Fox Hunting Over the Globe

The United States has more mounted fox hunting packs than any other country (including the U.K.), but fox are rarely killed by U.S. mounted hunts, in part because a fox can generally find a groundhog hole to scoot into, and also because fox are simply not considered an economic problem even in sheep country. Fox are never dug out -- the hounds are praised and the field rides on to find another fox.

Coyote are another matter, and when they are hunted the goal is termination. Unlike fox, which will generally circle back and stay within a defined home territory, coyote will run straight across country and may take hounds and horses across roads and out of hunt-permission territory. Unlike fox, coyote are considered a fairly serious pest as they may, on occasion, prey on cats, small dogs, sheep, and ducks.

Aldo Leopold on Gadgets and Fox Hunting

Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold, who was born on this day in 1887, was one of the most important people in the history of U.S. conservation. A 1909 graduate of the Yale Forestry School, Leopold wrote the first book on Game Management (it is still in print and it is still used at a text book), and was the first person to predict that the widespread extirpation of wolves through poison and trapping would result in an explosion in the deer population that, in turn, would wipe out much of the understory of American forests. Most famous for his eco-philosophical journal A Sand County Almanac, about his Wisconsin farm, Leopold also explored the role of wilderness and hunting in American culture.

In an early essay entitled Wildlife in American Culture, Leopold noted that even in the era before World War II, "the gadgeter, otherwise known as the sporting-goods dealer," was dominating the sporting press and warping America's understanding of the outdoors.

The phenomenon is very easy to see today, with hunting and fishing magazines centered less on wildlife and wild places than on the Quad Bikes, scent sprays, lures, bait, and expensive guns, rods, and reels that we are told we will need before we even think about going into the woods.

This ethos has now expanded into the world of camping and hiking, where everything has to be rip-stop, multi-fuel, Goretex, and composite construction. Not only must everything be lighter weight, there must be more luxury and options than ever before. As Leopold noted in this 1940-era essay, describing the beginning of the modern ethos:

"Then came the gadgeteer, otherwise known as the sporting-goods dealer. He has draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them. Gadgets fill the pockets, they dangle from neck and belt. The overflow fills the auto trunk, and also the trailer. Each item of outdoor equipment grows lighter and often better, but the aggregate poundage becomes tonnage. The traffic in gadgets adds up to astronomical sums, which are soberly published as representing 'the economic value of wildlife.' But what of cultural values?"

The great thing about fox hunting and terrier work is that, with the exception of the locator collar, the equipment we use to today would need no explanation to Jaques Du Fouilloux (1560) or Sir Walter Scott (1810). Nothing much has changed, and very little has gone "high tech," in large part because the intervening variable -- the dog -- is immune to mechanical intervention.

At its core, the fox hunter is a primitive hunter and the dog is a primitive animal. As Leopold noted about mounted American fox hunting (which has never included killing the animal being chased):

"Fox-hunting with hounds, backwoods style, presents a dramatic instance of partial and perhaps harmless mechanized invasion. This is one of the purest of sports; it has real split-rail flavor; it has man-earth drama of the first water. The fox is deliberately left unshot, hence ethical restraint is also present. But we now follow the chase in Fords! The voice of Bugle-Anne mingles with the honk of the flivver! However, no one is likely to invent a mechanical foxhound, nor to screw a polychoke on the hound's nose. No one is likely to teach dog-training by phonograph, or by other painless shortcuts. I think the gadgeteer has reached the end of his tether in dogdom."
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Coffee, Birds & the World Bank

American Redstart


It is pathetic, but true, that there are 391 Starbuck's coffee houses within an hour's drive from my house (50 miles). Amazingly, all of them seem to have a line of customers at all hours of the day. Could Americans be any more addicted to $4 coffees?

I told you it was pathetic, and as soon as they serve me my coffee, I promise you I'm going to leave.

As I wait for my coffee, I read the paper. Paul Wolfowitz, the current head of the World Bank and one of the architects of the war in Iraq, looks like he may lose his job for promoting his girlfriend to a World Bank job that pays better than Condoleeza Rice's.

The shocking part is not that there are scoundrels in Washington, or waste and corruption at the World Bank, but that Paul Wolfowitz has a girlfriend. Of course he had to pay her, but it's still amazing. Apparently, the human soul knows no limits to depravity.

Coffee and the World Bank.

There is a connection there, and I recall the linkage as I watch the pigeons rearrange themselves on the telephone wire in front of the Safeway food store across the street.

