Month: September 2016

California’s Drought Could Last for Centuries

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Clues from prehistoric droughts and arid periods in California show that today’s increasing greenhouse gas levels could lock the state into drought for centuries, according to a study led by UCLA professor Glen MacDonald.


The study, published today in the Nature.com journal Scientific Reports, looked at how natural climatic forces contributed to centuries-long and even millennia-long periods of dryness in California during the past 10,000 years. These phenomena—sun spots, a slightly different earth orbit, a decrease in volcanic activity—intermittently warmed the region through a process called radiative forcing, and recently have been joined by a new force: greenhouse gases.

As long as warming forces like greenhouse gases are present, the resulting radiative forcing can extend drought-like conditions more or less indefinitely, said MacDonald, a distinguished professor of geography and of ecology and evolutionary biology.

“Radiative forcing in the past appears to have had catastrophic effects in extending droughts,” said MacDonald, an international authority on drought and climate change. “When you have arid periods that persist for 60 years, as we did in the 12th century, or for millennia, as we did from 6,000 to 1,000 B.C., that’s not really a ‘drought.’ That aridity is the new normal.”

Researchers tracked California’s historic and prehistoric climate and water conditions by taking a sediment core in the Sierra Nevada mountains. They pulled a 2-inch-wide, 10-foot-deep cylinder of sediment from the bottom of Kirman Lake and analyzed it in third-of-an­-inch sections, creating the most detailed and continuous paleoenvironmental record of California.

The team correlated their findings with other studies of California climate history, and for the first time, united all the studies and cross-referenced them with histories of the Pacific Ocean’s temperature taken from marine sediment cores and other sources.

What they found was not only that periods of increased radiative forcing could produce drought-like conditions that extended indefinitely, but that these conditions were closely tied to prolonged changes in Pacific Ocean surface temperatures.

While the urban areas of California may find a way to deal with this, but the agriculture sector of the state is completely f%$#ed.

Can We Please Give them Back to Mexico? (Part CCCXLIV)

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Texas is at it again. It is now arbitrarily denying special ed services to meet a quota set by state regulators:

During the first week of school at Shadow Forest Elementary, a frail kindergartner named Roanin Walker had a meltdown at recess. Overwhelmed by the shrieking and giggling, he hid by the swings and then tried to escape the playground, hitting a classmate and biting a teacher before being restrained.

The principal called Roanin’s mother.

“There’s been an incident.”

Heidi Walker was frightened, but as she hurried to the Humble school that day in 2014, she felt strangely relieved.

She had warned school administrators months earlier that her 5-year-old had been diagnosed with a disability similar to autism. Now they would understand, she thought. Surely they would give him the therapy and counseling he needed.

Walker knew the law was on her side. Since 1975, Congress has required public schools in the United States to provide specialized education services to all eligible children with any type of disability.

But what she didn’t know is that in Texas, unelected state officials have quietly devised a system that has kept thousands of disabled kids like Roanin out of special education.

………

More than a dozen teachers and administrators from across the state told the Chronicle they have delayed or denied special education to disabled students in order to stay below the 8.5 percent benchmark. They revealed a variety of methods, from putting kids into a cheaper alternative program known as “Section 504” to persuading parents to pull their children out of public school altogether.

“We were basically told in a staff meeting that we needed to lower the number of kids in special ed at all costs,” said Jamie Womack Williams, who taught in the Tyler Independent School District until 2010. “It was all a numbers game.”

………

“It’s extremely disturbing,” said longtime education advocate Jonathan Kozol, who described the policy as a cap on special education meant to save money.

“It’s completely incompatible with federal law,” Kozol said. “It looks as if they’re actually punishing districts that meet the needs of kids.”

In a statement, Texas Education Agency officials denied they had kept disabled students out of special education and said their guideline calling for enrollments of 8.5 percent was not a cap or a target but an “indicator” of performance by school districts. They said state-by-state comparisons were inappropriate and attributed the state’s dramatic declines in special educations enrollments to new teaching techniques that have lowered the number of children with “learning disabilities,” such as dyslexia.

In fact, despite the number of children affected, no one has studied Texas’ 32 percent drop in special education enrollment.

………

There is no agreed-upon number for what percentage of kids have a disability that requires special education services.

