Month: April 2013

Baghdad Burning is Back

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Riverbend, who rose to notice as a blogger living in Baghdad (she documented just how corrupt and incompetent the invasion and administration were), has made her first blog post in over 5 years:

Finally, after all is said and done, we shouldn’t forget what this was about – making America safer… And are you safer Americans? If you are, why is it that we hear more and more about attacks on your embassies and diplomats? Why is it that you are constantly warned to not go to this country or that one? Is it better now, ten years down the line? Do you feel safer, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis out of the way (granted half of them were women and children, but children grow up, right?)?

And what happened to Riverbend and my family? I eventually moved from Syria. I moved before the heavy fighting, before it got ugly. That’s how fortunate I was. I moved to another country nearby, stayed almost a year, and then made another move to a third Arab country with the hope that, this time, it’ll stick until… Until when? Even the pessimists aren’t sure anymore. When will things improve? When will be able to live normally? How long will it take?

Nice to know that she is OK.

Why Big Pharma is the Problem, not the Solution

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In their never ending quest to extort rents from the rest of us, big pharma has a new tactic, it has established bogus “safety programs” that prohibit the sales of their drugs to generic manufacturers:

For decades, pharmaceutical companies have deployed an array of tactics aimed at preventing low-cost copies of their drugs from entering the marketplace.

But federal regulators contend the latest strategy — which relies on a creative interpretation of drug safety laws — is illegal.

The Federal Trade Commission recently weighed in on a legal case over the tactic involving the drug maker Actelion, and earlier this month a federal suit was filed in another case in Florida.

“We definitely see this as a significant threat to competition,” said Markus Meier, who oversees the commission’s health care competition team.

The new approach is almost elegant in its simplicity: brand-name drug makers are refusing to sell their products to generic companies, which need to analyze them so they can create the copycat versions. Traditionally, the generic drug makers purchased samples from wholesalers. But because of safety concerns, an increasing number of drugs are sold with restrictions on who can buy them, forcing the generic manufacturers to ask the brand-name companies for samples. When they do, the brand-name firms say no.

Brand-name companies say they are protecting themselves — and patients — in case the drugs are somehow used improperly. They say no law requires one company to do business with another.

Advocates for generic drugs say the practice could limit access to the low-cost drugs, which they say have saved more than a trillion dollars over the last decade. They say the companies that have most aggressively pursued the tactic tend to be those with drugs that are nearing the end of their patent life.

The problem is that Pharma can use its monopoly rents to continue to game the political system to f%$# the rest of us.

It needs to stop.

Sarah Palin Did One Right Thing, and Alaska Republicans Vote to Overturn It

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She changed the royalty structure for oil extracted from the state, and now Republicans have reversed this in a give away to big oil:

The Alaska Senate on Sunday afternoon approved the oil-tax bill that passed the House 13 hours before, sending to Gov. Sean Parnell the measure he had sought to save billions of dollars for Alaska’s leading industry.

The Senate vote was 12-8 to concur with the revised bill that the House approved 24-15 just before 2 a.m. Sunday morning (on reconsideration, three Republicans switched to support the bill). The Senate vote came past the midway point of the 90th day of the 90-day session.

Parnell said that Alaska’s current tax regime, which he backed as lieutenant governor in 2007 when it was pushed by Gov. Sarah Palin, is broken. It is taking so much money from industry, he said, that producers have been investing elsewhere, explaining the decline in oil production here. His bill, modified but not changed drastically in either the House or Senate, effectively wipes out Palin’s tax policy, Alaska’s Clear and Equitable Share, or ACES.

The new bill ends ACES big progressive tax steps, where tax rates increase as the price of oil rises. Parnell and supporters said the progressive tax was punitive toward industry. ACES supporters agreed that the tax took too much money at high oil prices, but the remedy was to lower the rate — not toss it.

Today’s Republican Party in Alaska: too radical, too stupid, and too obsequious to big oil for Sarah Palin.

