Much to his credit, Pope Benedict XVI posed this crucial question: 'Can Modern Warfare Ever Be Just?'http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/07/pope-benedict-xvi-questions-if-modern.html
Over at "The Thinking Housewife" Mrs. Wood and her correspondents are conducting a discussion of "Little Boy" and "Fat Man."
Their conversation culminates with Bill R's postulate that "radical pacifism" is the only "intellectually respectable argument against the atom bomb attacks on Japan."
Radical pacifism also seems the default position for Benedict's axiom that NO modern war can ever be just.
People who glimpse the intrinsic injustice of modern warfare's uncontrollable firepower (a kind of brute force that necessarily kills civilians) realize that we are now "playing" an "entirely new ballgame."
Christian "Just War Principles" Established c. 500 A.D. Vs. America's "just war" Tradition
From now on, every time human beings agree to wage war, they participate in unspeakable evil.
The depth-and-breadth of today's "lesser evils" trump every "greater evil" that occurred prior to explosive force being measured in megatons. (It may be that the advent of gunpowder marked the end of Just War and the beginning of just war...)
Earlier today, I made reference to Air Force general Arthur C who once confided: "It seems we have not fought a good war since World War II."
From now on, there are no "good wars" and "Just War" is now an impossibility.
Martin Luther King Jr. is humankind's prophetic voice crying in the modern wilderness, noting the inevitable downhill slope of violence even when violence seems to accomplish short-term goals - rather like "winning battles but losing wars."
"Pax On Both Houses: A Compendium Of Martin Luther King Posts"
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VVt.) greets the crowd at a rally last month in Phoenix.
Bernie Sanders wins backing of national nurses union
Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders won the endorsement of a national nurses union Monday, in a sign of the divide among organized labor groups over the Democratic race.
National Nurses United, which represents 185,000 nurses across the country, announced its pick at an event in Oakland attend by Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who has emerged as Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief rival for the Democratic nomination.
“He can talk about our issues as well as we can talk about our issues,” RoseAnn DeMoro, the union’s executive director, said in an interview, adding that “Bernie’s issues align with nurses from top to bottom.”
The endorsement was the first for Sanders from a national labor group. Last month, the American Federation of Teachers announced its support for Clinton, calling her “the champion working families need in the White House.”
It remains unclear whether the AFL-CIO, labor’s umbrella group, will side with either candidate during the Democratic primaries, given the division among its 56 member organizations. Both candidates, along with former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, made pitches last month to a meeting of the AFL-CIO’s executive council in Silver Spring, Md.
Sanders’s long advocacy of a single-payer health-care system is among the issues that resonated with the nurses union. Late last month, the senator, a self-described democratic socialist, appeared at a rally in Washington sponsored by the union and announced he would re-introduce “Medicare-for-all legislation.”
DeMoro also said that Sanders understands the threat to public health from climate change, environmental degradation and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership and cited several other issues on which he has stood with nurses, including support for minimum nurse-to-patient ratios at hospitals.
“He’s unequivocal on the issues,” DeMoro said, adding that on several of the union's priorities Clinton “fell very short.”
The union said its announcement was attended by several hundred nurses at its Oakland headquarters and live-streamed to 34 watch parties in 14 states.
John Wagner has covered Maryland government and politics for The Post since 2004.
A northern California police department is reviewing a video showing one of its officers pulling a gun on a man who was recording him on his cellphone.
The video, posted on YouTube, shows a Rohnert Park Public Safety officer driving toward Don McComas as he's filming. As McComas moves in closer to record the license plate number on the officer’s police SUV, the officer stops, gets out and tells McComas to take his hand out of his pocket.
McComas replies: “No sir, I’ve done nothing. I have done absolutely nothing. No.”
The officer removes his gun from his holster, speaks into his radio and says, “Seriously.”
McComas responds, “Put your gun down, really?”
The video shows McComas backing away as the officer motions the gun toward him.
McComas repeats he did nothing wrong and tells the officer not to touch him.
When McComas asks why the officer stepped out of his vehicle, the officer responds, “You taking a picture of me. I am taking a picture of you.” The officer then asked whether McComas was “some kind of a constitutionalist or crazy guy or something like that.”
“Why are you doing this?” the officer asks McComas, who responds, “Why are you sitting here with your gun on me? This is why I am doing this. To protect myself from you.”
McComas was not detained or arrested.
As the officer walks away, he tells McComas, “Go ahead, have a nice day and put it on YouTube. I don’t really care.”
Rohnert Park Mayor Amy Ahanotu and City Manager Darrin Jenkins said in a statement that an internal review will be conducted to determine if the proper protocols were followed.
“We’ve been made aware of this matter, and we are taking it seriously,” they said. “We understand the concerns that have been raised by our community and others and we want the public to know that your trust in law enforcement in our city is a top priority.”
McComas said he was in front of his home and hooking his boat to a trailer when he saw the Rohnert Park Public Safety officer drive into his neighborhood.
The officer, he said, made a few turns before stopping to face McComas. The officer did nothing but point at McComas and his home, McComas said.
McComas became concerned, so he pulled out his camera and started filming.
“The arrogance he showed me shouldn't come from an officer of the law,” he said. “They should de-escalate, not escalate or provoke.”
Hillary Clinton waves as she is introduced before speaking to the National Urban League, Friday, July 31, 2015, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Clinton: Trump is offensive to women but so is Rubio and the rest of the GOP field
EXETER, N.H. - Donald Trump's remarks about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly are offensive, but the rest of the Republican field is equally offensive, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday.
"What Donald Trump said about Megyn Kelly is outrageous, but what the rest of the Republicans are saying about all women is also outrageous," Clinton said. "They brag about slashing health-care funding, they say they would force women who have been raped to carry their rapist's child," and fail to put forward proposals that would help women earn equal pay.
Clinton was referring to comments Trump has made since Thursday's Republican primary debate. The Republican front-runner has criticized Kelly's debate questions as unfair to him and questioned her journalistic credentials. He also appeared to jokingly blame Kelly's menstrual cycle for her treatment of him, although he has denied that is what he meant.
"I think the guy went way overboard. Offensive, outrageous, pick your adjective," Clinton told reporters following a campaign event here focused on making college more affordable.
"But what Marco Rubio said has as much of an impact in terms of where the Republican Party is today as anybody else on that stage, and it is deeply troubling."
Clinton repeatedly pointed to the Florida senator's remark during the debate appearing to oppose all abortions, including those performed in cases where the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
"When one of their major candidates, a much younger man, the senator from Florida, says there should be no exceptions for rape and incest, that is as offensive and as troubling a comment as you can hear from a major candidate running for the presidency," Clinton said. "The language may be more colorful and more offensive, but the thinking, the attitude, toward women is very much the same. It just is delivered in a different package."
Rubio, who has languished in polling but received wide praise for his debate performance, said in a statement that Clinton "holds radical views on abortion that we look forward to exposing in the months to come," citing various stances she has taken over the years on parental notification and other issues.
In New Hampshire, Clinton also said Trump is "having the time of his life," and that his political showmanship amounts to "entertainment." She laughed off her attendance at Trump's 2005 wedding, saying she was supposed to be in Florida anyway, and decided to go to the wedding "because it's always entertaining."
Trump had said during the debate that Clinton came to the wedding because she was beholden to him as a result of his political and charitable donations. Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri had said at the time that the remark would hurt Clinton's feelings. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton were photographed at the event laughing and talking with Trump and wife Melania Knauss.
Trump is a major real estate developer in New York and thus was a prominent constituent in 2005, when Clinton was a New York senator. Asked whether she was now seeing a side of Trump she did not know, Clinton responded quickly.
"I didn't know him that well. I mean, I knew him. I knew him, and I happened to be planning to be in Florida and I thought it would be fun to go to his wedding because it's always entertaining," Clinton said. "Now that he's running for president, it's a little more troubling."
Trump deserves the backlash he is getting, Clinton said.
"But if we focus on that, we're making a mistake. What a lot of men on that stage said in that debate was offensive, and I want people to understand that if you just focus on the biggest showman on the stage, you lose the thread here."
Asked about the possiblity that Vice President Biden would enter the race and challenge her own front-running position, Clinton demurred.
"I consider him a friend. We were colleagues in the Senate. I have the highest affection and respect for him," Clinton said. " I think we should all just let the vice president be with his family and make whatever decision he feels is right for him."
Anne Gearan is a national politics correspondent for The Washington Post.
Washington (CNN)Donald Trump's plans to make America great again are going to include a lot of whining.
