Honest and Open New EPA Science Act

Comment at Crooks and Liars post describing the Honest and Open New EPA Science Act which was 'to inhibit regulations based, in part, on confidential or proprietary raw data.'

The entire premise of the Republican anti-environment stance is their money and power will shield/protect them from the negative impacts of their policies. For the sake of humanity, we desperately need them to learn they are not unique among humans. They are just as susceptible to the pollution they allow to spew into the air and water.

Choke on some pollution indeed.

Press failure

Comment at Crooks and Liars with video clip of Sean Spicer 'gaslighting' the press:

I blame the press for the sad state of affairs. Right wing news grew, profited and flourished under the failure of the mainstream press to contain their lies and doublespeak through benign neglect. Now we have a press secretary whose starting premise is a half truth which he follows with a ninety degree pivot to a full lie which rotates in a different direction to increase the base of the lie then he turns back around to accuse the press of misdirecting/misleading. Even a partial description of the spin is dizzying. 

I'm tired of DJT and company telling me what 'the real story is' and what's important. I want the truth.

Examples

Controlling information is power, some examples:

Rep. Nunes protects POTUS DJT from investigation by keeping information secret.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle can avoid prosecuting prison guards for murder because information from the police, the prison and emergency services were hidden or 'lost'.

Real reform of the system can only come about by increasing transparency.

Health care idea

The Republicans were unable to pass a health insurance reform law. And although the ACA is not  as bad off as they claim, it has flaws which will seriously impede its effectiveness in the future. One of the provisions in the Republican plan was to 'allow' buyers to 'choose' the type of coverage they wanted; or not require sellers (insurance providers) to provide a fixed set of benefits (like mental health or maternity care).

There was no or little talk of rationing during the recent debate over health care. But make no mistake, medical should be rationed. Resources are not unlimited so keeping very ill people alive at the expense of the wellbeing of many younger, healthy people is absurd. The question is how to set limits? A few years ago, there was an essay and study published about how Doctors' end-of-life decision making for themselves differed from the decisions of patients. This might be the best guide to determine the limits of basic medical care. Survey doctors for how the degree and extent of treatment they would pursue if they had a given diagnosis. Use 90-95% coverage of these limits to define the benefits of a basic universal health care plan; ideally, a system where patients never deal with billing paperwork - the billing system alone of the American healthcare system is extraordinarily expensive. Private insurers can offer anything above and beyond basic coverage.

Like the U.S. tax system, the U.S. health insurance system is deliberately complicated to generate the need for 'specialists' to maneuver the system. The beneficiaries are the 'specialists' themselves and their employers (who profit from their work). Consumers pay in time and stress and dollars due to misunderstanding and errors. A single payer system would lift a major burden from consumers.

Tax Protest

I just spent hours fighting with my tax return - and I have an easy one! There is no good reason why the IRS, who already has the majority of your income/tax status information, cannot automatically generate every tax payer's tax bill; your credit card company sends you a bill every month of purchases made from an enormous variety of vendors/sellers. The IRS should be ably to generate an annual tax bill to make our lives easier. I suggest all taxpayers go back to mailing in our tax forms (even when prepared online - just get the hard copy) in protest until they comply.

BTW, there are a number of companies that do some free tax prep but you need to give your information to a private company to use the service. The IRS already has your information - they are unlikely to sell it for profit.

Update: "Imagine filing your income taxes in five minutes — and for free." Except there are moneyed interests who lobby heavily against it.

Division

Comment at TRNN segment with Gerald Horne discussing the economic aspects of 'War on Immigrants:

Yes. But 'divide and conquer' is not a strategy unique to the U.S. Gender stratification is one of the oldest divisions used to exert social control and extract labor from a 'sub' class of people. The three major Abrahamic religions all assign women to a lower status than men; the major eastern cultures also tend to subjugate women relative to men. The body politic of the day uses social issues to the same effect; sexuality, race, class, immigrants, religion and even abortion rights among others are used to divide Americans into in-group and out-group. These internal conflicts are all staged to distract us from the massive transfer of power and wealth exercised by policy makers. 

