On Wednesday, the IPCC retracted a claim made in its 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers were melting so rapidly there was a "very high" chance that they would be gone by 2035, leaving Central and South Asia in a state of severe, perhaps permanent, drought.
It turns out that the claim was based not on peer-reviewed science but on the speculation of an Indian glaciologist named Syed Hasnain, who made the statement in a 1999 interview published in New Scientist - a respected popular journal of science but not a peer-reviewed one. While those glaciers are melting, they aren't doing so at nearly the pace the 2007 report indicated - and some of them may even be expanding. The statement should not have appeared in the report. So the IPCC has retracted it.
Just how long do you think it will take for the nanny-nanny naysayers to get all bug-eyed, to start screeching and pointing fingers about this? Oh, wait, they already are.
Climate change skeptics have lapped up the scandal, which they've already dubbed "Glaciergate," saying that it further erodes the credibility of climate science already damaged by last year's Climategate e-mail scandal. Global warming denier Peter Foster, writing in Canada's National Post, said the error showed how the "IPCC's task has always been not objectively to examine science but to make the case for man-made climate change by any means available."
There are so many things wrong with that paragraph that it's hard to disentangle the nonsense from the rest of it. One thing is that I have really gotten sick of the lazy, sloppy way that supposed journalists string together claims made by the naysayers in a way that makes them sound like accepted facts rather than the wild, unsubstantiated bullshit that they represent. In this case, how many casual readers are going to realize that "erodes the credibility," "already damaged," "Climategate" (presented without, be sure to note, quotation marks), and "scandal" are the words of the naysayers spouting their already-debunked garbage rather than a recitation of conventional wisdom - especially when the sentence starts out by embracing the too-easily-employed description "scandal?"
(I can't help but compare this to my experience some years ago of writing press releases for a political campaign, during which newspapers insisted that everything I stated had to be punctuated with some form of "he said," even when it was, indeed, a statement of routine fact that was not disputed by anyone involved.)
But the other thing involved here is more important: The IPCC initially defended the assertion - but when it was shown that it did not come from peer-reviewed work, that it could not be firmly substantiated, it was retracted.
So what "scandal?" What the hell are they talking about? In fact, that's part of how science is supposed to work: When you're proven wrong, you take it back. As IPCC Vice-chair Jean-Pascal van Ypersele said,
"Some people will attempt to use it to damage the credibility of the IPCC; but if we can uncover it and explain it and change it, it should strengthen the IPCC's credibility, showing that we are ready to learn from our mistakes."
But that, of course, is not how the nanny-nanny naysayers will see it, nor how they will seek to use it. Instead, they will use the very self-correction that is part of science as a weapon against it. And they will do it, and do it with neither pause nor shame, because they are not engaged in science. They are engaged in PR. Some in service to corporations, some in obeisance to corporate ideology, some because it's just easier to close their eyes than to see, some because any mention of the UN sends black helicopters flying in their skulls. But whatever the reason, what they are doing is, again and quite clearly, not science. And it never should be regarded as such.
Nearly five years ago, back in February 2005, as part of a post on privacy matters I addressed the "unbelievably slimy" effort by Phill Kline, then the attorney general of Kansas, to force abortion clinics turn over the complete medical records of nearly 90 women and girls, claiming he needed them for an investigation into underage sex and illegal late-term abortions.
Not just information actually necessary for such a weirdly-combined investigation, but the complete, unedited medical records - records which would include the patient's name, medical history, and details of her sex life, birth control practices, and psychological profile.
He initially won in court but eventually the effort failed.
That wasn't Kline only claim to infamy: If the name sounds familiar it's probably because he was also the man who persecuted Dr. George Tiller for years.
Which gives me not one but two good reasons to take open delight in the fact that TPM reports that he is now facing an ethics complaint charging him with a large-scale abuse of office. He stands
accused of dispatching staff to record license plates of women entering George Tiller's abortion clinic, getting records from a motel where patients stayed, and obtaining state medical files under false pretenses, then retaining them after his term as AG was over and repeatedly lying about it in court. ...
Kline is also accused of violating professional standards by appearing on the O'Reilly Factor five days before the 2006 election to talk about his pursuit of Tiller, flouting a warning from the state Supreme Court not to publicize legal positions.
The complaint was filed by the state's disciplinary administrator, who reports to the state Supreme Court. Kline will appear before a state board in May and could lose his law license. That wouldn't make up for what he put Dr. Tiller, Planned Parenthood and other agencies, and a number of Kansas women through - but it would be sweet nonetheless.
Yes! After going through pretty much what I expected - some tedious hours of cutting and pasting (and re-doing when formatting went weird) - the new look is here with comments.
I still liked Haloscan better that what I've got now but I just don't like Echo, which seems more geared toward "Hey! Tell all your 'friends' on Facebook et. al. that you said something somewhere!" rather than an actual exchange at the comment site.
Updated Okay, comments are going to be a problem here for a bit.
Haloscan, as you know, was bought out and converted to some little monstrosity called Echo. I don't like Echo. I don't like the look, I don't like that there is no way to have a link to your website (that isn't written out in the body of the comment), I don't like that there is no way to link directly to a comment, and I really don't like the idea of being expected to pay more for something that gives me less than I had before.
So Echo nee Haloscan is gone, no longer working here.
I tried to set up comments under Blogger but they don't work, either. It appears now that the only way I can get them to work is to "upgrade" to one of the inane color-by-numbers "layout" templates, which will lose everything in the right-hand column here, requiring me to reconstruct it by hand.
So it's going to require a bit of time (and, I suspect, a lot of irritation) before that's done. You'll know it's done when you see an obvious change in color or design or some such here.
In the meantime, I encourage anyone who has something to say to email me; the address is right over there on the right. If you do, I'd strongly suggest a subject line something like "Re Lotus" or "About your blog post" or some such thing to make sure it doesn't get mistaken for spam.
This post will be kept at the top for about a week.
Updated with something else I don't like about Echo: If you follow a link in a comment, the link opens in the same window - and there's no way to get back to the comment thread. You have to go back to the original post and re-open the comments to continue reading them.
Too much loss, too much pain, too much despair. Too much death.
Haiti overwhelms the senses; death closer to home overwhelms the soul. In between lies all the death that once flared across our awareness but is now mostly forgotten.
Death in southern Sudan, where people are murdered for their cattle and a peace agreement between south and north is on the verge of collapse.
Death in DR Congo, where over 100,000 people have been driven from their homes just since October in the face of an upsurge of violence.
Death in Somalia, where because of threats and violence the World Food Program has pulled out of the southern part of the country, leaving up to 1 million people without assistance.
Death in Iraq, a place where our attention faltered as soon as it was Iraqis doing the dying and no longer Americans.
Death in Afghanistan, where civilians killed are a quickly-forgotten headline about how the latest "incident" affects US "objectives" and exist only as guesses and estimates - even as those estimates were up by a third in 2009 over 2008.
Death in the rest of the twenty-oneon-going conflicts around the world, most of which involve people who have been killed by the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands and more, in fights of which we are but dimly aware - if at all.
And beyond even that, far beyond even that, there is the death that comes in bits and pieces, draining away life not in sudden huge chunks but steadily, like an opened vein, a life at a time, so steadily that we allow ourselves to forget it's happening, like a drumbeat in the distance that blends into the audio wallpaper - forgetting because to think of it too much is like opening our own veins.
Death like that of hunger, of malnutrition, of disease - of poverty. According to UN estimates, someone dies of hunger or a related cause every second, 36 million a year. Every six seconds, a child under five dies of hunger or a related cause. That's over 14,000 a day - and if the recent estimates of the earthquake's devastation prove accurate, that's a Haiti every week of the year. Every week. Every year.
There is too much death.