That is truly a major mind f%$#, and Alaska, arguably the state which is least suited to the actual cultivation of bananas, is an a clown like banana republic.

We Tortured

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A bipartisan panel convened by the Constitution Project has concluded that torture was practiced, and was approved by our most senior leaders, and, perhaps more importantly, actually use the word torture:

A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

………

The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable, the report says.

………

The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.

Unfortunately, they do not take a position on prosecutions, which means that their warnings on the US returning to torture are pretty toothless.

The people who conducted, and ordered, torture should be sent to a Federal “Pound Me in the Ass” prison for a very long time.

Schadenfreude

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Gold prices are falling off a cliff, and Ron Paul is getting hosed:

A few weeks ago, we figured out what was happening to the Ron Paul portfolio — the former Texas congressman’s 64% investment in gold and other rocks — and it wasn’t pretty.

………

All told, the average loss was -40.3% over the past six months

Given that The Wall Street Journal reported that Paul’s portfolio was worth between $2.44 million and $5.46 million — and that 64 percent of his assets were in these precious metal stocks — a very loose estimate is that Ron Paul has lost between $624,640 and $1,397,760 over the past six months, based on the average loss of his mining holdings. This assumes a 40.3% loss on 64% of his holdings.

It’s not nice to feel pleasure at someone else’s misfortune, but I am a bad man.

Heh.

Gold buggery does not make you money, but selling gold buggery to rubes does.

What a Surprise, Right Wing Economists Fudged their Data………

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The lead on the mass media stories is that Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s paper showing that debt levels above 90% of GDP have slower growth was an “Excel spreadsheet error”, but every single error reinforces their pro-austerity arguments, which indicates that these omissions and errors were deliberate:

In 2010, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff released a paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt.” Their “main result is that…median growth rates for countries with public debt over 90 percent of GDP are roughly one percent lower than otherwise; average (mean) growth rates are several percent lower.” Countries with debt-to-GDP ratios above 90 percent have a slightly negative average growth rate, in fact.

This has been one of the most cited stats in the public debate during the Great Recession. Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity budget states their study “found conclusive empirical evidence that [debt] exceeding 90 percent of the economy has a significant negative effect on economic growth.” The Washington Post editorial board takes it as an economic consensus view, stating that “debt-to-GDP could keep rising — and stick dangerously near the 90 percent mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth.”

Is it conclusive? One response has been to argue that the causation is backwards, or that slower growth leads to higher debt-to-GDP ratios. Josh Bivens and John Irons made this case at the Economic Policy Institute. But this assumes that the data is correct. From the beginning there have been complaints that Reinhart and Rogoff weren’t releasing the data for their results (e.g. Dean Baker). I knew of several people trying to replicate the results who were bumping into walls left and right – it couldn’t be done.

In a new paper, “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,” Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst successfully replicate the results. After trying to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results and failing, they reached out to Reinhart and Rogoff and they were willing to share their data spreadhseet. This allowed Herndon et al. to see how how Reinhart and Rogoff’s data was constructed.

They find that three main issues stand out. First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth. Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries. Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries. All three bias in favor of their result, and without them you don’t get their controversial result. ………

………

So what do Herndon-Ash-Pollin conclude? They find “the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0.1 percent as [Reinhart-Rogoff claim].” [UPDATE: To clarify, they find 2.2 percent if they include all the years, weigh by number of years, and avoid the Excel error.] Going further into the data, they are unable to find a breakpoint where growth falls quickly and significantly

The actual Excel error might be real, but the rest of this is a case of hypocritically massaging the data to get the results that they really wanted.

