms, but, according to the IG, for 43 percent of those arms, information was missing in a database used to track their receipt in Afghanistan.
• So it's perhaps no surprise that the report notes that the Afghan government is far from financial independence. Last year, the Afghan government saw revenues of about $2 billion. Its budget was far larger: $5.4 billion. Donors mostly made up that difference. In January, Afghanistan approved a $7.6 billion budget, with donors chipping in about $4.8 billion.

We spent $104 billion on the Marshall Plan. We've topped that in Afghanistan. Compare the results.

Who does the FDA work for?

The FDA has stated that some antibiotics used in animal feed are not safe and increase the risk of antibiotic resistance in people. The numbers bear this out as ever year, antibiotic-resistant infections kill at least 23,000 Americans and make another two million of us sick.

The antibiotics help farmers fatten their animals and can help prevent animal diseases. However, there is a growing number of farmers who have stopped using these drugs and are accomplishing the ends of fattening and disease prevention. Why, then, doesn't the FDA ban these drugs?

Guacamole, anyone?

Who's buying the stock?

There is growing evidence that more and more of the stock purchased in the markets (including the dark pools) is being bought as part of a corporate buy-back. Last year corporations bought $754.8 billion of their own shares. From 2006 through 2013, corporations authorized $4.14 trillion in buybacks of their own publicly traded stock in the U.S. Is this being done to prop up the stock or boost executive compensation or for some other reason?

Many corporations are resorting to borrowing in order to buy their shares. It does not sound good.

My Brother's Keeper

Kimberle Crenshaw, a law professor, does not object to the title, "My Brother's Keeper", which is a public-private initiative to help boys of color. The program was announced by Obama earlier this year and is rather far-reaching, focusing on providing strong support to boys of color via mentorships, school help and other means.

Crenshaw is upset in that the program is for boys only, yet girls suffer as much as their brothers. After all, they do grow up in the same households and neighborhoods and attend the same schools. She writes, "black and Hispanic girls are at or near the bottom level of reading and math scores. Black girls have the highest levels of school suspension of any girls. They also face gender-specific risks: They are more likely than other girls to be victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking, more likely to be involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and more likely to die violently. The disparities among girls of different races are sometimes even greater than among boys."

A no-brainer

Wash Sales are now Self Trade

Wash sales got a very bad name during the Depression.  Justifiably so, as they were one of the primary reasons for the tanking of the market. 

A wash sale involves the same party at each end of the trade, buyer and seller. In the 1920s two-thirds of the volume of some stocks consisted of wash sales. The basic purpose of a wash sale is to pump a stock’s price so insiders can bail out at the top and transfer the losses of a worthless or inflated security to uninformed investors. This is done by the same party conducting or authorizing simultaneous buying and selling in the stock, typically making sure trades occur at ever rising prices until the operators have unloaded their stock. Without that support, the price crashes.

Wash sales were declared illegal in the 1930s. But now it looks as though they are making a comeback - vide "dark pools" - as our financial regulators have modified the rules, even to the point of calling these trades "self trades".

Competition for the banks

Post offices used to provide banking services at one time. Dean Baker and Senator Warren think they should do so once more. Their focus would be on low and moderate income households. You could perform most of the basic banking services - basic checking and saving accounts, car loans, credit cards, etc. -  at the post office. And Baker thinks the postal banking system could make a profit, while meeting the needs of many Americans. Many European countries have viable postal banking systems.

You have to watch this

A Pediatric Orthopedic Surgeon and a Parent

That's Ron Turker and he has something to say about the current craze for child athletes. Perhaps his most interesting and provocative comment is: "Our kids no longer play sports; they are youth athletes.” 

In the old days kids arranged and organized their own sports. Today, that's no longer the case; there  are leagues upon leagues, coaches upon coaches, etc. Parents are spending a lot of money on coaches, leagues, equipment, road trips, motels, tournament fees, etc.

Turker has also found that he is now seeing more juvenile athletes coming in with repetitive stress injuries (both physical and, in a sense, emotional) that were once rare. Often, all the kids want is some time off from athletics. 