The best approximation may be 15.4 percent. That’s how many U.S. kids ages 2-8 whom doctors have diagnosed with a mental, behavioral or developmental disorder, according to a March 2016 study by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It’s a long read, and it is infuriating.

H/t Diane Ravitch.

Repeat after Me: There Are No Moderate Rebels in Syria

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In the latest episode of stupid sh%$ that Obama has done, we discover so called moderate rebels, who had been vetted by the CIA, just kicked US special forces out of the Syrian town of Al Ra’i:

………
 
The deployment of some 40 U.S. special forces to Al Ra’i did not go well. The Turkish “Free Syrian Army” proxies threatened to kill the U.S. forces. They called them “unbelievers” and “crusader pigs” and the U.S. forces had to retreat under Turkish cover (video). Some FSA spokesperson later claimed that the dispute was over U.S. support for the Kurdish dominated SDF, which at times had fought against the FSA. Unconfirmed reports now say that the special forces are back in Al Ra’i after certain FSA groups were ordered out of the area. There are also reports claiming the U.S., after the special forces were chased out of town, “accidentally” bombed some FSA group in Al Ra’i. Ooops.

However, the hostile FSA forces will be around and U.S. Special Forces are obviously seen as their enemy. If the U.S. forces proceed together with the other FSA groups they will certainly have to watch their back at any and all times.

The Turkish supported sectarian “moderate” FSA groups are the very same groups the CIA has “vetted” and provided with TOW missiles and other weapons. But nobody should be astonished that such groups, driven by religious zeal, eventually turn on their sponsors. They have done so in each historic parallel one can think of.

The current ceasefire in Syria is already breaking down. U.S. media claim that Russia and Syria are blocking UN aid to the al-Qaeda ruled areas in east-Aleppo but other media say that the “rebels” are the ones threatening the convoys. In east-Aleppo al-Qaeda demonstrators held a rally (vid) against UN aid.

Obama’s liberal interventionism is every bit as much as a clusterf%$# as Dick Cheney’s 1% doctrine.

Doing the Right Only Requires Months of Public Shaming

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For months, it has been known that Katherine Wade, former in-house lobbyist for CIGNA and now Insurance Commissioner for Connecticut, has had major conflicts of interests in the states review of the merger between Cigna and Anthem. (Her husband is a lawyer for Cigna as well)

She has finally agreed to recuse herself from reviewing the merger:

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy’s top insurance regulator, Katharine Wade, agreed to recuse herself from her state’s review of a massive healthcare merger between Anthem and Cigna, amid mounting criticism of her ties to Cigna. Wade had been leading a multistate review of the deal, which critics say could raise insurance premiums for 53 million Americans across the country. The recusal announcement came from Wade’s attorney during a meeting of the Office of State Ethics, which has been investigating the situation.

The merger between Anthem and Cigna appeared to be moving forward for months, but was thrown into turmoil after a months-long International Business Times investigative series into Wade and Malloy’s ties to Cigna. That series prompted a state ethics probe — and soon after the Department of Justice sued to block the merger.

………

As IBT’s series documented, Cigna and Anthem pumped campaign cash into the Democratic Governors Association — which is run by Malloy — at the very time they were pursuing their merger. While the cash flowed into the group, Malloy appointed Wade to head his state’s insurance department. She had served as an in-house lobbyist for Cigna, is married to a Cigna attorney and is the daughter-in-law of another attorney listed as representing the company. Malloy’s administration also promised to help Cigna if it pursued the merger.

Even by the standards of Connecticut politics, (The state is pretty much a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry) this was pretty brazen.

This Is a Natural Consequence of Hillary and the Democrats Running Away from Their Base

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen dozen of Hillary Clinton ads, and they all mention Donald Trump more than her.

The Senate candidates seem to be a collection of has beens and never weres who have be consciously selected as a f%$# you to the party base.

As such, it is no surprise that in a year when Senate Republicans are facing major headwinds, Trump and the fact that 24 of the 34 seats are held by Republicans, the possibility of the Democrats retaking the Senate are diminishing:

Part of the August of Democratic Complacency that revolved around robust poll numbers for Hillary Clinton (and the assumption they would get better and better as Americans shrank in revulsion from Donald Trump) was a consensus that Democrats would very likely win back control of the Senate and might even get the House if Trump continued to implode.