Just When You Thought that Obama Could Not Get Any Worse………

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He is proposing to sell the Tennessee Valley Authority to Wall Street for some magic beans:

The headline issue, cutting Social Security benefits by changing the measurement of inflation (the “chained CPI”), is something that writers on Naked Capitalism have been predicting for a long time. What has come as a shocking (but not surprising) twist is a bombshell buried in Obama’s budget: the proposed privatization of the Tennessee Valley Association. At this point I think it’s important to quote a part of this section of the budget at length:

TVA is a self-financing Government corporation, funding operations through electricity sales and bond financing. In order to meet its future capacity needs, fulfill its environmental responsibilities, and modernize its aging generation system, TVA’s current capital investment plan includes more than $25 billion of expenditures over the next 10 years. However, TVA’s anticipated capital needs are likely to quickly exceed the agency’s $30 billion statutory cap on indebtedness. Reducing or eliminating the Federal Government’s role in programs such as TVA, which have achieved their original objectives and no longer require Federal participation, can help put the Nation on a sustainable fiscal path. Given TVA’s debt constraints and the impact to the Federal deficit of its increasing capital expenditures, the Administration intends to undertake a strategic review of options for addressing TVA’s financial situation, including the possible divestiture of TVA, in part or as a whole.

Notice how nonsensical the justification for the “divestiture of TVA” is. The authors clearly acknowledge that the Tennessee Valley Authority is a “self-financing Government corporation”. The TVA issues its own debt and also has income from electricity sales. Yet because its capital expenditures are counted as part of the federal deficit for accounting purposes, privatizing the TVA supposedly counts as a “spending cut”. This is the willful blindness of orthodox thought taken to extreme levels. Privatizing the TVA doesn’t shrink the amount of debt in the economy one cent; all it does is bring that debt onto private balance sheets. In fact, private investors will buy the Authority on mainly on credit, increasing the amount of private debt.

Note also whoever buys this will pay far less than market value, because that is how this sh%$ works, and since they get it on the cheap, their goal will be to suck the marrow out of it, and to raise rates on the people it serves as fast as it possibly can.

That’s more than 9 million people he wants to f%$# like a drunk sorority girl.

Thatcher was too smart to privatize Britrail, but John Major was not, and the result was crappy service and fatal accidents.

It is so bad that even the Tories have disavowed selling off rail.

You will see the same from privatizing the TVA.

So, he’s going after two of the remaining jewels in the crown of the New Deal, the TVA, and Social Security.

He’s doing it because he wants to, because, except for the appeals to racial bigotry and abortion criminalization, he’s well to the right of Ronald Reagan, and he hates the liberal wing of the Democrat Party in general, and the New Deal in particular.

I’m beginning to think that I should add the tag “Manchurian Democrat” to posts like this.

I Hope So

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Ars Technica asks, “Will the Supreme Court end human gene patents after three decades?“

I think that it likely that they role back patent protections.

These days, they only seem to take patent cases when the United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals goes too far with patents.  (Which it does with mind-numbing regularity):

Since the 1980s, patent lawyers have been claiming pieces of humanity’s genetic code. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted thousands of gene patents. The Federal Circuit, the court that hears all patent appeals, has consistently ruled such patents are legal.

But the judicial winds have been shifting. The Supreme Court has never ruled on the legality of gene patents. And recently, the Supreme Court has grown increasingly skeptical of the Federal Circuit’s patent-friendly jurisprudence.

Meanwhile, a growing number of researchers, health care providers, and public interest groups have raised concerns about the harms of gene patents. The American Civil Liberties Union estimates that more than 40 percent of genes are now patented. Those patents have created “patent thickets” that make it difficult for scientists to do genetic research and commercialize their results. Monopolies on genetic testing have raised prices and reduced patient options.

On Monday, the high court will hear arguments about whether to invalidate a Utah company’s patents on two genes associated with breast cancer. But the legal challenge, spearheaded by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation, could have much broader implications. A decision could invalidate thousands of patents and free medical researchers and clinicians to practice medicine without interference from the patent system.

It’s very clear that a gene is a discovery, not an invention, but the patent court believes that you can patent a rainy day (I mean this literally: They approved a patent on weather derivatives in Bilski v. Kappos, which was later overturned by the Supreme Court. This court also allowed for patenting of tax deductions)

You Remember When it Was Reported that Germans Were Amongst the Poorest People in Europe?