Yes, yes, yes! I know all about the "cycle of life." I know all about the philosophy of how if nothing died, nothing could be born. I know all about the fact that even in the face of all the wars and hunger, world population is still increasing and about the increased pressure on resources that is producing and will produce.
But when coming home to a rapidly blinking light on the answering machine can cause the heart to accelerate to match, when through that, that same heart is reminded anew that every death stabs at some heart, every death opens a wound in some soul, every death leaves a hole in some life, it still seems to be that there is just too much death.
Updated - I don't believe in curses, but if I did, I would think the nation of Haiti is cursed. How much poverty and hunger, and how many natural disasters, is one nation, are one people, supposed to experience?
- This is one of the very few good reasons, perhaps the only good reason, for a military: having on tap a significant number of people organized and trained in moving large amounts of materiel and setting things up on the fly. (For example, I understand that the cockpit of an Air Force transport jet on the ground at the airport in Port-au-Prince is now acting as a flight control tower.)
- Pat Robertson is a senile, paranoid bigot and Rush Limbaugh is a disgusting skin-bag stuffed with maggots.
- For those who can offer assistance, my first pick for a donation would be Doctors Without Borders, but a list of some other worthies is here.
Updated to say that this is a link to some before-and-after photos showing the extent of the damage.
Just as perfection must not be the enemy of the good, compromise should not abet the inadequate. - Dave Colavito, writing at The Huffington Post on Friday to urge disinvestment from the health insurance industry until reforms are made. -- Updated So Digby makes reference to a "provocative" post from Tuesday by Chris Bowers at OpenLeft, who wonders aloud if any of the "supposed opponents" of the health care deform bill, "whether lefties or teabaggers," will work for GOPper Scott Brown in the special senatorial election in Massachusetts later this month and thereby "seize this newfound opportunity to defeat the bill."
Brown has a chance, even if only an outside chance. If Brown wins, he would probably be sworn in on January 21st. While there is an off-chance the final vote on health care reform will have already taken place by then, odds are that negotiations on the health care bill will still be ongoing.
Brown would be a 41st GOPper vote, enough to block final passage, and thus his election "would bring a sudden and surprising end to the health care reform legislative process." Bowers goes on:
For lefties, working for a Republican might be more difficult to swallow [than it would be for teabaggers]. ... [But] this might be the best remaining chance to stop a trillion dollar giveaway to the insurance industry. And what of all those calls to run primary challenges against Progressives in Congress who vote for the health care bill? Here is an opportunity to pre-emptively take out an incoming progressive Senator before she even votes for the health care bill.
Digby called that "a very interesting strategic argument" but it is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Not only was there nothing "provocative" about Bowers' post, there was nothing about any real "strategy," either. It was, rather, a pathetic attempt at Swiftian satire, intended as a sneer at anyone opposed to the mockery of health care "reform" that has emerged by saying in essence "Then why aren't you working for Scott Brown? Huh? Huh?"
Look, the idea, even the suggestion, that progressives would further empower reactionaries in order to defeat the health insurance bill is idiotic nonsense. But it's the kind of thing those of us who are aware of the longer-term defeat what is happening now represents have had to abide: Besides being considered everything from foolish to "living in a dream world" to being ready to see people die in order to express a dislike of Joe Lieberman (Or was it Blue Dogs? Depends on the day, I guess), now we are either closet right-wingers or useful idiots.
There are two ways the legislation could be stopped, neither of which I expect to happen: One is if it is defeated by GOPper and reactionary opposition, the other is if it is rejected by a sufficient number of progressives voting it down avowedly because "This is just not good enough." Short-term, the result is the same; longer-term, that is, in terms of strategy, the conviction among progressive opponents such as myself is that the latter simply is more likely to advance the goal of actual universal access to adequate health care than accepting the pending legislation is, especially considering its likely final form - that is, something close to the Senate bill.
That form is one that even as its advocates avidly, breathlessly, declare its vital, indeed "historic," nature, even they have to admit is seriously (although, they insist, not fatally) flawed. In fact, it's so flawed that National Nurses United, the largest professional organization and union of registered nurses in the US, with 150,000 members, came out against it last month.
“It is tragic to see the promise from Washington this year for genuine, comprehensive reform ground down to a seriously flawed bill that could actually exacerbate the healthcare crisis and financial insecurity for American families, and that cedes far too much additional power to the tyranny of a callous insurance industry,” said NNU co-president Karen Higgins, RN. ...
“Sadly, we have ended up with legislation that fails to meet the test of true healthcare reform, guaranteeing high quality, cost effective care for all Americans, and instead are further locking into place a system that entrenches the chokehold of the profit-making insurance giants on our health. If this bill passes, the industry will become more powerful and could be beyond the reach of reform for generations,” Higgins said.
I haven't heard much - anything, actually - about that source of opposition among the oh-so-"realistic" portions of the lefty blogosphere busily chiding the rest of us for our unwillingness to concede defeat via a false claim of victory; maybe it's because even the must hypnotized of the Obamabots can't bring themselves to claim that registered nurses don't care about patients and health care.
It just seems that every time I hear something new about this business, it gets worse. We're already heard, for just a few examples, that there's an individual mandate but no real cost controls, that the "ban" on recissions is bogus, being no stronger than what has existed since 1996, and that there are restrictions on abortion rights. And then there's the fact that the Senate bill continues the bizarre anti-trust exemption for the health insurance industry. And despite - or equally likely because of - all the compromises, over 40% of the uninsured will still be uninsured 10 years from now when the program is "fully in force" (as of 2019, 23 million uninsured under the Senate bill versus 54 million uninsured under "current law" - CBO figures).
More recently, we (or at least I) have learned about the "wellness" provisions, under which, no, you can't be turned down for insurance (after 2014 when the provisions go into effect, that is), but you can be charged up to double it you fail "wellness" programs because you are overweight or smoke or don't exercise enough - or have diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or any number of other chronic medical conditions.
Double? How about triple, quadruple, rates based on age or having certain conditions. Remember, you are required to have insurance, so you can't refuse to pony up. Meanwhile, insurers will be able to sell policies “across state lines,” with the result the same as it was for credit cards companies' ability to avoid usury laws: Insurers will set up shop in the states with the fewest, weakest, consumer protections and sell from there, effectively avoiding the stronger laws in other states.
Oh, and here's one I just learned about a couple of days ago, via California Progress Report:
Under the Senate version of the healthcare bill, caps are NOT eliminated for existing policies. If you have health insurance now, your caps remain in place, unless you can get a new health insurance policy. But since most new (and affordable) plans are only going to the young and healthy, this leaves most of us out in the cold. ...
This problem is so severe that an estimated 300,000 Americans will reach their lifetime limit by 2019. And since most people reaching this limit have chronic conditions, any lifetime limit on their healthcare policy could be an actual limit on their lifetime.
(Sidebar update: In my December 8 post, linked above, I referred to caps being maintained so long as they were not "unreasonable." In a subsequent manager's amendment, that was removed, eliminating caps. But as California Progress Report now makes clear, that only applies to new policies.)
But wait! What about all those good effects? What about the "expanded coverage?" Well, as NNU Co-president Deborah Burger put it,
“Those wishful statements ignore the reality that much of the expanded coverage is based on forced purchase of private insurance without effective controls on industry pricing practices or real competition and gaping loopholes in the insurance reforms.”
Or as I put it recently, it's not 30 million more people with health insurance, it's 30 million people forced to buy health insurance - some number of who will
find themselves with low-cost, high-deductible policies that still leave them without access to health care because even as they can afford the premiums, they can't afford the deductibles.
Well, maybe, but still this is a First Step! A Good Start! One that will be Improved Upon in the Years To Come! I'll leave aside the fact that Medicaid and Medicare (passed nearly 45 years ago) were also supposed to be "first steps" as well as my confusion about how the same federal government that I am branded some kind of fool for thinking could be forced into a true universal coverage program will eagerly embrace one if we just pass this half-assed bill first, which together leave me wondering about just how many years are in a "to come," and defer once again to NNU.
