Archive for July 2019
Eat more Dragonfruit
Dragonfruit has a texture like a fine-grained watermelon and not so much juice, and the seeds are not only edible but also undetectable in the mouth. Very mild but pleasant flavor. This is part of my eating-more-fruit initiative.
After cutting the fruit in half as shown, just use a teaspoon to eat it from the peel. After finishing:
Border Patrol Detained a 9-Year-Old American Girl on Her Way to School for 32 Hours. She had her passport with her.
Luke Darby reports in GQ:
Last Monday, the Dallas Morning News broke the story of Francisco Erwin Galicia, an 18-year-old U.S. citizen who was detained by Customs and Border Protection (CPB), transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and held in custody for nearly three weeks. ICE held Galicia even though he had documents on him that proved he was born in Texas. But by Tuesday afternoon, a little over 24 hours after the Morning News‘s story came out, Galicia went free.
As the Morning News reports, Galicia’s detention “appears to have been a bureaucratic mix up,” caused by an application for a Mexican visa to visit the U.S. filled out in his name. Galicia told the paper that he was held with 60 other men and not allowed to shower for the 23 days he was held, and by the time he was released he had lost 26 pounds. “It was inhumane how they treated us,” he said. “It got to the point where I was ready to sign a deportation paper just to not be suffering there anymore. I just needed to get out of there.”
The broad strokes of Galicia’s story, a U.S. citizen held by immigration authorities and threatened with deportation because of paperwork, is shockingly common. Peter Sean Brown, a Philadelphia man with the same name as an immigrant, was held for weeks and nearly deported to Jamaica. Officials weren’t swayed by his state-issued IDs that are only available to people with social security numbers. And in March of this year, 9-year-old Julia Medina was detained by CBP for 32 hours despite her being a U.S. citizen.
Though she’s an American, Medina’s family lives in Tijuana, and they cross the border each morning to get to school. On a Monday morning, CBP detained her and her 14-year-old brother, Oscar, saying she didn’t look like the photo in her passport, according to NBC San Diego. CBP said the elementary student, who was questioned without her parents present, “provided inconsistent information during her inspection.” The agency reportedly had no explanation for why it took 32 hours to confirm her citizenship and release her, though in that time they accused her brother, who is also a U.S. citizen, of human smuggling and tried to have him sign a document saying his sister was his cousin. Medina was finally released after her mother pleaded with the Mexican consulate to contact U.S. immigration authorities.
In all of these cases, Galicia, Brown, and Medina had paperwork on them that proved they were U.S. citizens when they were apprehended. . .
The Simple, Odious Reason Mitch McConnell Opposes Election Integrity
Alex Pareene writes in the New Republic:
Mitch McConnell is a victim of a “modern-day McCarthyism,” he claimed on Monday, after people on Twitter called him “Moscow Mitch” simply because he has spent a week blocking legislation intended to protect American elections from foreign interference. The Senate majority leader spent 30 minutes complaining on the Senate floor about the unfairness of it all, though it’s hard to judge the sincerity of his umbrage; he’s been called far worse, for doing far worse. But if McConnell really is hurt by Dana Milbank calling him a “Russian asset,” it does seem like one simple way to make Milbank stop would be to pass legislation designed to secure our elections.
The entire suite of Democratic proposals to improve election security are of course a nonstarter in a Republican-run government, and not just because Republicans have chosen to strategically believe or disbelieve in Russian election interference depending on the president’s moods and ever-shifting statements. Many of the Democratic proposals involve barring candidates and people associated with campaigns and political committees from receiving contributions, monetary and otherwise, from foreign nationals, and Republicans principally oppose most attempts to interfere in any form of influence-peddling. Some of them basically conceded as much, whispering on background to The New York Timesthat McConnell, as reporter Carl Hulse wrote, “is leery of even entering into legislative negotiation that could touch on fund-raising and campaign spending.”
I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over these proposals being blocked, as I imagine they’d be enforced with as much vigor as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is to say not really enforced at all. But it is notable that the most potentially helpful reform proposal the Democrats put forth, which has very little to do with the specter of “foreign interference,” was blocked along with all the rest. The main feature of the Securing America’s Federal Elections (SAFE) Act is a requirement that all federal elections use paper ballots.
Paper ballot requirements are one of those issues various Republicans and conservatives, even quite extreme ones, occasionally voice support for in order to sound Reasonable. Mark Meadows of the House Freedom Caucus introduced a bill requiring paper ballot receipts last year, which anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist and former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff approvingly mentioned in aWashington Post op-ed. The op-ed also mentioned another Senate bill requiring paper ballots, introduced by Democrats and Republicans (including Trump ally Lindsey Graham) in 2017 and 2018.
So far, McConnell and his allies have explained their opposition to the Democrats’ SAFE Act mainly by sidestepping the content of the legislation entirely. McConnell’s central opposition is that the bill is “partisan,” which is to say that Democrats want to pass it, which means, by definition, that McConnell cannot allow it to pass. (Or even be voted on: It might then attract some Republican support, which would make the bill less partisan, removing the basis of his opposition.)
This is enough for some conservatives. National Review, mostly applauding McConnell’s intransigence, offers only this in explanation of why the SAFE bill should have been blocked: “The Democrats tried to push these bills by unanimous consent. One of them, a bill giving states hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade their voting systems and requiring the use of paper ballots, had already passed the House—and won only a single Republican vote, meaning its support is far from unanimous.”
In general, though, when Republicans oppose election reform proposals that would make our elections easier to efficiently and fairly administer—and require that they be efficiently and fairly administered—they appeal to federalism and the tradition of local control of elections. (National Review, again: “This is an area traditionally handled by the states, and on those grounds McConnell has held up several efforts, some with bipartisan support, in recent months.”)
McConnell has supported sweeping, top-down federal election reforms in the past. In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, a largely useless set of reforms that had the side effect of rewarding the manufacturers of easily hackable electronic voting machines. (That bill’s only opponents in the Senate were, of all people, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, who opposed HAVA’s voter ID requirements.) But we are a long way from 2002, and the invocation of tradition and local control should make it clear what Republican opposition to electoral reform is about: Not doing Putin’s bidding, but Brian Kemp’s.
