Daniel H. Cohen: For argument’s sake (Video/Transcript)

Source: TED
My name is Dan Cohen, and I am academic, as he said. And what that means is that I argue. It's an important part of my life, and I like to argue. And I'm not just an academic, I'm a philosopher, so I like to think that I'm actually pretty good at arguing. But I also like to think a lot about arguing.

And thinking about arguing, I've come across some puzzles, and one of the puzzles is that as I've been thinking about arguing over the years, and it's been decades now, I've gotten better at arguing, but the more that I argue and the better I get at arguing, the more that I lose. And that's a puzzle. And the other puzzle is that I'm actually okay with that. Why is it that I'm okay with losing and why is it that I think that good arguers are actually better at losing?

Well, there's some other puzzles. One is, why do we argue? Who benefits from arguments? And when I think about arguments now, I'm talking about, let's call them academic arguments or cognitive arguments, where something cognitive is at stake. Is this proposition true? Is this theory a good theory? Is this a viable interpretation of the data or the text? And so on. I'm not interested really in arguments about whose turn it is to do the dishes or who has to take out the garbage. Yeah, we have those arguments too. I tend to win those arguments, because I know the tricks. But those aren't the important arguments. I'm interested in academic arguments today, and here are the things that puzzle me.

First, what do good arguers win when they win an argument? What do I win if I convince you that utilitarianism isn't really the right framework for thinking about ethical theories? So what do we win when we win an argument? Even before that, what does it matter to me whether you have this idea that Kant's theory works or Mill's the right ethicist to follow? It's no skin off my back whether you think functionalism is a viable theory of mind. So why do we even try to argue? Why do we try to convince other people to believe things that they don't want to believe? And is that even a nice thing to do? Is that a nice way to treat another human being, try and make them think something they don't want to think?

Well, my answer is going to make reference to three models for arguments. The first model, let's call this the dialectical model, is that we think of arguments as war, and you know what that's like. There's a lot of screaming and shouting and winning and losing, and that's not really a very helpful model for arguing but it's a pretty common and entrenched model for arguing.

But there's a second model for arguing: arguments as proofs. Think of a mathematician's argument. Here's my argument. Does it work? Is it any good? Are the premises warranted? Are the inferences valid? Does the conclusion follow from the premises? No opposition, no adversariality, not necessarily any arguing in the adversarial sense.

But there's a third model to keep in mind that I think is going to be very helpful, and that is arguments as performances, arguments as being in front of an audience. We can think of a politician trying to present a position, trying to convince the audience of something. But there's another twist on this model that I really think is important, namely that when we argue before an audience, sometimes the audience has a more participatory role in the argument, that is, arguments are also audiences in front of juries who make a judgment and decide the case. Let's call this the rhetorical model, where you have to tailor your argument to the audience at hand. You know, presenting a sound, well-argued, tight argument in English before a francophone audience just isn't going to work. So we have these models -- argument as war, argument as proof, and argument as performance.

Of those three, the argument as war is the dominant one. It dominates how we talk about arguments, it dominates how we think about arguments, and because of that, it shapes how we argue, our actual conduct in arguments.

Now, when we talk about arguments, yeah, we talk in a very militaristic language. We want strong arguments, arguments that have a lot of punch, arguments that are right on target. We want to have our defenses up and our strategies all in order. We want killer arguments. That's the kind of argument we want. It is the dominant way of thinking about arguments. When I'm talking about arguments, that's probably what you thought of, the adversarial model. But the war metaphor, the war paradigm or model for thinking about arguments, has, I think, deforming effects on how we argue.

First it elevates tactics over substance. You can take a class in logic, argumentation. You learn all about the subterfuges that people use to try and win arguments, the false steps. It magnifies the us-versus-them aspect of it. It makes it adversarial. It's polarizing. And the only foreseeable outcomes are triumph, glorious triumph, or abject, ignominious defeat. I think those are deforming effects, and worst of all, it seems to prevent things like negotiation or deliberation or compromise or collaboration. Think about that one. Have you ever entered an argument thinking, "Let's see if we can hash something out rather than fight it out. What can we work out together?" And I think the argument-as-war metaphor inhibits those other kinds of resolutions to argumentation. And finally, this is really the worst thing, arguments don't seem to get us anywhere. They're dead ends. They are roundabouts or traffic jams or gridlock in conversation. We don't get anywhere.