Trump on Tuesday morning in an interview on CNN's "New Day" proclaimed that he is "the most fabulous whiner" when confronted with an opinion piece that criticized him using the same label.
"I do whine because I want to win and I'm not happy about not winning and I am a whiner and I keep whining and whining until I win," Trump told CNN's Chris Cuomo on Tuesday.
Trump was pressed for specifics on the issues he's raised on the campaign trail and touched on every issue from abortion to equal pay for women to foreign policy during the half-hourlong interview on Tuesday.
And Trump also refuted a report that he was considering ruling out a third-party run.
"I'm running as a Republican, I'm leading in every poll...I'm leading all over the place and I want to run as a Republican," Trump said. "If I am treated fairly that's the way it's going to be but I want to keep that door open. I have to keep that door open because if something happens where I'm not treated fairly I may very well use that door."
Trump added that an independent run is "not something I want to do."
ABC News reported Monday that Trump was considering ruling out a third-party run, citing an unnamed senior adviser.
That came days after Trump refused to pledge to rule out a third party run and support the Republican nominee whoever it might be, when asked about it during the Republican primary debate last Thursday.
"It's amazing how many so-called senior advisers I have. Everybody's a senior adviser and a longtime adviser," Trump quipped in a separate interview on Fox News on Tuesday.
Trump's Tuesday morning Fox News appearance was his first since he criticized the Fox News moderators of Thursday's debate and sparked a controversy by going after Megyn Kelly, saying there was "blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever."
That comment was largely interpreted as a reference to menstruation, which Trump has fiercely denied.
But Trump seems to have buried the hatchet with Fox News, telling one of the show's morning anchors that "we've always been friends" as he was welcomed back onto the network.
Trump again slammed those who interpreted his comments as referring to menstruation on CNN, saying only "a deviant" and those with "sick minds" or "semi-sick minds" would think that.
He instead again pivoted to slamming former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush who suggested half-a-billion dollars to fund women's health was too much. Bush later said he "misspoke" and meant to critique only the half-a-billion dollars in funding Planned Parenthood receives.
"I think Jeb Bush owes women an apology because he made a terrible statement about women's health issues and it was a foolish statement and perhaps a stupid statement," Trump said. "He's the one that has to apologize to women."
Trump also lambasted Planned Parenthood, the health care organization and abortion provider that has been under fire after undercover videos were published online.
Lowe's manager replaces black delivery driver with white worker to appease customer
USA TODAY NETWORKMary Bowerman, USA TODAY Network August 11, 2015
Marcus Bradley was making a delivery for Lowe's Home Improvement in Danville, Va., when his manager called and told him to return to the store.
Bradley, an 11-year employee, said when he asked why he couldn't deliver the item, his manager told him, "because you are black, and they don't want you at the house," WSET-TV reported.
Bradley said he was told the customer asked his manager not to send a black employee to deliver the item.
When Bradley returned to the store, a white driver replaced him for the delivery, WSET-TV reported.
Bradley told the news station he would continue working with the company, but wished the situation was handled differently.
"…I would think Lowe's would take it into consideration to think about what they're doing next time," Bradley told WSET-TV.
Chris Ahearn, a Lowe's spokeswoman, said the manager involved is no longer with the company, The Washington Post reported.
"We've reached out to the drivers, and one of our senior executives went to the store to apologize to them in person," she told the Post. "We have zero tolerance for discrimination of any kind, and we should never have accepted the terms of the sale with the individuals who were delivered to."
Walruses, like these in Alaska, are being forced ashore in record numbers.
Alan: Given the invincible ignorance of their conservative constituents, Republican candidates need do nothing but oppose Democrats and mouth right-wing platitudes: "No new taxes. Strong defense. Personal responsibility. Austerity. No government handouts. Free markets. Deregulation."
At minimum they should be required to make an occasional non-platitudinous statement that addresses specific real world concerns. For example... "I do not believe in global warming and consider anthropogenic global warming a hoax. And even if is a real true, there is nothing we can do."
Consider. "If you had to drive your current car for the rest of your life and you knew it had a serious overheating problem which -- every time the engine over-heated -- would further diminish the longevity of your car, would you repair the overheating problem or would you say that "irreversible damage has already been done so there's no need for me to do anything?" If you answer the latter, you're lying.
Sarah Palin: "Alaska Feels Impacts Of Climate Change More Than Any Other State"
Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state's Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide.
On July 20th, James Hansen, the former NASA climatologist who brought climate change to the public's attention in the summer of 1988, issued a bombshell: He and a team of climate scientists had identified a newly important feedback mechanism off the coast of Antarctica that suggests mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065. The authors included this chilling warning: If emissions aren't cut, "We conclude that multi-meter sea-level rise would become practically unavoidable. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea-level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization."
Eric Rignot, a climate scientist at NASA and the University of California-Irvine and a co-author on Hansen's study, said their new research doesn't necessarily change the worst-case scenario on sea-level rise, it just makes it much more pressing to think about and discuss, especially among world leaders. In particular, says Rignot, the new research shows a two-degree Celsius rise in global temperature — the previously agreed upon "safe" level of climate change — "would be a catastrophe for sea-level rise."
Hansen's new study also shows how complicated and unpredictable climate change can be. Even as global ocean temperatures rise to their highest levels in recorded history, some parts of the ocean, near where ice is melting exceptionally fast, are actually cooling, slowing ocean circulation currents and sending weather patterns into a frenzy. Sure enough, a persistently cold patch of ocean is starting to show up just south of Greenland, exactly where previous experimental predictions of a sudden surge of freshwater from melting ice expected it to be. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist, recently said of the unexpectedly sudden Atlantic slowdown, "This is yet another example of where observations suggest that climate model predictions may be too conservative when it comes to the pace at which certain aspects of climate change are proceeding."
Since storm systems and jet streams in the United States and Europe partially draw their energy from the difference in ocean temperatures, the implication of one patch of ocean cooling while the rest of the ocean warms is profound. Storms will get stronger, and sea-level rise will accelerate. Scientists like Hansen only expect extreme weather to get worse in the years to come, though Mann said it was still "unclear" whether recent severe winters on the East Coast are connected to the phenomenon.
And yet, these aren't even the most disturbing changes happening to the Earth's biosphere that climate scientists are discovering this year. For that, you have to look not at the rising sea levels but to what is actually happening within the oceans themselves.
Water temperatures this year in the North Pacific have never been this high for this long over such a large area — and it is already having a profound effect on marine life.
Eighty-year-old Roger Thomas runs whale-watching trips out of San Francisco. On an excursion earlier this year, Thomas spotted 25 humpbacks and three blue whales. During a survey on July 4th, federal officials spotted 115 whales in a single hour near the Farallon Islands — enough to issue a boating warning. Humpbacks are occasionally seen offshore in California, but rarely so close to the coast or in such numbers. Why are they coming so close to shore? Exceptionally warm water has concentrated the krill and anchovies they feed on into a narrow band of relatively cool coastal water. The whales are having a heyday. "It's unbelievable," Thomas told a local paper. "Whales are all over the place."
Last fall, in northern Alaska, in the same part of the Arctic where Shell is planning to drill for oil, federal scientists discovered 35,000 walruses congregating on a single beach. It was the largest-ever documented "haul out" of walruses, and a sign that sea ice, their favored habitat, is becoming harder and harder to find.
Marine life is moving north, adapting in real time to the warming ocean. Great white sharks have been sighted breeding near Monterey Bay, California, the farthest north that's ever been known to occur. A blue marlin was caught last summer near Catalina Island — 1,000 miles north of its typical range. Across California, there have been sightings of non-native animals moving north, such as Mexican red crabs.
Salmon on the brink of dying out. Michael Quinton/Newscom
No species may be as uniquely endangered as the one most associated with the Pacific Northwest, the salmon. Every two weeks, Bill Peterson, an oceanographer and senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Oregon, takes to the sea to collect data he uses to forecast the return of salmon. What he's been seeing this year is deeply troubling.
Salmon are crucial to their coastal ecosystem like perhaps few other species on the planet. A significant portion of the nitrogen in West Coast forests has been traced back to salmon, which can travel hundreds of miles upstream to lay their eggs. The largest trees on Earth simply wouldn't exist without salmon.
But their situation is precarious. This year, officials in California are bringing salmon downstream in convoys of trucks, because river levels are too low and the temperatures too warm for them to have a reasonable chance of surviving. One species, the winter-run Chinook salmon, is at a particularly increased risk of decline in the next few years, should the warm water persist offshore.