Right wing media is dangerous for the lies they promulgate. They may be even more dangerous for the division they sow. The left is renown for its lack of organization and division; this is often seen as a strength. It is now necessary to pool this division so the cacophony of voices can speak towards a common goal.

Another economic pro-anti-immigrant lobby is the private prison industry. 'Illegal' immigrants are are not dangerous or unruly criminals so they are cheap to contain in mass housing - to the private prison industry, this means lots of $$ and profits. 

Update: Division in the form of segregation is costly in crime, economics, culture and likely health as described by NPR.

Beware models

Economist Dean Baker was interviewed on TRNN about the Federal Reserve raising interest rates. He mentions economic models and their predictions: 

So, first off, I'd just point out they've been wrong in the past. The other point I'd make is that to my view there's very little risk in probing, in the sense, let's get the unemployment rate lower, and we don't have any models that say inflation just shoots up. So, let's say they're right. 4.7% is the right number, and they foolishly listened to me and let the unemployment rate fall to 4.3% or something like that. Well, the models say that inflation would rise very gradually. We're currently at 1.7% by the measure they use. It might rise after six months, a year, to 2%. That's not a big deal.

The points I want to illustrate is (1) the existence of economic models and (2) they are used to drive economic policy. But the usefulness of any model is predicated on the accuracy of its predictions and based on how poorly the economy functions for most workers, these models are terribly ineffectual. 

[Warning: I am not an economist. The following are my opinion only.]

One major flaw of the most popular economic models is they presume capitalistic principles. And as anyone who ever listens to Richard Wolff would know, capitalism is notoriously unstable, prone to repeated boom and bust cycles. I prefer to liken it to simple predator-prey relationships whose models have a similar boom and bust trend with the distinct possibility of complete bust in that both predator and prey species die out. If my hypothesis is true and economic models are based on predator-prey dynamics, then the underlying assumptions of these models are just plain wrong! It is well past time for the economics discipline to determine the universal rules of economics so they and we can actually have accurate models.

See my earlier writings for more of my thinking on this matter.

Bernie should not start a political party

Comment at a TRNN story discussing the attempt to recruit Bernie to start a new political party:

The notion of creating another political party with the intent of advancing progressive policy through electoral success is silly on its face. 

The raison d'etre of the Republican and Democratic parties is to raise enormous amounts of money from big donors so between the two parties, the interests of big donors are always the forefront of all policy/regulations. The minor differences in social issues serve as icing on the cake to distract voters from the real underlying transfer of economic and political power to the big donor class. These are essentially political corporations. 

The raison d'etre of lesser political parties is either (1) express/disseminate 'non-standard' ideology that is ignored by the extremely limited options offered by the two major parties and/or (2) attract enough voters to achieve automatic ballot access. They are most often limited by campaign funds and media access. 

Any new party would have all the disadvantages of lesser parties with the risk of big money take over should any lesser party achieve any degree of electoral success. The problem with the system is too much power/money concentrated in too few hands. Another political party doesn't change that equation.

Trump's backer

Robert Mercer is the secretive hedge fund billionaire who backed DJT's election - he's responsible for the addition of Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon to Trump's team. Jane Mayer said this on a Democracy Now segment about Robert Mercer:

...And what he's done is he has tried to take this fortune and reshape, first, the Republican Party and, then, America, along his own lines. His ideology is extreme. He's way far on the right. He hates government. Kind of -- according to another colleague, David Magerman, at Renaissance Technologies, Bob Mercer wants to shrink the government down to the size of a pinhead. He has contempt for social services and for the people who need social services...

From the Mercer perspective, government is not legitimate. A non-legitimate government cannot be betrayed... so colluding with Russian interference to elect DJT would not be treason. DJT's tagline is 'Make America great again'. He's never defined 'America' or 'American' or 'great'. His major backer, Mercer, doesn't believe in American people or government. Trump's policies - anti-immigrant, anti-climate, anti-healthcare, anti-poor, etc. - indicate a complete disregard for a large segment of the American public. It appears the political ambitions of Trump and Mercer are to blow up America as we know it and profit as much as possible in the process. To apply DJT to himself - 'bad hombres'.