Kemp is currently the governor of Georgia, having won an election he was also then administering as secretary of state. Georgia’s paperless touchscreen voting machines have been in use since Georgia signed a $54 million contract with Diebold to purchase them days after HAVA became law. Since 2002, they’ve been insecure, and made proper election audits impossible. Advocates and voters are currently suing to force Georgia to immediately adopt paper ballots. Just last week they filed a brief accusing Kemp and his current secretary of state of destroying evidence by wiping servers and overwriting data on voting machines themselves.
America’s elections are a patchwork of fiefdoms, many run by secretaries of state (many of whom are Republicans), some directly run by state parties themselves. Republicans oppose federal reform of the system because it could deny them the ability to create chaos—chaos that sends the other side’s votes to the wrong polling places, purges thousands or hundreds of thousands from the rolls, and strands urban voters in long lines. Chaos that could create opportunities for—and plausible deniability about—more serious fraud and criminality. Chaos that makes it hard to believe this Senate will ever allow truly secure paper ballot regulations, with strict regular audits, to become a national requirement.
If anything, . . .
Why Private Equity Should Not Exist
Matt Stoller is worth following. His most recent column begins:
Earlier this month, a former Toys “R” Us employee named Sarah Woodhams confronted Democratic Presidential candidate Julian Castro. Woodhams told Castro about her experience at the corporation. She worked there for seven years, and then was laid off with no severance because a set of private equity firms bought the company and looted it. What she described is not an isolated instance, but an increasingly common one in America. Woodhams told Castro that “dozens of retail companies controlled by Wall Street have gone into bankruptcy, including RadioShack, Payless, and Kmart,” with 15,000 jobs alone in Pennsylvania having disappeared.
“Billionaires buy up these companies, make huge profits on our backs, and get away with it because there’s no financial regulation,” Sarah Woodhams explained. “As president, what will you do to hold private equity firms and hedge funds accountable for the destruction of our communities and livelihoods?”
Partly because of organizing by workers like Woodhams, partly because of the scale of the industry, private equity is becoming an important part of the political dialogue. Millions of workers working for companies controlled by PE funds. As I noted above, the debate is now hot; Elizabeth Warren released a plan specifically on private equity, paralleled by a report on financial power by Republican Marco Rubio in March. More importantly, Castro was confronted by an activist. Castro was embarrassed because he did not seem to know what PE was, so you can be sure the other Presidential candidates are preparing talking points on PE for their bosses. That’s a big deal, when even the mediocre politicians start to get it.
So what is private equity? In one sense, it’s a simple question to answer. A private equity fund is a large unregulated pool of money run by financiers who use that money to invest in and/or buy companies and restructure them. They seek to recoup gains through dividend pay-outs or later sales of the companies to strategic acquirers or back to the public markets through initial public offerings. But that doesn’t capture the scale of the model. There are also private equity-like businesses who scour the landscape for companies, buy them, and then use extractive techniques such as price gouging or legalized forms of complex fraud to generate cash by moving debt and assets like real estate among shell companies. PE funds also lend money and act as brokers, and are morphing into investment bank-like institutions. Some of them are public companies.
While the movement is couched in the language of business, using terms like strategy, business models returns of equity, innovation, and so forth, and proponents refer to it as an industry, private equity is not business. On a deeper level, private equity is the ultimate example of the collapse of the enlightenment concept of what ownership means. Ownership used to mean dominion over a resource, and responsibility for caretaking that resource. PE is a political movement whose goal is extend deep managerial controls from a small group of financiers over the producers in the economy. Private equity transforms corporations from institutions that house people and capital for the purpose of production into extractive institutions designed solely to shift cash to owners and leave the rest behind as trash. Like much of our political economy, the ideas behind it were developed in the 1970s and the actual implementation was operationalized during the Reagan era.
Now what I just described is of course not the rationale that private equity guys give for their model. According to them, PE takes underperforming companies and restructures them, delivering needed innovation for the economy. PE can also invest in early stages, helping to build new businesses with risky capital. There is some merit to the argument. Pools of capital can invest to improve companies, and many funds have built a company here and there. But only small-scale funds really do that, or such examples are exceptions to the rule or involve building highly financialized scalable businesses, like chain stores that roll up an industry (such as Staples, financed by Bain in the 1980s). At some level, having a pool of funds means being able to invest in anything, including building good businesses in a dynamic economy where creative destruction leads to better products and services. Unfortunately, these days PE emphasizes the “destruction” part of creative destruction.
The takeover of Toys “R” Us is a good example of what private equity really does. Bain Capital, KKR, and Vornado Realty Trust bought the public company in 2005, loading it up with debt. By 2007, though Toys “R” Us was still an immensely popular toy store, the company was spending 97% of its operating profit on debt service. Bain, KKR, and Vornado were technically the ‘owners’ of Toys “R” Us, but they were not liable for any of the debts of the company, or the pensions. Periodically, Toys “R” Us would pay fees to Bain and company, roughly $500 million in total. The toy store stopped innovating, stopped taking care of its stores, and cut costs as aggressively as possible so it could continue the payout. In 2017, the company finally went under, liquidating its stores and firing all of its workers without severance. A lot of people assume Amazon or Walmart killed Toys “R” Us, but it was selling massive numbers of toys until the very end (and toy suppliers are going to suffer as the market concentrates). What destroyed the company were financiers, and public policies that allowed the divorcing of ownership from responsibility.
The Origins of the Model: Building a “Counter-intelligentsia”
If there is a father to the private equity industry, it is a man named William Simon. Simon is perhaps one of the most important American political figures of the 1970s and early 1980s, a brilliant innovator in politics, financial, and in how ideas are produced in American politics. Simon was an accountant, a nerd, but also an apocalyptically oriented conservative financier who was a bond trader and top executive at Salomon Brothers in the 1960s and 1970s. Beyond ruthless, Simon believed in ruthlessness as a moral philosophy. He was, according to a friend, “a mean, nasty, tough bond trader who took no BS from anyone,” and would apparently wake up his children on weekend mornings with buckets of cold water. He was such a difficult person that he was invited onto the Citibank board of directors, and shortly thereafter, essentially kicked off.