NNU Co-president Jean Ross [said] “the bill seems more likely to be eroded, not improved, in future years due to the unchecked influence of the healthcare industry lobbyists and the lessons of this year in which all the compromises have been made to the right.”
Again, that's an argument I've previously made, that future efforts will not be directed to expanding or improving the program but to defending it against attacks. Indeed, it's already happening, Talking Points Memo reports:
With Democratic senators united on the health care bill ... their campaign arm has settled on an attack plan for 2010: Republicans would "repeal" it if they win control.
The damn thing hasn't even been passed yet and already the Dems' focus is not "we'll make it better" but "we'll keep it from getting worse."
But I think the thing that gets me off more than anything else about the whole crappy business - not necessarily the worst or most damaging aspect, but the bit that just gripes me the most - has been the attitude of the O-crowd, that is, the White House. Even some who accuse me of believing in "magical ponies," claiming with utter conviction and exquisite stupidity that I believe that if progressives reject this bill that next year national health care will be created, even some of them have openly agreed that I was right in saying that the Democrats (and particularly the White House) screwed it up at the very start by tossing single-payer into the trash heap before the issue was even engaged, compromising and backing up even before the debate began.
So what is the one thing the White House has weighed in on? What is the one thing that has moved Barack Obama to say "I want this in the bill?" Not a public option, not ending antitrust exemption, nothing about recissions or caps or Medicare expansion or abortion rights or quality standards or regulatory enforcement mechanisms. No, the one thing the O-man has specifically endorsed is the plan to finance the program via a whopping 40% excise tax on employer-provided insurance plans worth more than $8,500 a year for individuals or $23,000 a year for a family for four - the so-called and often-misnamed "Cadillac" insurance plans. The House bill calls for the program to be paid for by a surtax on those individuals making over $500,000, and couples making more than $1 million, a year - but we can't have that, oh no! Tax the rich? Out of the question!
No, we've got to finance this largely on the backs of the middle class, most particularly union members who gave up wage increases and oftentimes bargained away other gains or benefits in order to protect and improve their health insurance coverage. Doing that is the one thing that Barack Obama has specifically endorsed.
Why did I use the term "often-misnamed" in referring to "Cadillac" plans? The Washington Post reported on Thursday that
[h]ealth analysts recently questioned the assumption that the tax would target only the most lavish insurance packages, nicknamed "Cadillac plans." The analysts, writing in the journal Health Affairs, found that some less-generous plans could be taxed because they are costly for other reasons. The location of an employer and the type of industry, for example, have as much to do with the cost of plans as the generosity of the benefits and the kind of plan. Smaller businesses, especially those with a preponderance of older workers, tend to have higher premiums, as do certain industries, including the health-care sector.
The same WaPo article notes that
[w]hen the legislation would go into effect in 2014, only a small fraction of all plans would be taxed, but more would be captured over time: roughly a quarter by 2019, collecting about $150 billion over 10 years.
So in less than 10 years from now, one-fourth of employer-provided insurance plans would be subject to a 40% excise tax because they would be considered, in effect, luxurious. Just like the quarter of us who drive Cadillacs and other luxury cars.
And just what is the point of this? What about this hit-the-middle-class-and-union-members tax has got the White House all hot and sweaty? Why, it's the "cost-containment potential." The tax is levied on the insurance companies, who will pass the cost along to employers, and then
employers and employees would shift to less-generous plans that would make patients more sensitive to costs, slowing the growth in health-care spending.
Do you get it? Do you see? The problem, according to the White House and the health-care economists they listen to, is you. You "overuse" health care. You are insufficiently "cost-conscious." It's all your fault. You don't comparison shop for a cardiologist. You don't independently investigate and evaluate treatment options for your cancer or your diabetes or your hypertension and generate a cost-benefit analysis. You don't personally compare the clinical trials for Avapro and Diovan. And the way to (I love this phrase) "bend the cost curve" is to reduce your coverage and make you spend more out of pocket for what remains through higher deductibles and co-pays - so you'll use less health care, thus keeping the cost down. In other words, the way to make health care more affordable is to make it less affordable.
No wonder economics is called "the dismal science."
And it's trash. It won't work. The vast majority of people simply do not have the skills, do not have the requisite knowledge, to do the sort of cost-benefit comparison shopping this crap necessarily envisions. Rather, in the face of higher costs, people are just as likely to cut back on needed care as unneeded care, making health outcomes worse, not better, and potentially increasing health care costs in the long run as conditions go untreated until they become crises.
And they have to know it won't work. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services of HHS reported that the "cost bending" effect of the excise tax would be to reduce national health expenditures in 2019 by - hold on to your hats - 0.3%! That's right, reduced coverage and higher out-of-pocket costs will together succeed in cutting overall spending by less than one-third of one percent. That's the cost-containment to be achieved by paying for this whole pile on the backs of union members and the middle class.
But we have to do it that way - because fer god's sake, we can't tax the rich!
The thing now is, at the end of it all, I'm resigned to the fact that this bill is going to pass. It's too important to too many Democrats, too important to too many faux progressives, too important to President Hopey-Changey, and as usual the concerns of real progressives are mocked or dismissed or ignored or trampled while the Dimwits and the reactionaries must be appeased. I hope that it can be improved at least in some ways before final passage but I have little faith it will be.
Still, defeat need not mean surrender. Even as Rose Ann DeMoro wrote at The Huffington Post of "An Inglorious End to the Promise of Reform," Jean Ross of NNU said
“nurses will continue to work with the thousands of grassroots activists across the nation to campaign for the best reform, which would be to expand Medicare to cover everyone, the same type of system working more effectively in every other industrial country. The day of that reform will come.”
While I think "Medicare for all" is more of a slogan than a program, I do agree the day of reform, real reform, will come. But I am convinced that passage of this bill, by allowing every enabler of the health insurance industry to say "Health care reform? We did that already," pushes that day further off rather than brings it closer. And that is a real tragedy.
Footnote: The Washington Post article I cited includes a quote from one Jonathan Gruber, identified as "an MIT economist and a leading proponent of the new tax." He dismisses concerns about the effect of excise tax, saying "slightly higher" deductibles are
enough to make people more cost-sensitive but not enough to make them skip necessary care. ... "There's literally no evidence out there that people are going to suffer."
Turns out that Jonathan Gruber has been paid nearly $400,000 in sole-source contracts with HHS since March to consult on the "President’s health reform proposal." Um, isn't commenting as "an MIT economist" on a program about which you have are being paid to consult something of an ethical conflict of interest?
Updated with two corrections: Based on a USA Today report, the post originally said "don't feel left out if you don't have employer-provided insurance: Another part of the Senate plan is an 0.9 percentage point increase in Medicare withholding." However, according to the New York Times, that increase would only apply to individuals with incomes over $200,000 a year or families with annual incomes over $250,000. The reference has been deleted.
Also, the incomes affected by the proposed surtax in the House bill has been corrected. Previously the post said it applied to "those with incomes in excess of $1 million a year." The correct figure is $500,000 a year for individuals and $1 million a year for couples.
One last bit of geek news from an oldster before getting back to the daily world.
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the earliest image yet of the universe - just 600 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just a toddler.
Scientists released the photo Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. It's the most complete picture of the early universe so far, showing galaxies with stars that are already hundreds of millions of years old, along with the unmistakable primordial signs of the first cluster of stars.
The galaxies are so young they haven't formed spiral or elliptical shapes and are seeds of the later, larger galaxies of today.
The new Hubble picture captures those distant simpler galaxies juxtaposed amid closer, newer and more evolved ones. The result is a cosmic family photo that portrays galaxies at different ages and stages of development over the course of more than 13 billion years.
In the image, the earliest galaxies are the small, faint, blue ones.