"You talk to fishermen, and they all say: 'We've never seen anything like this before,' " says Peterson. "So when you have no experience with something like this, it gets like, 'What the hell's going on?' "
Atmospheric scientists increasingly believe that the exceptionally warm waters over the past months are the early indications of a phase shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a cyclical warming of the North Pacific that happens a few times each century. Positive phases of the PDO have been known to last for 15 to 20 years, during which global warming can increase at double the rate as during negative phases of the PDO. It also makes big El Niños, like this year's, more likely. The nature of PDO phase shifts is unpredictable — climate scientists simply haven't yet figured out precisely what's behind them and why they happen when they do. It's not a permanent change — the ocean's temperature will likely drop from these record highs, at least temporarily, some time over the next few years — but the impact on marine species will be lasting, and scientists have pointed to the PDO as a global-warming preview.
"The climate [change] models predict this gentle, slow increase in temperature," says Peterson, "but the main problem we've had for the last few years is the variability is so high. As scientists, we can't keep up with it, and neither can the animals." Peterson likens it to a boxer getting pummeled round after round: "At some point, you knock them down, and the fight is over."
Pavement-melting heat waves in India. Harish Tyagi/EPA/Corbis
Attendant with this weird wildlife behavior is a stunning drop in the number of plankton — the basis of the ocean's food chain. In July, another major study concluded that acidifying oceans are likely to have a "quite traumatic" impact on plankton diversity, with some species dying out while others flourish. As the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it's converted into carbonic acid — and the pH of seawater declines. According to lead author Stephanie Dutkiewicz of MIT, that trend means "the whole food chain is going to be different."
The Hansen study may have gotten more attention, but the Dutkiewicz study, and others like it, could have even more dire implications for our future. The rapid changes Dutkiewicz and her colleagues are observing have shocked some of their fellow scientists into thinking that yes, actually, we're heading toward the worst-case scenario. Unlike a prediction of massive sea-level rise just decades away, the warming and acidifying oceans represent a problem that seems to have kick-started a mass extinction on the same time scale.
Jacquelyn Gill is a paleoecologist at the University of Maine. She knows a lot about extinction, and her work is more relevant than ever. Essentially, she's trying to save the species that are alive right now by learning more about what killed off the ones that aren't. The ancient data she studies shows "really compelling evidence that there can be events of abrupt climate change that can happen well within human life spans. We're talking less than a decade."
For the past year or two, a persistent change in winds over the North Pacific has given rise to what meteorologists and oceanographers are calling "the blob"— a highly anomalous patch of warm water between Hawaii, Alaska and Baja California that's thrown the marine ecosystem into a tailspin. Amid warmer temperatures, plankton numbers have plummeted, and the myriad species that depend on them have migrated or seen their own numbers dwindle.
Significant northward surges of warm water have happened before, even frequently. El Niño, for example, does this on a predictable basis. But what's happening this year appears to be something new. Some climate scientists think that the wind shift is linked to the rapid decline in Arctic sea ice over the past few years, which separate research has shown makes weather patterns more likely to get stuck.
A similar shift in the behavior of the jet stream has also contributed to the California drought and severe polar vortex winters in the Northeast over the past two years. An amplified jet-stream pattern has produced an unusual doldrum off the West Coast that's persisted for most of the past 18 months. Daniel Swain, a Stanford University meteorologist, has called it the "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge"— weather patterns just aren't supposed to last this long.
What's increasingly uncontroversial among scientists is that in many ecosystems, the impacts of the current off-the-charts temperatures in the North Pacific will linger for years, or longer. The largest ocean on Earth, the Pacific is exhibiting cyclical variability to greater extremes than other ocean basins. While the North Pacific is currently the most dramatic area of change in the world's oceans, it's not alone: Globally, 2014 was a record-setting year for ocean temperatures, and 2015 is on pace to beat it soundly, boosted by the El Niño in the Pacific. Six percent of the world's reefs could disappear before the end of the decade, perhaps permanently, thanks to warming waters.
Since warmer oceans expand in volume, it's also leading to a surge in sea-level rise. One recent study showed a slowdown in Atlantic Ocean currents, perhaps linked to glacial melt from Greenland, that caused a four-inch rise in sea levels along the Northeast coast in just two years, from 2009 to 2010. To be sure, it seems like this sudden and unpredicted surge was only temporary, but scientists who studied the surge estimated it to be a 1-in-850-year event, and it's been blamed on accelerated beach erosion "almost as significant as some hurricane events."
Biblical floods in Turkey. Ali Atmaca/Anadolu Agency/Getty
Possibly worse than rising ocean temperatures is the acidification of the waters. Acidification has a direct effect on mollusks and other marine animals with hard outer bodies: A striking study last year showed that, along the West Coast, the shells of tiny snails are already dissolving, with as-yet-unknown consequences on the ecosystem. One of the study's authors, Nina Bednaršek, told Science magazine that the snails' shells, pitted by the acidifying ocean, resembled "cauliflower" or "sandpaper." A similarly striking study by more than a dozen of the world's top ocean scientists this July said that the current pace of increasing carbon emissions would force an "effectively irreversible" change on ocean ecosystems during this century. In as little as a decade, the study suggested, chemical changes will rise significantly above background levels in nearly half of the world's oceans.
"I used to think it was kind of hard to make things in the ocean go extinct," James Barry of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California told the Seattle Times in 2013. "But this change we're seeing is happening so fast it's almost instantaneous."
Thanks to the pressure we're putting on the planet's ecosystem — warming, acidification and good old-fashioned pollution — the oceans are set up for several decades of rapid change. Here's what could happen next.
The combination of excessive nutrients from agricultural runoff, abnormal wind patterns and the warming oceans is already creating seasonal dead zones in coastal regions when algae blooms suck up most of the available oxygen. The appearance of low-oxygen regions has doubled in frequency every 10 years since 1960 and should continue to grow over the coming decades at an even greater rate.
So far, dead zones have remained mostly close to the coasts, but in the 21st century, deep-ocean dead zones could become common. These low-oxygen regions could gradually expand in size — potentially thousands of miles across — which would force fish, whales, pretty much everything upward. If this were to occur, large sections of the temperate deep oceans would suffer should the oxygen-free layer grow so pronounced that it stratifies, pushing surface ocean warming into overdrive and hindering upwelling of cooler, nutrient-rich deeper water.
Enhanced evaporation from the warmer oceans will create heavier downpours, perhaps destabilizing the root systems of forests, and accelerated runoff will pour more excess nutrients into coastal areas, further enhancing dead zones. In the past year, downpours have broken records in Long Island, Phoenix, Detroit, Baltimore, Houston and Pensacola, Florida.
Evidence for the above scenario comes in large part from our best understanding of what happened 250 million years ago, during the "Great Dying," when more than 90 percent of all oceanic species perished after a pulse of carbon dioxide and methane from land-based sources began a period of profound climate change. The conditions that triggered "Great Dying" took hundreds of thousands of years to develop. But humans have been emitting carbon dioxide at a much quicker rate, so the current mass extinction only took 100 years or so to kick-start.
With all these stressors working against it, a hypoxic feedback loop could wind up destroying some of the oceans' most species-rich ecosystems within our lifetime. A recent study by Sarah Moffitt of the University of California-Davis said it could take the ocean thousands of years to recover. "Looking forward for my kid, people in the future are not going to have the same ocean that I have today," Moffitt said.
As you might expect, having tickets to the front row of a global environmental catastrophe is taking an increasingly emotional toll on scientists, and in some cases pushing them toward advocacy. Of the two dozen or so scientists I interviewed for this piece, virtually all drifted into apocalyptic language at some point.
For Simone Alin, an oceanographer focusing on ocean acidification at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, the changes she's seeing hit close to home. The Puget Sound is a natural laboratory for the coming decades of rapid change because its waters are naturally more acidified than most of the world's marine ecosystems.
The local oyster industry here is already seeing serious impacts from acidifying waters and is going to great lengths to avoid a total collapse. Alin calls oysters, which are non-native, the canary in the coal mine for the Puget Sound: "A canary is also not native to a coal mine, but that doesn't mean it's not a good indicator of change."
Though she works on fundamental oceanic changes every day, the Dutkiewicz study on the impending large-scale changes to plankton caught her off-guard: "This was alarming to me because if the basis of the food web changes, then . . . everything could change, right?"
Alin's frank discussion of the looming oceanic apocalypse is perhaps a product of studying unfathomable change every day. But four years ago, the birth of her twins "heightened the whole issue," she says. "I was worried enough about these problems before having kids that I maybe wondered whether it was a good idea. Now, it just makes me feel crushed."