In the early 1970s, Simon went into politics, a leader at the Treasury Department under Nixon and Ford. He oversaw not just Treasury but became the the ‘Energy Czar’ in charge of the oil crisis, and a key player in rejecting New York City’s 1975 request for funds to ward off bankruptcy. Simon, along with a few others like Pete Peterson, came out of the Nixon administration with a better reputation than he had going in, perceived as a neutral and competent technocrat. Simon saw both prosperity and poison in Nixon and Ford. He supported the attacks on New York City’s and the forced austerity by the Federal government, but he also despised Nixon’s attempted economy-wide price controls to deal with inflation.
After his time at the Treasury, Simon turned to intellectual organizing, because he believed that the Republicans were soft. Simon though Republicans, even when they had power, as Nixon or Ford of Governors like Nelson Rockefeller of New York, were still liberal, operating as conservative Phyllis Schafly put it, merely “an echo” of the Democrats. So he sought to finance thinkers in academia to restructure how elites did policy, or as he put it, a “counter-intelligentsia.” He became the President of the Olin Foundation, the key conservative foundation providing money to the nascent law and economics movement, the conservative intellectual backlash against New Deal controls on finance and corporate power. Law and economics wasn’t perceived of as a right-wing institutional framework, but a scientific one. Olin gave to Harvard Law to build out a law and economics program, and financial supremacy over corporations was accepted quickly in liberal citadels.
The law and economics movement helped build the intellectual edifice for PE, a model designed to restructure the American economy from the very beginning. In 1965, Henry Manne, a law and economics organizer, wrote about the “market for corporate control,” putting forth financial markets where corporations were bought and sold as the essential mechanisms for firing inefficient managers and replacing them with ones who would look out for the owners.
In 1965, Manne was ahead of his time, because most people thought American businesses were well-run. But in the 1970s, in an inflationary environment and as foreign imports began coming into the U.S. in force, this belief collapsed. In 1970, Milton Friedman put forward the shareholder value of the firm, a theory that the only reason for the corporation to exist is to maximize shareholder value. In 1976, Michael Jensen, the intellectual patron saint of PE, refined these concepts into a paper titled “Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure,” arguing that loading up firms with debt would discipline wasteful management, and that placing ownership in the hands of a few would force managers to be attentive to efficient operation of the corporation.
The increasingly widespread belief that American corporations were mismanaged, inflationary chaos, and a crisis of confidence among liberals combined into what was a political revolution in commerce. William Simon was both both a participant in and a moral light for this revolution. In the mid-1970s, he (or his ghostwriter) put pen to paper, and wrote a book popular among members of “the new right” as the large class of 1978 Congressional Republicans (which included a young Newt Gingrich) was known. His book was called A Time for Truth, and along with Robert Bork’s Antitrust Paradox, it gave the New Right a language to marry morality and political economics. Reagan would run on New Right themes in 1980.
A Time for Truth reflected Simon’s hardcore attitude. It was a jeremiad, with terms tossed around like ‘economic dictatorship’, charges of Communism and fascism, and a screed about the perils of government. The book was introduced by the intellectual godfather of the right-wing, the Austrian economist, F.A. Hayek, who lauded it as “a brilliant and passionate book by a brilliant and passionate man.” Simon popularized the pseudo-scientific term, ‘capital shortage,’ or the the idea that businesses simply didn’t have the incentive to invest in factories because of government rules or fear of inflation. This led to inflation, lower productivity, and stagnation. The solution would be simple: cut capital gains taxes, cut government spending, reduce antitrust enforcement, and stop regulating through public institutions.
The Carter administration and Congressional Democrats took Simon’s advice, and slashed capital gains taxes, cutting the maximum rate to 28% from 49% in 1978. They deregulated trucking, finance, airplanes, and railroads. In addition, changes in pension laws enabled American retirement savings to flood into new vehicles, like venture capital and its cousin, what would first be known as leveraged buy-outs and then private equity. The Reagan administration’s further deregulation of finance enabled a long bull market in the 1980s as speculators took control of the economy. Shareholders no longer were content to leave their money in stocks that paid dividends, because they could now keep most of their capital gains. And the chaos unleashed by deregulation opened up the door to corporate restructuring of corporations who had been tightly controlled by public rules, but were now free to enter and exit new businesses.
In 1982, William Simon turned into a leader of the financial revolution. He pulled off the first large scale leveraged buyout, of a company called Gibson Greeting cards, a deal that shocked Wall Street. He and his partner paid $80 million for Gibson, buying the company from the struggling conglomerate RCA. The key was that they didn’t use their own money to buy the company, instead using Simon’s political credibility and connections to borrow much of the necessary $79 million from Barclays Bank and General Electric, only putting down $330,000 apiece. They immediately paid themselves a $900,000 special dividend from Gibson, made $4 million selling the company’s real estate assets, and gave 20% of the shares to the managers of the company as an incentive to keep the stock price in mind. Eighteen months later, they took Gibson public in a bull market, selling the company at $270 million. Simon cleared $70 million personally in a year and a half off an investment of $330,000, an insanely great return on such a small investment. Eyes popped all over Wall Street, and Gibson became the starting gun for the mergers and acquisitions PE craze of the 1980s.
Another business trend intersected with changes in policy encouraging financial dominance: the rise of management consulting. Like law and economics, management consultants rose in the late 1960s with pseudo-scientific theories about business, and they began treating corporations as financial portfolios, with subsidiaries of assets. Many of the organizers of private equity firms in the 1980s came from management consulting firms like the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey. Mitt Romney was an early innovator around PE. He came from Bain, which was a consulting firm. To give you a sense of what that meant in terms of the philosophy of commerce, here’s Bain Consulting today, helping companies find ways to innovate around raising prices instead of productive techniques. . .
Continue reading. There’s a lot more.
Facebook buys settlement to avoid investigation and production of documents
Matt Stoller writes in Big:
Details about the Facebook Settlement: FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra was on MSNBC on Sunday to talk about the Facebook settlement. Chopra, along with the other Democratic commissioner, dissented from the settlement. He pointed out that the FTC didn’t bother to complete the investigation and that the FTC didn’t get documents from Mark Zuckerberg, in return for which Facebook paid a $5 billion fine. It’s a very ugly situation in what looks like a corrupt deal, Facebook buys a liability release and the FTC gets a headline with $5 billion in it.