Legend has it that the coffee plant was first discovered in Ethiopia by a goat herder who found his charges a little too animated after eating beans from a local bush. The coffee plant (and the drink) eventually made its way to Yemen and the Arab world via the Sudanese slaves that were forced to paddle boats across the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula.

With alcohol banned, coffee quickly became the "drug of choice" in the Arab world. While an alcohol-besotted Europe struggled in a drunken haze through the Dark Ages, the Arab world became caffeinated and invigorated. Soon after they started the first coffee houses in the world, Arabs began creating grand libraries, universities, new mathematical equations, and amazingly complex architectural designs. Such is the power of coffee.

Coffee houses hit Europe around 1600, and there they had the same effect they had in the Arab world -- a spectacular growth in intellectual clarity and output. From the enlightened coffee houses of London grew the first newspaper divisions (business, style, overseas news, etc.), the first organized scientific associations, and Lloyds of London -- the first international insurance cartel.

Coffee consumption took off like a rocket in Great Britain, and in 1796, when the British took over Sri Lanka (Ceylon) from the Dutch, the new settlers began clearing land for coffee plantations.

By the 1860s, Sri Lanka was the largest coffee producer in the world.

In 1869, however, a lethal fungus known as coffee rust had shown up on the island causing premature defoliation of the coffee plants, and dramatically reducing berry yield.

By 1879, the rust fungus had spread across the island and into Indian plantations as well, with the result being a collapse of coffee production across the region.

Unable to grow coffee in the face of a devastating rust fungus epidemic, Ceylonese and Indian plantation owners began to rip out their coffee plants in order to grow tea.

Within a few decades, tea consumption in the U.K. had surpassed coffee consumption, and it has remained so to this day.

While tea is the national drink of Great Britain, coffee remains the national drink of the United States, where we consume vast quantities of it. In fact, though coffee is the second most internationally traded commodity in the world (after oil), the U.S. consumes one-quarter of the world's coffee beans.

Coffee came to the New World via the French, who introduced it into the Caribbean in the mid 1700s, and the Spanish, who brought coffee plants to Latin America a few decades later.

By the mid 1800s, coffee plantations had been planted in Central and South America, and these coffee plantations were greatly expanded after coffee rust decimated production in Sri Lanka and India.

Coffee plantations in Central and South America were diverse operations that grew, rather naturally, out of the multi-storied small-patch gardening operations that had been successfully employed by the native Indians for several thousand years before Columbus.

These small patch gardens were created by removing large trees with little agricultural value, but leaving those that might yield a nut harvest, good wood, seasonal fruits, or which had the lucky property of fixing nitrogen in the soil.

Under these large forest tree were planted shorter citrus and cacao trees, and between these were planted bananas. Underneath and between the bananas were planted coffee bushes and vegetable crops for local food consumption.

Multi-storied "shade coffee" plantations were miracles of production. When coffee prices fell (as they often did), other crops provided sustenance and cash, ensuring that the locals could always eat and pay for things made elsewhere.

Because multiple types of plants were found on shade-grown coffee plots, multiple types of insects and birds were present. The result was not only less overall insect predation on any one crop, but less erosion and slower evaporation as both rain and sunlight filtered through multiple vegetative layers.

Shade-grown coffee plantations were particularly rich in bird life -- especially neo-tropical migrant song birds such as redstarts, Tenessee warblers, Baltimore Orioles, yellow-throated and solitary vireos, wood thrushes, catbirds, ruby-throated hummingbirds, Nashville Warblers, and oven-birds.

All told, more than 150 bird species are known to winter or live year-round in shade coffee plantations, making them the most bird-intensive agricultural areas in the world.

Shade coffee production thrived.  

But something wicked this way drifted. The coffee rust fungus that had been seen in Sri Lanka 100 years earlier, was discovered in Brazil and Nicaragua. This discovery caused a panic, not only in the coffee industry, but also among the economic and political elite that run such major banking and development policy shops as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The fear was that coffee rust would soon sweep through Central and South America. If that happened, not only would the coffee crop be destroyed, but so too would the economic base of entire countries and many millions of people. If that happened, not only would we not have coffee in New York, Paris and Vienna, but billions of dollars of foreign loans would go unpaid.

Something had to be done.

What was done was massive, mechanical, and swift. Under orders from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the large cartels that control much of the world's coffee market, coffee plantations in Central and South America were systematically ripped from the ground and replanted.