The Hubble was launched in April 1990 and so is approaching 20 years of service. In addition to a boatload of spectacular images, it has helped resolve a conflict over the age of the universe and was instrumental in demonstrating the presence of supermassive black holes at the centers of most if not all galaxies and, perhaps most dramatically, in discovering the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. The Hubble should be in service until at least 2014 and quite possibly beyond.
It's about 30 light years wide and contains a wispy mixture of hydrogen and helium atoms at a temperature of 6000 C.
The thing is, this cloud is surrounded by a giant bubble of interstellar gas at a million degrees, formed by supernova explosions - and the cloud should have either been crushed or dispersed by the higer-pressure surroundings.
In other words, according the the laws of physics, it shouldn't exist.
Science mysteries are way cool. Stuff that makes scientists scratch their heads are one of the best ways to new discoveries.
Well, they mystery has been solved by a pair of 32-year old spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched in September and August 1977, respectively. (That's not a typo: Voyager 2 was launched first. They were numbered the way they were because Voyager 1, by virtue of having a different trajectory, would pass the other craft and reach the original prime targets of the missions - Saturn and Jupiter - first.)
The solar system is enveloped in a bubble formed by the solar winds - charged particles flowing outward from the sun - called the heliosphere. The outermost layer of the heliosphere, where the solar winds are being slowed by the pressure of interstellar gas, is called the heliosheath. That is where Voyager 1 and 2, nearly 11 billion and 9 billion miles from Earth respectively (more than twice the distance to Pluto) are. Beyond the heliosheath is the Local Fluff. So the probes are
on the verge of entering interstellar space - but they are not there yet.
"The Voyagers are not actually inside the Local Fluff," says [Merav] Opher[, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator]. "But they are getting close and can sense what the cloud is like as they approach it."
And what they have found is that
"the Fluff is much more strongly magnetized than anyone had previously suspected - between 4 and 5 microgauss," says Opher. "This magnetic field can provide the extra pressure required to resist destruction."
A gauss is a measure of the strength of a magnetic field; a microgauss is one millionth of a gauss. By comparison, the Earth's magnetic field is about 0.5 gauss, or 500,000 microgauss.
And that's the second thing I like about science shown here: Resolving those head-scratching conundrums with new discoveries and new understandings.
Solving puzzles leading to new learning. What's not to like?
Okay, time to get the new year started. Considering that the old one was pretty crappy, it seemed wise to get the new one off on a more fun footing. So - geek news!
Actually, it's a bit sad as geek news goes: NASA is concerned that the upcoming Martian winter could spell the end of the career of Spirit, the Mars rover whose planned 90-day mission is now a few days over six (Earth) years long.
It's not the first time the end has been feared: Just 18 days after landing, even before its twin rover Opportunity came down, it stopped transmitting data. It recovered from that near-death experience two weeks later, only to have a problem with a steering brake crop up some months later. Its right front wheel stop working in 2006, so since then it's been driving backwards. In the fall or 2007 a dust storm left the solar panels so covered with dust that it was feared Spirit could no longer function - and the same thing happened again in 2008.
But this is bad: Nine months ago one of its wheels broke through a crust layer and sank into loose sand. It has been stuck ever since. Every effort to get the rover free has failed; the last attempt actually would up with it sunk deeper into the sand. Remember that the rover uses solar power to operate. Unless the team can get the rover free or at the very least improve its tilt to angle the solar panels toward the sun, Spirit may well not survive.
However, science is not short on serendipity, and Spirit has provided some.
"Spirit had to get stuck to make its next discovery," says [Ray] Arvidson[, deputy principal investigator for the rovers].
The very churning of the wheels in the loose soil has uncovered sulfates,
"minerals just beneath the surface that shout to us that they were formed in steam vents, since steam has sulfur in it[," Arvidson explained. "]Steam is associated with hydrothermal activity – evidence of water-charged explosive volcanism. Such areas could have once supported life."
"And most amazingly, the boundary between the sulfate-rich soil and the soil with just the generic concentration of sulfates runs right down the middle of the stranded rover."
By getting stuck and by getting stuck just where it did, Spirit
has given scientists material evidence of past water on Mars on two time scales: ancient volcanic times, and cycles ongoing to the present day.
Even if the rover can't get loose, if its tilt can be improved enough to get enough sun to keep working, it can provide double serendipity: It could use radio transmissions to measure the wobble of Mars's axis of rotation, which would tell scientists things about the interior of the planet - something that is only possible for a rover which is no longer a rover, that has a reliable fixed position. And it could still provide additional information about Martian weather.
Still, Arvidson says, "we’re ready to leave." Now it just remains to be seen if they can.
Footnote: Meanwhile, on the other side of Mars, Opportunity just keeps on keepin' on. NASA's rover mission page is here.
Which, of course, proves that there's no such thing as global warming.
When they attempt a more serious argument than that, the nanny-nanny naysayers often resort to sneering at climate models - at the very idea of climate models. It's all nonsense, they insist, just wild speculation, the success of models in producing results in close approximation with the historical records notwithstanding.
The odd thing is, they may be correct: The models may be wrong. Unfortunately for them (and everyone else), two recent studies indicate in different ways that the models might be underestimating global warming.
One of those studies was reported a couple of days ago, when researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said new findings
suggest that climate change may be affecting aquatic environments faster and sooner than the atmosphere. ...
Lake Tahoe, Clear Lake and four other big lakes in Northern California and Nevada are heating up faster than the surrounding atmosphere....
[R]esearchers tapped satellite sensor temperature data compiled over 18 years in what is believed to be the first time that long-range lake surface temperatures have been dissected. What the data reportedly showed is that the lakes' water temperature rose two times faster, on average, than the regional air temperatures.
Philipp Schneider, the study's lead author, called the results "a big surprise" and that if the results are confirmed, "lake ecosystems are going to be very much affected, especially because the trend we observed seems to be quite rapid."
Earlier, the November 25 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters carried a paper by Jeffrey Park, a professor of geology and geophysics at Yale. It described an increased time lag in the response of CO2 levels in the atmosphere to short-term changes in temperature: A lag time that used to be about five months is now at least 15 months.
Why the change? "Think of the oceans like soda," he said in an email to Kevin Drum. "Warm cola holds less fizz. The same thing happens as the oceans warm up." Drum noted:
By itself, that's unsurprising, but the magnitude of the change was much bigger than he expected.
And that was the real point: The study indicated, in Park's words, "that human activities have lately outpaced the ocean's capacity for absorbing carbon." The oceans act as a massive heat sink, offsetting the impact of the anthropogenic release of carbon into the atmosphere by soaking up a good amount of that carbon. But if Park is right, that role could be coming to an end as the oceans reach the limit of their capacity to take up carbon. That means no buffer against further CO2-driven warming and more rapid changes.
Which, by the way, is how that first study, the lake study, figures in: Not only the oceans, but even lakes are acting at heat sinks, indicating - again - that more heating is being generated than atmospheric models account for. And when a saturation point is reached, atmospheric warming could skyrocket.
That's unlikely to happen for a few decades, anyway, but still....
Happy New Year.
The Footnote: To add to the joy there is the recent news that global warming is already speeding up insect breeding and that some pest species that bred once a year are now breeding twice.
T'other Footnote: I came across the Park paper in a post by Kevin Drum - credit where it's due - but which I now can't for the life of me locate, so I don't have a link.
T'other Other Footnote: A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the plan for a "Global Day of Action" on climate change on December 12-13. Over 3,000 events took place across the world; some photos can be found here.
Updated From Digby at Hullabaloo I learn that Joe "Call Me Mr. President" Lieberman
said on "Fox News Sunday" that the U.S. will have to take an active approach in Yemen after multiple recent terrorist attacks on the U.S. were linked back to the Middle Eastern nation.
The Connecticut senator said that an administration official told him that "Iraq was yesterday's war, Afghanistan is today's war. If we don't act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow's war."