Donkey Party optimism about the Senate actually began to spike in July when former senator Evan Bayh suddenly jumped into the race for the seat of Republican Dan Coats, who is retiring. Bayh had big sacks of money left over from his previous Senate campaigns and had always been very popular among Hoosiers. Republican nominee Todd Young looked like a sudden loser, and a lot of observers figured the GOP would concede the seat.

But pro-Republican outside groups did not get the memo, and they’ve already spent $5 million on the Indiana Senate race, with more in the pipeline. And although the Bayh name may be minor magic in the state, the former senator has some baggage, too, including tenuous residency in the state during his recent years as a lawyer-lobbyist in sinful D.C. While the Democrat is still the favorite, the polls are tightening noticeably, and Indiana’s one state where Trump is unlikely to drag down the ticket.

If Bayh’s no longer a lock, the whole proposition of a Democratic-controlled Senate gets dicier. And indeed, the prognosticators have become more cautious, with the Upshot and Daily Kos both now giving Democrats a 54 percent chance of regaining control of the upper chamber. Wisconsin and Illinois are still states where Republican incumbents are in deep trouble. But Republicans are narrowly favored to take a seat back in Nevada. Recent polling shows Ohio and Florida likely falling off the Senate battleground map. And vulnerable GOP incumbents in New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania are looking stronger, though they are far from being out of the woods.

Hillary is aggressively courting Republicans who are unsettled by Trump.  The Senate and House strategies are to try to tie candidates to Trump.

There is absolutely nothing positive being said by the Democratic party campaign apparatus about the Democratic Party.

“Not Donald Trump,” will not take back the Senate.

Another Rock is About to Be Turned Over in New York Yeshivas

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It looks like a lawsuit will reveal that New York Yeshivas have systematically evaded state requirements on the quality of their secular education:

A powerful New York law firm has entered the fight over haredi education in the city, throwing its weight behind a group dedicated to bringing the curriculum at yeshivot in line with state-mandated curriculum.

 The Young Advocates for Fair Education (YAFFED) announced on Monday its new partnership with the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher global law firm. “Together, we will work to hold the New York City and New York State Departments of Education accountable – once and for all – for their failure to uphold and enforce vital federal and state laws protecting the rights of tens of thousands of hassidic and ultra-Orthodox children in New York to a basic education,” the announcement read.

 ………

 Since 2014 the organization has been pressuring New York State and New York City officials to change the situation in certain yeshivot where they don’t believe education is up to scratch. Last year, as reported by The Jerusalem Post, the City of New York launched an investigation into 39 Brooklyn yeshivot for alleged failure to meet the state-mandated educational curriculum. More than a year later, YAFFED is unsatisfied with the lack of visible results.

 ………

 YAFFED has received backlash from the haredi community for trying to change the Orthodox way of life, and particularly for having operated through channels outside of the ultra-Orthodox world.

That last paragraph reflects what is a longstanding problem in Orthodox community.

This unwillingness to apply the sunlight of public scrutiny to shortcomings within the community causes real problems for that community, in this case creating a generation of adults completely unequipped to engage the world, a halachic requirement.

One of the tenets of Jusaism is that, “It is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but you are not free to desist from it either.”*

By eschewing the ability to meaningfully interact with the world, you are eschewing the the obligation to meaningfully interact with the world.

It appears that New York state politicians have put the enforcement of educational standards on the back burner for fear of a backlash from the Orthodox community.

*Rabbi Tarfon, Pirke Avot 2:21

OK, I Approve

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The Obama administration has closed a loophole that allowed companies to take a tax credit on foreign taxes paid for income that they have refused to repatriate:

The U.S. Treasury Department took fresh steps on Thursday to curb tax avoidance by multinational corporations, announcing new curbs on a loophole through which companies artificially use credits for foreign taxes they pay to improperly lower their U.S. tax bills.

In a notice that took direct aim at the European Union’s push to have its member states collect more taxes from U.S. companies’ overseas units, Treasury officials said they’re writing new rules that would restrict how corporations can use credits on their foreign tax payments to reduce their U.S. tax bills. The official notice puts corporate tax planners on notice that officials will challenge any strategies that violate their intended rules.

The measure will focus on tax-planning strategies in which companies separate foreign tax payments from the underlying income that they’re based on. That separation — which Treasury’s notice described as a “splitter” arrangement — allows companies to artificially inflate credits they use to cut their U.S. tax bills.