Run a University

As I've noted before the job of university president pays well. In the world of the private university, 42 presidents received more than a million dollars each for their work. Public university presidents did not do as well, only nine made over a million. These millions do not include such perks as free luxury cars and country club memberships and free housing. But presidents need help. The number of their helpers (campus administrators) increased by 60% from 1993 to 2009; the faculty increased by 6%.

A Heretic

Some would call William Deresiewicz that. He's a graduate of Columbia and taught at Yale for twelve years. Yet, he has written an article entitled "Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League".  There is a lot of sound analysis there, much of which I agree with. Here are some excerpts, some of which I've 'bolded'.:

• Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.
• Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.
• So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error. Once, a student at Pomona told me that she’d love to have a chance to think about the things she’s studying, only she doesn’t have the time. I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion.
• Students are regarded by the institution as “customers,” people to be pandered to instead of challenged. Professors are rewarded for research, so they want to spend as little time on their classes as they can. The profession’s whole incentive structure is biased against teaching, and the more prestigious the school, the stronger the bias is likely to be. The result is higher marks for shoddier work.
• Let’s not kid ourselves: The college admissions game is not primarily about the lower and middle classes seeking to rise, or even about the upper-middle class attempting to maintain its position. It is about determining the exact hierarchy of status within the upper-middle class itself. 
• This system is exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is isolated from the society that it’s supposed to lead. The numbers are undeniable. In 1985, 46 percent of incoming freshmen at the 250 most selective colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution. By 2000, it was 55 percent. As of 2006, only about 15 percent of students at the most competitive schools came from the bottom half. The more prestigious the school, the more unequal its student body is apt to be. And public institutions are not much better than private ones. As of 2004, 40 percent of first-year students at the most selective state campuses came from families with incomes of more than $100,000, up from 32 percent just five years earlier.
• And so it is hardly a coincidence that income inequality is higher than it has been since before the Great Depression, or that social mobility is lower in the United States than in almost every other developed country. Elite colleges are not just powerless to reverse the movement toward a more unequal society; their policies actively promote it.
• Instead of service, how about service work? That’ll really give you insight into other people. How about waiting tables so that you can see how hard it is, physically and mentally? You really aren’t as smart as everyone has been telling you; you’re only smarter in a certain way. There are smart people who do not go to a prestigious college, or to any college—often precisely for reasons of class. There are smart people who are not “smart.”
• The education system has to act to mitigate the class system, not reproduce it. Affirmative action should be based on class instead of race, a change that many have been advocating for years. Preferences for legacies and athletes ought to be discarded. SAT scores should be weighted to account for socioeconomic factors. Colleges should put an end to résumé-stuffing by imposing a limit on the number of extracurriculars that kids can list on their applications. They ought to place more value on the kind of service jobs that lower-income students often take in high school and that high achievers almost never do. They should refuse to be impressed by any opportunity that was enabled by parental wealth. Of course, they have to stop cooperating with U.S. News.
• I used to think that we needed to create a world where every child had an equal chance to get to the Ivy League. I’ve come to see that what we really need is to create one where you don’t have to go to the Ivy League, or any private college, to get a first-rate education.

Going backwards

The graphic above was created by the Russell Sage Foundation. It's hard to imagine that there could be a 36% decline in the median household over a ten-year period. Even those at the 95% level suffered, as only 4% of them increased their household income. And the stock market continues to hit new highs!

Carlo Bergonzi Died

Communication Management Units

I'd never heard of Communication Management Units (CMU). Molly Crabapple says that the Bureau of Prisons established two of them  in 2006 and 2008 as secret "Limited Communication for Terrorist Inmates". Their purpose is to cut off prisoners from the outside world. Most of the prisoners are Muslims; they make up roughly 70 percent of the prisoners in CMUs but only 6 percent of the federal prison population. 

As Crabapple describes the units, they are inhuman. The prisoners’ every word is recorded. They are strip-searched before and after each visit from loved ones (in case they write messages on their body). Letters are severely restricted; phone calls are limited to two 15-minute calls a week. CMU prisoners may spend decades without hugging their wives or children. 

What kind of country have we become?