Katharine Hayhoe speaks about climate change to students and faculty at Wayland Baptist University in 2011. Geoffrey McAllister/Chicago Tribune/MCT/Getty
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and evangelical Christian, moved from Canada to Texas with her husband, a pastor, precisely because of its vulnerability to climate change. There, she engages with the evangelical community on science — almost as a missionary would. But she's already planning her exit strategy: "If we continue on our current pathway, Canada will be home for us long term. But the majority of people don't have an exit strategy. . . . So that's who I'm here trying to help."
James Hansen, the dean of climate scientists, retired from NASA in 2013 to become a climate activist. But for all the gloom of the report he just put his name to, Hansen is actually somewhat hopeful. That's because he knows that climate change has a straightforward solution: End fossil-fuel use as quickly as possible. If tomorrow, the leaders of the United States and China would agree to a sufficiently strong, coordinated carbon tax that's also applied to imports, the rest of the world would have no choice but to sign up. This idea has already been pitched to Congress several times, with tepid bipartisan support. Even though a carbon tax is probably a long shot, for Hansen, even the slim possibility that bold action like this might happen is enough for him to devote the rest of his life to working to achieve it. On a conference call with reporters in July, Hansen said a potential joint U.S.-China carbon tax is more important than whatever happens at the United Nations climate talks in Paris.
One group Hansen is helping is Our Children's Trust, a legal advocacy organization that's filed a number of novel challenges on behalf of minors under the idea that climate change is a violation of intergenerational equity — children, the group argues, are lawfully entitled to inherit a healthy planet.
A separate challenge to U.S. law is being brought by a former EPA scientist arguing that carbon dioxide isn't just a pollutant (which, under the Clean Air Act, can dissipate on its own), it's also a toxic substance. In general, these substances have exceptionally long life spans in the environment, cause an unreasonable risk, and therefore require remediation. In this case, remediation may involve planting vast numbers of trees or restoring wetlands to bury excess carbon underground.
Even if these novel challenges succeed, it will take years before a bend in the curve is noticeable. But maybe that's enough. When all feels lost, saving a few species will feel like a triumph.
Alan: Who needs real positions when you've got a nice piece of ass? Alan: Hal Crowther contends that the most salient feature of American political process is how much influence can be bought for chump change. http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/ArticleArchives?category=1179077 The "bribes" necessary to suborn federal politicians are so small that Big Money can buy off both parties' candidates by splitting donations 70-30 or 60-40. This consummate cynicism enhances the electability of the candidates most beholden to The Golden Calf, while pocketing the other party's candidates as well.
"Why of course the people don't want war... Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought along to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's Deputy Chief and Luftwaffe Commander, at the Nuremberg trials, 1946.
"Do War's Really Defend America's Freedom?"
(Homage To Marine Commandant, Major General Smedley Butler
Per capita, Spain gives 50% more than the U.S. to Foreign Aid. England gives 250% more than the U.S. Sweden gives 500% as much. Not only is the United States a skinflint nation, it prides itself by thinking it's 150 times more generous than it is. Then it has the brass balls to believe the national budget can be balanced simply by cutting its paltry donation to Foreign Aid.
Americans already think a third of the budget goes to foreign aid.
The poll result that seems to most frustrate budget analysts is the apparent belief among Americans that foreign aid is a huge cost to the federal government. The latest poll that my colleague Ezra Klein cites finds that the average American thinks the United States spends 28 percent of the federal budget on aid to foreign governments -- more than the country spends on Social Security or Medicare or defense.
In reality, we spend only 1 percent on foreign aid.
This gap between perception and reality is ridiculously large. That's depressing, but it also presents an opportunity. The case that 28 percent of the budget should go to foreign aid is very strong. And if Americans already think we give that much -- well, the least we could do is accommodate them!
We could even announce that we're obeying the American people's wishes and cutting aid to be only 25 percent of the federal budget. Or 15 percent! Or five percent! Any of these moves would lead to a massive increase in the well-being of the average human being, and here's why.
So how does foreign aid look on that scale? Well, let's take the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) as an example. It started in 2004 and has a reputation for being among the most cost-effective aid programs the United States has invested in. One study estimated that PEPFAR spent $2,700 for each life it saved. That's in keeping with other highly effective aid interventions. GiveWell estimates that providing insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria costs around $1,500 to 2,000 per life saved. Deworming efforts cost somewhere between $1,700 and $4,000 per life saved.
Let's compare that to a major social policy meant to improve welfare here in the United States. The Medicaid expansion included in the new health care law is a good example. Health wonks like MIT's Jon Gruber have long argued that expanding Medicaid is the most cost-effective way to expand coverage, and numerous studies (this one being perhaps the most pertinent) have found that insuring more people saves lives. Friends-of-the-blog researchers Aaron Carroll and Harold Pollack estimate that expanding Medicaid costs $1 million per life saved.
I don't want to diss Medicaid expansion: $1 million per life is actually really good compared to a whole lot of government programs. I suspect you'd get a number many orders of magnitude higher if you tried to do the same calculation for, say, a fancy new spy plane. But that would be hundreds of times less effective than increasing aid to developing countries. The case for redirecting spending — particularly truly wasteful spending, such as much of the defense budget or farm payments or unnecessary medical payments — toward more aid to the third world is extremely strong.
The equality case
The proceeds of mines like this one in Nigeria often don't go to their nations' people. (George Osodi/National Museum of African Art)
Perhaps you don't buy the utilitarian intuition that we want to make as many people better off as possible. Let's say you think it's more important that government treat people fairly. The case for redirecting money to the developing world is still very strong.
The most basic reason why is that place-of-birth is as arbitrary a reason to treat someone differently as is race or gender. Someone living on less than $1 a day in Haiti no more chose to be in that position than I chose to a white male in the richest country on Earth. If world institutions are to be structured to treat both of us fairly, they would allow for the Haitian to at the very least have the same starting resources, if not the same outcomes, as I do. For that to happen, something dramatic has to change in U.S. policy. One way to shrink the gap is to let many more people come to the United States. But assuming that nativistic attitudes prevail, foreign aid is the next best option.
But there's another wrinkle here, as well. It's not just that we fail to provide enough resources to the Haitian. It's also that world institutions are set up so as to actively harm him.
One of the most prominent voices making this kind of argument is Yale's Thomas Pogge, who alleges that "most of us do not merely let people starve, but also participate in starving them." We elect politicians who allow business owners to take the land's natural resources, compensating only illegitimate and dictatorial rulers for the privilege. We buy goods, including those ill-gotten natural resources, from those businesses. The politicians we elect have created a system of international finance that allows those illegitimate rulers to borrow in the name of their people, which materially benefits those rulers, increases incentives for bloody coups d'état and prevents later governments from spending on anti-poverty programs. We also enforce immigration laws that keep people from moving to countries where they could escape poverty.
If you buy any part of Pogge's argument, then it follows that we must stop propping up structures that perpetuate world poverty and support policies that undermine them. Pogge's preferred plan is known as the global resources dividend, in which all countries pay a 1 percent fee on any natural resources they use, and the proceeds are spent by NGOs or democratic governments of poor countries to fight world poverty.
But an increase in the U.S. aid budget would similarly counteract whatever harms the United States may be inflicting on the people of poor nations.
The nationalist case
At this point, you might still think the case is weak. The U.S. government exists for Americans. Why should we have to care about saving the lives of people abroad, or even about not harming them?
The most plausible defense of the United States only caring for its own citizens is that our country knows what Americans need better than it knows what people abroad need. More generally, one could argue that a system where nations take care of their own produces the best outcomes, and that a self-interested policy approach on the part of the United States brings us closer to that system.
The philosopher Robert Goodin has a great explication of this argument's limits in the paper "What is so special about our fellow countrymen?" Our relationships to our countrymen are indeed special, but they're special in the costs we impose on them as much as in the benefits we give. We let our fellow citizens, and no other nation's, vote, but we can also conscript them, force them to pay taxes and purchase their property against their will. So, on what grounds can we treat our citizens better than foreigners some of the time but worse on other occasions?
"It's a two-way deal!" you might say. Taxes and eminent domain and the like are the prices we pay for special treatment from the state. But few of us would be willing to accept the implications of treating the government like a mutual-benefit society of that type. Chances are that many congenitally handicapped people will, throughout the course of their lives, receive far more in benefits from the state than they'll contribute in taxes; indeed, if they are unable to work, their contribution will be quite minimal. If the government is a mutual benefit society, we must expel people like that and deny them any benefits.