Officials with the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service said it was possible that U.S. companies that find themselves subject to new tax bills as a result of EU investigations could use splitter arrangements to reduce their U.S. taxes. Last month, the European Commission found that Ireland must collect $14.5 billion in back taxes from Apple Inc. after determining that the iPhone maker received a special tax deal that violated so-called “state-aid” rules, which are aimed at fostering competition.

………

In effect, the new rule would disallow corporations from using foreign tax credits unless the companies actually bring home to the U.S. — or repatriate — the overseas earnings on which they’ve paid the foreign taxes. Repatriation of overseas income triggers the 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate, one of the highest in the world — and companies can use foreign tax credits to reduce or eliminate it. Treasury officials are worried that without the new rule, companies could claim artificially inflated foreign tax credits tied to offshore money they haven’t brought home.

U.S. officials have grown increasingly concerned that more than $2 trillion in offshore earnings that U.S. multinationals haven’t yet repatriated is now fair game for European countries.

Mark J. Mazur, Treasury’s assistant secretary for tax policy, said the new regulation would close “another tax loophole that contributes to the erosion of our tax base.”

“Today’s action protects the U.S. tax base by ensuring that such credits are only available when corporations repatriate their foreign earnings,” Mazur said.

Why the f%$# did this take 7 years to do?

Why did Obama have to wait until the  “I no longer have a f%$# to give” stage of his Presidency?

This should have started on day one.

Revenge of the Chicago School

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After the coup that killed Allende and thousands of Chileans, the economy was largely managed by American consultants from the Chicago School, who attempted to create a free market paradise.

It didn’t work, and they had to roll back some of the more extreme examples of free market fundamentalism after 12-18 months due to widespread fraud and corruption.

One thing, arguably the single most disastrous “reform”, did last and now Chileans are discovering that privatizing their retirement accounts has resulted in their nest eggs being eaten up by excessive fees and poor performance.

Seriously, every time someone tries to implement “Galt’s Gulch”, this is what happen: Corruption, fraud, incompetence, and instability:

Discontent has been brewing for years in Chile over pensions so low that most people must keep working past retirement age. All the while, privately run companies have reaped enormous profits by investing Chileans’ social security savings.

The bubbling anger boiled over in July when Chileans learned that the former wife of a Socialist Party leader was receiving a monthly pension of almost $7,800 after retiring from the prison police department. That figure dwarfs the average monthly pension of $315, which is even less than a monthly minimum-wage salary of $384.

In a country already battered by widespread political and corporate corruption, this was the last straw.

Hundreds of thousands of people marched through Santiago, the capital, and other cities to protest the privatized pension system. More than 1.3 million people, according to organizers, turned up in August, the largest demonstration since Chile’s return to civilian rule in 1990.

One protester was Luis Montero, 69, whose monthly pension is about $150. Like many Chileans, Mr. Montero has mainly worked informal jobs without a contract at wages too meager for him to save enough for retirement. He still does maintenance work at a school to make ends meet.

………

In 1981, the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet privatized the old pay-as-you-go pension system, in which workers, employers and the government all contributed.

Under the privatized system, which President George W. Bush hailed as an example to follow, workers must pay 10 percent of their earnings into accounts operated by private companies known as pension fund administrators, or A.F.P.s, the initials of the term in Spanish. The administrators invest the money and charge workers a commission for transactions and other fees. Employers and the government do not make any contributions to the workers’ accounts.

………

The money invested by the administrators bolstered Chile’s capital markets, which stimulated economic growth and yielded reasonable returns. Today six A.F.P.s — half of them owned by foreign companies — manage $171 billion in pension funds, equivalent to about 71 percent of Chile’s gross domestic product, according to the office of the supervisor of the pension funds.

………

A commission on pension reform, appointed in 2014 by President Michelle Bachelet, found that the median A.F.P. pension was equivalent to 34 percent of a retiree’s last average salary (24 percent in the case of women and 48 percent for men). The overall figure rose to 45 percent with supplements from a federally funded safety net established during Ms. Bachelet’s first term in office.………

“The median A.F.P. pension will be equivalent to 15 percent of the last wages,” he said. “When we have an entire generation retiring solely from the A.F.P. system, the picture gets even bleaker. We have to address this problem now.”