The New York City Farm

The NYC Honeybee Association had 25 members in 2007, now it has 480. The Chicken Meetup Group had 400 members in 2012, two years later it has 765. For some reason more New Yorkers are raising hens for eggs, rabbits for meat and bees for honey. They are using the tiniest of spaces - including on roofs - to raise their animals. Here is one of these farmers.

A Voice of Reason re Immigration

Veronica Escobar is a judge in El Paso, one of the places where immigrants are registered and later dispersed to other cities. While there have been more immigrants coming to El Paso and straining resources, she's close enough to the situation to say that there is no crisis; the crisis exists solely in the words of our politicians. Not only are they stirring up the population, but they want to spend money to 'control the situation'.

The most prominent waste of money is Rick Perry's proposal to send 1,000 National Guardsmen to 'protect' the border. This will cost $12,000,000 a month. The wastefulness appears endemic in Texas as state legislators and the Department of Public Safety are planning to spend an additional $30 million over six months to create a “surge” of state law enforcement resources. Part of Mr. Obama's $3 billion will go to surveillance ( drones at $40 million) and transportation and detention ($1 billion). Add all this to the $259 we spend each day on each detained immigrant. Does this make sense to you?

Implementing Dodd-Frank Has Been Slow

Dodd-Frank was passed four years ago, just 52 percent of the rules mandated by Dodd-Frank have been finalized by federal regulators. Part of the problem is that the bill charged various federal agencies with supplying the details; the agencies have not done a very good job. And the Republicans haven't been overly eager to have the full bill up and running, so they've done whatever they can to stall things.

Interesting Numbers

Greg Kaufmann got these numbers from a recent Census report on poverty:

US poverty (less than $19,090 for a family of three): 46.5 million people, 15 percent

Children in poverty: 16.4 million, 23 percent of all children, including 39.6 percent of African-American children and 33.7 percent of Latino children. Children are the poorest age group in the US

Deep poverty (less than $11,510 for a family of four): 20.4 million people, 1 in 15 Americans, including 7.1 million children

People who would have been in poverty if not for Social Security, 2012: 61.8 million (program kept 15.3 million people out of poverty)

People in the US experiencing poverty by age 65: Roughly half

Twice the poverty level (less than $46,042 for a family of four): 106 million people, more than 1 in 3 Americans

Jobs in the US paying less than $34,000 a year: 50 percent

Impact of public policy, 2010: Without government assistance, poverty would have been twice as high — nearly 30 percent of population

Percentage of entitlement benefits going to elderly, disabled or working households, 2010: Over 90 percent

Interviewing anti-immigration protesters

Immigrants or Refugees?

You remember these words carved into the Statue of Liberty. Don't you?

Give me your tired, your poor, 

Your huddled masses, yearning to breath free, 

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, 

Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me, 

I lift my lamp beside the golden door. 

Why don't we believe and practice these words anymore? Can't we see that most of these kids trying to enter this country are from three countries - Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador? Because of the War on Drugs between 2009 and 2012 a civilian was more likely to be killed by violence in these countries than killed in Iraq at the height of the insurgency.

These kids are truly refugees.

What's with airplanes this year?

In March Malaysia Airlines flight 370 went missing. Today Algeria Airlines reports one of its planes has gone off the radar. This happened 55 minutes after takeoff. It was flying across the Sahara from Burkino Faso to Algeria. There are 110 passengers and six crew on board.

An extra tooth or two

Ashik Gavai, a teenager from India, had had gum problems and pain for the past year and a half. He was finally correctly diagnosed as having "complex composite odontoma where a single gum forms lots of teeth. It's a sort of benign tumour." The tumor was pretty tough and required the use of a chisel and hammer to open it. Then the deluge started:

The deluge was 232 small teeth, the most anyone has heard of. He still has 28 regular teeth.

Just another plagiarist

While it's a front-page article in the NY Times, the charge of plagiarism against a national politician is not new. The names of Rand Paul and Joe Biden come readily to mind. Today's politician who "confronts questions of plagiarism" is Senator John Walsh, recently appointed Democrat from Montana. 