"Multiple" attacks in this case means maybe two, the others mentioned, such as the attack on the USS Cole, not really qualifying as "recent." The two would be the November shootings at Fort Hood by Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people, and the attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to set off an explosive on a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas day. The latter does appear to have been an attempted act of terrorism: US officials are claiming that Abdulmutallab said
that al Qaeda operatives in Yemen supplied him with an explosive device and trained him on how to detonate it.
But the former has largely been regarded as a psych case, not a terrorism case - except, or course, by the wingnuts and people like Joe "Curtis LeMay" Lieberman. No matter, the senator from the great state of Neocon insists that both men might have had some connection to a radical Muslim cleric in Yemen and that's all the proof he needs to start dreaming about bombing runs and invasions.
Which is typical political "Macho Man" blather, but, you know, so what? Grant everything he claims. Let him spin his fantasies. It seems to me that the contentions about Yemen actually serve to point up the uselessness of a military response to such as al-Qaeda.
Those who have called counter-terrorism a "law enforcement issue," with the emphasis on the patient work of investigation and intelligence-gathering, have been called anything and everything from naive to "objectively pro-terrorist."
But how is this better? They're in Afghanistan! Bomb Afghanistan! Now they're in Pakistan! Bomb Pakistan! No, wait, now they're in Yemen. Bomb Yemen!
Then what? No, no, wait again, now they're in Kowabunga with camps at the headwaters of the Wazoo River! Bomb them up the Wazoo!
It's an unending game of Whack-a-Mole with for the most part living, breathing - or, rather, formerly living and breathing - human beings just trying to get on with their lives who make up most of those on the receiving end of mallets made of cruise missiles.
It's stupid and it's pointless.
Oh, and what "old point" does this serve to prove? Well, there's this, which I wrote on October 2, 2001:
Our best weapons are bread and butter, not bombs; our best tactic reconstruction, not retaliation; our best strategy justice, not jingoism.
And more the the point, this from January 5, 2002:
Patient police work of effective investigation and intelligence has done and will do more to oppose terrorism than all our bombing sorties combined.
That still seems true to me and still seems clearly the better way.
Footnote: The patron saint of pant-wetters also said that the administration should not release the 90 Yemenis now held at Gitmo. Whether, it appears, there is any evidence against them or not.
Updated to note that earlier reporting had said, and this post originally said, that Abdulmutallab had tried to set off "a plastic explosive." It has developed that the explosive was a powdered explosive called PETN which he tried to set off by injecting it with a liquid. The phrase "a plastic explosive" has been changed to "an explosive."
Which actually raises a point: The idea was to set off a chemical reaction by combining the liquid with the PETN - but would that have caused an explosion? Such a method seems highly unlikely to produce the extremely rapid release of energy that constitutes an explosion; more likely, the reaction would have been drawn out over a time. (Keeping in mind that in a case like this, one second can be a long time.) That doesn't mean it wasn't dangerous: Even without an explosion, it might have produced a fireball sufficient to damage the plane enough to bring it down. But it's also possible that the only person injured would have been Abdulmutallab himself. It's impossible to say anything for sure - especially without knowing what the liquid was, which I haven't noticed reported - but I can't help but wonder if even if the thing had gone off as planned would the event have gone off as planned.
HalsoScan, which provides the comment feature here, has been bought out and is going to a pay service called Echo in just a few days.
The cost isn't much and even in my current straits I expect I could afford it but I'm not willing to pay for it since it really involves paying in order to get access to a bunch of features in which I have no interest and which are of little use to a low-traffic blog like this place.
So I'm letting it expire. I should have Blogger's comment form - which I don't like that much but it's there - up and running as soon as that happens. Which means that all of you chomping at the bit to make your opinions known will not be disappointed.
Updated This is the last of my "catching up" posts, which has come a good deal later than originally intended, but it's not like it's important or anything, just our economic futures and all.
That future doesn't look so good. I'm tired of reading economic news that insists on saying "the recession appears to be ending" (or even "has ended") or "the economy has turned a corner," or whatever, all of which begin to sound like William Westmoreland (or, as we called him, Waste-more-land) declaring we could see "the light at the end of the tunnel" in Vietnam. Because the fact is, until a turnaround starts to affect and improve the lives of a significant number of people, it ain't over no matter what the number-crunchers living in the Land of Economic Theory tell us.
And that won't happen for a while.
Unemployment is a lagging indicator, meaning it won't bounce back until well after the recovery is underway. But even then, the consensus is that joblessness will improve at a glacially slow pace - so woe unto all of us if the consensus is wrong and the outlook is even worse.
The official unemployment rate hit 10.2% in October before dropping a bit to 10.0% in November - which was still, except for October, the highest rate since July 1983 and 3.2 percentage points higher than a year before. (Monthly figures can be found by going to this link at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and changing the "From" year.)
And those "official" figures, of course, don't tell the whole story. Include those who are working part-time only because they can't find full-time work and those "marginally attached" to the labor force (defined as those who had not searched for work in the preceding four weeks and including "discouraged workers" who had given up looking altogether), and the unemployment rate hits 17.5%.
And even that doesn't address the situation of temporary workers, the hiring of who has surged recently. That could be taken as a good sign, since after the last two recessions in the early 1990s and in 2001, such a surge was followed by employers bringing those temps on as permanent employees - but in those cases, that went on for just two or three months and the recent surge has lasted for four months -
and still corporate managers have been reluctant to shift to hiring permanent workers, relying instead on temps and other casual labor easily shed if demand slows again. ...
Last month 52,000 temps were added, greater than the number of new workers in any other category. Not even health care and government, stalwarts through the long recession, did better.
So does "temp" now indicate "in transit to permanent" or just "temporary," with all of the instability for such workers as the term indicates?
Meanwhile,
[t]he number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) rose by 293,000 to 5.9 million. The percentage of unemployed persons jobless for 27 weeks or more increased by 2.7 percentage points to 38.3 percent.
Get that? Nearly 40% of the unemployed, the "officially" unemployed, have been out of work for over six months. That kind of deep and long-term unemployment has wreaked havoc on states' unemployment compensation funds.
Currently, 25 states have run out of unemployment money and have borrowed $24 billion from the federal government to cover the gaps. By 2011, according to Department of Labor estimates, 40 state funds will have been emptied by the jobless tsunami.
Necessary total loans, it is predicted, will reach $90 billion. And
with holiday workers soon to be laid off, analysts are forecasting that the nation's unemployment rate will rise to 10.5% next summer before beginning to decline.
If it does. If everything goes right. John Mauldin, president of Millennium Wave Investments, and Michael Shedlock, an advisor representative at SitkaPacific Capital Management
have been crunching the unemployment data. They conclude that the unemployment rate won't hit 5% (or so-called full employment) until - best-case scenario - 2020. ...
Meanwhile, the economy has shed about 8 million private-sector jobs in the last two years, even as the U.S. needs to add about 125,000 jobs a month just to absorb the new folks entering the workforce. Put the two together, and the economy would need to create about 15 million jobs over the next five years just to get back to where we started at the inception of the Great Recession, Mauldin calculates. ...
What Maudlin is saying is that the U.S. needs to add 250,000 jobs a month every month for five years. That's an unprecedented level of job creation. Over the last decade we've experienced just one year when the economy gained more than 250,000 jobs a month every month, Mauldin says, and that was 1999: the height of the tech bubble. ...
[That is, the] model assumes some very optimistic (if long-range) outcomes - namely, no recessions for the following 10 years and 2 million jobs added each year after 2011. "Of course, we've never done that, but let's be optimistic," Mauldin writes.
Which I suppose is appropriate for a "best-case" scenario, but considering what it requires, even "best" seems to be understating it; "miraculous" seems more appropriate.
And the worst case scenario? That assumes a quick double-dip recession in 2011.