No one would accept a state that cruel because governments are not, in fact, mutual benefit societies. Instead, Goodin argues that states are just ways that we fulfill our general ethical obligations to other human beings. That, for practical reasons, involves some divvying up of roles on national lines. It wouldn't make much sense for German taxpayers to pay to repair American roads. But it also means that we shouldn't pass up opportunities to help people from outside our political community. Indeed, we're often morally obligated to seize such opportunities.
Call the bluff
This is a better poker move than anything Topher Grace does in "Ocean's 11." (Warner Bros.)
So, Congress and the president could call the American peoples' bluff and direct 28 percent of the fiscal year 2015 budget to foreign aid. According to the Congressional Budget Office's latest projections, the United States will spend $3.777 trillion that year. Twenty-eight percent of that is a little under $1.1 trillion. We might be able to slice that from the budget through cuts to defense, farm subsidies and wasteful health spending, though it would take a lot of doing.
But, given that investors are literally giving money away to the United States for free at the moment, why not take some of it and give it to poor people abroad? Borrowing $1.47 trillion (minus the paltry sum we now spend on USAID, PEPFAR, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, etc.) would get us to 28 percent.
As for how to spend it, the sky's the limit! We could spend it on highly cost-effective interventions, such as an expansion of PEPFAR, de-worming efforts or anti-malarial bed nets. We could try more ambitious projects that are possible only with funding of that scale. Or we could just, you know, give the money to poor people. A newly released randomized trial shows that practice improves any number of health, education and financial outcomes for poor people, and most importantly, it allows them to direct aid dollars to what they actually need, which they usually understand better than do outside aid workers. Cash transfers would also minimize administrative bloat and corruption; in poor countries with cellphone-based payment systems, you can evade corrupt governments entirely.
Would this be politically unpopular? Obviously. People hate spending this much on foreign aid. But given that they already think we're spending this much anyway, why not anger the voters and save millions of lives as a consequence?
Altruists of Congress, unite! You have nothing to lose but your seats (possibly).
Dylan Matthews covers taxes, poverty, campaign finance, higher education, and all things data. He has also written for The New Republic, Salon, Slate, and The American Prospect. Follow him on Twitter here. Email him here.
***
Americans Clamor For Budget Cuts
But Have No Intention To Enact Them
Americans preach abstract budget cuts that have no intention of implementing in practice. These fiscal pharisees' foremost pleasure is lying to others to distract them from the fact that they're lying to themselves.
When the nation's nose is pushed hard against the glass of reality, Americans will not agree on enough budget cuts lower the deficit by more than a fewer percentage points. ***
Most Americans are threatened by the prospect of thinking and avoid it by spouting middle school sound bites that are as platitudinously comforting now as they were then.
The refusal of some 20 Republican governors or state legislatures to accept the ACA Medicaid expansion has to rank as one of the biggest political and moral scandals of modern times. To allow millions of citizens to suffer or die needlessly without health insurance merely to continue a political grudge is beyond reprehensible, but to do so when such state costs are covered between 90% to 100% by the federal government descends to abject immorality. That funding fact, alone, makes today's sad episode one for the history books. Like the "Jim Crow" South or post-WWII "red-lining" of minority communities, this Republican policy of denying available health insurance to the poor is indefensible on a historic level.
Republicans are aware of their crime and, in particular, know that the biggest PR key to denying their culpability is to pretend that this withheld insurance is not fully or near fully funded by the federal government. After all, what moral person could gratuitously, miserly, refuse health insurance to their own citizens? No, it must be fiscally impossible. Out of the sinners' control. But how?
Enter Fox's Megyn Kelly at the last Republican debate, with as an intentionally dishonest a question that you could imagine:
KELLY: Governor Kasich, You chose to expand Medicaid in your state, unlike several other governors on this stage tonight, and it is already over budget by some estimates costing taxpayers an additional $1.4 billion in just the first 18 months.
You defended your Medicaid expansion by invoking God, saying to skeptics that when they arrive in heaven, Saint Peter isn’t going to ask them how small they’ve kept government, but what they have done for the poor.
Why should Republican voters, who generally want to shrink government, believe that you won’t use your Saint Peter rationale to expand every government program?
Wow! I thought: Ohio's Medicaid expansion - passed over objections of the Republican legislature - is already $1.4 billion over budget?!? Holy cow! These Republicans are innocent of heart - or at least forgivably broke. Right?
No. This dishonest Megyn Kelly "question" (previously the rage on right wing web sites) is so galling, and so dangerous, that it requires close attention:
1. This is not about waste or profligacy. The sole reason for the extra costs is because Ohio's Medicaid expansion proved so necessary and appealing that more people signed up than predicted. Do you catch that trick? Ohio's Medicaid expansion is not so vital and successful beyond expectations; No, it is "over budget." In other words, when Gov. Kasich [illustrative numbers only] originally hoped to reduce Ohio's uninsured rate by 5% in the first year, but wound up reducing it by 8%, that wasn't a striking success; it was an Orwellian failure to meet a budget. (Kudos for the dry accounting language of evil.)
2. Still, what about the $1.4 billion in extra costs? All of it, 100%, is covered by the federal ACA program, without any additional costs to Ohioans.
3. But Ms. Kelly mentions the "taxpayers"? Ohio taxpayers? No. She is slyly referring to federal taxpayers. But the ACA federal taxes are already being collected, and they don't go up or down whether Ohio expands Medicaid, rejects Medicaid or enrolls more (or less) than they expected in Medicaid. If Ohio Republicans succeeded in taking away their citizens' insurance, federal taxpayers would not save a penny.
4. Sure, but after a couple of years Ohio taxpayers will have to pay 5% to 10% of this higher number? Two answers: (i) yes, but that was never the Republican objection. Republicans objected to paying 5% to 10% from dollar one, and falsely pretend that the problem was "billions" of unfunded costs. (ii) Much of the unexpected ACA Medicaid expansion consisted of former (traditional) Medicaid members learning that they are eligible for the new, expanded ACA Medicaid. Guess what? The Medicaid expansion is paid 90%-100% by the federal government, while the traditional Medicaid is paid around 50%. So, with respect to the "overage," Ohio is getting double the Medicare reimbursement by accepting Obamacare, and eliminating the (substantial but inadequate) amounts that it used to spend on the uninsured.
OK, that may sound wonky, but it is clear . . . and Megyn Kelly certainly knew what she was obfuscating. Sorry, Megyn. The politics of your Republican bosses remain immoral . . . historically immoral. A true journalist would report the crime, not aid in covering it up.
"GOP's Anti-Medicaid Expansion Body Count, By State"
(BTW: just look at the language of her question - "You defended your Medicaid expansion by invoking God," you talk about "arriv[ing] in heaven," and "Saint Peter" and what we should do "for the poor." Megyn Kelly is most worried about defending the morality, not the economics, of the Republican position. Indeed, with typical chutzpah, she turns the question on its head and asks why Republican voters shouldn't "believe that you won’t use your Saint Peter rationale to expand every government program?" That is some nice old time religion they have.)
Five years have passed since the onset of what is sometimes called the Great Recession. While the economy has slowly improved, there are still millions of Americans leading lives of quiet desperation: without jobs, without resources, without hope.
Who was to blame? Was it simply a result of negligence, of the kind of inordinate risk-taking commonly called a “bubble,” of an imprudent but innocent failure to maintain adequate reserves for a rainy day? Or was it the result, at least in part, of fraudulent practices, of dubious mortgages portrayed as sound risks and packaged into ever more esoteric financial instruments, the fundamental weaknesses of which were intentionally obscured?
If it was the former—if the recession was due, at worst, to a lack of caution—then the criminal law has no role to play in the aftermath. For in all but a few circumstances (not here relevant), the fierce and fiery weapon called criminal prosecution is directed at intentional misconduct, and nothing less. If the Great Recession was in no part the handiwork of intentionally fraudulent practices by high-level executives, then to prosecute such executives criminally would be “scapegoating” of the most shallow and despicable kind.
But if, by contrast, the Great Recession was in material part the product of intentional fraud, the failure to prosecute those responsible must be judged one of the more egregious failures of the criminal justice system in many years. Indeed, it would stand in striking contrast to the increased success that federal prosecutors have had over the past fifty years or so in bringing to justice even the highest-level figures who orchestrated mammoth frauds. Thus, in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the “junk bond” bubble that, in many ways, was a precursor of the more recent bubble in mortgage-backed securities, the progenitors of the fraud were all successfully prosecuted, right up to Michael Milken.
Again, in the 1980s, the so-called savings-and-loan crisis, which again had some eerie parallels to more recent events, resulted in the successful criminal prosecution of more than eight hundred individuals, right up to Charles Keating. And again, the widespread accounting frauds of the 1990s, most vividly represented by Enron and WorldCom, led directly to the successful prosecution of such previously respected CEOs as Jeffrey Skilling and Bernie Ebbers.