Oh, and one more thing, and as an educator, this is the one that really bothers me: If argument is war, then there's an implicit equation of learning with losing. And let me explain what I mean. Suppose you and I have an argument. You believe a proposition, P, and I don't. And I say, "Well why do you believe P?" And you give me your reasons. And I object and say, "Well, what about ...?" And you answer my objection. And I have a question: "Well, what do you mean? How does it apply over here?" And you answer my question. Now, suppose at the end of the day, I've objected, I've questioned, I've raised all sorts of counter-considerations, and in every case you've responded to my satisfaction. And so at the end of the day, I say, "You know what? I guess you're right. P." So I have a new belief. And it's not just any belief, but it's a well-articulated, examined, it's a battle-tested belief.

Great cognitive gain. Okay. Who won that argument? Well, the war metaphor seems to force us into saying you won, even though I'm the only one who made any cognitive gain. What did you gain cognitively from convincing me? Sure, you got some pleasure out of it, maybe your ego stroked, maybe you get some professional status in the field. This guy's a good arguer. But cognitively, now -- just from a cognitive point of view -- who was the winner? The war metaphor forces us into thinking that you're the winner and I lost, even though I gained. And there's something wrong with that picture. And that's the picture I really want to change if we can.

So how can we find ways to make arguments yield something positive? What we need is new exit strategies for arguments. But we're not going to have new exit strategies for arguments until we have new entry approaches to arguments. We need to think of new kinds of arguments. In order to do that, well, I don't know how to do that. That's the bad news. The argument-as-war metaphor is just, it's a monster. It's just taken up habitation in our mind, and there's no magic bullet that's going to kill it. There's no magic wand that's going to make it disappear. I don't have an answer. But I have some suggestions, and here's my suggestion.

If we want to think of new kinds of arguments, what we need to do is think of new kinds of arguers. So try this. Think of all the roles that people play in arguments. There's the proponent and the opponent in an adversarial, dialectical argument. There's the audience in rhetorical arguments. There's the reasoner in arguments as proofs. All these different roles. Now, can you imagine an argument in which you are the arguer, but you're also in the audience watching yourself argue? Can you imagine yourself watching yourself argue, losing the argument, and yet still, at the end of the argument, say, "Wow, that was a good argument." Can you do that? I think you can. And I think, if you can imagine that kind of argument where the loser says to the winner and the audience and the jury can say, "Yeah, that was a good argument," then you have imagined a good argument. And more than that, I think you've imagined a good arguer, an arguer that's worthy of the kind of arguer you should try to be.

Now, I lose a lot of arguments. It takes practice to become a good arguer in the sense of being able to benefit from losing, but fortunately, I've had many, many colleagues who have been willing to step up and provide that practice for me.

Thank you.

(Applause)

The US: Surveillance, secrets and security

This special edition of the show delves into the continuing crackdown on whistleblowers in Barack Obama’s America.

Source: Al Jazeera
This week on the Listening Post, we feature a special edition of the show.

On August 21, Bradley Manning, the US soldier convicted of leaking a trove of secret government documents to anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, was sentenced to 35 years in prison having been convicted in July of 20 charges against him, including espionage.

This is one of the latest developments in the ongoing story of secrecy and surveillance in Barack Obama’s America.

When we first took an extended look at the White House’s war on whistleblowers a year ago, little did we know that there was another figure waiting in the wings, about to make political history.

Edward Snowden took the stage in June 2013, revealing the sweeping extent of the NSA's surveillance programme. He has gone down as one of US' most important whistleblowers of all time, becoming the seventh person to be charged by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act, more than double the number of prosecutions of all previous presidential administrations combined.

For the most part, coverage of this story by the US mainstream media has been interesting, to say the least.

At the beginning of Manning’s trial, many mainstream organisations did not even bother turning up. And across the airwaves, both Manning and Snowden had their characters assassinated, their pasts smeared and their motives pathologised.

Then the journalist who broke the Edward Snowden story, the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, became the subject of a hostile media reception himself, something that the other messenger, Julian Assange, can relate to.

And in an ironic twist, the US media establishment has not been immune to government surveillance itself, as news outlets like The Associated Press and Fox News, discovered the government was eavesdropping on some of their own reporting on national security issues.
Facing mounting pressure, President Obama acknowledged that his government needs to be more transparent about surveillance. He has pledged to carry out a review of the Patriot Act to see what changes need to be made to protect privacy and civil liberties. This is a story journalists and citizens in the US and around the world will be watching closely.