In fact, that whole column is worth reading. Another tidbit:
Boeing Customers In Trouble Until Boeing “Gets Its Shit Together:” Low cost Irish airline Ryanair CEO had choice words for Boeing:
Ryanair has 135 of the 737 Max models on order, the first five of which are due for delivery in the autumn, but they will not be able to fly until regulators have declared the plane safe.
O’Leary warned that Ryanair may not have any of the planes ready by next summer unless Boeing “gets its shit together” in making upgrades required for regulators to allow the plane to fly.
I don’t think anyone in power recognizes just how much trouble Boeing is in. The leadership has no idea what to do because they don’t actually know how to build safe planes. The CEO was hired for his political prowess in covering up problems, not solving them.
Is The Movement To Eat Less Meat Actually Making A Difference?
The answer is clearly “Yes,” at least so far as I’m concerned. My new diet of no meat, no dairy, no eggs, and no refined/processed food has made a great difference. But in general? Lynne Curry reports for HuffPost:
Would it surprise you to learn that 95% of the people who bought a plant-based burger this past year were meat eaters?
The National Restaurant Association’s 2019 What’s Hot report shows that a lot of omnivores are choosing alternative proteins they believe are better for their health and the Earth. And groundbreaking, celebrity-endorsed non-beef burgers, such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger, are satisfying people’s protein cravings while driving a national meat-free trend.
“Most surveys definitely show that anywhere between 30 and 50% [of people] are interested in cutting down on meat,” Becky Ramsing of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future told HuffPost. The institution’s current research is focused on “getting our brains around” why a growing number of people are reducing their meat consumption without becoming vegetarian or vegan.
To be sure, the public messaging to eat less meat is inescapable. Health reports continue to link red meat and processed meat to chronic diseases. Animal welfare groups campaign for shoppers to buy humane animal products and choose plant-based substitutes instead of factory-farmed meats.
And then there’s climate change. World Resources Institute and other environmental groups have sounded a call to action to cut our impact on the environment in half by eating less meat and dairy.
Although Americans still eat four times as much meat as the rest of the world, the demand for plant-based foods soared 20% last year, compared with 8% in 2017.
It’s clear that the American diet is shifting. But are there any signs that it’s making a difference?
What Experts Say
Brian Kateman is the founder of the Reducetarian Movement, built on the core belief that cutting back is more effective than cutting out meat completely. He says that even a 10% reduction in meat consumption can have significant effects on personal health, the lives of 70 billion farm animals and global warming.
As the author of “The Reducetarian Solution” (and editor of “The Reducetarian Cookbook”), Kateman’s goal is to unify everyone who is purposefully reducing the amount of animal products they consume. “I think we are finally starting to see a trend of folks recognizing that meat consumption isn’t an all-or-nothing premise and that vegan food isn’t just for vegans,” Kateman told HuffPost.
The popular concept of Meatless Mondays is also based on the idea that simple steps lead to sweeping change. The campaign promotes “one day a week, cut out meat” to help people gradually shift away from meat-heavy diets. With an appealing message and endorsements by the Humane Society of the United States, Friends of the Earth and many others, schools, hospitals and corporate cafeterias nationwide now embrace Meatless Mondays.
As the campaign’s technical adviser, the Center for a Livable Future calculatedthat if everyone who knows about Meatless Mondays — 32% of Americans surveyed — followed it faithfully for 52 weeks, it would be the equivalent of taking 1.6 million cars off the road for a year.
There is more evidence that people can fight climate change with their forks. A Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) report called “Less Beef, Less Carbon” found that by reducing beef consumption by 19% from 2005 to 2014, Americans dramatically reduced carbon emissions equivalent to 39 million fewer cars.
To put it in more personal terms, Sujatha Bergen, the NRDC’s health campaigns director, told HuffPost, “If the average American cut just a quarter pound of beef a week from their diet, about one hamburger, it would be the equivalent of taking 10 million cars off the road for a year.”
Food’s Carbon Footprint
Beef isn’t the only food that produces emissions that contribute to global warming. As Bergen explained, all food involves energy, fossil fuels and fertilizer. But cows, along with sheep (but few people eat lamb), are ruminants with a digestive system that generates methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases. Their waste produces another, nitrous oxide. . .
Woody Almond and Woods and the Dorco PL602
That’s the Emperor 2 Best. I once had an Emperor 1, a small but powerful little brush. The 2 did a fine job with Meißner Tremonia’s Woody Almond shaving paste, which makes a very nicely fragranced lather.
Three passes with the wonderful Dorco PL602 (and again my thanks to Victor Marks for pointing it out) left my face perfectly smooth with never so much as the threat of nick, and good splash of Woods aftershave from the belated Saint Charles Shave finished the job.
The Opioid Crisis Is About More Than Corporate Greed
Zachary Siegel reports in the New Republic:
“Just like Doritos keep eating. We’ll make more.”
“It’s like people are addicted to these things or something. Oh, wait, people are…”
These lines are from emails sent between opioid manufacturers and distributors, recently pried loose by attorneys general suing Big Pharma for its role in fueling a massive wave of overdose deaths. Similar to the damning internal memos revealing that Big Tobacco knew that cigarettes indeed caused cancer, these emails appear to show that Big Pharma knew that a significant share of their product was landing in the street, feeding addiction. And yet they kept shipping out obscene quantities to rural towns across America, creating even more demand.
Nearly every step of the pharmaceutical supply chain is implicated in the soaring death rate. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, prescription opioids killed 218,000 people from 1999 to 2017. Many of the companies—from Johnson & Johnson to obscure distributors like Cardinal Health—are listed as defendants in hundreds of lawsuits filed by nearly every state in the country. The government thinks these corporations should pay up and treat the addiction their products caused. But the companies claim to have been acting legally and in compliance with federal regulators like the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Was it all, technically, legal?
What the opioid crisis illustrates is not that there are a few bad apples in the pharmaceutical industry, but that the country’s entire health care system is driven by profit at the expense of public health and safety. Drug manufacturers, pharmacy chains, drug distributors, and insurance companies got rich while people, especially people lower down the income ladder, suffered—and the DEA, through neglect or incompetence or a mix of both, watched it all happen.