I disagree with the model of large scale nation-states; they concentrate too much power in too few individuals. But the Trump/Mercer intent appears to concentrate power in a few rich and power people without the state as a legal safeguard. This is much, much worst than large nation-states. I fear for the country and the world.

State of organized crime

A number of former Russians have been targeted in what appears to be state sponsored assassins:

Former Russian Lawmaker Is Shot To Death Outside Hotel In Kiev

twice-poisoned Russian dissident

Alexander Litvinenko: Profile of murdered Russian spy

Vladimir Putin was for all intents and purposes, the head of Russia when these events took place. And there's evidence Putin interfered with the U.S. presidential election on behalf of the current POTUS, DJT. Now watch as the authoritarian state takes hold with ever increasing deportations and invasion of Americans' privacy by customs agents. I fear for this country.

'deaths of despair'

There's a story on NPR which discusses the research concluding that the disturbing increasing death rate amongst white Americans are due to economic despair. This is further sign of a non-functioning economy. Our current economy is so poor at providing for its people, its causing a shift demographics! Economy needs to be redefined to include human wellbeing: production, consumption and exchange of capital to support the sustained wellbeing of people.

'Keep America safe'

Comment at Truthout in response to editorial regarding Trump's proposed budget:

'Keep America safe' doesn't seem to apply to safety from starvation; safety from climate disruption; safety from consumer products; safety from instigated conflicted. 

Real safety would protect/defend from self-serving politicians and capitalists. A good place to start is increase transparency.

March-in rights

Who knew?... Apparently the federal government has some rights to the intellectual property developed from publicly funded research:

Here's how it works. When the federal government — through an agency like the National Institutes of Health — pays for medical research that leads to an invention that can be patented, federal law gives the government a license to use that intellectual property.

According to the NPR story,  Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas has requested the U.S. exercise these rights to decrease drug prices. Not only has NIH refused to do so, they've also refused to hold hearings. Supposedly one reason is fear that:

... lower prices could also make drug companies less eager to invest lots of money in new medications.

...

"Perhaps we as a country would rather have lower drug prices and a little less innovation," Ellison said.

Stupid argument. Right now, big pharma uses their huge treasuries to strong arm competition out of the market - they lobby for trade agreements that protect their intellectual property and regulations that keep smaller firms out of the market. If big pharma decides to not invest in research, this opens business opportunities for small firms. So not only would drug prices come down due to competition from government licensed production, they would likely be more competition from newly invented products.

Transparency of information is good economics. Even as little as permitting more than one institution (a pharma and the government) to make use of it has the potential to improve the market for consumers.

BTW, taxpayers paid for the research on drugs under discussion. Right now, taxpayers pay to invent the drugs (researchers earn a living) and taxpayers pay to buy the drugs (big pharma makes astronomical profits). My preference would be to give the inventors a significant bonus and allow any pharma to produce and sell it under safe conditions. The drug information is freely available to all taxpayers and the drugs are available at very competitive prices.


Update: NPR story suggests U.S. government buy a drug company to lower drug price. Effectively, this is another way for the public to buy intellectual property. Owning the rights to a drug allows makers to control how much they can charge - it's a monopoly on that item. These two stories are varients of transfering intellectual property from private control to public control - increasing transparency.

Mistakes of the past...

Republicans have offered up a health care plan to replace Obamacare (see here and here). It also cuts addition treatment which Michael Botticelli, former director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, says will eventually be more costly than treating addicts.

Just a reminder of the consequences of Ronald Reagan's decision to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill had a very high cultural and financial cost. Rates of homelessness and the number of mentally ill criminal in prison increased massively. The cost of crime to the victims alone likely exceeded the 'savings' of deinstitutionalization. The cost of prison and criminal recidivism further adds to the bill.