………

“The government’s proposals mean more of the same, and don’t solve the real problem,” said Luis Mesina, the secretary general of the Confederation of Bank Trade Unions and the face of the movement opposed to the private pension administrators. “We need to put an end to the A.F.P.s.”

………

Manuel Riesco, an economist with the National Center for Alternative Development Studies, agreed that the funds had done well — for themselves. The money they collect from salary deductions is more than twice as much as they pay out in pensions.

“That’s a huge surplus they will never give back,” Mr. Riesco said. “The state is spending large amounts of the federal budget to compensate for the failure of the private system. And as the population gets older, what do the A.F.P.s do? Reduce pensions even more. It’s a perverse and irrational system.”

This is typical, and under the Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) required by the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), any attempt to fix this would open up Chile to massive liability from the secretive tribunals.

The free market mouseketeer model is broken, and it always has been.

About F%$#ing Time

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8 years ago, New York granted Verizon a franchise to deliver broadband on the condition that they offer FIOS service to every household in the 5 boroughs.

Needless to say, Verizon has not done this, instead moving only into the most lucrative neighborhoods.

Finally, New York City has issued a notice of default:

New York City officials yesterday notified Verizon that the company is in default of an agreement to bring fiber connections to all households in the city and could file a lawsuit against the company.

The road to a potential lawsuit has been a long one. In June 2015, New York released an audit that found Verizon failed to meet a commitment to extend FiOS to every household in the five boroughs by June 2014. City officials and Verizon have been trying to resolve the matter since then with no success, as Verizon says that it hasn’t actually broken the agreement.

The default letter (full text) sent yesterday by the city Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DoITT) says Verizon has failed to pass all residential buildings in the city with fiber. As of October 2015, there were at least 38,551 addresses where Verizon hadn’t fulfilled installation service requests that were more than a year old, the letter said.

“Moreover, Verizon improperly reduced, from $50 million to $15 million, the performance bond required [by] the Agreement on the basis of Verizon’s incorrect representations that Verizon had met the prescribed deployment schedule, when in fact it had not,” the letter said. City officials demanded that Verizon restore the bond and wants a response within 30 days. The default letter also accuses Verizon of failing to make records related to its provision of cable service available to the city during its audit.

“Officials say they could sue Verizon unless the carrier shows clear plans for stepping up installations,” and that the notice is the first step in that process, The Wall Street Journal reported. The citywide fiber agreement lets NYC seek monetary damages from Verizon if it fails to deliver on the fiber promises.

………

Verizon made its citywide FiOS commitment in 2008 in exchange for a cable television franchise. Technically, Verizon is only obligated to provide TV service, but Verizon provides Internet and phone access over the same wires.

Verizon claims it has met the requirement to pass all households with fiber, but Verizon and the city disagree over the definition of “pass.” Verizon says its fiber doesn’t actually have to be in front of a building in order to “pass” it, as long as it’s close enough to buildings that Verizon can provision service without delay. The city’s default letter says Verizon hasn’t met the agreement since “it has not run fiber immediately in front of or behind each residential building in the City.”

Verizon has blamed landlords for not providing access to buildings. But the city’s audit report found evidence that Verizon demanded exclusive agreements from landlords that would shut out other providers, in violation of the franchise agreement.

The phone and cable companies are natural monopolies, and their business models are predicated on this.

It’s why marked based solutions simply do not work.

Wisconsin, the Wholly Subsidiary of Koch Industries

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Documents revealed from the various “John Doe” investigations of Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin show just how corrupt and polluted the Badger state has become:

The pervasive influence of corporate cash in the democratic process, and the extraordinary lengths to which politicians, lobbyists and even judges go to solicit money, are laid bare in sealed court documents leaked to the Guardian.

The John Doe files amount to 1,500 pages of largely unseen material gathered in evidence by prosecutors investigating alleged irregularities in political fundraising. Last year the Wisconsin supreme court ordered that all the documents should be destroyed, though a set survived that has now been obtained by the news organisation.