Throw in the very real possibility of higher taxes and we get unemployment peaking at just below 13% in 2011 and 2012, and then remaining above 10% for the next eight years. (David Rosenberg, chief economist at Canada's Gluskin Sheff and formerly of Merrill Lynch, says unemployment could hit 13%, too.)
What's really worrying is that this worst-case scenario looks clearly more likely than the best-case one:
Meredith Whitney, who is about as famous as a bank analyst can get, said Monday that we're in for a double-dip recession, by the way.
And economist Joseph Stiglitz thinks that there is "a significant chance" of one.
Just how bad is it? Consider that the GDP needs to grow 2.5% a yearjust to absorb the people newly entering the job market every month. Compare that the the average prediction of economists of 2.9% growth in 2010, and the picture doesn't look good. Especially when it turns out that according to the Commerce Department's revised figures, the economy didn't grow at a 2.8% annual rate in the third quarter of 2009, but at a 2.2% rate.
In fact, the figure was even more disappointing, as the initial projection was for a 3.5% annual growth rate. What's more, a significant part of that 2.2% was due to the Cash for Clunkers program:
Motor vehicle output added 1.45 percentage points to the third-quarter change in real GDP after adding 0.19 percentage point to the second-quarter change.
Take away from the third quarter that net 1.26 percentage point gain over the second quarter and growth outside the federal program shrinks to an anemic annual growth rate of 0.94%.
Just how bad is it? The good news was that in November, the economy lost the fewest jobs in a month (11,000) that it had since December 2007. Not gained any, just lost the fewest.
And even as leading economic indicators continued to tick up,
Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics, noted that the index did not adequately reflect smaller companies.
"The index takes no account of the dire state of the small business sector, which ... remains in deep recession," he said.
Ultimately, just how bad is it?
“Depression has been forestalled only because major government borrowing and spending is filling the gap,” Albert M. Wojnilower, a Wall Street economist and consultant at Craig Drill Capital, said in a newsletter last week.
And a good hunk of that spending - the stimulus - won't be there next year.
Even the Fed admits that unemployment will remain at or near record post-WW2 highs for some time; in fact, Fed policymakers say it could take "five or six years" for the economy and the labor market to be consistently healthy.
Besides the deep and persistent unemployment and its effects of individuals and states, there are other danger signs, some of them partially hidden. For one,
U.S. mortgage delinquency rates and the percentage of loans that entered the foreclosure process jumped in the third quarter, with both reaching record highs, the Mortgage Bankers Association said on Thursday. [Record-keeping began in 1972.]
The percentage of loans on which foreclosure actions were started rose to 1.42 percent in the third quarter, an all-time high....
"It is all about unemployment, everything else is secondary," MBA's chief economist Jay Brinkmann said in an interview. ...
The delinquency rate for mortgage loans on one-to-four-unit residential properties rose to a seasonally adjusted rate of 9.64 percent of all loans outstanding as of the end of the third quarter of 2009, up 40 basis points from the second quarter and up 265 basis points from one year ago, the MBA said in its National Delinquency Survey.
The delinquency rate broke the record set last quarter.
That increase in the delinquency rate is undoubtedly tied to another revealing statistic about the "shadow inventory" of houses headed for sale because of foreclosure or delinquency but which are not yet on the market: The number of such homes has risen by 55% over the last year, from 1.1 million to 1.7 million. Banks have resisted putting these houses up for sale for fear of further depressing a housing market that is just showing the first signs of recovery, a recovery that may be souring and is at least uncertain. But if government efforts to help homeowners keep their houses can't keep up with the number of defaults, that will only go on so long. And on that front, things are moving very slowly: Of the over 700,000 temporary mortgage modifications made under the federal program, less than 5% have become permanent.
For another, despite everything from massive bailouts to mortgage renegotiation programs, banks remain reluctant to loan.
[An] Associated Press story notes that "according to the Federal Reserve, loans by the nation's 8,000 banks fell 8 percent to $6.7 trillion in the past year, and some analysts expect them to keep falling at least through next year."
More particularly, October was the ninth consecutive month during which lending by the 22 top recipients of federal bailout money declined even though their profits are increasing. Why? Pat Choate at Huffington Post says the reason is "White House politicking and old-fashioned banker greed," with the profits going to pay off federal loans so Obama can kill the bailout as a political issue and the banks can get out from under the restrictions they were under.
But economist Michael Munger has a more subtle and darker explanation. He maintains that the Fed has been "POURING money into the system" (emphasis in original), increasing the money supply by 10% a month, by buying long-term Treasury bonds. That leaves banks with plenty of cash. They also are selling off some of their collateralized debt obligations - the sort of toxic "assets" that brought us to the brink of ruin in the first place. So the wholesale credit market is flush with cash but it's not turning into loans in the retail market. Why?
Munger says that banks "are still trying to avoid risk" - a strange attitude for institutions whose blithe gambling almost brought on a catastrophe, but never mind - so they are pursuing a different course:
[B]anks are borrowing money from the government, at 0%, and then buying NEW federal debt[, that is, the Treasury bonds], which pays 3%. That's a guaranteed 3% real return, with no risk. So the Fed buys up debt to increase the money supply, to get the banks to lend. But the banks just buy more government debt, lending to the government instead of lending to small businesses or even large businesses.
And the government is having to borrow more and more to finance the deficit being used to bail out the banks. But the banks are just using the bail-out money to buy more of the debt being used to finance the bail-out! From the taxpayer's perspective, you'd be better off playing the "3-card monte" games in Times Square.
In short, the banks are taking federal (public, taxpayer) money and loaning it back to the government at a profit. We're paying the bill and getting precisely zilch for it, not even an easing of credit.
It's impossible to believe that this disgraceful shell game is going on without the knowledge of Fed chair and golden boy Ben Bernanke, cruising toward confirmation for a second seven-year term even as he utterly failed to see the looming crisis and continues to stonewall about details of the Fed's rescue of AIG.
He has certainly made his interests clear: He intends to crush inflation into a black hole such that even a 3% per year inflation rate is dangerously high because it "could cause the public to lose confidence in the central bank’s willingness to resist further upward shifts in inflation." That is, a 3% inflation annual inflation rate could cause we consumers to panic. If that plan means 10% or more unemployment and allowing the big banks to continue their suck-money-from-the-public shell game, then so be it.
But don't let it be said that Ben Bernanke is unconcerned about deficits. Oh, no, not Ben Bernanke! Shoveling trillions into the coffers of Wall Street is one thing, but after all, there have to be limits somewhere! So in testimoney before the Senate Banking Committee earlier this month,
Bernanke called for cutbacks in Medicare and Social Security even as unemployment rises and the middle class is endangered.
Why there? Because, he said, "That's where the money is." He even hinted that Congress should repeal Social Security and Medicare, stating "it's only mandatory until Congress says it's not mandatory."
Well, I have my own suggestions about where a good hunk of money could be found, but that is likely a topic for a different post, so I'll just note here that when asked if he would take taxes on the rich off the table, Bernanke suddenly turned diffident, saying that was up to Congress and he tried to stay out of such discussions, a consideration that apparently does not apply to slashing benefits that go mostly to the middle and lower-middle classes in the name of reducing deficits, the better to fight - again - the demon or more accurately the specter of inflation.
(It's worth noting at this point that low inflation helps banks and other lenders and somewhat higher inflation helps creditors because both expect the inflation to pay part of the real cost of loans, which are paid out in today's dollars but repaid in tomorrow's - inflated - dollars. And also worth noting who, in that light, Bernanke's policies help.)
That same devotion to the golden idol that is Wall Street, with the same paranoia about its evil enemy inflation, has infected the White House. A few weeks ago Paul Krugman wrote that
[i]n December 2008 Lawrence Summers, soon to become the administration’s highest-ranking economist, called for decisive action. “Many experts,” he warned, “believe that unemployment could reach 10 percent by the end of next year.” In the face of that prospect, he continued, “doing too little poses a greater threat than doing too much.”
