Later On

Thanks to Constant Reader for forwarding a pointer to this article about Freeman Dyson, which begins:

For more than half a century the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.” Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees,” whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that “perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers.” Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.

But in the considered opinion of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Dyson’s friend and fellow English expatriate, this is far from the case. “His mind is still so open and flexible,” Sacks says. Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier. Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists — William Press, former deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, calls him “infinitely smart.” Dyson — a mathematics prodigy who came to this country at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory — not only did path-breaking science of his own; he also witnessed the development of modern physics, thinking alongside most of the luminous figures of the age, including Einstein, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Witten, the “high priest of string theory” whose office at the institute is just across the hall from Dyson’s. Yet instead of hewing to that fundamental field, Dyson chose to pursue broader and more unusual pursuits than most physicists — and has lived a more original life.

Among Dyson’s gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do. His thoughts about how science works appear in a series of lucid, elegant books for nonspecialists that have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond physics. Dyson has written more than a dozen books, including “Origins of Life” (1999), which synthesizes recent discoveries by biologists and geologists into an evaluation of the double-origin hypothesis, the possibility that life began twice; “Disturbing the Universe” (1979) tries among other things to reconcile science and humanity. “Weapons and Hope” (1984) is his meditation on the meaning and danger of nuclear weapons that won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Dyson’s books display such masterly control of complex matters that smart young people read him and want to be scientists; older citizens finish his books and feel smart.

Yet even while probing and sifting, Dyson is always …

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I’ve already blogged Chalmers Johnson’s article to which this is an introduction, but I thought the introduction deserved its own post:

Recently, reviewing lobbying disclosure reports, the Washington Times discovered "that 18 of the top 20 recipients of federal bailout money spent a combined $12.2 million lobbying the White House, the Treasury Department, Congress, and federal agencies during the last quarter of 2008." Citibank alone, according to the New York Times, fielded "an army of Washington lobbyists," plunking down $1.77 million in lobbying fees just in the fourth quarter of last year.

And it isn’t only sinking financial institutions begging for federal dollars that have bolstered their Washington lobbying corps. So have the biggest U.S. armaments companies — "drastically," according to reporter August Cole of the Wall Street Journal. In 2008, he found, Northrop Grumman almost doubled its lobbying budget to $20.6 million (from $10.9 million the previous year); Boeing upped its budget from $10.6 million to $16.6 million in the same period; and Lockheed-Martin, the company that received the most contracts from the Pentagon last year, hiked its lobbying efforts by a whopping 54% in 2008.

If you want to get a taste of what that means, then click here to view an ad for that company’s potentially embattled boondoggle, the F-22, the most expensive jet fighter ever built. What you’ll discover is not just that it will "protect" 300 million people — that’s you, if you live in the USA — but that it will also employ 95,000 of us. In other words, the ad’s threatening message implies, if the Obama administration cuts this program in bad times, it will throw another 95,000 Americans out on the street. Now that’s effective lobbying for you, especially when you consider, as Chalmers Johnson does below, that for any imaginable war the U.S. might fight in the coming decades, the F-22 will be a thoroughly useless plane.

We don’t usually think of the Pentagon as a jobs-and-careers scam operation, a kind of Mega-Madoff Ponzi scheme that goes BOOM!, though it is clearly designed for the well-being of defense contractors, military officers, and congressional representatives; nor do we usually consider the "defense" budget as a giant make-work jobs racket, as arms experts Bill Hartung and Christopher Preble recently suggested, but it’s never too late.

Chalmers Johnson, author of the already-classic Blowback Trilogy, including most recently Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, makes vividly clear just how little the Pentagon is organized to consider the actual defense needs of the United States. In many ways, it remains a deadly organization of boys with toys that now poses a distinct economic danger to the rest of us. (Check out, as well, a TomDispatch audio interview with Johnson on the Pentagon’s economic death spiral by clicking here). Tom

And if you haven’t read John’s article, read it now (just after the intro reproduced above).