The files open a window on a world that is very rarely glimpsed by the public, in which millions of dollars are secretly donated by major corporations and super-wealthy individuals to third-party groups in an attempt to sway elections. They speak to a visceral theme of the 2016 presidential cycle: the distortion of American democracy by big business that has been slammed by both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

In a case that is the subject of a petition currently in front of the US supreme court, five Wisconsin prosecutors carried out a deep investigation into what they suspected were criminal campaign-finance violations by the campaign committee of Scott Walker, Wisconsin governor and former Republican presidential candidate. Known as the “John Doe investigation”, the inquiry has been a lightning rod for bitter disputes between conservatives and progressives for years.

In July 2015 the state’s supreme court halted the investigation, saying the prosecutors had misunderstood campaign finance law and as a result had picked on people and groups “wholly innocent of any wrongdoing”. Highly unusually, the court also ordered that all the evidence assembled by the prosecutors be destroyed and later held under seal.

………

Among the new material contained in the documents are donations amounting to $750,000 to a third-party group closely aligned to Walker from the owner of NL Industries, a company that historically produced lead paint. Within the same timeframe as the donations, the Republican-controlled legislature passed new laws making it much more difficult for victims of lead paint poisoning to sue NL Industries and other former lead paint manufacturers (the laws were later overturned in the federal courts).

The John Doe files also provide new insight into the extensive efforts made by allies of Scott Walker to help a conservative member of the Wisconsin supreme court, David Prosser, hang onto his seat in a 2011 re-election. A network of like-minded groups and campaigners channeled $3.5m in undisclosed corporate funds to pay for TV and radio ads backing the judge.

………

In 2015, Justice Prosser refused to recuse himself from a case in which the state supreme court sat in judgment over the John Doe investigation, despite the fact that the investigation focused on precisely the same network of lobbying groups and donors that had helped him hang onto his seat. The judge joined a majority of four conservative justices who voted to terminate the investigation and destroy all the documents now leaked to the Guardian.

Prosser told the Guardian that four years had passed since his re-election before he joined the decision to close the John Doe investigation, over which time any potential conflict of interest had faded.

They have no shame.

H/t Charlie Pierce, who coined the title for this post, as well as the nickname for Gov. Walker.

I Believed That This Is a Well Deserved Instance of Kicking a Man While He Is Down

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Parliament has released a report on the decision to depose Muammar Gaddafi by the British and French, and they pillory David Cameron’s actions.

I think that it is no accident that this happened months after the former PM announced his resignation:

David Cameron’s intervention in Libya was carried out with no proper intelligence analysis, drifted into an unannounced goal of regime change and shirked its moral responsibility to help reconstruct the country following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, according to a scathing report by the foreign affairs select committee.

The failures led to the country becoming a failed a state on the verge of all-out civil war, the report adds.

The report, the product of a parliamentary equivalent of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, closely echoes the criticisms widely made of Tony Blair’s intervention in Iraq, and may yet come to be as damaging to Cameron’s foreign policy legacy.

Situation has deteriorated since David Cameron’s upbeat visit after Gaddafi fell, with latest administration on the brink

It concurs with Barack Obama’s assessment that the intervention was “a sh%$show”, and repeats the US president’s claim that France and Britain lost interest in Libya after Gaddafi was overthrown. The findings are also likely to be seized on by Donald Trump, who has tried to undermine Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy credentials by repeatedly condemning her handling of the Libyan intervention in 2011, when she was US secretary of state.

(%$ mine)

This has been known for some time, but it is interesting how his former Tory colleagues have been so eager to throw him under the bus, even while half of the Labour party continues to try and shield Tony Blair from the consequences of his even more heinous acts.

Quote of the Day

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For more than three decades, macroeconomics has gone backwards. The treatment of identification now is no more credible than in the early 1970s but escapes challenge because it is so much more opaque. Macroeconomic theorists dismiss mere facts by feigning an obtuse ignorance about such simple assertions as “tight monetary policy can cause a recession.” Their models attribute fluctuations in aggregate variables to imaginary causal forces that are not influenced by the action that any person takes. A parallel with string theory from physics hints at a general failure mode of science that is triggered when respect for highly regarded leaders evolves into a deference to authority that displaces objective fact from its position as the ultimate determinant of scientific truth.

—Paul Romer, Chief Economist at the World Bank

I think that this is a good description of both the current state of economics and the string theory sect faction in physics.

They both favor mathematical elegance over a coherent model which would provide some of predictive value.

H/t naked capitalism

We’re the Phone Company. We Don’t Care; We Don’t Have To.