The idea here was a simple one: by growing coffee in direct sun, rather than in the shade, coffee plants could be made safe from the coffee rust fungus. The prescription for salvation was destruction, and entire mountain sides were plowed clear of their multistory canopies and the detritus burned. In their place was planted dense hedgerows of a dwarf variety of coffee that could withstand direct tropical sunlight.

With the loss of a diversified shade forest cover, bird populations that had once thrived in the rich overstory of coffee plantations plummeted. At the same time, with the absence of trees to provide vegetative nutrients to the soil and hold back erosion, the fertilizer needs of coffee plantations skyrocketed. Mono-cropped sun coffee plantations proved far more susceptible to insect infestations than shade plantations, so insecticide inputs also increased. The open sunny soil between coffee plants proved susceptible to weed infestations, so herbicide use also increased. Finally, though the new coffee plants produced a great number of beans, the plants themselves were not as hardy as the old shade-grown varieties, and an additional expense had to be factored into the equation -- the cost of periodically replanting large numbers of exhausted plants.

Ironically, all of the devastation and destruction was not needed. It turns out that due to the peculiarities of Latin America's climate and the timing of rain, humidity and mountain temperature, coffee leaf rust has not been able to proliferate in either Central or South America.

Adding insult to injury, it turns out that the new dwarf varieties of sun-grown coffee are not less susceptible to coffee leaf rust than the older varieties. When a fungus outbreak does occur, as it sometimes does, it is generally localized and easily treatable with a copper-based fungicide.

Sadly, however, the damage to the once-vibrant shade coffee plantations cannot be rapidly undone. Forests that took decades to grow were razed to the ground in hours, and will now take decades to grow back.

The good news is that some people are re-thinking coffee production in Central and South America, and in time shade-grown coffee may yet make a partial come back.

If so, the folks spearheading the charge will be the aging hippies and eco-freaks that once wore tie-dyed T-shirts and earthshoes. Now older, these folks frequent businesses like Starbucks and Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, edit newspapers and magazines, start movements, run foundations, and are otherwise a social force to be reckoned with.

For this set, buying coffee has become a political act. From their perspective, if you are not buying shade-grown, organic, free trade coffee, then you are simply giving the "big wink" to American song bird destruction and the poisoning of the soil, people and economies of Latin America.

They have a point, and it's such a good and strong point that companies like Starbucks are working to change their business practices as a consequence.

Working with Conservation International, Starbucks has created a set of Coffee and Farmer Equity practices (CAFE for short ) to guide the growing and purchase of coffee.

This year, Starbucks is supposed to purchase 60 percent of its coffee from suppliers who successfully implement the CAFE guidelines.

The end of this story is not yet written, but it may yet be good news, albeit good news that remains at least 10 or 15 years off due to slow nature of the turn around, and the slow regrowth of shade coffee plantations.

That said, if consumers continue to demand and purchase shade grown coffee grown in Mexico and Central America, we may yet see a turn around in neotropical songbird decline in the United States.

If so, that would certainly make a $4 coffee worth the price.
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                                                 This is a repost from 2007. .

Monarchs & Mexico

A repost from this blog, 2009.

"I understand more and more how population is the problem. I was asking almost every peasant I met how many children they have. They say 'I have eight, 12, 15, nine.' These people are in their 50s. I ask how many children their children have. They say, 'Oh, senor, there are so many that we can't count them.' And most of them are getting their living from the forest. They want to get permits to log in the forest."
- Homero Aridjis, Mexico's foremost authority on Monarch butterflies

The Monarch butterfly migration, from Canada to Mexico, is now in full swing.

This butterfly migration predates human existence in the western hemisphere. For thousands of years, millions of Monarch butterflies from the United States and Canada east of the Rocky Mountains have flow up to 3,000 miles to overwinter in a small forest area in central Mexico.

Now, however, the Monarch is seriously threatened. The reason: rapid deforestation of Mexico's high-altitude Oyamel fir stands which provide the rare micro-climate necessary to prevent the butterflies from freezing, but keeps them cold enough so that their reproductive systems remain dormant until spring.

The Mexican forest wintering ground of the Monarch was not discovered by scientists until 1975.

By the mid-1980s, scientists realized that rapid deforestation in the Oyamel fir forest was not sustainable, and could drive the Eastern Monarch butterfly to extinction. At that time, the Mexican government created a monarch reserve of approximately 62 square miles that consisted of no-logging zones at five known overwintering sites.

But local residents have largely ignored the restrictions, saying they are too poor to care about the monarch butterfly -- the trees must fall to put food on the table for hungry mouths.

"Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing if the butterflies didn't come back. At least we could log," said one campesino.

Ultimately, humans and butterflies are competing for the same forest resources. Unless population growth is stemmed, and alternative economic opportunities are developed, the fate of the Monarch may be sealed.

Aerial photographs of Mexico's forest region where the butterflies hibernate show that that 30 years ago the forest was nearly 2,000 square miles.

Today, only a tenth of it remains. The largest tract today is 20 square miles, five times smaller than the largest tract 30 years ago.



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How We Came to Poison Our Minds

John Snow is a historically important person that you have probably never heard of.

Snow was a Victorian-era physician who was raised up in a world in which everyone believed that disease was caused by miasma or "bad air."

And so, when a cholera epidemic swept through London in 1854, the general consensus was that there was not much to be done about it other than to pray, keep the windows closed, and perhaps burn a few incense cones.

Snow did something different, however: he talked to local residents in his area and mapped out where they lived. If anyone in a family came down with cholera, he put a little dot on a street map.

Soon enough, a pattern became clear -- people coming down sick were heavily concentrated in a certain area. The commonality, Snow suspected, was that they all drew water from a water pump situated on Broad Street.

After explaining his thesis to a local council, Snow was given permission to knock the handle off the water pump, and the cholera epidemic quickly abated. This was, for all practical purposes, the beginning of scientific epidemiology.

Why do I bring this story up?

Simple: America has come down with a new disease, and it is every bit as pernicious and debilitating as cholera.

It is the disease of stupidity and ignorance.

Some people still believe in the miasma theory when it comes to this disease.

No less an authority than Alan Greenspan once talked of "irrational exuberance" in the stock market. Where did it come from, he wondered, his face down in a book, the television off.

Today, with all our jobs exported to China, the rich paying less in taxes than ever before, and the nation perpetually teetering on the edge of war, millions of other Americans are left scratching their head wondering what went wrong.

How did we end up in this mess? Where was the point of infection?

Now I am no John Snow, but I have spent the last 30 years in Washington, D.C. studying stupid.

And I have a theory.

The pump, in this case, is an obscure regulation in an obscure federal agency.

It does not look like much, but like the John Snow's pump handle, it is directly linked to a public utility.

The utility is television and radio, and the pump handle is the Fairness Doctrine.

Eh? The Fairness Doctrine? What the hell am I on about?

Let me explain.

The Fairness Doctrine was a Federal Communications Commission policy, first embraced in 1949, which said that broadcasters had to devote a portion of their daily airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest and present contrasting views on those subjects.

The Fairness Doctrine gave us folks like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley and Eric Sevareid.

In 1987, however, the Reagan Administration ordered the Federal Communications Commission to abolish the Fairness Doctrine because it violated their notion of the First Amendment.

Yes, that's right: The forced teaching of creation science and school prayer did not violate their notion of the First Amendment, but putting "fair and balanced" news on radio and television did. Go figure.

Why was the Fairness Doctrine put in at all?

The clue can be found in the year -- 1949. This was legislation that passed pretty quickly after World War II.

The idea here was a simple one: Propaganda was a disease, and the obvious antidote was to make sure extremist politicians could never colonize the airwaves.

But it was always understood that extremist politicians were not the only threat. After all, free speech has never been free.

Have you ever shelled out money for a full-page ad in a big city daily? Have you ever bought 20 or 30 television spots? Ever purchased drive time radio for a week in five middle-of-the-road stations operating in seven cities? I have, and it ain't cheap!

Newspapers, magazines and broadcast networks are owned by millionaires and billionaires, and the folks who pay the bills tend to be massive corporations whose bottom line is always the bottom line.

You want to know why tobacco, booze, crappy car manufacturers, price-gouging pharmaceutical companies, and incompetent financial service companies have been given such a long and free ride by the media? Simple: look who pays the bills.

To be clear, there are no meetings between the heads of General Motors and CBS in which they plot to sell us crappy gas-guzzlers.

The sad part of this story is that those meetings don't have to occur; everyone understands how it goes. And so the head of CBS is aware, to the penny, how much his company depends on General Motors and pharmaceutical advertising. Beer ads and Merrill Lynch ads are factored into the matrix as well.

On the other side of the coin, the head of GM understands that radio and TV stations need content, and so he and other big business interests in pharmaceutical companies, stock brokerage houses, credit card companies, and agricultural and chemical interests reach out to help fund lawyers, lobbyists, analysts, university chairs, and talking heads from trade associations and think tanks.