Ten months later unemployment reached 10.2 percent, suggesting that despite his warning the administration hadn’t done enough to create jobs. You might have expected, then, a determination to do more.
But in a recent interview with Fox News, the president sounded diffident and nervous about his economic policy. ... “[I]t is important though to recognize ... that if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession.” ...
[A] report on Politico.com suggests that deficit reduction, not job creation, will be the centerpiece of his first State of the Union address.
That is, the same claptrap that Bernanke was spewing, living in the same world. Ten percent unemployment? The worst long-term unemployment ever? Over 17% of the workforce either unemployed or underemployed? Businesses and individuals unable to obtain credit? Foreclosures? None of that affects confidence in this world. Only the deficit does. Why? Because businesses (especially small businesses) and individuals are not those whose concerns matter in this world. The only ones who matter are "the investors" - the banks, the investment houses. They are the ones who must be placated, must be pleased, must be given their offerings, must have their devotions.
Ever since the Great Recession began economic analysts at some (not all) major Wall Street firms have warned that efforts to fight the slump will produce even worse economic evils. In particular, they say, never mind the current ability of the U.S. government to borrow long term at remarkably low interest rates - any day now, budget deficits will lead to a collapse in investor confidence, and rates will soar.
It is a "phantom menace," Krugman says, "a threat that exists only in their minds" - while the real danger, the danger that Summers recognized a year ago, the danger of a government effort too small, too short, while the conditions it was meant to address persist, goes unattended.
While businesses go without credit. And while we go without jobs. And while we go without homes. And while we can't afford health care. And while we can't afford to retire. And while we can't afford a future for our children. And while we are expected to see our and their futures contract further for the sake of protecting the interests and private jets and summer homes of a handful of robber barons. And while we are expected to live as the peasants of old, as the "huddled masses" of a century ago, to leave the elite to their mansions while we keep our places, live lives of servitude without complaint, and then die without making a fuss.
Because, you know, the alternative is for the investors to lose confidence - and that prospect is just too horrifying to contemplate.
Foonote the First: In some cases, the reluctance of banks, particularly smaller banks, to lend is not their fault. In late November, the FDIC reported on some information about its secret list of troubled banks.
The number of banks on the regulator's confidential watch list increased by 33% in the third quarter, to 552, the highest level in almost 16 years....
Tough credit conditions persisted, with charge-offs and past-due loans reaching record highs, "and we expect that it will be at least a couple of more quarters before we see a meaningful improvement in that trend," said Chairman Sheila Bair....
The troubled bank list represents 6.8% of all banks covered by the FDIC's deposit insurance fund....
[M]ore than 1,000 banks could ultimately face seizure by authorities before the financial industry's woes subside, according to research and consulting firm Institutional Risk Analytics, which provides data on lenders to clients ranging from private investors to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The closing of Colonial Bank, with its $25 billion in assets taken over by BB&T in August, was among the biggest banks failures in US history. Just a couple of days ago, the FDIC took over seven more banks, bringing the total for the year to 140.
The high number of bank failures has pushed the FDIC insurance fund into the red and has cost $30 billion. The FDIC expects the cost of the crisis to its insurance fund to reach $100 billion over the next four years.
Footnote the Second: Bernie Sanders has introduced the "Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act," which would require the Secretary of the Treasury to submit to Congress "a list of all commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds, and insurance companies that the Secretary believes are too big to fail" and then to break them up into units small enough that their failure "would no longer cause a catastrophic effect on the United States or global economy without a taxpayer bailout."
An editorial in the December 15 New York Times, while not citing the bill, certainly endorsed the concept:
If we have learned anything over the last couple of years, it is that banks that are too big to fail pose too much of a risk to the economy. Any serious effort to reform the financial system must ensure that no such banks exist.
Sounds like a plan, or at least a start of one.
Footnote the Third: Not all the news was black, some of it was merely gray, even maybe light gray. For one, consumer sentiment increased some, but less than expected, while still remaining at "quite negative levels," in the words of Richard Curtin, director of the Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers.
Meanwhile,
[p]ersonal incomes rose in November at the fastest pace in six months while spending posted a second straight increase, raising hopes that that the recovery from the nation's deep recession might be gaining momentum.
According to the Commerce Department, personal incomes were up 0.4 percent in November and spending rose 0.5 percent in November. Both, however, were slightly less than economists' predictions.
Updated to include several additional bits: the information about state unemployment funds, the three paragraphs following the mention of the 2.2% growth rate in the third quarter, the mention of the possible souring of the housing market, and the third footnote.
...for no reason other than it gave me a much-needed smile and demonstrated yet again the truly remarkable human creative impulse, something at which we can be perpetually amazed and for which we should be profoundly grateful. (Found here, which has a couple of other similar examples.)
Kent Conrad is saying that whatever health care deform bill comes out of a conference committee had damned well better toe the line on what the Senate passes - or more accurately, what he and his fellow corporate-tit-sucking toadies demanded - or it may not get 60 votes. Put more bluntly, it's "Do it our way of we'll filibuster the conference report and kill the whole thing."
Put even more bluntly, it's "Hey, House of Representatives, fuck you and the bill you rode in on! Equal partners in the Legislative Branch? Screw that and eat this!" And in fact "The Hill" is saying that "momentum seems to lie behind the Senate bill staying intact."
Remember all that hoopla about the "historic" House vote? Remember how I was so disappointed in what came out? Apparently, I shouldn't have been because apparently, it didn't mean crap.
Updated Yeah, this catching up stuff is taking longer than I thought 'cause we've been rather distracted of late, particularly in scrambling for new health care coverage after we lost ours when my wife had to leave her job because of her heart condition. But I'm getting there....
But speaking of health coverage and all that, that's what this interruption is about. I actually addressed this earlier this month, but it deserves a loud reprise because what I complained about has continued unabated.
It is a small rant about one aspect of the health care deform "debate" (which is more a debate over how much more can - not even should, but can - be given away to appease the drug and insurance industries and, more recently, the anti-choice crowd and the egomaniacs than it is over actual policy). More specifically, it's about the figure the "suck it up, loser" crowd keeps sticking in the face of those of us who find the Senate bill, let's just call it, less than attractive, the statistic that says "30 million more people will have insurance!" Connected with it is the assertion by some, particularly Ezra Klein, that opposing the Senate bill means you're willing to let people die for lack of coverage. (As a sidebar, in a column he accused people of allowing others to die to express their dislike of Blue Dogs - and a week later in a TV appearance said the exact same thing in virtually the exact same words, except he inserted "Joe Lieberman" in place of "Blue Dogs." Apparently he thinks this is an all-purpose debilitating slammer requiring only the insertion of the villain du jour.)
Time out, gang. In a technical sense, the statement about the number of newly-insured may be true, but it would be more accurately expressed as "30 million people will be forced to buy insurance!" Even if it sucks. Even if it's a plan with high premiums and crappy coverage. Because that's what we're really talking about here. That's what that number actually represents: the amount of additional business for the health insurance industry.
And having health insurance is not even the issue. I mean it. It's not. Having health insurance is not the issue. Having access to adequate health care is the issue. Insurance is merely a means to that end. It's a route (and far from the best one), not the destination. It's the hammer and saw, not the bookshelves. It's - you get the idea.
So here's the question I want answered: How many of that 30 million will as a result of this legal requirement to further fill the coffers of the insurance industry have access to adequate health care in a way they didn't before? Does anyone know? I'm not even thinking here about the sort of major disasters that can (and often enough do) bankrupt even people with insurance, I'm talking about plain old health care, about the ability to go to the doctor, to the dentist, to pay for a mammogram or an EKG or blood work, about getting a cast on a broken arm.