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After being called out by the press, AT&T, which cut a deal for low internet costs for the poor as a part of its merger with DirectTV, and then specifically avoided upgrading the speed of their networks to avoid offering them discounted service has relented in the face of lots of bad press:

AT&T will stop exploiting a loophole that it used to deny a discounted home Internet service to poor people in areas where it hasn’t upgraded its network.

 AT&T’s purchase of DirecTV came with a Federal Communications Commission requirement to offer Internet service for either $5 or $10 a month to households in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). But AT&T was able to avoid making this discount price available to low-income people in areas where its network doesn’t support download speeds of at least 3Mbps.

A broadband advocacy group called the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) asked AT&T to reconsider recently, and AT&T denied the request. But AT&T changed its mind after the NDIA wrote a blog post that was widely shared by news media and fueled criticism of the carrier.

Incumbent carriers can be trusted to the the right thing when they have exhausted every other possibility, I guess.

This is a classic example of a market failure which is not supposed to occur according the the free market mousketeers, but it makes perfect sense:  If you can make more money off of poor service, then you will make more money off of poor service.

Linkage

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Here is the video of antibiotic resistance:

Wow. This is Repulsive

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Former Foreign Secretary for Tony Blair has expressed relief that the whole Brexit blowup has distracted people from his lying to get his country to go to war:

Newly leaked emails show how a key U.K. architect of the Iraq war expressed relief that the “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union would reduce media coverage of the devastating results of an inquiry into the United Kingdom’s role in the the war.

On July 4, former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw emailed former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to discuss the upcoming release of the Chilcot Report– a document detailing the British government’s inquiry. The report probed, among other things, the depth of private British commitment and support for the American-led war in Iraq.

In anticipation of coming press coverage, Straw asked Powell to review a statement in a Word document he drafted. He wrote that the “only silver lining of the Brexit vote is that it will reduce medium term attention on Chilcot — thought it will not stop the day of publication being uncomfortable.”

What a contemptible and narcissistic piece of work.

No Accountability, Ever

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Carrie Tolstedt, the former Wells Fargo executive who ran the division that routinely defrauded consumers, retired to copious praise from her superiors and a huge retirement package:

Wells Fargo & Co’s “sandbagger”-in-chief is leaving the giant bank with an enormous pay day—$124.6 million.

In fact, despite beefed-up “clawback” provisions instituted by the bank shortly after the financial crisis, and the recent revelations of massive misconduct, it does not appear that Wells Fargo is requiring Carrie Tolstedt, the Wells Fargo executive who was in charge of the unit where employees opened more than 2 million largely unauthorized customer accounts—a seemingly routine practice that employees internally referred to as “sandbagging”—to give back any of her nine-figure pay.

On Thursday, Wells Fargo agreed to pay $185 million, including the largest penalty ever imposed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to settle claims that that it defrauded its customers. The bank’s shareholders will ultimately have to swallow the cost of that settlement. The bank also said it had fired 5,300 employees over five years related to the bad behavior.

Tolstedt, however, is walking away from Wells Fargo with a very full bank account—and praise. In the July announcement of her exit, which made no mention of the soon-to-be-settled case, Wells Fargo’s CEO John Stumpf said Tolstedt had been one of the bank’s most important leaders and “a standard-bearer of our culture” and “a champion for our customers.”

On Thursday, Richard Cordray, the head of the CFPB, had a different take, “It is quite clear that [the actions of Tolstedt’s unit] are unfair and abusive practices under federal law,” said Cordray. “They are a violation of trust and an abuse of trust.”

A spokesperson for Wells Fargo said that the timing of Tolstedt’s exit was the result of a “personal decision to retire after 27 years” with the bank. The spokesperson declined to comment on whether the bank was considering clawing back Tolstedt’s back pay.

………

What’s more, Tolstedt ran the community banking division of the bank, which included its retail banking and credit card divisions, during the entire period in which the customer abuse was alleged, which goes back to 2011. The CFPB said about three quarters of the unauthorized accounts opened by employees of Wells Fargo were bank deposit accounts. Another 565,000 were unauthorized credit card applications. Tolstedt took over the division in 2008, after Wells Fargo merged with Wachovia during the financial crisis.

………

“This appears to be exactly the situation that clawback provisions were created for,” says Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, a group that lobbies for more regulation of the big banks. “If they don’t apply here, when will they apply.”