These folks are always available for comment and they all appear sensible, even as they slowly move the ball in the direction of their corporate masters.

Against this corporate and political tide once stood a little scrap of paper: the Fairness Doctrine.

All it said was that news had to be fair and balanced.

It did not seem like much in 1987, and so when right-wing ideologues pushed to have it pulled from the rules, it did not seem like a big deal.

First Amendment? Freedom of Speech? Hell yeah! We don't need some scrap of paper limiting what we can say on TV and radio. Fair and balanced? F*ck that!

No one thought too much about how odd it was that the same people who espoused First Amendment reasons to scrap the Fairness Doctrine were the same people who wanted to make it a constitutional crime to burn an American flag made in China in order to protest an unjust war.

And so the Fairness Doctrine was tossed onto the scrap heap of history, and in short order we had Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, Fox News and the paid shills at CNBC.

These folks were followed up more by right-wing radio and TV hosts in the form of Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly.

Right wing Christians then heaped on in the form of Hugh Hewitt and Bob Grant, followed by a slow trickle of left-wing radio and television voices, in the form of Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and Al Franken.

And what disappeared?

What disappeared was good old fashioned "just the facts ma'am journalism." There is less and less of that every day.

It turned out that putting blathering idiots on talk radio and TV was pretty cheap as compared to hiring investigative reporters and sending film crews around the world to gather the news.

And so, beginning in 1987, a sea-change occurred in the kind of information that began flowing into our living rooms and cars.

Where once we had rational discourse and a clear presentation of facts, we now had paid apologists for corporate excess whose central message was that greed was good, and that there was nothing wrong with America that another capital gains tax cut could not fix.

What America needed, we were told, was less bank regulation.

National heath care? That was creeping socialism.

Social Security? That was a scam -- the whole system was going to go broke unless we privatized it and put it all into the Stock Market right now.

Energy crisis? Relax about that! Oil was cheaper now that it was 15 years ago, and if they would only allow us to drill in Alaska, we would have oil without meter forever. Let the free market take care of it. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler know what they are doing!

Unions? They are nothing but greedy, lazy workers managed by corrupt labor bosses intent on sucking America dry. You want to help American workers? Here's how you do it: buy more Chinese-made stuff at WalMart. It's about time American workers learned to suck it up and compete head to head with the Chinese. If they can make plastic trash cans for $1 a unit over there, how come we can't? If we buy more stuff from China, American workers and companies will feel the heat and see the light.

And, as time went on, all of this took on the appearance of truth.

This was the new reality.

Fact faded from the mind. The landscape had changed, and now no one remembered what the old landscape looked like.

Our forests were different 100 years ago? Chestnuts trees? What? Who knew?

Tell me about the chestnuts trees grandpa ... and tell me about facts too. What are those?

How did we lose the Chestnut trees? It was a miasma. There is nothing to be done about it other than to bury the dead forest, close the windows and light some incense.

What killed off Walter Cronkite and the steady voice of the evening news? It was a miasma. There is nothing to be done about it other than to bury the old news anchors, close the windows and light some incense.

And what happened to the American economy? Where did it go? It was a miasma. There is nothing to be done about it other than to bury the closed factories, close the windows and light some incense.

The Fairness Doctrine? That old thing? That has nothing to do with the problem. That's about talk.

Talking is not what brought down the American economy. Talking is as harmless as water.

Now drink up, and let's turn on Fox News and see what's new.

They're fair and balanced -- they tell us so right in their ads!
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To Be a Great Nation... Again

When this country was great, we taxed the rich.

We need to be great again.

The issue is not left or right, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative.

And to underscore the point, let me point out that it was Democrats, not Republicans, that started this tax cut pandering.
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As Catherine Rampell notes on The New York Times Economix blog.

[O]nce upon a time, Republicans did indeed advocate leaving taxes alone, opposing tax cuts.

In the 1950s and 1960s, federal deficits were relatively small compared to the size of the economy, but even during those flush years, Republican leadership was reluctant to advocate tax cuts. In 1953, for example, Dwight Eisenhower said the country “cannot afford to reduce taxes, reduce income, until we have in sight a program of expenditures that shows that the factors of income and of outgo will be balanced.”

And when his successor, John F. Kennedy, proposed sharp tax cuts in 1963, the more conservative Republicans in Congress initially opposed them because the cuts would expand the deficit.

So let's cut the crap, and salute basic math and history.

This country was great once, and it was not great when we kicked our poor in the shins, or denigrated the sick and the unemployed. 