Interesting post, which begins:

Extramarital sex is the principal factor in high violent crime rates in the Americas (North, South, and Central). This surprising conclusion calls for some explanation. As promised, here it is.

The first point to make is that most violent crime involves young male perpetrators on male victims. The violence is thus between potential competitors over women (1). Such violence can prove deadly. In their study of homicides in Detroit, Canadian researchers found that the leading cause of homicides was seemingly unmotivated aggression that police classify as "trivial altercations." For instance, two men accidentally jostle each other in a bar, there is a scuffle, and someone gets fatally stabbed. Men who lose face in such encounters fall in the pecking order and become less desirable as dates. In trivial altercations, men are indirectly fighting over women.

In contrast, men who are married and out of the dating arena have remarkably low rates of violence. Divorce is of interest here because formerly-married men find themselves dating again. When that happens, their involvement in violent crime rises also. This is not too surprising because dating takes place in singles bars and night clubs where alcohol is consumed and inhibition is lowered. A substantial proportion of violent crime occurs close to such venues.

Researchers have also looked at the physiological implications of divorce. Divorced men have unusually high levels of the male hormone testosterone coursing through their veins…

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I just started reading Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, by Kató Lomb. She spoke 5 languages fluently (Hungarian, English, Russian, German, and French) and worked in 16, but what is particularly interesting is that she learned the languages (save her native language, Hungarian) as an adult, after getting a PhD in chemistry. She took German in high school but did so poorly that she and others regarded her as “a foreign language flop.” That she actually later succeeded in becoming a fluent multilingual gives one hope—and also, of course, arouses considerable interest in how she did it. One technique, for example, was that she read novels in the new language she wanted to learn from the very beginning. The book is a collection of her writings and reflections on how she learned so many languages through her own study.

Extremely interesting if you’re interested in other languages.

Yardley made a fine shaving soap that lathers up like a dream. The Simpsons Persian Jar 2 Super helped, of course. The Futur with a Treet Black Beauty blade did a fine job, and D.R. Harris Arlington aftershave was a good finish. One guy emailed me that he found the fragrance of Arlington was like a drink he once had—so I tried my own memory. No drink associations for me. How about you?

Interesting sounding book:

KATÓ LOMB (1909–2003) was one of the great polyglots of the 20th century. A translator and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world, Lomb worked in 16 languages for state and business concerns in her native Hungary. She achieved further fame by writing books on languages, interpreting, and polyglots. Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, first published in 1970, is a unique collection of anecdotes and reflections on language learning. It belongs to a select group of texts by such renowned polyglot linguists as Bloomfield, Pei, and Stevick.

More evidence that we should restrict intake of high-fructose corn syrup:

The journal Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ybbrc) (BBRC), published by Elsevier, will publish an important review this week online, by M. Daniel Lane and colleagues at Johns Hopkins, building on the suggested link between the consumption of fructose and increased food intake, which may contribute to a high incidence of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. Over the past four decades life-styles have gravitated toward the excessive consumption of ‘high energy’ foods and sedentary behavior that has resulted in a high incidence of obesity and its pathological consequences. This scenario has led to the increased occurrence of insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes. At present, approximately thirty percent of adult Americans can be classified as obese. Moreover, these changes now extend into the younger age group.

M. Daniel Lane and co-workers at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore have now pulled together work, largely in their laboratory (many papers beginning in 2000), dealing with the role of malonyl-CoA in the signaling system in the brain (specifically the hypothalamus) that has inputs into the higher brain centers that determine feeding behavior, most notably appetite. Two papers in the journal PNAS in 2007 and 2008 showed that glucose and fructose act quite differently in the brain (hypothalamus) – glucose decreasing food intake and fructose increasing food intake. Both of these sugars signal in the brain through the malonyl-CoA signaling pathway and have inverse effects on food intake.