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Well, Wolfgang Münchau has made what should be an obvious observation, that, “if the same unit of account gives us a higher wealth figure for Spain than for Germany, and when you also know that this cannot be true,” which means that on a very deep level, a Euro in Spain is worth something different (less) than one in Germany:

A European Central Bank survey shows that households in northern Europe have a much lower net wealth than those in southern Europe. Average German net assets per household are just under €200,000, while they are €300,000 in Spain and €670,000 in Cyprus. No, this not a typo.

 German newspapers screamed that poor Germans are bailing out rich Cypriots. This interpretation is wrong but the truth behind these counter-intuitive findings is even more disturbing. What the survey shows is not wealth differentials but the de facto exchange rates between the eurozone economies. They are not measures of net wealth but of imbalances. And they are enormous.

 Since the start of the eurozone, wages and consumer prices have remained broadly constant in Germany. In southern Europe, the general level of wages and prices has increased year in, year out. Over the period, this persistent inflation gap has led to a large discrepancy in asset prices. This is why an apartment in Milan costs much more than one in Munich, the city with the highest property prices in Germany. A German euro buys more real estate in Munich than an Italian euro buys in Milan.

 In the frantic German debate about these figures, the focus is on median wealth – the statistic that pinpoints the exact middle if one were to rank households by wealth. Looking at the median, the gap becomes even more extreme. In countries with extremely large wealth differentials such as Germany, where a few super-rich people own a large share of the land and real estate, the median is significantly lower than the mean.

When I mentioned that the Germans set up the Euro to export inflation to aid exports, I neglected to mention the obvious, that inflation is a devaluation of currency, and the inflation, largely caused by what the Germans demanded when the Euro was created.

Münchau correctly notes that the only way for this to be corrected is for Germany to inflate, or Spain (and the rest of them) to deflate, and since the Germans are opposed to any sort of meaningful inflation, this means crushing deflation in the rest of the Euro zone.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the Germans cannot come up with a way to make the situation even worse:

Professors Lars Feld and Peter Bofinger said states in trouble must pay more for their own salvation, arguing that there is enough wealth in homes and private assets across the Mediterranean to cover bail-out costs. “The rich must give up part of their wealth over the next ten years,” said Prof Bofinger.

 The two economist are members of Germany’s Council of Economic Experts or “Five Wise Men”, a body that advises the Chancellor on major issues. There is no formal plan to launch a wealth tax but the council is often used to fly kites for new policies.

Yes, German “Wise Men”.

Now there’s a concept that makes the rest of us feel so confident about the future of the EU.

Prof Bofinger told Spiegel Magazine that it was a mistake to target deposit holders in banks, the formula used in the EU-IMF Troika bail-out for Cyprus where those with savings above €100,000 at Laiki and Bank of Cyprus face huge losses. “The canny rich in southern Europe just shift their money to banks in Northern Europe to escape seizure,” he said.

 Prof Feld said a new survey by the European Central Bank had revealed that people in the crisis countries are richer than the Germans themselves. “This shows that Germany has been right to take a tough line of euro rescue loans,” he said.

Only, as Münchau notes, it’s all about inflation and a market flaws created in the Euro Zone at German insistence.

The study shows how EMU states have twisted themselves into a Gordian Knot under monetary union, and why Germans feel a strong sense of grievance over escalating bail-out demands. Yet it is also highly controversial since it relies on data before the housing crash in Spain, and may understate implicit wealth in Dutch pensions or German life insurance.

Oh, yes, here is another reason why the numbers are bullsh%$.

Any attempt to enforce a wealth tax in future rescue talks will be seen by Club Med as further evidence that the Northern powers will try to impose all the burden of crisis adjustment on those in trouble rather than accepting their own shared responsibility for the failings of the EMU. This comes a day after Germany said over the weekend that there could be no banking union after all without a fresh EU treaty, effectively kicking the issue into touch for years.