In striking contrast with these past prosecutions, not a single high-level executive has been successfully prosecuted in connection with the recent financial crisis, and given the fact that most of the relevant criminal provisions are governed by a five-year statute of limitations, it appears likely that none will be. It may not be too soon, therefore, to ask why.
One possibility, already mentioned, is that no fraud was committed. This possibility should not be discounted. Every case is different, and I, for one, have no opinion about whether criminal fraud was committed in any given instance.
But the stated opinion of those government entities asked to examine the financial crisis overall is not that no fraud was committed. Quite the contrary. For example, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, in its final report, uses variants of the word “fraud” no fewer than 157 times in describing what led to the crisis, concluding that there was a “systemic breakdown,” not just in accountability, but also in ethical behavior.
As the commission found, the signs of fraud were everywhere to be seen, with the number of reports of suspected mortgage fraud rising twenty-fold between 1996 and 2005 and then doubling again in the next four years. As early as 2004, FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker was publicly warning of the “pervasive problem” of mortgage fraud, driven by the voracious demand for mortgage-backed securities. Similar warnings, many from within the financial community, were disregarded, not because they were viewed as inaccurate, but because, as one high-level banker put it, “A decision was made that ‘We’re going to have to hold our nose and start buying the stated product if we want to stay in business.’”
Without giving further examples, the point is that, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the prevailing view of many government officials (as well as others) was that the crisis was in material respects the product of intentional fraud. In a nutshell, the fraud, they argued, was a simple one. Subprime mortgages, i.e., mortgages of dubious creditworthiness, increasingly provided the chief collateral for highly leveraged securities that were marketed as AAA, i.e., securities of very low risk. How could this transformation of a sow’s ear into a silk purse be accomplished unless someone dissembled along the way?
While officials of the Department of Justice have been more circumspect in describing the roots of the financial crisis than have the various commissions of inquiry and other government agencies, I have seen nothing to indicate their disagreement with the widespread conclusion that fraud at every level permeated the bubble in mortgage-backed securities. Rather, their position has been to excuse their failure to prosecute high-level individuals for fraud in connection with the financial crisis on one or more of three grounds:
First, they have argued that proving fraudulent intent on the part of the high-level management of the banks and companies involved has been difficult. It is undoubtedly true that the ranks of top management were several levels removed from those who were putting together the collateralized debt obligations and other securities offerings that were based on dubious mortgages; and the people generating the mortgages themselves were often at other companies and thus even further removed. And I want to stress again that I have no opinion whether any given top executive had knowledge of the dubious nature of the underlying mortgages, let alone fraudulent intent.
But what I do find surprising is that the Department of Justice should view the proving of intent as so difficult in this case. Who, for example, was generating the so-called “suspicious activity reports” of mortgage fraud that, as mentioned, increased so hugely in the years leading up to the crisis? Why, the banks themselves. A top-level banker, one might argue, confronted with growing evidence from his own and other banks that mortgage fraud was increasing, might have inquired why his bank’s mortgage-based securities continued to receive AAA ratings. And if, despite these and other reports of suspicious activity, the executive failed to make such inquiries, might it be because he did not want to know what such inquiries would reveal?
This, of course, is what is known in the law as “willful blindness” or “conscious disregard.” It is a well-established basis on which federal prosecutors have asked juries to infer intent, including in cases involving complexities, such as accounting rules, at least as esoteric as those involved in the events leading up to the financial crisis. And while some federal courts have occasionally expressed qualifications about the use of the willful blindness approach to prove intent, the Supreme Court has consistently approved it. As that Court stated most recently in Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A. (2011):
The doctrine of willful blindness is well established in criminal law. Many criminal statutes require proof that a defendant acted knowingly or willfully, and courts applying the doctrine of willful blindness hold that defendants cannot escape the reach of these statutes by deliberately shielding themselves from clear evidence of critical facts that are strongly suggested by the circumstances.
Thus, the department’s claim that proving intent in the financial crisis is particularly difficult may strike some as doubtful.
Second, and even weaker, the Department of Justice has sometimes argued that, because the institutions to whom mortgage-backed securities were sold were themselves sophisticated investors, it might be difficult to prove reliance. Thus, in defending the failure to prosecute high-level executives for frauds arising from the sale of mortgage-backed securities, Lanny Breuer, the then head of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, told PBS:
In a criminal case…I have to prove not only that you made a false statement but that you intended to commit a crime, and also that the other side of the transaction relied on what you were saying. And frankly, in many of the securitizations and the kinds of transactions we’re talking about, in reality you had very sophisticated counterparties on both sides. And so even though one side may have said something was dark blue when really we can say it was sky blue, the other side of the transaction, the other sophisticated party, wasn’t relying at all on the description of the color.
Actually, given the fact that these securities were bought and sold at lightning speed, it is by no means obvious that even a sophisticated counterparty would have detected the problems with the arcane, convoluted mortgage-backed derivatives they were being asked to purchase. But there is a more fundamental problem with the above-quoted statement from the former head of the Criminal Division, which is that it totally misstates the law. In actuality, in a criminal fraud case the government is never required to prove—ever—that one party to a transaction relied on the word of another. The reason, of course, is that that would give a crooked seller a license to lie whenever he was dealing with a sophisticated buyer. The law, however, says that society is harmed when a seller purposely lies about a material fact, even if the immediate purchaser does not rely on that particular fact, because such misrepresentations create problems for the market as a whole. And surely there never was a situation in which the sale of dubious mortgage-backed securities created more of a problem for the marketplace, and society as a whole, than in the recent financial crisis.
The third reason the department has sometimes given for not bringing these prosecutions is that to do so would itself harm the economy. Thus, Attorney General Eric Holder himself told Congress:
It does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute—if you do bring a criminal charge—it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.
To a federal judge, who takes an oath to apply the law equally to rich and to poor, this excuse—sometimes labeled the “too big to jail” excuse—is disturbing, frankly, in what it says about the department’s apparent disregard for equality under the law.
In fairness, however, Holder (who later claimed his comment was misconstrued) was referring to the prosecution of financial institutions, rather than their CEOs. Moreover, he might have also been influenced, as his department unquestionably was, by the adverse reaction to the Arthur Anderson case, where that accounting firm was forced out of business by a prosecution that was ultimately reversed on appeal. But if we are talking about prosecuting individuals, the excuse becomes entirely irrelevant; for no one that I know of has ever contended that a big financial institution would collapse if one or more of its high-level executives were prosecuted, as opposed to the institution itself.
Eric Holder; drawing by John Springs
Without multiplying examples further, my point is that the Department of Justice has never taken the position that all the top executives involved in the events leading up to the financial crisis were innocent; rather it has offered one or another excuse for not criminally prosecuting them—excuses that, on inspection, appear unconvincing. So, you might ask, what’s really going on here? I don’t claim to have any inside information about the real reasons why no such prosecutions have been brought, but I take the liberty of offering some speculations.
At the outset, however, let me say that I completely discount the argument sometimes made that no such prosecutions have been brought because the top prosecutors were often people who previously represented the financial institutions in question and/or were people who expected to be representing such institutions in the future: the so-called “revolving door.” In my experience, most federal prosecutors, at every level, are seeking to make a name for themselves, and the best way to do that is by prosecuting some high-level person. While companies that are indicted almost always settle, individual defendants whose careers are at stake will often go to trial. And if the government wins such a trial, as it usually does, the prosecutor’s reputation is made. My point is that whatever small influence the “revolving door” may have in discouraging certain white-collar prosecutions is more than offset, at least in the case of prosecuting high-level individuals, by the career-making benefits such prosecutions confer on the successful prosecutor.
So, one asks again, why haven’t we seen such prosecutions growing out of the financial crisis? I offer, by way of speculation, three influences that I think, along with others, have had the effect of limiting such prosecutions.
First, the prosecutors had other priorities. Some of these were completely understandable. For example, before 2001, the FBI had more than one thousand agents assigned to investigating financial frauds, but after September 11 many of these agents were shifted to antiterrorism work. Who can argue with that? Yet the result was that, by 2007 or so, there were only 120 agents reviewing the more than 50,000 reports of mortgage fraud filed by the banks. It is true that after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, new agents were hired for some of the vacated spots in offices concerned with fraud detection; but this is not a form of detection easily learned, and recent budget limitations have only exacerbated the problem.