Lane commented: "We feel that these findings may have particular relevance to the massive increase in the use of high fructose sweeteners (both high fructose corn syrup and table sugar) in virtually all sweetened foods, most notably soft drinks. The per capita consumption of these sweeteners in the USA is about 145 lbs/year and is probably much higher in teenagers/youth that have a high level of consumption of soft drinks. There is a large literature now that correlates, but does not prove that a culprit in the rise of teenage obesity may be fructose."

The fact that fructose metabolism by the brain increases food intake and obesity risk raises health concerns in view of the large and increasing per capita consumption of high fructose sweeteners, especially by youth.

Source: Elsevier

Good to know:

The "are you driving yet?" talk should become part of every pediatrician’s regular physical exam for teenagers, Hopkins Children’s experts say. Pediatrician Letitia Dzirasa, M.D., notes that car accidents kill more 15- to -20-year-olds than any disease, so teenage driving should be considered a risky behavior, in need of as much attention as unprotected sex or underage drinking.

"Pediatricians talk to their teen patients about eating disorders, alcohol, marijuana use," Dzirasa says, "but the one conversation that is not happening often enough is about the number-one killer of teenagers: car accidents."

The American Academy of Pediatrics advises pediatricians to:

• Ask 15-year-olds if they are applying for a driver’s permit soon

• Discuss driving risks and ask probing questions about driving behavior

• Ask specific questions about medication use, use of alcohol, night-time driving, seatbelt use, use of a cell phone while driving.

• Encourage parents to place driving restrictions on their teenagers, such as making sure the novice driver is accompanied by an adult.

• Ask parents to consider a written contract with their children, establishing the rules of engagement and penalties for failure to follow them.

• Remind teens and parents that many state laws restrict cell phone use and nighttime driving for novice drivers.

Dzirasa also urges pediatricians to learn about their state’s driving laws and discuss them with both teens and parents. Maryland has a graduated driver’s licensing (GDL) law that eases novice drivers into driving in three stages: learner’s permit, provisional license and driver’s license. Research shows that graduated licensing reduces both the number of accidents and the number of severe injuries, Dzirasa says. For example, one study showed that graduated licensing led to 35 percent fewer crashes that require hospitalizations among 16-year-olds. Other studies have shown that the crash rate among 16-year-olds dropped by 26 percent to 41 percent in the first year after the adoption of a graduated licensing law.

High-risk behaviors or conditions among teen drivers include:

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting:

Imagine a platoon of soldiers fighting in a hazardous urban environment who carry personal digital assistants that can display the location of enemy shooters in three dimensions and accurately identify the caliber and type of weapons they are firing. Engineers at Vanderbilt University’s Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) have developed a system that can give soldiers just such an edge by turning their combat helmets into "smart nodes" in a wireless sensor network.

ISIS developed this novel technology with the support of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and the university has patented two of the system’s key elements.

Like several other shooter location systems developed in recent years, the ISIS system relies on the sound waves produced when a high-powered rifle is fired. These acoustic signals have distinctive characteristics that allow the systems to pick them out from other loud noises and track them back to their source. Current systems, however, rely on centralized or stand-alone sensor arrays. This limits their accuracy and restricts them to identifying shooters at line-of-sight locations.

By contrast, the ISIS system combines information from a number of nodes to triangulate on shooter positions and improve the accuracy of its location identification process. It also uses a patented technique to filter out the echoes that can throw off other acoustic detection systems, explains Akos Ledeczi, the senior research scientist at ISIS who heads up the development effort.

"When DARPA gave us the assignment of creating a shooter location system using nodes with very limited capabilities, they didn’t think we could solve the technical problems," Ledeczi admits. "At first, I didn’t think we could do it either, but we figured out how to make it work!"

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Kevin Drum has an excellent post in which he suggests some overall principles for financial reform. It begins:

Bloomberg reports that new financial regulations are on their way:

The Obama administration is preparing an overhaul of U.S. banking rules that would force financial companies to keep more cash on hand in case their trading bets go wrong.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told lawmakers yesterday that changes will include “strong oversight, including appropriate constraints on risk-taking.” Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the case of American International Group Inc. showed the “intense problem” of trading with insufficient capital to guard against losses.