While there are significant similarities between Big Pharma and Big Tobacco, there is also a key difference that makes today’s story of corporate malfeasance even worse: namely, that the supply chain for tobacco is much simpler than opioids, which are, theoretically, tightly controlled substances that pass through a dizzying array of actors and regulators.
First, a doctor must write a prescription, which must be filled at a pharmacy, and is likely paid for by an insurance company. Depending on the needs of their customers, pharmacies place orders for these drugs (customers, it turns out, need a lot of them). Shipping companies then go between the pharmacy and the drug manufacturers. Overseeing this entire system is the DEA, which sets the quota for how many opioids a company is allowed to manufacture, and tracks where those pills go.
While politicians are making hay out of Big Pharma’s wanton greed and recklessness, far less attention has been paid to the DEA. Attorneys general suing Big Pharma recently unearthed a database that both the corporations and the government—each for their own self-interested reasons—fought to keep sealed, called the Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System (ARCOS). Mammoth in size and granular in detail, ARCOS tracks the shipments of every single controlled substance, from the company that manufactured it, to the company that shipped it, to the pharmacy that received it. It is the world atlas for how the opioid crisis began.
All told, from 2006 to 2012, roughly 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pills criss-crossed America, according to a Washington Post analysis. While many of these pills went to legitimate patients, millions more were showered on troubled communities with a voracious thirst for pain relief. While drug manufacturers produced more and more opioids (approved by the DEA), and distributors shipped those pills to pharmacies all over the country (tracked by the DEA), drug companies saw record profits—and America’s overdose death rate soared off the charts.
“I think this [database] brings home what we all knew,” says Corey Davis, an attorney and public health expert at the Network for Public Health Law. “This wasn’t just incompetence on the part of the DEA and the Department of Justice, it was knowing and intentional failure to do what most people think is their jobs.”
What is the DEA’s job, exactly? Its first task, and the one most associated with the agency, is the Sicario-esque disruption of illicit flows of drugs coming into the U.S. from abroad, like intercepting speedboats filled with cocaine. Its other major responsibility is controlling licit pharmaceuticals. “The whole goal of the prescription system is to make sure that patients are getting their medications, and that medications are not going to those who aren’t patients,” which is called “diversion,” says Bryce Pardo, a drug policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. “That’s the whole point of the system, which was invented a hundred years ago. Clearly, the system broke. The system failed.”
Pardo points out, in the DEA’s defense, the story of a so-called DEA whistle-blower blaming a pharma-backed piece of legislation passed by Congress in 2016, which prevented agents from stopping suspicious shipments of opioids, and stunted investigations into the very corporations that are now being villainized and sued. Just as DEA agents were working their way up the pharmaceutical supply chain, much as they would in a case against any transnational crime organization, Congress hamstrung their enforcement efforts.
Or so the story goes—but that’s not the whole of it. “These companies, often times acting legally, were asking for preclearance from the DEA to go about their business,” says Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University (where I’m currently a journalism fellow). “Now, the DEA is saying their hands were tied when, in fact, their hands were not tied. They were completely asleep at the wheel. And by the time the DEA began constricting the [prescription] supply and targeting certain doctors and distributors, it was too late.”
In drug policy scholarship, there is a concept called the “balloon hypothesis.” When one end of a balloon gets squeezed, the air inside, rather than disappearing, rushes to fill the other end of the balloon. The balloon hypothesis is used to describe, often critically, America’s drug enforcement strategy. If cocaine production in Colombia is stamped out, production will shift to, say, Peru. If the Dark Web’s Silk Road gets shut down, a new Dark Web market pops up. The air has to go somewhere.
The balloon hypothesis also applies to the ever-shifting demand for drugs. “Over a period of 20 years, the DEA provided the green light to a 39-fold increase in the oxycodone quota and a 12-fold increase in the hydrocodone quota, even as our opioid epidemic unfolded,” Senator Dick Durbin wrote in a letter to the editor to The Washington Post.
In other words, the prescription balloon expanded, under the DEA’s watch, big time. But starting in 2011, the prescription market finally began to shrink after Purdue Pharma reformulated its blockbuster drug OxyContin with so-called abuse deterrent technology, and pill mills serving the black market were shut down. The supply was squeezed. The air still had to go somewhere, and it rushed to deadlier opioids like heroin spiked with illicit fentanyl. With enforcement focused on prescription opioids, the overdose crisis got worse.
Dan Ciccarone, a physician-researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who studies heroin use, says the crisis unfolded in three waves: . . .
Continue reading. There’s much more, including some pertinent observations on reducing demand (which ultimately is the only solution).
Proof Ole Miss Knew Identities of Two Students Who Posed in Front of Shot-Up Emmett Till Sign, But Did Little
Jerry Mitchell, Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, reports in ProPublica:
When the head of the University of Mississippi condemned fraternity members last week for posing with guns in front of a bullet-riddled memorial to the slain 14-year-old civil rights icon Emmett Till, he defended the campus investigation and the decision not to discipline the students.
He said Ole Miss had been unable to identify “all” the students involved when it received the complaint “or that they were all affiliated with the same fraternity.”
But the statement was misleading.
A bias complaint filed in March, and obtained by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica, clearly identifies two of the men by name and their membership in Kappa Alpha Order.
The photo “shows three boys, at least two of whom are members of KA at Ole Miss,” the complaint reads.
On Monday, following questions from the news organizations about the discrepancy, interim Chancellor Larry Sparks acknowledged that his administration had mishandled the investigation and said that he has launched an internal review into a “breakdown in communications” that prevented a full examination of the incident by university administrators.
“Our ongoing review has updated our understanding of some key facts in this process,” Sparks wrote in response to questions from the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica.
The bias incident investigation “process has not concluded,” he wrote. “We will proceed accordingly to make all appropriate referrals and assessments.”
The complaint filed in March included a copy of a photo that student Ben LeClere posted on March 1 to his private Instagram account. The image showed LeClere and two fraternity brothers in front of a roadside plaque commemorating the site where Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River. The 14-year-old black youth was tortured and killed in August 1955. An all-white, all-male jury acquitted two white men charged with Till’s murder. His death helped launch the modern civil rights movement.