The article contends that the final paper required for Mr. Walsh’s master’s degree from the United States Army War College seems to indicate that the senator appropriated at least a quarter of his thesis on American Middle East policy from other authors’ works, with no attribution. Most of the appropriations are word-for-word. When interviewed by the Times, Mr. Walsh said he did not believe he had done anything wrong. Here is one way of looking at his thesis:

The plagiarism is not Mr. Walsh's sole difficulty with the truth. His claim to have graduated from the University of Albany was refuted. He was denied a promotion from colonel to general in the National Guard because he urged other guardsmen to join a private advocacy group, the National Guard Association of the United States, in which he was seeking a leadership role.

A worthy Senator?

And the count goes on and on

Another week, another GM recall. This time it's only 717,960, none of which is related to the ignition switch. There are several reasons but a turn-signal bulb is the biggest culprit this time with 120,426 instances of a problem. 

Dumb Tourists

Pam Martens of Wall Street on Parade reports today on the first day of testimony before the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee of Investigations. I don't know what the scope of the investigations are, but this one is about hedge funds and high frequency trading.  The subject is extremely complex and, in her mind, very likely not quite kosher; she calls those not on the inside - her and us - "dumb tourists".

First, you've got a situation where the banks with whom the funds deal can leverage these deals as high as 20-1. Yet, Federal law has something called Regulation T, which says that a bank or broker-dealer cannot extend more than 50 percent margin on a stock account. Then, you've got something called a basket option, which defines all these trades (which last minutes) as long-term transactions and, thus, subject to a lower tax rate. The Senate report says that one firm may have engaged in "tax avoidance of more than $6 billion". It is also questionable as to whether the books and records say who is the true owner of an account.

Another interesting excerpt from the Senate report:

“Large partnerships – which include hedge funds, private equity funds, and publicly traded partnerships – are some of the most profitable entities in the United States.  According to a 2013 preliminary report issued by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), ‘[i]n tax year 2011, nearly 3.3 million partnerships accounted for $20.6 trillion in assets and $580.9 billion in total net income.’ That GAO report also found that the IRS was failing to audit 99% of the tax returns filed by large partnerships with assets exceeding $100 million.”

The hearing continues on Wednesday.

Makes no sense to me

80% of California is classified as being in an extreme drought. Yet, water use actually jumped one percent this May, compared to the same period last year. Then, you get the weird case of Laura Whitney and her husband, Michael Korte. They live in Glendale, part of Contra Costa, and  have been trying to conserve water by cutting back on lawn watering, taking shorter showers, and doing larger loads of laundry. Here's how their lawn looks.

Although the Water Board says that lawn care is typically the single biggest water user for the average property and a 500-square-foot lawn can use more than 18,000 gallons of water per year, they have decided to fine the couple as much as $500 for not keeping their lawn green.

Oliver on Prisons

Subprime Redux?

It's not mortgages as it was in the 2000s. Now it's car loans. Auto loans to people with tarnished credit have risen more than 130 percent in the five years since the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, with roughly one in four new auto loans last year going to borrowers considered subprime. This year subprime auto loans are up 15%.

Many of the characteristics of the mortgage subprime debacle are present with these auto loans. The accuracy of the information in many loans is highly questionable, often income is overstated and employment history, more or less, made up. The loans are often at least twice the size of the value of the used cars purchased, including dozens of battered vehicles with mechanical defects hidden from borrowers.And the loans are being sold to people who can't really afford them. The loans are bundled into complex bonds - which are listed as investment grade by the ratings agencies - and then sold as securities by banks to insurance companies, mutual funds and public pension funds. The interest rates can be as high as 23%.

Results are deteriorating. In the first three months of this year, banks had to write off as entirely uncollectable an average of $8,541 of each delinquent auto loan, up about 15 percent from a year earlier, according to Experian. In another sign of trouble ahead, repossessions, while still relatively low, increased nearly 78 percent to an estimated 388,000 cars in the first three months of the year from the same period a year earlier. The number of borrowers who are more than 60 days late on their car payments also jumped in 22 states during that period.

Jury gone wild

A jury in Florida seems to have had it in for R J Reynolds, the tobacco company. They awarded the widow of a smoker who died in 1996 $23.6 billion dollars in punitive damages and $16.8 million in compensatory damages. I'm sure Reynolds will appeal the decision and will likely lower the awards significantly.