 Critics have long argued that North Europe is equally to “blame” for the crisis since it flooded the South with cheap credit, and they accuse Germany of destabilizing the intra-EMU trade system by screwing down German wages and running a current account surplus of 7pc of GDP.

(emphasis mine)

As I’ve said many times, it’s exporting inflation to the periphery.

It’s why kicking the Germans out of the Euro probably the only thing that will keep the EU together.

Any serious move to a wealth tax could the erode the pro-euro ardour of South Europe’s uber-rich. The ECB bond buying policy has largely rescued the wealthiest strata while the full brunt of EMU austerity has fallen on ordinary people and the unemployed.

 The political debate on euro membership may change dramatically if rich Cypriots, Italians, Spaniards, and Portuguese start to see EMU as a threat to their property, rather than a defence.

This is seen as a problem. I see it as a solution.

The sooner that the Euro Zone breaks up, the more likely it is that we will not see the break up of the European Union and a return to conflict in Europe.

On Tax Day, Read Joseph Stiglitz

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He makes the obvious point that the tax code since the Reagan tax cuts has skewed increasingly toward the richest people in our society:

………

Today, the deadline for filing individual income-tax returns, is a day when Americans would do well to pause and reflect on our tax system and the society it creates. No one enjoys paying taxes, and yet all but the extreme libertarians agree, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, that taxes are the price we pay for civilized society. But in recent decades, the burden for paying that price has been distributed in increasingly unfair ways.

About 6 in 10 of us believe that the tax system is unfair — and they’re right: put simply, the very rich don’t pay their fair share. The richest 400 individual taxpayers, with an average income of more than $200 million, pay less than 20 percent of their income in taxes — far lower than mere millionaires, who pay about 25 percent of their income in taxes, and about the same as those earning a mere $200,000 to $500,000. And in 2009, 116 of the top 400 earners — almost a third — paid less than 15 percent of their income in taxes.

Conservatives like to point out that the richest Americans’ tax payments make up a large portion of total receipts. This is true, as well it should be in any tax system that is progressive — that is, a system that taxes the affluent at higher rates than those of modest means. It’s also true that as the wealthiest Americans’ incomes have skyrocketed in recent years, their total tax payments have grown. This would be so even if we had a single flat income-tax rate across the board.

What should shock and outrage us is that as the top 1 percent has grown extremely rich, the effective tax rates they pay have markedly decreased. Our tax system is much less progressive than it was for much of the 20th century. The top marginal income tax rate peaked at 94 percent during World War II and remained at 70 percent through the 1960s and 1970s; it is now 39.6 percent. Tax fairness has gotten much worse in the 30 years since the Reagan “revolution” of the 1980s.

Citizens for Tax Justice, an organization that advocates for a more progressive tax system, has estimated that, when federal, state and local taxes are taken into account, the top 1 percent paid only slightly more than 20 percent of all American taxes in 2010 — about the same as the share of income they took home, an outcome that is not progressive at all.

With such low effective tax rates — and, importantly, the low tax rate of 20 percent on income from capital gains — it’s not a huge surprise that the share of income going to the top 1 percent has doubled since 1979, and that the share going to the top 0.1 percent has almost tripled, according to the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. Recall that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans own about 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, and the picture becomes even more disturbing.

LEONA HELMSLEY, the hotel chain executive who was convicted of federal tax evasion in 1989, was notorious for, among other things, reportedly having said that “only the little people pay taxes.”

As a statement of principle, the quotation may well have earned Mrs. Helmsley, who died in 2007, the title Queen of Mean. But as a prediction about the fairness of American tax policy, Mrs. Helmsley’s remark might actually have been prescient.

Today, the deadline for filing individual income-tax returns, is a day when Americans would do well to pause and reflect on our tax system and the society it creates. No one enjoys paying taxes, and yet all but the extreme libertarians agree, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, that taxes are the price we pay for civilized society. But in recent decades, the burden for paying that price has been distributed in increasingly unfair ways.