Of course, while the FBI has substantial responsibility for investigating mortgage fraud, the FBI is not the primary investigator of fraud in the sale of mortgage-backed securities; that responsibility lies mostly with the SEC. But at the very time the financial crisis was breaking, the SEC was trying to deflect criticism from its failure to detect the Madoff fraud, and this led it to concentrate on other Ponzi-like schemes that emerged in the wake of the financial crisis, along with cases involving misallocation of assets (such as stealing funds from a customer), which are among the easiest cases to prove. Indeed, as Professor John Coffee of Columbia Law School has repeatedly documented, Ponzi schemes and misallocation-of-asset cases have been the primary focus of the SEC since 2009, while cases involving fraud in the sale of mortgage-backed securities have been much less frequent. More recently, moreover, the SEC has been hard hit by budget limitations, and this has not only made it more difficult to assign the kind of manpower the kinds of frauds we are talking about require, but also has led the SEC enforcement staff to focus on the smaller, easily resolved cases that will beef up their statistics when they go to Congress begging for money.
As for the Department of Justice proper, a decision was made in 2009 to spread the investigation of financial fraud cases among numerous US Attorney’s Offices, many of which had little or no previous experience in investigating and prosecuting sophisticated financial frauds. This was in connection with the president’s creation of a special task force to investigate the crisis, from which remarkably little has been heard in the intervening four-plus years. At the same time, the US Attorney’s Office with the greatest expertise in these kinds of cases, the Southern District of New York, was just embarking on its prosecution of insider-trading cases arising from the Raj Rajaratnam tapes, which soon proved a gold mine of prosecutable cases that absorbed a huge amount of the attention of the securities fraud unit of that office.
While I want to stress again that I have no inside information, as a former chief of that unit I would venture to guess that the cases involving the financial crisis were parceled out to assistant US attorneys who were also responsible for insider-trading cases. Which do you think an assistant would devote most of her attention to: an insider-trading case that was already nearly ready to go to indictment and that might lead to a high-visibility trial, or a financial crisis case that was just getting started, would take years to complete, and had no guarantee of even leading to an indictment? Of course, she would put her energy into the insider-trading case, and if she was lucky, it would go to trial, she would win, and, in some cases, she would then take a job with a large law firm. And in the process, the financial fraud case would get lost in the shuffle.
In short, a focus on quite different priorities is, I submit, one of the reasons the financial fraud cases have not been brought, especially cases against high-level individuals that would take many years, many investigators, and a great deal of expertise to investigate. But a second, and less salutary, reason for not bringing such cases is the government’s own involvement in the underlying circumstances that led to the financial crisis.
On the one hand, the government, writ large, had a part in creating the conditions that encouraged the approval of dubious mortgages. Even before the start of the housing boom, it was the government, in the form of Congress, that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, thus allowing certain banks that had previously viewed mortgages as a source of interest income to become instead deeply involved in securitizing pools of mortgages in order to obtain the much greater profits available from trading. It was the government, in the form of both the executive and the legislature, that encouraged deregulation, thus weakening the power and oversight not only of the SEC but also of such diverse banking overseers as the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, both in the Treasury Department. It was the government, in the form of the Federal Reserve, that kept interest rates low, in part to encourage mortgages. It was the government, in the form of the executive, that strongly encouraged banks to make loans to individuals with low incomes who might have previously been regarded as too risky to warrant a mortgage.
Thus, in the year 2000, HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo increased to 50 percent the percentage of low-income mortgages that the government-sponsored entities known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were required to purchase, helping to create the conditions that resulted in over half of all mortgages being subprime at the time the housing market began to collapse in 2007.
It was the government, pretty much across the board, that acquiesced in the ever-greater tendency not to require meaningful documentation as a condition of obtaining a mortgage, often preempting in this regard state regulations designed to assure greater mortgage quality and a borrower’s ability to repay. Indeed, in the year 2000, the Office of Thrift Supervision, having just finished a successful campaign to preempt state regulation of thrift underwriting, terminated its own underwriting regulations entirely.
The result of all this was the mortgages that later became known as “liars’ loans.” They were increasingly risky; but what did the banks care, since they were making their money from the securitizations. And what did the government care, since it was helping to create a boom in the economy and helping voters to realize their dream of owning a home?
Moreover, the government was also deeply enmeshed in the aftermath of the financial crisis. It was the government that proposed the shotgun marriages of, among others, Bank of America with Merrill Lynch, and of J.P. Morgan with Bear Stearns. If, in the process, mistakes were made and liabilities not disclosed, was it not partly the government’s fault? One does not necessarily have to adopt the view of Neil Barofsky, former special inspector general in charge of oversight of TARP, that regulators made almost no effort to hold accountable the financial institutions they were bailing out, to wonder whether the government, having helped create the conditions that led to the seeming widespread fraud in the mortgage-backed securities market, was all too ready to forgive its alleged perpetrators.
Please do not misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that the government knowingly participated in any of the fraudulent practices alleged by the Financial Inquiry Crisis Commission and others. But what I am suggesting is that the government was deeply involved, from beginning to end, in helping create the conditions that could lead to such fraud, and that this would give a prudent prosecutor pause in deciding whether to indict a CEO who might, with some justice, claim that he was only doing what he fairly believed the government wanted him to do.
The final factor I would mention is both the most subtle and the most systemic of the three, and arguably the most important. It is the shift that has occurred, over the past thirty years or more, from focusing on prosecuting high-level individuals to focusing on prosecuting companies and other institutions. It is true that prosecutors have brought criminal charges against companies for well over a hundred years, but until relatively recently, such prosecutions were the exception, and prosecutions of companies without simultaneous prosecutions of their managerial agents were even rarer.
The reasons were obvious. Companies do not commit crimes; only their agents do. And while a company might get the benefit of some such crimes, prosecuting the company would inevitably punish, directly or indirectly, the many employees and shareholders who were totally innocent. Moreover, under the law of most US jurisdictions, a company cannot be criminally liable unless at least one managerial agent has committed the crime in question; so why not prosecute the agent who actually committed the crime?
In recent decades, however, prosecutors have been increasingly attracted to prosecuting companies, often even without indicting a single person. This shift has often been rationalized as part of an attempt to transform “corporate cultures,” so as to prevent future such crimes; and as a result, government policy has taken the form of “deferred prosecution agreements” or even “nonprosecution agreements,” in which the company, under threat of criminal prosecution, agrees to take various prophylactic measures to prevent future wrongdoing. Such agreements have become, in the words of Lanny Breuer, the former head of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, “a mainstay of white-collar criminal law enforcement,” with the department entering into 233 such agreements over the last decade. But in practice, I suggest, this approach has led to some lax and dubious behavior on the part of prosecutors, with deleterious results.
If you are a prosecutor attempting to discover the individuals responsible for an apparent financial fraud, you go about your business in much the same way you go after mobsters or drug kingpins: you start at the bottom and, over many months or years, slowly work your way up. Specifically, you start by “flipping” some lower- or mid-level participant in the fraud who you can show was directly responsible for making one or more false material misrepresentations but who is willing to cooperate, and maybe even “wear a wire”—i.e., secretly record his colleagues—in order to reduce his sentence. With his help, and aided by the substantial prison penalties now available in white-collar cases, you go up the ladder.
But if your priority is prosecuting the company, a different scenario takes place. Early in the investigation, you invite in counsel to the company and explain to him or her why you suspect fraud. He or she responds by assuring you that the company wants to cooperate and do the right thing, and to that end the company has hired a former assistant US attorney, now a partner at a respected law firm, to do an internal investigation. The company’s counsel asks you to defer your investigation until the company’s own internal investigation is completed, on the condition that the company will share its results with you. In order to save time and resources, you agree.
Six months later the company’s counsel returns, with a detailed report showing that mistakes were made but that the company is now intent on correcting them. You and the company then agree that the company will enter into a deferred prosecution agreement that couples some immediate fines with the imposition of expensive but internal prophylactic measures. For all practical purposes the case is now over. You are happy because you believe that you have helped prevent future crimes; the company is happy because it has avoided a devastating indictment; and perhaps the happiest of all are the executives, or former executives, who actually committed the underlying misconduct, for they are left untouched.
I suggest that this is not the best way to proceed. Although it is supposedly justified because it prevents future crimes, I suggest that the future deterrent value of successfully prosecuting individuals far outweighs the prophylactic benefits of imposing internal compliance measures that are often little more than window-dressing. Just going after the company is also both technically and morally suspect. It is technically suspect because, under the law, you should not indict or threaten to indict a company unless you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that some managerial agent of the company committed the alleged crime; and if you can prove that, why not indict the manager? And from a moral standpoint, punishing a company and its many innocent employees and shareholders for the crimes committed by some unprosecuted individuals seems contrary to elementary notions of moral responsibility.