This country was great when we taxed the rich and invested in infrastructure.

We know how to be great, because we have been great before.  Let's do that. Again.
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Money Down a Rat Hole

Starbucks, cell phones, e-readers and fraud.  We can pay our debts if we want.

The last three weeks have cast up three massive pharma frauds cases:

• Big:  $750 MILLION fraud dealing with payola for blood drugs. (Newsweek).
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• ‎Bigger:  $1.3 BILLION fraud dealing with payola for bipolar drugs. (Business Week)
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• Biggest:  $3 BILLION fraud dealing with payola for heart and mood drugs. (New York Times)

This is the kind of stuff that is driving the "Occupy Wall Street" folks -- the sense that corporations are ripping us off blind, no one is going to jail behind it, and no one is even being forced to give up their bonuses for designing and green-lighting these frauds.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office says $125 billon in improper payments were made by Uncle Sam last year, with $70 billion of this being done by Medicare and Medicaid alone.

And, of course, it's not just improper payments is it?

The IRS says the "tax gap" between what they should be collecting and what they do collect is in excess of $350 billion a year. But what are they doing to close that gap? Not much. More than 10,000 cases of tax fraud in excess of $2 million have been filed in the last five years, but the IRS has yet to resolve a single one of these cases so far.

Meanwhile, companies like Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Facebook, Forest Labs, Microsoft, and Google are using legal tax dodges and loopholes like the Double Irish and the Dutch Sandwich to avoid paying hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. taxes.

Any question now why this country is going broke? These are the U.S. Government's own numbers!

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Time to Unleash the Dogs on Wall Street Fat Cats

Why the Gibbet Was Invented

The Washington Post should be a good read tomorrow, with two very big fraud cases popping out into public view.

The first fraud case is in New York, where the Attorney General will be using the state False Claims Act and the Martin Act to go after $2 billion worth of public employee pension fraud done by Bank of New York Mellon when they were skimming foreign exchange transactions. Virginia, California, Florida and Arkansas have alread joined a similar case in their respective states, and other banks (such as State Street) will rack the money count even higher before it's all over. 

The second fraud case is a bit smaller and deals with several hundred million dollars stolen from the U.S. Treasury and from disabled veterans when disallowed legal costs were baked into their home mortgage documents. The disabled veterans were pickpocketed on the front end, and mugged like the rest of us on the back end.

These kind of cases are why the Gibbet was invented.
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Next Time Someone Talks About Jobs

Next time someone talks about jobs... ask them if they are wearing anything made in America.

Ask if illegal aliens clean their offices and do their lawn, and whether they repair their Japanese car with parts made in Korea.

Ask if they think America was great when unions did not exist and everyone had minimum wage jobs, or when unions were strong and wages were enough to support a family while you held your head high in church and put folding money in the plate.

Ask if America was great when we had small stores and a main street, or when we replaced it with a massive parking lot at the WalMart.

Ask if they will support a candidate whose core platform is Made in America by Americans.
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Uncle Sam is Ripped and Ready... for 1980

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS SHRUNK CONTRACT SPENDING for the first time in 13 years, identified $3 billion in cost reductions in information technology projects across government, worked to help agencies avoid $4 billion in payment errors last year and tripled the amount of recoveries of improper payments to vendors.

All good?

Well yes, but see what I have to say about that at the link!

You Call That a Watchdog?

Bernie Madoff stole $60 billion because the SEC could not see past its nose.

The economy tanked under the subprime banking fiasco because the SEC could not find a hotdog if given season tickets to Yankee Stadium.

So what is Congress' response to all this?

Believe it or not, it's to cut the enforcement budget of the SEC while giving a $200 million cushion to the liars, cheats and thieves on Wall Street.

From The New York Times come this excellent analysis from Daniel Rosenbaum:

The economy is still suffering from the worst financial crisis since the Depression, and widespread anger persists that financial institutions that caused it received bailouts of billions of taxpayer dollars and haven’t been held accountable for any wrongdoing. Yet the House Appropriations Committee has responded by starving the agency responsible for bringing financial wrongdoers to justice — while putting over $200 million that could otherwise have been spent on investigations and enforcement actions back into the pockets of Wall Street.