It can't be denied that some among those 30 million are families and individuals who are without insurance by choice, who are either young enough or healthy enough or something enough to have decided that the money they save on premiums is worth the risk of not having insurance. How many of those people there are is unclear; the right tries to maximize them by playing with the numbers while the left often ignores them or assumes the number is insignificant. That may even be true - but again, no one seems to know and the fact that they exist is unquestionable. The point being that they already had access to insurance, they already had access to health care.
A more significant question is how many of those 30 million people could get insurance now, for example through high-risk pools, but don't because that would just leave them paying premiums for insurance they couldn't use because the deductibles are so high - that is, leave them with crap and worse off than they were before? And how many of those newly-insured people will wind up in just that situation? How many of that 30 million will be people who, having been forced to buy insurance, find themselves with low-cost, high-deductible policies that still leave them without access to health care because even as they can afford the premiums, they can't afford the deductibles?
And one more thing: How many still will be left out? How many still will lack insurance-provided access? I haven't seen a figure for the Senate plan, but figure this: The CBO estimated that for the insipid but superior House plan, even after everything was up and running and the maximum impact was reached 10 years from now, there would be 36 million newly insured but 18 million still uninsured. So if the Senate bill would produce 30 million more insured, that would appear to mean that even 10 years from now there would still be 24 million uninsured. Even allowing for some who are uninsured because they prefer the penalties to the premiums, it's only reasonable to think that those 24 million will mostly be people still left out in the cold, lacking access to care. (Would it be fair to propose that Ezra Klein is willing to have those people die for lack of affordable health care in order to express his distaste for the DFHs?)
The blunt bottom line is that presenting the 30 million figure as "the uninsured getting insurance" is not analysis, it's PR. It's sloganeering. It's spin. Presenting it as "the uninsured getting health care" is a lie. And using it in either form to slam people opposed to the Senate bill is - to say the least - offensive.
Health insurance is not the issue. Access to adequate health care is. It's damn well time people remembered that.
Updated with a Footnote: Turns out I was right about the future uninsured. On Tuesday (link via MMFA) the CBO wrote to Harry Reid saying that under present law, 54 million people would be uninsured in 2019 and under the Senate bill, 31 million of those will have insurance - leaving 23 million still uninsured.
I'm dong this as a separate post because all these examples come from a single article written for The Daily Censored by Dr. Michael Niman, a professor of journalism and media studies at Buffalo State College.
- Over the last 10 years, the annual Halloween Naked Pumpkin Run in Boulder, Colorado
grew to involve hundreds of folks, clad only in running shoes and hollowed-out pumpkins over their heads, sprinting through the brisk downtown Boulder night. The event, which usually begins around 11pm, draws thousands of cheering spectators each year.
It's even inspired a few imitators in other cities in the West. But of course, silly fun runs counter to closed minds. Last year the city started arresting runners; this year, they sent out two SWAT teams and a small platoon of riot officers to make the arrests.
Since Boulder has a long tradition of public nudity and no laws on the books against nudity, the pumpkins, according to the police, would be charged with “indecent exposure,” following the legal logic that donning a pumpkin head, as opposed to wearing nothing, makes the remaining bodily exposure “indecent.” If convicted of this charge, celebrants would be required to register, for the remainder of their lives, as “sex offenders.”
- In 2006, Tamara Freeman was on an airplane with her two kids, who wouldn't stop arguing over the window seat. Finally, she spanked them and in the commotion, they kids accidentally spilled a can of tomato juice on her. When a flight attendant came, Freeman shouted some profanity at her and threw the half-empty can of juice to the floor.
She was arrested and charged with terrorism. She spent three months in jail awaiting trial where, at the urging of her public defender, she pled guilty in return for a sentence of probation. Under the terms of the probation, she can't leave Oklahoma and as a "convicted terrorist," she can't fly. So she was unable to get home to Maui for a series of custody hearings. So she lost custody of her children.
- Another pair of desperados are Dawn Sewell and Carl Persing. It seems that while flying, Carl put his head on Dawn’s lap and she smiled. For some reason this was seen by a flight attendant as some kind of sexual activity and got some serious lip from Carl when they were disturbed. They were charged, yes, with terrorism.
- Three years ago come January, two Fairfield, Connecticut sisters of Jordanian descent were being arraigned on a charge of disturbing the peace. A packet of what later was identified as salt fell from one of their pockets, initiating a bio-terror panic that shut down part of downtown Bridgeport. The sisters were charged with, say it with me, terrorism. For salt.
- Late in October, Zack Aslam, a freshman at Michigan State University student,
aparently got upset after a heated discussion with another student and began to, as the kids say, “talk shit.” Campus police haven’t released the specifics of what the 17-year-old supposedly said to his friends, but they charged him with, according to the MSU student paper, “threatening terrorism and communicating that threat to another person.” He was talking shit. Did I mention he was 17? Police later went to his dorm room and impounded all of his belongings.
He's now another terrorist.
- In March 2006, the then-brand new Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which pretty much seeks to outlaw as terrorism any activity which could harm the economic interests of any vaguely-defined “animal enterprise,” was employed against six animal rights activists protesting a private “animal-testing” company, Huntington Life Sciences.
HLS is a long-time target of animal rights groups.... Protests against the company, ranging from legally protected speech to illegal threats, vandalism, and harassment of employees, nearly bankrupted HLS in 2000 when it was dropped from the New York Stock Exchange.
The arrested activists were never charged with engaging in any illegal activities. Instead, they were charged and convicted as terrorists for maintaining a Web site that unabashedly celebrated such acts.
Because, you see, mere political agreement is "material support" of terrorism.
- Finally, in Utah,
a person has engaged in “commercial terrorism” if “he [or she?] enters or remains unlawfully on the premises of or in a building of any business with the intent to interfere with the employees, customers, personnel, or operations of a business."
Our list of folks newly classified as terrorists is extensive. It includes the New York social worker I wrote about last month, who is being investigated for tweeting. It includes University at Buffalo professor Steve Kurtz, who faced a four-year prosecution as a terrorist for producing physically harmless but politically potent and internationally acclaimed artwork critiquing corporate sacred cows such as genetically modified foods.
With the crackdown on the Naked Pumpkin Run, can we expect our ranks of registered sex offenders to swell in much the same way our ranks of accused and convicted terrorists has grown? If so, the terms “terrorism” and “sex offender” will lose all meaning—but not before these McCarthy-era tactics of tarring your opponents with toxic labels ruins countless lives.
I'd add one thing. Notice that there is one consistent thread running through all these examples: In all cases, the charges are used in support of power, whether corporate or governmental, or authority, whether that be a cop, a campus, or just a flight attendant. They are punishments for not being what "we" tell you to be or not doing what "we" tell you to do - ultimately, for the "crime" of failing to passively submit. Two more '60s slogans that deserves to be reanimated are "Fight the Power" and "Question Authority."
"He writes with sensitivity, passion, intelligence and with an eye to the common good."
"[He is] clearly one of those silly people who believes in 'civilization,' probably along with the Tooth Fairy and justice."
"He lives in a magical fantasy world."
"Powerfully spoken."
"A balanced and sensible view concerning the crazy ideas that often prevail regarding war and freedom."
"You do good work."
"Our political differences are vast and irreconcilable but he earnestly believes what he wants is best for the country; he’s firmly committed to it, makes no apologies for it and won’t settle for less."
"God bless you!"
"SHUT THE FUCK UP."
About Lotus
Lotus has been at various times the newsletter of a local peace group, a column in a different group's newsletter, a stand-alone monthly, and now a blog. Posts appear bi-weekly; posts are drawn from my weekly cable-TV show "The Erickson Report," which can be found here.
Comments either here or by email are encouraged. Comments here must be reasonably relevant and reasonably civil. Spam, trolls, and comments that are merely personal slams on me or another commenter will be deleted without hesitation, warning, or regret.
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Our lives are not our own, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future. - author David Mitchell
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