Oliver on climate change

Inversion Simplified

Some other companies practicing inversion: Mylan, Medtronic, AstraZeneca

Since 2008 (six years ago), two dozen U.S. companies have moved their legal base abroad as part of a merger, the same number that did so over the previous 25 years.

You should read David Rothkopf's article

He ruminates on this week's slaughters of the innocent - the four kids killed on the beach in Gaza and the downing of the Malaysian plane over the Ukraine. It's a powerful piece. Here are some excerpts:

Modern low-intensity conflicts are won and lost on their ragged edges. Nations act as though the careful plans of their militaries and intelligence operations can harness the chaos of combat and guide it to advance their interests. And then the unplanned happens, collateral damage occurs, and it has a bigger impact on politics and the position of combatants than all the calculated elements of the conflict added up.

While the Israeli government can and repeatedly does justify its actions against Hamas as self-defense, it cannot argue away the deaths of four children on the beach or, for that matter, the large number of other civilian victims of its attacks. There is no moral equation that offers a satisfactory calculus to enable us to accept the death of innocents as warranted.

Leaders on both sides have lost all sense that when you share a land, you share each other's children, and that they belong not to the flawed nations of today but to the promise of what might come tomorrow.

The sight of dead children not only weakens Israel politically and dents the country's international standing, but it taints every defensible action Israel might take and devalues any future peace by literally having snuffed it out for those killed.

When innocents die, standard military metrics for success or failure pale in comparison with the human costs depicted so graphically in the media -- highlighting once again with indelible and deeply disturbing images the hubris of leaders who delude themselves into believing they can control the uncontrollable.

From our meditation instructor

Corporations should pay their fair share of taxes

Monolithic corporations, like Pfizer, have cut their federal income taxes a lot. The share of federal revenue coming from corporate taxes has fallen from around 32 percent in 1952 to 8.9 percent now. As a share of gross domestic product, it has fallen from about 6 percent of GDP then to less than 2 percent now.

This is due largely to a process called inversion. Basically, a company buys or merges with a non-US company and claims to no longer be based in the US to get out of paying certain taxes. The company does, however, keep the same employees, executives, buildings, sales channels and customers it had inside the US before the switch.

This has worked quite well for Pfizer. Bloomberg reports “earnings before taxes outside the US were $15 billion in 2011 while losses within the country were $2.2 billion. … These operating results appear to be inconsistent with [Pfizer's] domestic and international revenues, which in 2011 were $26.9 billion and $40.5 billion, respectively.”

In addition to inversion, companies need not repatriate profits held overseas. Again, the money adds up; Pfizer held as much as $73 billion of taxable profits outside the US in 2012.

400,000 deaths per year?

That's what one study estimated with regard to preventable harm in hospitals. Another study claims that patients are no better protected now than they were 15 years ago. A third concludes that preventable patient harm is the third-leading cause of death in America. Other studies show that medication errors, adverse drug events and injuries due to drugs occur in up to 25 percent of patients within 30 days of being prescribed a drug.

In my business days one of the 'cliches' I felt was reality was: you can't manage if you don't measure. That appears to be the basic problem in reducing the number of deaths that are preventable. Providers and public health agencies still are not accurately measuring the harm.

Elaine Stritch Died Today

Against Muslim-Americans?

Since Bill Clinton, the President has sponsored a dinner at the end of Ramadan. The dinner is meant to honor Muslims who are celebrating the end of a day of fasting during the holy month of Ramadan. These dinners have not been especially newsworthy until this year. This year there was a modicum of news. Some Muslims did not accept the invite and protested the event. The President endorsed Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip. He also had a good word to say about NSA spying on Muslim-Americans. And he invited the Israeli Ambassador to the US, an outspoken advocate of Israel's settlement enterprise who has claimed Muslim and Arab culture is endemically violent.

Disaster Planning by TBTF banks

Things in the financial world have grown very, very complex. When Lehman failed, it had $639 billion in assets and 209 subsidiaries; it took three years to unwind the bank. Today JPMorgan has $2.5 trillion in assets and 3,391 subsidiaries. Could it ever be unwound? 

Dodd-Frank mandated that large financial institutions submit plans to the Federal Reserve and the FDIC explaining how they could be “rapidly” liquidated without bringing down the economy. 