These criticisms take on special relevance, however, in the instance of investigations growing out of the financial crisis, because, as noted, the Department of Justice’s position, until at least recently, is that going after the suspect institutions poses too great a risk to the nation’s economic recovery. So you don’t go after the companies, at least not criminally, because they are too big to jail; and you don’t go after the individuals, because that would involve the kind of years-long investigations that you no longer have the experience or the resources to pursue.
In conclusion, I want to stress again that I do not claim that the financial crisis that is still causing so many of us so much pain and despondency was the product, in whole or in part, of fraudulent misconduct. But if it was—as various governmental authorities have asserted it was—then the failure of the government to bring to justice those responsible for such colossal fraud bespeaks weaknesses in our prosecutorial system that need to be addressed.
Colonel Ty Seidule is professor and Head of the Department of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point. In a five minute video, he destroys the Civil War revisionist argument that the Civil War wasn't fought over slavery. Of course, anyone who understands history knows that the Confederacy was formed to protect racist slavery, but far too many people still don't understand that or don't want to understand it. For them, and for anyone who wants to be able quickly to dismantle Civil War revisionism whenever they see it, this video is must viewing. The transcript begins here, the video and the rest of the transcript are below the fold.
Was the American Civil War fought because of slavery? More than 150 years later this remains a controversial question.
Why? Because many people don't want to believe that the citizens of the southern states were willing to fight and die to preserve a morally repugnant institution. There has to be another reason, we are told. Well, there isn't.
The evidence is clear and overwhelming. Slavery was, by a wide margin, the single most important cause of the Civil War -- for both sides. Before the presidential election of 1860, a South Carolina newspaper warned that the issue before the country was, "the extinction of slavery," and called on all who were not prepared to, "surrender the institution," to act. Shortly after Abraham Lincoln's victory, they did.
The secession documents of every Southern state made clear, crystal clear, that they were leaving the Union in order to protect their "peculiar institution" of slavery -- a phrase that at the time meant "the thing special to them." The vote to secede was 169 to 0 in South Carolina, 166 to 7 in Texas, 84 to 15 in Mississippi. In no Southern state was the vote close.
Alexander Stephens of Georgia, the Confederacy's Vice President clearly articulated the views of the South in March 1861. "Our new government," he said, was founded on slavery. "Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, submission to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition." Yet, despite the evidence, many continue to argue that other factors superseded slavery as the cause of the Civil War.
Some argue that the South only wanted to protect states' rights. But this raises an obvious question: the states' rights to what? Wasn't it to maintain and spread slavery? Moreover, states' rights was not an exclusive Southern issue. All the states -- North and South -- sought to protect their rights -- sometimes they petitioned the federal government, sometimes they quarreled with each other. In fact, Mississippians complained that New York had too strong a concept of states' rights because it would not allow Delta planters to bring their slaves to Manhattan. The South was preoccupied with states' rights because it was preoccupied first and foremost with retaining slavery.
Some argue that the cause of the war was economic. The North was industrial and the South agrarian, and so, the two lived in such economically different societies that they could no longer stay together. Not true.
In the middle of the 19th century, both North and South were agrarian societies. In fact, the North produced far more food crops than did the South. But Northern farmers had to pay their farmhands who were free to come and go as they pleased, while Southern plantation owners exploited slaves over whom they had total control.
And it wasn't just plantation owners who supported slavery. The slave society was embraced by all classes in the South. The rich had multiple motivations for wanting to maintain slavery, but so did the poor, non-slave holding whites. The "peculiar institution" ensured that they did not fall to the bottom rung of the social ladder. That's why another argument -- that the Civil War couldn't have been about slavery because so few people owned slaves -- has little merit.
Finally, many have argued that President Abraham Lincoln fought the war to keep the Union together, not to end slavery. That was true at the outset of the war. But he did so with the clear knowledge that keeping the Union together meant either spreading slavery to all the states -- an unacceptable solution -- or vanquishing it altogether.
In a famous campaign speech in 1858, Lincoln said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." What was it that divided the country? It was slavery, and only slavery. He continued: "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free... It will become all one thing, or all the other." Lincoln's view never changed, and as the war progressed, the moral component, ending slavery, became more and more fixed in his mind. His Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 turned that into law.
Slavery is the great shame of America's history. No one denies that. But it's to America's everlasting credit that it fought the most devastating war in its history in order to abolish slavery.
As a soldier, I am proud that the United States Army, my army, defeated the Confederates. In its finest hour, soldiers wearing this blue uniform -- almost two hundred thousand of them former slaves themselves -- destroyed chattel slavery, freed 4 million men, women, and children from human bondage, and saved the United States of America.
I'm Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor and Head, Department of History at the United States Military Academy, West Point for Prager University.
Wed Aug 12, 2015 at 4:57 AM PT: To be clear: The video was posted on a right-wing website, but this isn't about that website's credibility, it's about the credibility of Ty Seidule. His credentials speak for themselves. And that it was posted on a right-wing website should even help when showing it to Civil War revisionists. Don't click through on the transcript link, because it's open public domain, and you can read it in its entirety here.
ORIGINALLY POSTED TO LAURENCE LEWIS ON TUE AUG 11, 2015 AT 02:16 PM PDT.
A Florida news anchor stormed off the set after his colleague began a "news" story about one of the Kardashian girls picking a name for her pet rabbit. Anchor John Brown began yelling "I can't take anymore Kardashians on this show! Who cares?!"
Watch as he storms off and continues yelling from the background:
As you read, make a check mark whenever you disagree with something Jesus says.
For example, do you disagree with the following statements?
"Love your enemy."
"Turn the other cheek."
"Pray for those who persecute you."
"Give to anyone who asks."
“You cannot serve both God and money."
"If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away." “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple." So...'
How ya doin'? Anybody strike out at Number 3? Be honest now! Most conservative Christians will substantially (or categorically) disagree with most of Jesus' moral exhortations.
Furthermore, if we posit that "Pharisees" are an enduring human "type" (not just an ancient Jewish sect) and that like their spiritual forebears they are represented by upright, church-goers in every generation, many Christians will not do well with "The Woe Passages" either.
On the other hand, if the criterion is "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" most (if not all) conservative Christians will jump aboardhootin' like yahoos.
If my conjecture is correct, most conservative "Christians" would feel more at home inThe Old TestamentthanThe New.
There is nothing wrong with this.
They just don't score very high on the "Know Thyself."
They mistake their role in the world and tend to be miffed with Pope Francis for reminding everybody that it's not about talkin' the talk but walkin' the walk.
Excerpt: "A drug with similar effects might generate substantial marketing."
Listening to music boosts recovery from surgery and reduces pain, research finds
Listening to music before, during and after surgery reduces patients' pain, eases anxiety and lessens the need for painkillers, British scientists said.
After reviewing evidence from around 7,000 patients, scientists said patients going for surgery should be allowed to choose the music they would like to hear to maximise the benefit.
But they also warned that the music should not interfere with the medical team's communication during an operation.
Dr Catherine Meads from Brunel University, who co-authored the research, said music should be available for patients undergoing surgery.
"Music is a non-invasive, safe and cheap intervention that should be available to everyone undergoing surgery," she said.
The team conducted a meta-analysis of all published randomised trials, looking at how music compares with standard care or other non-drug interventions such as massage and relaxation in affecting recovery of adults after operations.
The results, published in The Lancet journal, found patients were significantly less anxious after surgery and reported more satisfaction after listening to music.
They also needed less pain medication and reported less pain compared with controlled subjects.
While the study found listening to music at any time seemed effective, there was a trend for better outcomes if patients listened to music before surgery rather than during or after surgery.
There was a slightly greater reduction in pain and in use of pain relief when patients selected their own music.
Dr Martin Hirsch of Queen Mary University of London, co-author of the study, said that it has been well-known since the time of Florence Nightingale that listening to music has a positive impact on patients.
"However, it's taken pulling together all the small studies...into one robust meta-analysis to really prove it works," he said.
Paul Glasziou of Australia's Bond University said the results held a clear message.
"Music is a simple and cheap intervention," he wrote in The Lancet.
"A drug with similar effects might generate substantial marketing."
The team now plans to follow up with a pilot scheme introducing music at The Royal London Hospital for women having caesarean sections and hysteroscopy.
Patients will submit their playlist on their chosen device to be connected to a pillow with inbuilt loudspeakers.
Researchers will then analyse the effectiveness of rolling this out in practice.