The economics of healthcare is more than the initial outlay to treat immediate ills. There are long term consequences to personal and social wellbeing. Because people live in communities, their actions can have repercussions throughout the larger community.

Entitled to not pay taxes

Comment at Truthout post critiquing the America Health Care Act:

The Republican 'health care plan' is a rich people entitlement plan to not pay taxes that support social wellbeing. Ironic: rich people are actually for entitlement plans (Republican 'health care plan') even when they constantly bash non-entitlement 'entitlement' socialized pension (social security) and socialized health care (Medicare/Medicaid/VA) plans.

Note: How about TrumpSCare for 'Trump Sub-optimum care'?

Science of gun policy

Comment at Truthout article about teachers fighting for gun control in schools:

The NRA is a good example of [gun] policy by ideology as opposed to policy based on science. Science is a system of knowledge that accurately predicts the future under defined conditions (example, researchers accurately predict vaccinations can prevent most cases of target infectious disease). NRA is all about profiting from guns so they don't want accurate scientific predictions of the effect of gun proximity to violence. As a result, they are a major player in banning epidemiological research on gun violence. This allows the NRA to use ideological '2nd Amendment' arguments to advance 'gun right'. The opposition doesn't have the resources to conduct scientific studies so they are forced to use anecdotal evidence to make their case to policy makers; even when their arguments are more intuitively sound, the stridency of the gun rights lobby is overwhelming. 

The resistance needs to fight individual issue battles under the umbrella of increasing overall universal rights. Policy should be based on science, not ideology.

Money & economy

Comment drawn from Richard Wolff video at Truthout:

For workers who 'exchange/sell' their labor to employers for wages, money is stored labor. With money, people exchange their stored labor for objects containing stored labor or services (direct labor). Value of land must then reflect how much labor must be invested to return profit. 

Prof. Wolff said something with even more prolonged implications than his comments about money - workers work to support themselves (and their families). This means the purpose of economies - production, consumption and exchange of capital - is to support the wellbeing of people. The wellbeing of people is not restricted to the current generation, so this includes the long term sustained wellbeing of people. This means profits are not necessary to economies and even more interesting, industrial sectors which do not support human wellbeing are anti-economic; think arms and military industrial complex.

Update: mistake in the original "...profits are necessary to economies..." It has been corrected above.

This article at Buzzflash clearly demonstrates the short economic consequence of our current global economic trajectory I predicted - ever increasing concentration of wealth in the upper income tier by their constant extraction from the producing tiers. When workers are starved to the point they are not productive, the system will degrade into a very low productivity economy. I called it economic desertification. It's preventable. But the best solution is not to replace one set of elites (or apex predator) with another. It's much better to evolve a system with many small enterprises with complex interrelationships in an information transparent society, a modified anarchy because it 'evolves' with the community and is not pre-structure like a charter based society.

More than consumer information

Comment at Truthout post proposing graphic warning labels:

Yes, fully informing consumers is the only way to democratize markets. Without complete information, it is not possible to consume your values; instead, you are forced to consume the values of those controlling information. Consuming values in both literal sense of eating and figurative sense of supporting human/animal/environmental rights. 

But why stop with direct consumer information? Information is used to control and manipulate the behavior of everyone. DJT incites fear by calling immigrants criminals and terrorists in order to gain support for his 'Mexican-paid' wall and Muslim ban. Department of Defense uses national security fears to avoid and get away with not conducting legally mandated audits to (a) force politicians to increase their funding and (b) terrify voters into paying their bills. DuPont hid the health impacts of PFOA so consumers would continue to buy/use teflon. Pharma uses patent protection to obscenely profit from life saving drugs. All sorts of technology companies repress competition by buying and quashing innovative inventions and patents... 

Information transparency would initiate the most transformative and revolutionary political and cultural reform. It won't come from the top. The only possibility is a grassroots revolution.