Here's what Stanley Fischer, the Fed Vice-Chair, has to say about that,“In short, actively breaking up the largest banks would be a very complex task, with uncertain payoff.” His boss, Janet Yellen, notes that the wind-down plans are “complex” and some plans encompass “tens of thousands of pages.” She says that there is a "process" to handle the situation. However, I suspect she has doubts about some of the plans as she also says, "I think we need to give these firms feedback.”

Now hospitals are playing the game

Back in November I wrote about the fact that universities have become businesses. One indication of this was the payment of compensation to retired presidents. Supposedly, they are being paid because of their fund-raising skills. Payments are in the six and seven figure range as they assume some position at the university.

But the size of these payments is dwarfed by the retirement payments made to presidents of non-profit hospitals; the typical reason is fund-raising skills, the typical retirement 'job' is executive vice chairman. 

Some examples of what these skills are worth:
$5,600,000 to the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital former CEO.
$4,400,000 to the CEO of Momtefiore.
$4,000,000 to the chief executives of North Shore-L.I.J.and NYU Langone Medical Center.

Yes, these are all jobs in NYC. But, things aren't too bad for other presidents. Nationally, the average nonprofit hospital chief earned $475,600 in total compensation.

Repeating the same mistakes

Rosa Brooks - and most others - thinks Obama makes the same mistakes over and over. And here is a precis of her reasoning. The full article is well worth reading.

1. Other people's nationalism (or tribal, ethnic, religious, or familial loyalty) is as real as ours.

2. It's not a "war of ideas."

3. There is no "them."

4. The fog of war is even foggier than you think -- and it extends well beyond warzones.

5. When we get self-righteous and condescending, we annoy people; when we issue meaningless ultimatums, we look dumb.

6. "Don't do stupid shit" is a sound maxim, but it's not a strategy. Neither is "leadership."

Naming Names

That's one thing you won't see in Justice's Statement of Facts re the Citibank settlement. You won't see much in this statement. There are no revealing incriminating internal e-mails or letters from whistleblowers although the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report issued by another agency does talk about these. Does Rubin still wield a large degree of influence?

The Harvard Grant Study: What It Tells Us

For almost 75 years 268 students at Harvard between 1939 and 1944 have participated in what may be longest long-term psychological study. The purpose of the Harvard Grant Study—so called for its original funder, chain-store magnate William T. Grant—was to determine which traits best predict a successful life. Recently, George Vaillant, who directed the study for more than three decades, has published Triumphs of Experience, which chronicles the study. Here's what Allegra Kirkland thinks are the most interesting findings:

1. Beware of Alcohol AbuseOn its own, this statement isn’t too surprising; it’s long been known that sustained heavy drinking can lead to severe health problems. But Vaillant, who calls alcoholism a “disorder of great destructive power,” insists it has other equally significant, devastating consequences. For example, alcoholism is the single strongest cause of divorce between the Grant Study men and their wives. The Harvard researchers also found that it was strongly coupled with neurosis and depression, with these psychological traits following alcohol abuse rather than preceding it. And together with cigarette smoking, alcohol abuse was the #1 cause of morbidity and death among the #1 cause of morbidity and death among the study participants.
2. Liberals Have More SexIn one of the oddest discoveries, researchers found that aging liberals had much more active sex lives than their conservative counterparts. Though political ideology had no bearing on overall life satisfaction, the conservative participants ended their sex lives at around age 68 on average, while most liberal men continued having sex regularly well into their 80s. Vaillant was himself puzzled by this, noting that he’d consulted urologists about the findings but “they have no idea why it might be so.”
3. Moms MatterThe relationship between participants and their mothers was found to be a critical factor in determining lifelong well-being. While researchers found a powerful correlation between the warmth of the men's relationships generally and their health and happiness later in life, the dynamic between mother and son was found to be particularly influential. According to their findings, men who had “warm” childhood relationships with their mothers earned $87,000 more annually than men who had distant maternal ties. Fittingly, their boyhood relationships with their mothers were also associated with effectiveness at work. Among the other physical and psychological benefits: men who had poor childhood relationships with their moms were much more likely to develop dementia in old age.
4. Personality Is Not StaticOne of the main advantages of longitudinal studies is the ability to track change over time. What Vaillant found in his decades of speaking to and studying the Grant Study men is that personality is a constantly shifting, evolving set of traits, not an ironclad description of what a human being is like. From his perspective, adult development continues long after adolescence, as people experience and are altered by major life events like marriage, divorce, career changes and the birth of children. The participants who were determined to have the most successful lives accepted the fundamentally haphazard courses of their lives, rather than fixating on regrets and missed opportunities. As one of the participants, Charles Boatwright (all names have been changed), explained at the age of 79, “The things you felt so passionate about when you were young, you learn to let go of. You realize that all those things you thought you were going to be, you ain’t. As I have often said, at this stage in life it’s not what you’ve accomplished in a day, but how the day felt.”