This is probably good stuff, but one thing that I find persistently missing from these discussions is any sense of guiding principles.  There are a million rules you might want to put in place to regulate the financial industry, and every one of them might individually sound sensible.  But what’s the big picture?  What are you trying to accomplish?

If you asked me, for example, I’d toss out three big principles.  #1 is …

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Thomas R. Pickering, co-chairman of the International Crisis Group, was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1989 to 1992. William S. Sessions was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations from 1987 to 1993. They wrote this article in the Washington Post:

President Obama declared in his inaugural address that the United States is "ready to lead once more." Not content to merely say the right thing, he took several significant steps to act on his words within the first days of his presidency — signing, for instance, executive orders to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and secret CIA facilities around the world.

The president understands that no democracy can lead if it engages in activities that damage its defenses and undermine its system of government. And that is what torture does.

Investigations by Congress and other bodies have shown that, since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, government officials have encouraged and acquiesced in prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel, and detainees have been transferred to countries that are known to torture. In many cases, the perpetrators of abuse and torture were given the support and encouragement (tacit or explicit) of their superiors, possibly as high up the chain of command as the president himself.

In other cases, particular units were apparently given the freedom to bypass the chain of command, and members of those units could ignore orders.

Detainee mistreatment flies in the face of American ideals — and it strengthens the case of those who fight against us. These methods yield suspect information, and they put our troops, and indeed all Americans, at greater risk of torture and abuse if they are captured by our enemies. When we lower our standards of detainee treatment, others may follow suit; we also provide our enemies with a far better recruiting tool than they could ever produce on their own. And where efforts are made to find legal loopholes and bypass congressional controls, they strain the foundation of our republic by undermining the rule of law.

Closing the doors on the places where torture has occurred — as well as on the attitudes that allowed it to happen — is a crucial first step toward strengthening our position in the world.

But it is only a first step. America needs President Obama to name a nonpartisan commission to investigate the post-Sept. 11 policies and actions regarding the detention, treatment and transfer of security detainees. The mandate of this commission would not be to conduct a criminal investigation; that is the job of our criminal justice system. Rather, this commission would serve the vital purpose of presenting a full picture of policies and actions that followed the 2001 terrorist attacks. We must understand how we got where we are today to ensure that we correct our past mistakes and change our policies going forward.

Taking this step would be fully consistent with President Obama’s commitment to move our country beyond the policies of the past to begin restoring the rule of law.

The chairmen of both the Senate and House Judiciary Committees have called for the creation of a commission to investigate our country’s actions after Sept. 11, including examining questions regarding the detention, treatment and transfer of prisoners. We commend them for their commitment to ensuring a full understanding of what happened and what was authorized in Americans’ names. We believe that a presidential commission is the best way to accomplish this goal. It could move forward quickly and provide the public with the objective and nonpartisan answers that our country needs.

It is in the interest of our nation’s security that President Obama should immediately …

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A good round-up by Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

Carrie Johnson in The Washington Post today picks up on a problem we’ve been writing about at TWI for months now: when it comes to information about crimes committed by the previous administration, President Obama isn’t following through on his big commitments to “open government.”

“Civil liberties advocates are accusing the Obama administration of forsaking campaign rhetoric and adopting the same expansive arguments that his predecessor used to cloak some of the most sensitive intelligence-gathering programs of the Bush White House,” Johnson wrote.

No kidding.

While The Post has mentioned some of these issues in previous stories, it hasn’t given the Obama administration’s surprising position on “state secrets”  nearly the sort of sustained attention that it deserves.  The Obama administration’s use of secrecy privileges to protect the previous administration’s lawbreaking has been going on for months, as I’ve been writing about here, and other legal bloggers, such as Glenn Greenwald at Salon, have been extensively reporting on as well.