LeClere was clutching a shotgun in the photo, and fraternity brother John Lowe was squatting beneath the bullet-pocked sign. A third fraternity member stands on the other side of the sign with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. (The complaint misidentified Lowe as holding the rifle when he was in fact squatting.)
It appears that man is Howell Logan, a Kappa Alpha member who was identified on Twitter and Instagram by former high school classmates from the private Deerfield-Windsor School in Albany, Georgia. Logan was a star athlete there.
Late last week, three social media accounts appearing to belong to Logan were deleted, around the same time as social media accounts bearing the names of LeClere and Lowe were deleted. The image in the Instagram photo is strikingly similar to photos shared by Logan’s former classmates. Logan’s height also appears to match the height of the man seen in the photograph.
Logan did not return requests for comment, and neither did LeClere and Lowe. It is not clear whether the students shot the memorial or were merely posing in front of it.
The Kappa Alpha chapter at Ole Miss suspended the three men in the photo last week after being asked for comment by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica.
In his initial statement on Friday, Sparks called the photo “offensive.” The university, he said, had turned over the image to the FBI, which concluded no specific crime had occurred.
Susan Glisson, who ran Ole Miss’ William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation for two decades before retiring in 2016, called the university’s response so far “unconscionable.”
She questioned why Ole Miss officials deferred their own inquiry while awaiting an FBI decision. “Pursuing the possibility of an investigation did not prevent the university from engaging in long-established protocols for how to respond to incidents like this,” she said.
On Monday, Sparks acknowledged that Ole Miss officials had confirmed the status of the two named students shortly after the complaint was filed. LeClere is currently an enrolled junior and majoring in managerial finance. Lowe is not currently enrolled. . .
Over 900 migrant children have been taken from their parents since President Trump officially ended separations, according to Justice Dept. data.
Miriam Jordan reports in the NY Times.
More than a year after President Trump officially ended migrant family separations at the southern border, immigration authorities continue to routinely separate families for reasons as minor as a parent not changing a baby’s diaper or having a traffic citation for driving without a license, according to new documents filed Tuesday in federal court.
More than 900 children have been removed from an adult — usually a parent — with whom they arrived at the southern border since June of 2018, according to tallies provided by the Department of Justice to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging the separations.
“The administration is still doing family separation under the guise that they are protecting children from their own parents even though the criminal history they are citing is either wrong or shockingly minor,” said Lee Gelernt, with the A.C.L.U.’s Immigrants Rights Project. “This is just circumventing the court’s order.”
The new numbers were filed with Judge Dana M. Sabraw in San Diego as part of the court’s continuing supervision of the family separation issue. In its motion on Tuesday, the civil rights group asked the judge to clarify a set of standards for such separations that would ensure that children are taken from their parents only when there is evidence that the parent is a genuine danger to the child, or is unfit to provide care.
Family separations began occurring in large numbers in the spring of 2018 under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” border enforcement policy, which called for nearly all adults who entered the country illegally to face criminal prosecution. Any children accompanying them were placed in shelters or foster care. Migrant families often ended up hundreds or thousands of miles apart for weeks or longer.
After Mr. Trump terminated the policy and Judge Sabraw issued an order to reunify all separated families, cases of separations dropped precipitously. But they have recently been climbing rapidly, Mr. Gelernt said, with a total of 911 separations over the past year.
The latest separations are mainly based on crimes committed by the parent, according to the new documents, but A.C.L.U. lawyers argue that many of the violations are as minor as traffic tickets.
“Right now, the government can separate based on any criminal history, regardless of the severity, and based on subjective criteria,” Mr. Gelernt said. “We want them only separating in specific circumstances.”
The separations were central to the Trump administration’s . . .
The optics are bad but the reality is worse. What has the US become? Those children are traumatized and will suffer for years from the official actions of the US government.
Prayer to Our Lady of Waiting Rooms
Carrie Shipers is the author of Family Resemblances (University of New Mexico Press, 2016); Cause for Concern (Able Muse Press, 2014), selected by Molly Peacock for the 2014 Able Muse Book Award; and Ordinary Mourning (ABZ Press, 2010). She teaches at Rhode Island College in Providence, and she wrote this poem:
Prayer to Our Lady of Waiting Rooms
Let the seats be plentiful and padded.
Let the magazines be recent or let the book
I’ve brought last until we can leave.
Let the TV on its bolted stand be off,
muted, or showing something I can ignore—
weather, gameshows, CNN. Let the room
be mostly empty—no one shouting, sobbing,
asking about my husband’s health.
Let everyone be strangers except
the staff. Let the walls be freshly painted,
soothing to behold. Let my husband
be there for a physical or routine checkup.
Let no one comment on my clothes
or unwashed hair, how I can sit
so calmly while he has staples
or a catheter removed, his lungs or heart
or kidneys tested, an infected wound
debrided. Under no circumstances
let me be called into the back by a nurse
who touches my arm, says I’m sorry but—
Let my husband walk out whistling
before I’ve finished my book, looked
at my watch too many times. Let the news
be good or benign, his next appointment
not for months. When the waiting is over,
let us walk outside feeling better,
or at least no worse, than we did before
Walk flowers
The top of the photo is severely cropped because I wanted to remove the close-up of my finger. To make up for that, here’s a photo of Molly resting.
The Anger of the White Male Lie
Ijeoma Oluo has a good essay in Medium:
I’m reading an email from a white man. It is about 15 paragraphs of poorly written vitriol, telling me in far too many words about how wrong I am. About everything. I’m wrong about feminism. It’s unnecessary. And by the way, the wage gap doesn’t exist. I’m even more wrong about racism. There is no more racism. It’s been over a very long time and maybe if people like me would just get over the past we’d be motivated to get off of our asses and get real jobs. As proof of how wrong I am, he’s included links to youtube videos made by other white men saying pretty much the exact same thing as him. He has also inserted a few graphs. He consistently calls me “Ms. Oluo” and reiterates a few times that he “means no disrespect” but it is clear from his insistence that I read all of his horrible paragraphs and that I “learn a little more” about “my people” that he means every bit of disrespect his poorly phrased sentences are capable of conveying and more.