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Synergy and bees

Mark Winston, a biologist, thinks we should spend more time studying the interactions of all the pesticides used with bees. There are more than 120 pesticides, so the interactions have to be phenomenal. He extrapolates from this observation and urges that we study how exposure to low dosages of combined chemicals may affect human health before approving compounds.

Popular dancing of the past 100 years

Roads are melting in Yellowstone

For the past ten years the water in some parts of Yellowstone National Park has been heating up and causing the ground to rise; by 2010 the rise in some areas was one foot. Wyoming's hot summer has not made things better. Now the asphalt on some roads in the park is melting to such a degree that the roads are closed to tourists. There is even a possibility that you could step through the ground and into boiling water.

Oliver on Inequality

More psychotherapy in Illinois than New York

That's what ProPublica found when they looked at group psychotherapy sessions in 2012. Illinois had 290,000, about twice as many as New York. Even stranger, the highest billers were not psychotherapists, they were three ob/gyns and a thoracic surgeon. These four claimed to have had 37,864 sessions that year, more than the total for all providers in the state of California. One ob/gyn alone had 10,400 sessions in 2012, at a cost to Medicare of $207,980. They were reimbursed more than $730,000.

Detroit has a different claim to large billing - the number of sessions per client. A social worker was reimbursed for nearly 5,000 group therapy sessions for her 26 Medicare patients, an average of 190 each. She also billed for 2,820 individual psychotherapy visits for the same 26 patients, who allegedly would have received an average of 298 therapy sessions apiece in 2012. 

Which do you prefer?

Venezuela is not in the best of shape. It is trying to raise money from people using the Caracas airport. There is now a charge for the privilege of using a state-of-the-art air purification system, which uses ozone to remove contaminants. At the same time there are other problems at the airport - the toilets don't have water, the air conditioning is broken, and there are stray dogs wandering the airport.  

They are also preventing airlines from extracting their profits from the country, which has led to fewer flights.

Citibank pays $7 billion as settlement

Yet no one goes to jail despite these comments from Holder:

“As a result of their assurances that toxic financial products were sound, Citigroup was able to expand its market share and increase profits.”

“Despite the fact that Citigroup learned of serious and widespread defects among the increasingly risky loans they were securitizing, the bank and its employees concealed these defects.’’

The first of many?

It looks like Corinthian College is at death's door. It's lost $94,000,000 in the first nine months of the fiscal year and it's cash has dwindled to $28,000,000. It's looking for buyers for 100 schools and will close twelve. Most importantly, the federal government is moving in and pushing for a settlement. The fed supplied $1.4 billion of Corinthian's $1.6 billion revenue last year. 72,000 students will be left in the lurch.

A study is just that

In the 21st century scientific studies are published just about every day. And some are recalled because the evidence is faulty or the logic weak. A recent study in Science seems to be a little different in that the scientists do not come to a definitive conclusion.

The study was based on the fact that there has been a forty-fold increase in the rate of earthquakes in Oklahoma between 2008-13. About 20% of these earthquakes greater than magnitude 3.0 have occurred around the small town of Jones since 2008. Researchers have linked this increase to a near doubling in the volumes of waste water disposed of in the central Oklahoma region between 2004 and 2008.