Most recently, in the al-Haramain case, in which an Islamic charity sued the government for wiretapping the group and its lawyers without a warrant, the Obama administration told a federal district court that it simply did not have the authority to do what the court ordered (turn over critical documents that would allow the suit to go forward) and hence, it was not going to comply. What’s more, the new, open, free information-loving administration basically threatened to send in the federal marshals to seize from the judge’s files the offending “secret” documents at issue in the case, if he planned to turn them over to al-Haramain’s lawyers. It didn’t matter that the organization’s lawyers had already seen them, and knew exactly what they revealed: that the Bush administration had been secretly wiretapping the Islamic charity and its attorneys, without a warrant, in violation of federal law.

This was the second major Obama Justice Department showdown over the “state secrets” privilege (explained here). The first, which TWI was first to write about, was in the case of Binyam Mohamed and other torture victims suing Jeppesen Dataplan, the Boeing subsidiary that assisted the CIA in transporting the men to be tortured. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the men have pressed their claims against the company in part to avoid the broad range of immunities government officials usually claim — only to be thwarted by the Bush administration’s assertion that the “state secrets” privilege requires its dismissal.  Incredibly – even to the judges, it seemed — the Obama administration has continued to maintain that position.

In response, last month, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and ranking Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (Penn.) introduced a bill that would require judges to look at the classified evidence when the government makes the state secrets claim, rather than blindly accept the government’s claims about the sensitivity of the materials.

Now that the mainstream media is finally taking a serious look at this — as I’ve noted before, some in the press seem to have been willfully avoiding some of these troubling Obama administration positions — that legislation might have a chance.

In case you missed it, Obama does a fine finish (sans teleprompter):

QUESTION: Mr. President, you came to office pledging to work for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. How realistic do you think those hopes are now, given the likelihood of a prime minister who is not fully signed up to a two-state solution and a foreign minister who has been accused of insulting Arabs?

OBAMA: It’s not easier than it was, but I think it’s just as necessary.

We don’t yet know what the Israeli government is going to look like, and we don’t yet know what the future shape of Palestinian leadership is going to be comprised of. What we do know is this: that the status quo is unsustainable, that it is critical for us to advance a two-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side in their own states with peace and security.

And by assigning George Mitchell the task of working as special envoy, what we’ve signaled is that we’re going to be serious from day one in trying to move the parties in a direction that acknowledges that reality.

How effective these negotiations may be, I think we’re going to have to wait and see. But, you know, we — we were here for St. Patrick’s Day, and you’ll recall that we had what had been previously sworn enemies celebrating here in this very room.

You know, leaders from the two sides of Northern Ireland that, you know, a couple of decades ago — or even a decade ago — people would have said could never achieve peace, and here they were, jointly appearing, and talking about their commitment, even in the face of violent provocation.

And what that tells me is that, if you stick to it, if you are persistent, then — then these problems can be dealt with.

That whole philosophy of persistence, by the way, is one that I’m going to be emphasizing again and again in the months and years to come as long as I’m in this office. I’m a big believer in persistence.

I think that, when it comes to domestic affairs, if we keep on working at it, if we acknowledge that we make mistakes sometimes, and that we don’t always have the right answer, and we’re inheriting very knotty problems, that we can pass health care, we can find better solutions to our energy challenges, we can teach our children more effectively, we can deal with a very real budget crisis that is not fully dealt with in my — in my budget at this point, but makes progress.

I think, when it comes to the banking system, you know, it was just a few days ago or weeks ago where people were certain that Secretary Geithner couldn’t deliver a plan. Today, the headlines all look like, "Well, all right, there’s a plan." And I’m sure there will be more criticism, and we’ll have to make more adjustments, but we’re moving in the right direction.

When it comes to Iran, you know, we did a video, sending a message to the Iranian people and the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And some people said, "Well, they did not immediately say that we’re eliminating nuclear weapons and stop funding terrorism." Well, we didn’t expect that. We expect that we’re going to make steady progress on this front.

We haven’t immediately eliminated the influence of lobbyists in Washington. We have not immediately eliminated wasteful pork projects. And we’re not immediately going to get Middle East peace. We’ve been in office now a little over 60 days. What I am confident about is that we’re moving in the right direction and that the decisions we’re making are based on, how are we going to get this economy moving? How are we going to put Americans back to work? How are we going to make sure that our people are safe? And how are we going to create not just prosperity here, but work with other countries for global peace and prosperity?