A few weeks ago, the Republican-controlled appropriations committee cut the Securities and Exchange Commission’s fiscal 2012 budget request by $222.5 million, to $1.19 billion (the same as this year’s), even though the S.E.C.’s responsibilities were vastly expanded under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Charged with protecting investors and policing markets, the S.E.C. is the nation’s front-line defense against financial fraud. The committee’s accompanying report referred to the agency’s “troubled past” and “lack of ability to manage funds,” and said the committee “remains concerned with the S.E.C.’s track record in dealing with Ponzi schemes.” The report stressed, “With the federal debt exceeding $14 trillion, the committee is committed to reducing the cost and size of government.”

But cutting the S.E.C.’s budget will have no effect on the budget deficit, won’t save taxpayers a dime and could cost the Treasury millions in lost fees and penalties. That’s because the S.E.C. isn’t financed by tax revenue, but rather by fees levied on those it regulates, which include all the big securities firms.

A little-noticed provision in Dodd-Frank mandates that those fees can’t exceed the S.E.C.’s budget. So cutting its requested budget by $222.5 million saves Wall Street the same amount, and means regulated firms will pay $136 million less in fiscal 2012 than they did the previous year, the S.E.C. projects....

... Given the magnitude of the S.E.C.’s task, Congress could make Wall Street firms pay more and not less to police the mess they helped create. A government that wants to hold wrongdoers’ feet to the fire and prevent future abuses could finance an S.E.C. enforcement surge analogous to the military’s strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress could fully finance the S.E.C.’s requested $1.4 billion — and add another $100 million for technology spending. The $1.5 billion would be paid entirely through fees. Financing the S.E.C. adds nothing to the federal deficit and, on the contrary, will help reduce it. It is an investment that would most likely generate increased fines and penalties that could be returned to defrauded investors and taxpayers.

Who is to blame for the sorry state we are in?

Congress, Congress, Congress.

So long as Congressional elections are funded by big business, we are going to have Payola Politics of the first order.

This is a war, in which Wall Street has decimated Main Street, yet Congress has just chosen to re-arm the folks who took 20% of the value of your house, 20% of the value of your 401-K, and which left one in five Americans unemployed.

Remember in November 2012!!
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The Good News is the Bad News is Wrong

In the January 30, 1970 issue of Life magazine, they predicted that things would really be rotten by 1980s.   Click the picture below to see how bad it was going to be....

And what really happened?

Nothing too grim... .

• The Clean Air Act went into effect, and today we have cleaner air than we did in the 1960s;
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• Air pollution did not result in less sunlight reaching earth, and so global cooling did not occur as predicted;
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• There were no major ecological "break downs" in the U.S.  In fact, our surface waters got cleaner, we planted more trees than we cut, and soil quality improved as we moved to no-till or low-till agriculture;
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• Increased Co2 in the atmosphere did not result in either of the conflicting scenarios suggested -- "mass flooding" or a "new ice age";
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• Noise levels had no impact on heart disease and the SST super sonic transport airplane went out of business entirely, so sonic booms did not result in children being damaged before birth (no children were ever damaged that way, by the way);
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• "Residual DDT" has not had an impact on liver cancer rates.  While liver cancer rates have increased in the U.S., (about 15,000 men and 6,000 women are told they have primary liver cancer every year) this is largely due to an increase in longevity and better diagnosis.  Most liver cancer is associated with people over age 65 who have hepatitis B and hepatitis C, are heavy alcohol abusers, have been made sick from aflatoxin mold on food, have iron storage disease, or are obese.  Past exposure to DDT is not listed as a risk factor by NIH..

To put a point on it, this Life magazine article did not get a single thing right.

Not only did it preach an entirely wrong gloom-and-doom scenario, but it also missed the following important trends shaping people and the planet:

• Rapidly falling birth rates across the world which have dramatically slowed the rate of population growth;
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• Dramatic improvements in access to food, access to clean water, and access to vaccines in the developing world;
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• Vast new swaths of wild lands being put under protection across the world, especially in Africa and Latin America;
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• The rise of personal computers and personal satellite phones (i.e. your pocket cell phone) which  now enable people to instantly communicate across the world via word, picture, and video at almost no cost.
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• The eradication of smallpox and rinderpest, and the rapid decline in the incidence of most other horrible diseases, such as leprosy and polio.  Though malaria is still with us, and HIV/AIDS has reared its ugly head, people are generally living longer, healthier and more productive lives across the globe.

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• Related Post:
  ** The Oldest and Most Important Debate
  ** The Continuing Crisis
  ** The Good News is the Bad News is (Mostly) Wrong

National Debt is Largely Due to TWO Sources

Link

When you dramatically cut taxes and increase military spending, you are committing long-term economic suicide. We used to understand this, which is why paying taxes during war time was once seen as a hallmark of patriotism, celebrated even by Walt Disney.