The scientists speculate that the disposal of water in four high-volume wells could be responsible for a swarm of tremors up to 20 miles away. They concluded that the injection of wastewater is "likely responsible" for the swarm with the caveat,"There are thousands of these wells in the US, so only a few appear to be problematic. The difficulties can be avoided but we need to know more about the process so we can give proper guidance to the authorities."

Is fracking the problem?

Behavioral Psychology for Animals

Can she count?

Hillary Clinton has been getting batted around in the press for the size of her speaking fees to colleges. But she needs the money. Bill's pension is not very much; it's only 10 times the poverty level for a family of three. And he does need a staff and an office, which has expenses like rent and postage. Of course, in the 21st century he and his wife have to be protected around the clock.

That first year out of office was tough. He received in pension and other perks, adjusted for 2013 dollars, $335,000 in fiscal year 2001. But things got better: $1.285 million in 2002, and over $1 million every year thereafter through 2011. Since 2011, the outlay by the taxpayer for former President Clinton has been just under $1 million. Including what is budgeted for fiscal year 2014, Clinton will have received a taxpayer outlay of $15,937,000 since leaving the White House in 2001. 

And then there are the speeches and books.

More Congressional Inaction

There has not been an increase in taxes for over twenty years. There has been a deterioration in our highways in that time.

Controlling money or people?

On April 1 Mother Jones revealed that Hobby Lobby's 401k invested in companies making contraceptives. Has three months not been long enough to divest these stocks?

Come fly with me

Members of Congress are required to file a financial form every year. This form includes gifts of travel for which someone else pays; last year nearly 1,900 trips at a cost of more than $6 million last year were taken by our representatives. Usually the travel is not second class; lawmakers bring along their husbands or wives, fly in business class, and stay in plush four-star hotels. 

The form is widely used by reporters, watchdogs, and members of the public to scrutinize lawmakers' finances. However, the form no longer will ask for travel gifts; the House Ethics Committee says it's not needed as it is also reported to the House's Office of the Clerk.

This change just makes it harder for us to find out what favors are being passed out.

200 is now 650

Earlier this week we were told that 200 soldiers had been dispatched to Iraq to protect the U.S. Embassy and the Baghdad airport. Today, we learn that 650 troops are on the ground in Iraq.

Will it stop here?

We are the best

For a fair period of time I've marveled at our belief (and resulting actions) that we are the best nation on earth and other nations should be like us whether or not they want to or are capable of becoming. Stephen Walt supports my contention in his latest article for Foreign Policy. Some excerpts from his article:

• The desire to extend liberalism into Eastern Europe lay behind NATO expansion, and it is a big reason that so-called liberal hawks jumped on the neocon bandwagon in Iraq. It explains why the United States tried to export democracy to Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East, instead of focusing laser-like on al Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks. It was the foundation of Bill Clinton's strategy of "engagement and enlargement," George W. Bush's "liberty doctrine," and Barack Obama's initial embrace of the Arab Spring and decision to intervene in Libya. It is, in short, the central thread in the complex tapestry of recent U.S. foreign policy.
• Paradoxically, the more a liberal society tries to spread its creed to others, the more likely it is to compromise those values back home. One need only look at the evolution of U.S. politics over the past 20 years to see that tendency in spades.
• The conclusion is obvious. The United States and other liberal states would do a much better job of promoting their most cherished political values if they concentrated on perfecting these practices at home instead of trying to export them abroad. If Western societies are prosperous, just, and competent, and live up to their professed ideals, people in other societies will want to emulate some or all of these practices, suitably adapted to local conditions.

Barrack wins

In the latest Quinnipiac poll he was named the worst president since WWII. 33% of poll respondents chose him, 28% chose George W. On the opposite scale Reagan is deemed the best with 35% and Clinton second with 18%.

Same old, same old

In May Credit Suisse pleaded guilty to criminal wrongdoing - a rarity - for its work helping taxpayers hide assets in offshore accounts. The article also reported that BNP Paribas was also very likely to plead guilty to criminal charges and further that it was likely that real people would also be charged.

Well, the news is in re BNP and, surprise, no one is charged. The bank simply has to pay $8.9 billion despite this statement by the assistant district attorney in Manhattan, “This conspiracy was known and condoned at the highest levels of BNP”.  There is still no incentive for bankers to change their habits.