And we are going to stay with it as long as I’m in this office, and I think that — you look back four years from now, I think, hopefully, people will judge that body of work and say, "This is a big ocean liner. It’s not a speedboat. It doesn’t turn around immediately. But we’re in a better — better place because of the decisions that we made."

All right? Thank you, everybody.

You may have noticed this yourself. Granted, the untrimmed, unpeeled root is an ugly sucker, but once peeled, you have a creamy white globe of goodness. You can chop it up and make a soup (and use an immersion blender if you like). Or you can easily shred it for a salad, like this one from the Kitchn [sic]:

Quick Celery Root Salad with Capers and Lemon
serves 4

1 lemon, juiced
1 head celery root, peeled
Salt and pepper
2 tablespoons walnut oil
1/4 cup good olive oil
2 teaspoons sugar
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
1/3 cup juicy capers, rinsed
Small handful Italian parsley, chopped

Peel the celery root and shred it. Stop halfway through and sprinkle with a tablespoon of the lemon juice to keep the root from turning brown. Shred the other half and toss with another tablespoon of lemon juice. Salt and pepper liberally and toss.

Whisk the remaining lemon juice with the walnut oil, olive oil, sugar, and vinegar. Taste and adjust. Toss with the celery root, capers, and chopped parsley. Serve.

Related: Recipe Recommendation: Celery Root Bisque

Be sure to check out the photo at the link: a beautiful salad.

From The Eldest:

Turn a bit red when you drink a mere half bottle of beer? If you’re of East Asian descent, consider that a warning: You may be at higher risk of alcohol-caused esophageal cancer. Researchers reported the link Monday in hopes of increasing awareness that the inherited flushing trait — found in about a third of people from Japan, China and Korea — offers valuable health information.

Alcohol is a known risk factor for a variety of cancers, including esophageal, and heavier drinking is considered riskier than light drinking.

Lots of people turn slightly red if they imbibe too much. At issue here is facial flushing from a small amount of alcohol. It’s due to a deficiency in an enzyme that helps metabolize alcohol, called ALDH2.

People with a severe deficiency of the enzyme usually don’t drink because it makes them feel too bad; in addition to flushing they feel nausea and a rapid heartbeat.

But people with a partial deficiency — they inherited one bad copy of the enzyme-producing gene instead of two — may put up with the flushing. A series of studies by Dr. Akira Yokoyama of Japan’s Kurihama Alcohol Center found that those people are six to 10 times more likely to develop esophageal cancer than people who drink a comparable amount but aren’t enzyme-deficient.

"Somehow the message just hadn’t gotten out," said Dr. Philip J. Brooks, who researches alcohol and cancer at the U.S. National Institutes of Health…

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Bill Moyers interviews:

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL.

You’ve heard me say before that my heroes are people who do the best of things in the worst of times. They are proving it all over again during this great collapse of the economy.

My friend Peter Dreier, who teaches politics at Occidental College in California, says "This Economy is a Real Killer." He cites research estimating that for every percent the rate of unemployment climbs, an additional 47,000 people die – half from heart attacks. More than 800 are murdered. And nearly twelve hundred commit suicide.

We’re experiencing now what the CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY calls an explosion of demand at shelters for abused women, treatment centers for addiction, health care clinics and counseling centers for troubled young people. In those places of refuge the financial disaster takes on a human face.

With me now is one of my heroes. Marta B. Peláez spends every working day with women and children in need. She is President and CEO of Family Violence Prevention Services in San Antonio, Texas, a city of more than one million people. A clinical psychologist, among her other duties, Marta Peláez oversees a shelter for battered women and children, where the demand for admission has tripled in recent months.

BILL MOYERS: Marta Peláez, welcome to the JOURNAL.

MARTA PELÁEZ: Thank you very much, Bill, for the invitation.