One of the essential lies of the right and the left is that America can do great things on the cheap... that we can wage war without an increase in taxes or mortality... that we can import cheap goods and that it will not cost jobs... and that we can import cheap labor and it will not cost jobs.

There is no free lunch. Why do so few people understand this basic truth?
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An Irishman Who Speaks Plain Truths

A few rude words, but we live in a rude world, and it's more than time for a rude awakening.

God bless the Irish!   As for the bit at the end, it's true -- Michael Flatley really is from Chicago!
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Morning Edition Tomorrow

I get a few quotes on NPR's Morning Edition tomorrow, talking about the war on fraud -- especially health care fraud.  For a previous interview on this topic, see here.   For how this relates to canine health, see here.
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The Integrity of Transparency

Welcome to the New Economy

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The Grameen Bank and Community Capitalism

Women borrowers returning to pay loan installments.

Muhammad Yunus won the 2006 Nobel Peace prize for founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the idea of "micro-credit" or what I call "Community Capitalism."

It was Yunus, a professor of economics in Bangladesh, who first suggested that tiny loans to impoverished people, who were otherwise too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans, might make a world of difference.

In fact, Yunis himself got the experiment rolling by giving the first loan out of his own pocket in 1974 -- $27.00 given to 42 women in a village where the woman needed to buy bamboo in order to make bamboo furniture they could sell.

Today the Grameen Bank has issued over $ 6.5 billion to 7.5 million borrowers, 97% of whom are village women (Grameen means village) who have gone on to buy such things as sewing machines to make clothes for sale, seed with which to plant crops for market, and cell phones which become "village phones" which can be rented by the minute.

The Grameen Bank even lends to beggars, encouraging them to move from pure begging to street sales of such low-cost goods as matches.

The Grameen Bank has grown because it makes borrowers members of the bank, charges borrowers an interest rate to cover capital loss from delinquent loans, and because most poor women (well over 90%) end up paying back their loans.

Today, more than 95% of the equity in the Grameen Bank is owned by former borrowers; the government of Bangladesh owns less than a 5% stake.

The Grameen Bank does not just lend money: it also educates rural women in a few simple basic ideas by asking them to recite the Sixteen Decisions (see below) and pledge to follow them in their own lives.

The Sixteen Decisions

1. We shall follow and advance the four principles of Grameen Bank: Discipline, Unity, Courage and Hard work – in all walks of our lives.



2. Prosperity we shall bring to our families.



3. We shall not live in dilapidated houses. We shall repair our houses and work towards constructing new houses at the earliest.



4. We shall grow vegetables all the year round. We shall eat plenty of them and sell the surplus.



5. During the plantation seasons, we shall plant as many seedlings as possible.



6. We shall plan to keep our families small. We shall minimize our expenditures. We shall look after our health.



7. We shall educate our children and ensure that they can earn to pay for their education.



8. We shall always keep our children and the environment clean.



9. We shall build and use pit-latrines.



10. We shall drink water from tubewells. If it is not available, we shall boil water or use alum.



11. We shall not take any dowry at our sons' weddings, neither shall we give any dowry at our daughter's wedding. We shall keep our centre free from the curse of dowry. We shall not practice child marriage.



12. We shall not inflict any injustice on anyone, neither shall we allow anyone to do so.



13. We shall collectively undertake bigger investments for higher incomes.



14. We shall always be ready to help each other. If anyone is in difficulty, we shall all help him or her.



15. If we come to know of any breach of discipline in any centre, we shall all go there and help restore discipline.



16. We shall take part in all social activities collectively.

For the record, Bill Clinton was instrumental in getting the Nobel Committee to focus on the work of Dr. Yunus, noting in a speech given at University of California, Berkeley in 2002, that Yunus was "a man who long ago should have won the Nobel Prize [and] I’ll keep saying that until they finally give it to him."

When they finally did, Dr. Yunus asked that Yusuf (aka Cat Stevens) play the midday Nobel concert as not just a musical voice, but also as a philanthropic one that has helped found schools, fund orphanages, and rebuild houses damaged by hurricane and earthquake in the developing world. Yusuf's Australian tour has just started and is sold out, I am told. >> Take a listen.


Cat Stevens concert at the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for Muhammad Yunus

Notions of Time and Reward Shape Culture

This is a terrific video. Watch the whole thing for both form and content. Nice!
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