Triumph or Tragedy

NPR posted a story on it website yesterday announcing the First Clouded Leopard Cub Born Using Cryopreserved Semen. I am often of two minds with such announcements. As a supporter and advocate of science and information, I cheer at the advancement of knowledge and understanding. IMO, the best justification for scientific inquiry is curiosity interesting; answer an interesting question. In instances when extraordinary efforts are needed to preserve a species, I detest the need to ask the question, often because human destruction of habitat is the root of population decline. When I read the post yesterday, I was angry. Economic greed drives habitat loss and decimates wildlife. Now appeals to the compassion of workers funds this type of research and 'preserves' these lost species in zoos as living exhibits. It's morally wrong.

Unifying Resistance

A comment I posted at Truthout. It pulls together several themes I've written about here:

"Trump is upping his game, and we, as resisters, aren't ready." 

Yes. It's also time to be proactive as opposed to reactive. But we need to understand the reflex to react and how to step back and see the forest to respond proactively. It's important to understand how politics divides people in both obvious and subtle ways. DJT is a practitioner of confrontational divisiveness; he outright declares his rejection of immigrants, Mexicans, unattractive women, prisoners of war, disabled people, etc. Divide and conquer can also be achieved by more subtle tactics, such as when Republicans and Democrats specifically void the needs of the poor by leaving them out of the debate (or DJT spotlighting the educated with his 'I love the poorly educated').  

The modus operandi of the body politic is to act on the interests of the elite at the expense of the larger population by dividing the larger group. Successful opposition would require some degree of unified resistance which is not the case with single issue movements. I would suggest single issue movements make their case under the umbrella of a larger 'meta' theme for the benefit of the larger overall. For instance, demanding that all policy be based on objective evidence would mean the numbers of gun injuries and deaths factors into gun policy and definitions of corporate personhood would correct for the differential influence such policy would confer on owners. Another useful theme would be to define economies as 'production, consumption and exchange of capital for the sustained wellbeing of humanity'. 'Sustained' would entail policy makers incorporate a long view of policy outcomes - think climate change; 'wellbeing' would require some degree of universal healthcare; and the 'economics' of warfare would be completely invalidated. A final theme would be maximize information transparency. The only way a small group (elites) can concentrate power to any extent is through the control of information. They use propaganda (selective/deceptive use of information) to create divides in the larger population and amplify infighting. Information transparency inoculates against propaganda.  

The resistance movement needs to recognize that although Trump is personally repugnant and vulgar, he is only a figurehead. The real adversaries in the long fight are the power elites.

Redress of disproportionate scale

The primary problem with the economy right now is enormous inequality expressed in many ways. On the meta level, the power of corporations to effect ecosystem scale damage threatens the survival of humanity through its impact on the environment - climate change, air and water pollution, fracking triggered earthquakes, water shortages, etc. My favorite example is the power to literally remove mountains by mountaintop coal mining. Bill Nye describes another example where tar sands oil extraction has denuded one quarter of the visible ecosystem in the Canadian province of Alberta.

As regular readers would know, my preferred solution is to make information fully transparent. Controlling information is how corporations concentrate power. There are two other options which would diffuse the ability of corporations to concentrate power. Neither would be as effective as information transparency but its always good to attack large problems from multiple fronts. One would be to force all corporations to have a fixed expiration dates. Corporations are legal entities. The Supreme Court has given them some personhood rights without the limits that natural persons experience with biologically imposed death. Corporate expiration dates would fix that problem. BTW, because corporations are owned by people, the extension of personhood rights to corporations means owners of corporations have more rights than non-owners. Its surprising this isn't seen as a challenge to one-person-one-vote.

The other option is to limit the size of financial institutions. Banks are tools by which corporations collect/borrow the money/capital to become powerful. No one individual has the money to buy the resources to blow up mountains. By pooling the money of many people, banks can collect the needed funds. Smaller banks can't collect as much money. This would not prevent the concentration of power but it would put up additional barriers because it forces the participation of more players who each would/could add their own conditions.

So not as simple as my preferred open information proposal but perhaps good options to add to the tool chest in opposition to concentrated economic power.