BILL MOYERS: Tell me who these women are who come to see you.

MARTA PELÁEZ: These are women who in the middle of the night, usually a weekend, during a weekend, have to run for their lives and those of their children. They arrive at the shelter with one shoe on, one shoe off, a little baby in their arms, maybe with just diapers on. And the other children crying, scared, clinging onto this woman. To begin life from that point on. That’s who they are.

BILL MOYERS: What do they need from you, when they arrive?

MARTA PELÁEZ:They do not know what they need. They are in shock, and they are traumatized. After 32 years of serving that population, we know that they need comprehensive, long term services. Because the trauma is big. The trauma is long standing. And it needs services to address everything that has happened to them. Legal services, medical services, educational services, therapeutic services, transitional housing, job skills, intervention for the children, all kinds of things.

BILL MOYERS: When did you begin to see a spike in the number of women coming to see you?

MARTA PELÁEZ: About April, May of last year, we began to see numbers increasing in ways that we could not explain, based on patterns of years past. And that peak became a plateau and it stayed with us.

Last year, at this same time, I had 68, 70 on my daily census, women and children. Today, I just called this morning, we had 184 women. 114 of them, of those people, are children.

BILL MOYERS: Do most of these women come with children? …

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Naturally enough, under a Republican administration, the departments charged with protecting workers and their rights have an uphill battle. One agency seems to have been gutted and will have to be rebuilt. Steven Greenhouse reports in the NY Times:

The federal agency charged with enforcing minimum wage, overtime and many other labor laws is failing in that role, leaving millions of workers vulnerable, Congressional auditors have found.

In a report scheduled to be released Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office found that the agency, the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, had mishandled 9 of the 10 cases brought by a team of undercover agents posing as aggrieved workers.

In one case, the division failed to investigate a complaint that under-age children in Modesto, Calif., were working during school hours at a meatpacking plant with dangerous machinery, the G.A.O., the nonpartisan auditing arm of Congress, found.

When an undercover agent posing as a dishwasher called four times to complain about not being paid overtime for 19 weeks, the division’s office in Miami failed to return his calls for four months, and when it did, the report said, an official told him it would take 8 to 10 months to begin investigating his case.

“This investigation clearly shows that Labor has left thousands of actual victims of wage theft who sought federal government assistance with nowhere to turn,” the report said. “Unfortunately, far too often the result is unscrupulous employers’ taking advantage of our country’s low-wage workers.”

The report pointed to a cavalier attitude by many Wage and Hour Division investigators, saying they often dropped cases when employers did not return calls and sometimes told complaining workers that they should file lawsuits, an often expensive and arduous process, especially for low-wage workers.

During the nine-month investigation, the report said, 5 of the 10 labor complaints that undercover agents filed were not recorded in the Wage and Hour Division’s database, and three were not investigated. In two cases, officials recorded that employers had paid back wages, even though they had not.

The accountability office also investigated hundreds of cases that it said the Wage and Hour Division had mishandled. In one, the division waited 22 months to investigate a complaint from a group of restaurant workers. Ultimately, investigators found that the workers were owed $230,000 because managers had made them work off the clock and had misappropriated tips. When the restaurant agreed to pay back wages but not the tips, investigators simply closed the case.

In another case, the accountability office found that workers at a boarding school in Montana were not paid more than $200,000 in overtime. But when the employer offered to pay only $1,000 in back wages as the two-year statute of limitations approached, the division dropped the case.

“We have a crisis in wage theft, and the Department of Labor has not been aggressive enough in recent years,” said Kim Bobo, executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, a group that advocates for low-wage workers. “The new secretary of labor says she’s the new sheriff in town, but I’m concerned she’s facing the wild, wild West of wage theft.”

Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis said she took the report’s findings seriously.

“I am committed to ensuring that every worker is paid at least the minimum wage,” Ms. Solis said, “that those who work overtime are properly compensated, that child labor laws are strictly enforced and that every worker is provided a safe and healthful environment.”