He suggests that I try being “less angry” as if it is not anger that propelled him through a google search of my name, to my website, to my contact page, then to his email, and then through the writing of a billion paragraphs complete with charts and footnotes. He says “less angry” as if I am not currently adding his email into a file with countless other long-winded missives, dismissals and violent threats from white men who decided to take the time out of their day to let me know in sometimes very disturbing ways that they need me to be “less angry.”
In closing he puts his full name and title. He’s a woodcarver and personal trainer. And, apparently, expert on race and gender studies.
Somebody needs to stop telling these white boys that they can be anything they put their mind to.
I say that in jest. A lot. But I’m only half joking. Actually, I’m not joking at all. Somebody really does need to stop telling these white boys that they can be anything, and that they can have everything. Because it is not true, and it was never true, and we’re the ones who have to pay when they find that out.
Angry black woman.
I’m the angry black woman. I’m the shouting, take no shit, finger-wagging, side-eye giving black woman. I am angry about a lot of things. I’m angry about police brutality and systemic poverty and the school to prison pipeline. I’m angry because the community I love is threatened daily and has been for hundreds of years.
There is righteous anger born of love. Born of the desire to protect those that you love and the life that you love. Anger born of the need to hold tight what little joy and beauty you’ve been able to find in a hostile world.
I was never told by this society that I could be anything and I could have everything. I was always told to settle for less. And my anger and the anger of so many other marginalized people has always lied in that reality. The truth of the situation.
But white male anger is steeped in a lie. It is fighting for what they were never going to have. For the promises that were never going to be fulfilled. White men are the only people allowed to fully believe in the American dream and perhaps that is the cruelest thing to have ever been done to them and the world that has to suffer their anger as they refuse to let go of a fantasy that we were never allowed to imagine ourselves in.
White men who shoot up schools and workplaces are not murderous monsters, or mindless thugs. They are “lovesick” or “misunderstood” or “tragic.” Hundreds of thousands of words are dedicated to finding the reasons why someone with so much promise could have fallen so far.
But how much promise was there really?
How much promise is there in a life where you are told that all you have to do is exist in order to inherit a kingdom. How much promise is there in a life where your mediocrity is constantly applauded and every hero looks like you and every love interest is a supermodel, but at the end of the day you will be working in a cubicle with everyone else and your only consolation is that you will be making $1.50 an hour more than the women and people of color in your office?
How much promise is there in being told that your culture is the only one worth knowing, and that your language is the only one worth speaking? How much promise is there in never having to say you are sorry, never having to say you are wrong, never having to say you don’t know?
Many Americans love to laugh at the ridiculousness of monarchy. At these backwards countries who believe that simply by being born, these bluebloods deserve to rule entire populations. But what is white male supremacy in America if not an overabundance of kingdom-less monarchs who can’t even speak French?
A few weeks ago I was sitting at a stoplight and realized that I wasn’t quite as sure how to get home as I’d initially thought. As I punched the “home” button on my Waze app on my phone I heard shouting to the right of my car. I looked over and there was a white man in an SUV waving his arms at me and yelling. He was furious that I’d dared to look at my phone in my car. He was oblivious to the fact that I was trying to actually be a safer driver by knowing where I was actually going. He just knew that he had pulled up next to me and I had my phone in my hand and he had to do something. He leaned out of the window of his SUV and spittle flew out of his mouth as he angrily shouted.
I looked straight ahead as he screamed, becoming angrier and angrier. I was afraid that he might be armed, he seemed out of control. The light turned green and I pulled forward, but the man next to me was too busy yelling to notice right away. Then, angry that I had pulled forward before him, he sped ahead with such force that I could hear his tires squeeling. He peeled in front of me and then had to swerve out of the way at the last minute to avoid hitting a car that was stalled around the corner. I shook my head in wonder at the absurdity of it all.
I wrote about the weird event on facebook, figuring if anything, it would be entertaining to my friends. Within a few seconds a commenter, a white woman, said, “Let me guess, this was a white man?” She had her own story about being yelled at for driving in a way that a white man disapproved of. Soon, many others were sharing their stories. . . .
Poem about Tree of Life synagogue massacre wins Doolin poetry prize
The dead keep piling up and all I have are poems
to wrap them in. Pockmarks across synagogue walls
are a new font in a familiar language I refuse to utter.
Men have begun again to speak in tongues syntaxed
by phonemes of caliber and clip capacity: diction I
will not assemble into sentences; sounds I cannot make
into words. What color, the stripes being woven like old
narratives into new camp pajamas? How many stars
asterisk prayers into the bluest night? There is no
metaphor for what I cannot abide; no pentameter
for the sound of earth falling from the hands of love
into a freshly-filled grave. My iambs are a pair
of backwards-turned boots in the stirrups of a riderless
horse. We measure the inarticulate grammar of fear
in the steady metronome of newsfeed updates,
punctuate the lulls between carnage with promises
enjambed in the wind. Cover my eyes with verses
if you must. Bribe the ferryman with curses and dust.
A poet’s contract is blood-inked, bone-stamped,
ratified eternal at the frontier where hope kisses rust.– Matt Hohner
That’s the poem by Matt Hohner, chosen by poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin as the winner of the Doolin poetry competition, part of Doolin Writers’ Weekend. It’s from this Irish Times article, which notes:
Matt Hohner, a Baltimore native, holds an MFA in writing and poetics from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. He has been a finalist for the Moth International Poetry Prize and taken both third and first prizes in the Maryland Writers Association Poetry Prize. He won the 2016 Oberon Poetry Prize the 2018 Sport Literate Anything but Baseball Poetry Prize, and the Doolin Writers’ Weekend Poetry Prize. Hohner’s work has been published in numerous journals and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. An editor for Loch Raven Review, Hohner’s book Thresholds and Other Poems, his first full-length book, was published by Apprentice House Press in Fall 2018. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Also included in the article is a video:
Big Boys Don’t Cry, written and performed by Joe Byrne, was chosen by Dave Lordan as the winner of the Doolin Writers’ Weekend Poetry Video Competition 2019.
Pink Grapefruit and avocado, with the Duke and Rockwell
The Duke 3 Best has a knot about the same loft as the Chubby 1 Best, but the knot is softer, presumably because it is not so very dense. I like the Duke a lot, and this morning it made an exceptional lather from Meißner Tremonia’s Pink Grapefruit shaving paste. This is one of the lathers where I notice a special slickness on my face when I rinse.