About 6 in 10 of us believe that the tax system is unfair — and they’re right: put simply, the very rich don’t pay their fair share. The richest 400 individual taxpayers, with an average income of more than $200 million, pay less than 20 percent of their income in taxes — far lower than mere millionaires, who pay about 25 percent of their income in taxes, and about the same as those earning a mere $200,000 to $500,000. And in 2009, 116 of the top 400 earners — almost a third — paid less than 15 percent of their income in taxes.

Conservatives like to point out that the richest Americans’ tax payments make up a large portion of total receipts. This is true, as well it should be in any tax system that is progressive — that is, a system that taxes the affluent at higher rates than those of modest means. It’s also true that as the wealthiest Americans’ incomes have skyrocketed in recent years, their total tax payments have grown. This would be so even if we had a single flat income-tax rate across the board.

What should shock and outrage us is that as the top 1 percent has grown extremely rich, the effective tax rates they pay have markedly decreased. Our tax system is much less progressive than it was for much of the 20th century. The top marginal income tax rate peaked at 94 percent during World War II and remained at 70 percent through the 1960s and 1970s; it is now 39.6 percent. Tax fairness has gotten much worse in the 30 years since the Reagan “revolution” of the 1980s.

Citizens for Tax Justice, an organization that advocates for a more progressive tax system, has estimated that, when federal, state and local taxes are taken into account, the top 1 percent paid only slightly more than 20 percent of all American taxes in 2010 — about the same as the share of income they took home, an outcome that is not progressive at all.

With such low effective tax rates — and, importantly, the low tax rate of 20 percent on income from capital gains — it’s not a huge surprise that the share of income going to the top 1 percent has doubled since 1979, and that the share going to the top 0.1 percent has almost tripled, according to the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. Recall that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans own about 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, and the picture becomes even more disturbing.

He also notes that the increasingly unfair tax will hamstring voluntary compliance, which is at the core of our tax system.

If Republicans want to call this belief socialism, then we need a f%$#load more socialism.

Whiny Bitch of the Day

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Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is mad as hell about the Eu’s proposed financial transaction tax.

Oh the horror of a tax of one tenth of 1% on stock trades, and one one-hundredth of 1% on derivatives will destroy all life as we know it on the planet.

His argument is that it will crush the speculative arbitrage that is the meat and potatoes for Wall Street and the City of London, causing a shrinkage of the financial industry.

He says that it “has the character of a pogrom.”

Well, I got your “pogrom” right here.

Randall Munroe accurately reflects my feelings on this in this cartoon:

Excess financialization of our economy is not productive, nor is it symbiotic.  It is a parasitic drain on society, and a source of instability.

It needs to be ended.

Fabulous!!!

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The French upper house has passed the same sex marriage law:

Following months of protests both for and against the measure, the French Senate on Tuesday night passed an important provision in a package of laws that would legalize same-sex marriage in the country. The vote is a political win for embattled President Hollande.

French President François Hollande has had precious little to celebrate since he was elected last May. His country’s economy has refused to ignite, unemployment is nearing record highs and his government has been rocked by recent corruption allegations.

But this week, Hollande was finally able to take a key step toward fulfilling a major campaign promise. After months of passionate debate both among lawmakers and on the streets of Paris, the French Senate late Tuesday passed a key provision of the package of laws that would ultimately place same-sex marriage on par with heterosexual marriage in the country.

Following a 10-hour debate, the Senate voted 179 to 157 in favor of an article allowing gay and lesbian couples to wed. The law will only go into effect once the Senate approves all of its component parts. A further article still pending approval would allow gay married couples in the country to adopt. The first article passed on Tuesday, however, was the most important and virtually assures the legalization of gay marriage in the country.

It could still take several weeks before all of the provisions of the law are passed in the Senate. France’s lower house, the National Assembly, passed the law in mid-February.

Good for them.