Ms. Solis said the Wage and Hour Division planned to increase its staff by a third by hiring 250 investigators — 100 of them as part of the federal stimulus package — “to refocus the agency on these enforcement responsibilities” and “ensure that contractors on stimulus projects are in compliance with the applicable laws.”

Ms. Solis said the hirings would “reinvigorate the work of this important agency.”…

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In the NY Times, it begins:

The following is a letter sent on Tuesday by Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president of the American International Group’s financial products unit, to Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of A.I.G.

Dear Mr. Liddy,

It is with deep regret that I submit my notice of resignation from A.I.G. Financial Products. I hope you take the time to read this entire letter. Before describing the details of my decision, I want to offer some context:

I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.

After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.

I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.

You and I have never met or spoken to each other, so I’d like to tell you about myself…

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Not for torture this time, but for a US specialty: imprisonment. In particular, imprisonment of immigrants. Daphne Eviatar reports:

A comprehensive report issued by Amnesty International USA Wednesday finds that tens of thousands of immigrants are being held in detention in the United States – many in violation of international law.

Conducted by Amnesty researchers based on interviews over the course of a year with immigration lawyers and judges, asylum seekers, government officials and non-governmental organizations, the report finds that U.S. immigration policy has increasingly detained immigrants – including lawful residents and even some U.S. citizens – without a meaningful ability to challenge their detentions in an objective judicial proceeding, without access to a lawyer to help them determine their legal status, and often in inhumane conditions, commingled with criminals and denied access to minimal health care.

“America should be outraged by the scale of human rights abuses occurring within its own borders,” said Larry Cox, executive director of AIUSA, in a statement released with the report. “Officials are locking up thousands of human beings without due process and holding them in a system that is impossible to navigate. . . . The U.S. government must ensure that every person in immigration detention has a hearing to determine whether that detention is necessary.”

Such arbitrary detentions violate international standards such as the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, says Amnesty. The group calls on Congress to amend the immigration laws to eliminate arbitrary detention, use alternatives to detention where possible and improve detention conditions.

“Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person,” reads Article 9 of the U.N. Covenant. “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention” or deprived of liberty, the Covenant continues, except “in accordance with such procedures as are established by law.”

“For people who are in mandatory detention, where they’re automatically detained without an individualized review, that’s arbitrary detention,” said said Sarnata Reynolds, policy director for refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty USA. “That’s a violation of international law.”

For many immigrants, such individualized review is not happening.

Amnesty researchers interviewed a Buddhist monk from Tibet, for example, who fled to the United States after being imprisoned and tortured twice because of his religious beliefs and political statements in Tibet. When he arrived in New York, he was immediately placed in detention. Although his attorney applied for his release and even submitted an affidavit from a member of the American Tibetan community who pledged to provide the monk lodging and ensure his appearance at immigration hearings, the government never even responded to the attorney’s request. The monk – who did not want his name used out of fear of retaliation — was never permitted to even argue his case for release to an immigration judge. After ten months in detention, he was finally granted permission to remain in the United States in September 2007.

The U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has called on governments to ensure that “alternative and noncustodial measures, such as reporting requirements, should always be considered before resorting to detention.” …

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Interesting story by Greg Gordon of McClatchy:

The CIA, which has been monitoring foreign countries’ use of electronic voting systems, has reported apparent vote-rigging schemes in Venezuela, Macedonia and Ukraine and a raft of concerns about the machines’ vulnerability to tampering.

Appearing last month before a U.S. Election Assistance Commission field hearing in Orlando, Fla., a CIA cybersecurity expert suggested that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his allies fixed a 2004 election recount, an assertion that could further roil U.S. relations with the Latin leader.

In a presentation that could provide disturbing lessons for the United States, where electronic voting is becoming universal, Steve Stigall summarized what he described as attempts to use computers to undermine democratic elections in developing nations. His remarks have received no news media attention until now.

Stigall told the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that Congress created in 2002 to modernize U.S. voting, that computerized electoral systems can be manipulated at five stages, from altering voter registration lists to posting results.

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