Three passes with the Rockwell R3 left my face totally smooth, and I really enjoyed the feel and frangrance of my Saint Charles Shave Avocado Oil aftershave balm. This is another I should be using more often.
The day is launched, and I’m having Healthy Hot Sauce with my breakfast. 🙂
Dr. Greger’s Healthy Hot Pepper Sauce
I really like pepper sauce and if you search the blog you’ll find several posts where I give my own recipes. You’ll note that those recipes include a lot of salt, and now I’m keeping y sodium intake to 1100mg/day (and being successful at that). To my chagrin, I discovered that my old standby commercial hot sauces were very high in sodium, so today I made Dr. Greger’s recipe:
I used 3 large jalapeños (and those I did core and seed) a packet of about a dozen small red Thai chiles, about 8-10 Serrano peppers and about a dozen habaneros. I didn’t seed any of them except the jalapeños. I followed the recipe, and I’ve just bottled the first batch. It is very tasty. This is going to be a totally successful pepper sauce.
I confess I didn’t use gloves. No problems so far, but I did wash my hands well and I’m keeping my fingers away from my eyes.
An immersion blender makes this recipe extremely easy since you blend the sauce right in the pot you cooked it in. I use my immersion blender a lot: it takes up very little room, it’s a cinch to clean, and I can store it in a drawer—and I don’t have to be pouring liquids into a blender pitcher and pouring them out again. It’s terrific to make a smooth soup (e.g., broccoli soup, which I’ll be making when the weather turns colder, or gazpacho).
UPDATE: I think the next time I make it, I’ll include a handful of raisins and/or pitted dates with the peppers.
Unmarked buildings, quiet legal help for accused priests
The Catholic church seems to be corrupt at its core. Martha Mendoza, Juliet Linderman, and Garance Burke report for AP:
The visiting priests arrived discreetly, day and night.
Stripped of their collars and cassocks, they went unnoticed in this tiny Midwestern town as they were escorted into a dingy warehouse across from an elementary school playground. Neighbors had no idea some of the dressed-down clergymen dining at local restaurants might have been accused sexual predators.
Full Coverage: The ReckoningThey had been brought to town by a small, nonprofit group called Opus Bono Sacerdotii. For nearly two decades, the group has operated out of a series of unmarked buildings in rural Michigan, providing money, shelter, transport, legal help and other support to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Catholic priests accused of sexual abuse across the country.
Again and again, Opus Bono has served as a rapid-response team for the accused.
When a serial pedophile was sent to jail for abusing dozens of minors, Opus Bono was there for him, with regular visits and commissary cash.
When a priest admitted sexually assaulting boys under 14, Opus Bono raised funds for his defense.
When another priest was criminally charged with abusing a teen, Opus Bono later made him a legal adviser.
And while powerful clerics have publicly pledged to hold the church accountable for the crimes of its clergy and help survivors heal, some of them arranged meetings, offered blessings or quietly sent checks to this organization that provided support to alleged abusers, The Associated Press has found.
Though Catholic leaders deny the church has any official relationship with the group, Opus Bono successfully forged networks reaching all the way to the Vatican.
The AP unraveled the continuing story of Opus Bono in dozens of interviews with experts, lawyers, clergy members and former employees, along with hundreds of pages of documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests.
In recent months, two of the group’s founders were forced out after Michigan’s attorney general found that Opus Bono had misused donated funds and misled contributors. A third co-founder, a priest, was abruptly removed from ministry earlier this month after the AP began asking about an allegation that he had sexually abused a child decades ago.
Still, since 2002, Opus Bono has played a little-known role among conservative Catholic groups that portray the abuse scandal as a media and legal feeding frenzy. These groups contend the scandal maligns the priesthood and harms the Catholic faith. [Apparently the group is totally unaware of how Opus Bono harms the Catholic faith. – LG]
Opus Bono established itself as a counterpoint to the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests and other groups that have accused the church of trying to cover up the scandal and failing to support victims of clergy misconduct. Opus Bono focuses on what it considers the neglected victims: priests, and the church itself.
“All of these people that have made allegations are very well taken care of,” Opus Bono co-founder Joe Maher said in a radio interview, contending that many abuse accusations lodged against priests are false. “The priests are not at all very well taken care of.”
Opus Bono’s roots reach back almost two decades to a sex abuse scandal that convulsed The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church, a grand stone structure set amid Detroit’s crumbling brick blight.
For 25 years, the Rev. Eduard Perrone presided there. Inside the church, commonly known as Assumption Grotto, glossy Opus Bono brochures tout the pastor’s role as the group’s co-founder and spiritual lifeblood. Stern and imposing, the 70-year-old Perrone is a staunch conservative; he refused to marry couples, for example, if he thought the bride’s dress was too revealing.
Earlier this month, his parishioners were shocked when Perrone was removed from ministry after a church review board decided there was a “semblance of truth” to allegations that he abused a child decades ago. Perrone told the AP that he “never would have done such a thing.”
In the years before Perrone helped start Opus Bono, he and Assumption Grotto took in at least two priests who had been accused of sexual misconduct at dioceses in other states. One of them later admitted to molesting as many as 50 children in the 1980s and ’90s, according to court documents in Texas. . .
Continue reading. There’s MUCH more.
The Catholic church has lost its moral authority, at least in my view.
Good news from doctor
I can drop three of the four meds I’ve been taking (hypertension, blood glucose, cholesterol). And the doctor strongly approved of the dietary changes I made and said that if only people would do this when they were younger, they could avoid things like hypertension, heart attacks, diabetes, and so on.
He did caution me that I would have to continue the diet, but that’s not a problem: I truly enjoy it.
The coal-miners who called their canary “Cassandra”
That phrase came to me as I thought about all the safeguards the US has put in place to warn of dangers to its institutions, and how resolutely the warnings sounded by those safeguards are being ignored. The Mueller investigation’s findings are being ignore and distorted by the GOP, Mitch McConnell refuses to act on legislation to protect election security, and we see mass shootings continually repeated. Something is seriously wrong.
Later On 