(emphasis mine)

So, she presided over a department where fraud was not only rampant, but appeared to be a required employee activity (they fired over 5000 ordinary employees over this) in the division while she presided over it, but no harm, no foul, because she’s a senior executive who gets to “Retire” at 56 with a payout of $124,600,000.00.

We really need to start throwing banksters in jail.

Sugar is Evil

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I am not referring to Glucose, or Fructose, or Sucrose, but rather the recent revelation that the sugar industry bribed scientists so that they would minimize the impact on heart health:

Back in the 1960s, a sugar industry executive wrote fat checks to a group of Harvard researchers so that they’d downplay the links between sugar and heart disease in a prominent medical journal—and the researchers did it, according to historical documents reported Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

One of those Harvard researchers went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where he set the stage for the federal government’s current dietary guidelines. All in all, the corrupted researchers and skewed scientific literature successfully helped draw attention away from the health risks of sweets and shift the blame solely to fats—for nearly five decades. The low-fat, high-sugar diets that health experts subsequently encouraged are now seen as a main driver of the current obesity epidemic.

The bitter revelations come from archived documents from the Sugar Research Foundation (now the Sugar Association), dug up by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. Their dive into the old, sour affair highlights both the perils of trusting industry-sponsored research to inform policy and the importance of requiring scientists to disclose conflicts of interest—something that didn’t become the norm until years later. Perhaps most strikingly, it spotlights the concerning power of the sugar industry.

“These findings, our analysis, and current Sugar Association criticisms of evidence linking sucrose to cardiovascular disease suggest the industry may have a long history of influencing federal policy,” the authors concluded.

………

After the review, the sugar industry continued to fund research into heart disease and other health issues. By the 1980s, few scientists focused on the role of sugar in heart disease. The 1980 Dietary Guidelines for Americans emphasized curbing fats and dietary cholesterol to prevent heart disease.

Today, Nestle points out, “the balance has shifted to less concern about fat and much greater concern about sugars.” But, the story should act as a cautionary tale of the potential harms from industry-sponsored studies.

“Potential harms” from “Industry sponsored studies”?

Real harm, time, and time, and time, and time, and time again.

This crap is inherently corrupting, and any researcher that takes industry money should be debarred from federal funding.

Any researcher that takes industry money and does not explicitly and clearly reveal this should be debarred from federal funding for life.

And They Think That This Guy Can Win the next Election?

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In his leadership campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, Owen “Oily”* Smith has now said that if he were elected Prime Minister, he would rejoin the Euro even if it meant completely unrestricted immigration and having to join the Euro zone.

Seriously?

While I understand that those who will be voting in the next leadership election, Labour members, are likely to be more supportive of EU membership than the general public, but when juxtaposed with joining the Euro Zone, which is a Berlin dominated basket case, has to be the stupidest campaign pitch since Damien Thorn ran on a platform of free Syphilis and the apocalypse.

H/t Atrios.

*I am not making this up. It was his his actual nickname when he was a lobbyist for Pfizer.

Seriously?

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After swearing out an arrest warrant for Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein, they have followed up by issued an arrest warrant for radio host Amy Goodman for filming the protests and the ensuing brutality of the pipeline’s Pinkertons:

So much for the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

 Despite well-established freedom of the press protections that outline and guarantee the rights of reporters who cover breaking news stories—including confrontations between demonstrators and authorities—North Dakota officials have charged Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman with criminal trespassing after she documented private security personnel’s use of dogs to attack Native American foes of the Dakota Access Pipeline project.

 Video footage obtained by Goodman, an internationally respected and frequently honored independent journalist, helped to alert Americans to the tactics being used to stop demonstrations against the pipeline by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their allies. On Friday, the Obama administration halted work on key portions of the $3.8 billion pipeline project—recognizing concerns raised by the tribe and environmental activists.

To quote Tallyrand,* it is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

The behavior of the pipeline company, as well as the behavior of local and state law enforcement has been abhorrent, and their natural response is to go after the reporter.

I think that contaminants in North Dakota from fracking have melted their so-called minds.

 *Again, this is probably not an actually a quote from Tallyrand. It was likely said by Joseph Fouché, but, “C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute,” is all too frequently credited to Talleyrand.