Taking us through the debate are Michael Ratner, the president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights; Ed Pilkington, a chief reporter for the American edition of The Guardian newspaper; Chase Madar, the author of The Passion Of Bradley Manning; Michael German, a former FBI agent and member of the American Civil Liberties Union; and Jeffrey D Gordon, former Defense department spokesman.

In the second half of the show we speak to Matthew Miller, a defender of the Obama administration’s crackdown on whistleblowers and a former director of Public Affairs at the Department of Justice. He has also served as Attorney General Eric Holder’s spokesman during Obama’s first two years in office.

Early last year, he wrote a piece in The Daily Beast, defending the administration’s approach to those who leak classified information. “Some things are secret for a reason,” he argued, “and when government employees violate the law, to disclose information that undermines our national security, there must be consequences.”

President Barack Obama Weekly Address August 17, 2013 (Video/Transcript)

Hi, everybody. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been visiting with Americans across the country to talk about what we need to do to secure a better bargain for the middle class.

We need to rebuild an economy that rewards hard work and responsibility; an economy built firmly on the cornerstones of middle-class life. Good jobs. A good education. A home of your own. A secure retirement. And quality, affordable health care that’s there when you need it.
Right now, we’re well on our way to fully implementing the Affordable Care Act. And in the next few months, we’ll reach a couple milestones with real meaning for millions of Americans.

If you’re one of the 85% of Americans who already have insurance, you’ve already got new benefits and protections under this law that you didn’t before. Free checkups, mammograms, and contraceptive care. Discounted prescription medicine on Medicare. The fact you can stay on your parents’ plan until you turn 26. And much, much more. And it’s okay if you’re not a fan of the Affordable Care Act – you can take advantage of these things anyway.

If you don’t have insurance, beginning on October 1st, private plans will actually compete for your business. You can comparison shop in an online marketplace, just like you would for cell phone plans or plane tickets. You may be eligible for new tax credits to help you afford the plan that’s right for you. And if you’re in the up to half of all Americans who’ve been sick or have a preexisting condition, this law means that beginning January 1st, insurance companies have to cover you – and they can’t use your medical history to charge you more than anybody else.

You can find out more about the law, and how to sign up to buy your own coverage right now at HealthCare.gov. Tell your friends and neighbors without insurance about it, too. And tell your kids that there’s a new, easy way to buy affordable plans specifically tailored to young people.

Many Members of Congress, in both parties, are working hard to inform their constituents about these benefits, protections, and affordable plans. But there’s also a group of Republicans in Congress working hard to confuse people, and making empty promises that they’ll either shut down the health care law, or, if they don’t get their way, they’ll shut down the government.

Think about that. They’re actually having a debate between hurting Americans who will no longer be denied affordable care just because they’ve been sick – and harming the economy and millions of Americans in the process. And many Republicans are more concerned with how badly this debate will hurt them politically than they are with how badly it’ll hurt the country.

A lot of Republicans seem to believe that if they can gum up the works and make this law fail, they’ll somehow be sticking it to me. But they’d just be sticking it to you.

Some even say that if you call their office with questions about the law, they’ll refuse to help. Call me old-fashioned – but that’s lousy constituent service. And it’s not what you deserve.
Your health insurance isn’t something to play politics with. Our economy isn’t something to play politics with. This isn’t a game. This is about the economic security of millions of families.

See, in the states where governors and legislatures and insurers are working together to implement this law properly – states like California, New York, Colorado and Maryland – competition and consumer choice are actually making insurance affordable. So I’m going to keep doing everything in my power to make sure this law works as it’s supposed to. Because in the United States of America, health insurance isn’t a privilege – it is your right. And we’re going to keep it that way.

Thanks. And have a great weekend.

OPINION: reality check on the Affordable Care Act

Misleading information, sloppy coverage are confusing the public about Obamacare 

Source: The Center for Public Integrity

By Wendell Potter

Not confused enough yet about how much health insurance might cost some of us next year when the consumer protections in Obamacare kick in? Just wait. It’s likely you’ll soon be far more confused — and alarmed — than you already are.

Take, as an example, the CNNMoney story from last week, headlined, “Where Obamacare premiums will soar.” The subhead was equally scary: “Get ready to shell out more money for individual health insurance under Obamacare … in some states, that is.”

The first thing you should keep in mind when you read such stories is that very few Americans will be affected by how much insurers will charge for the individual policies they’ll be selling in the online health insurance marketplaces beginning Oct. 1. The CNN story doesn’t mention, as it should have, that in a country of 315 million people, only 15 million — less than five percent of us — currently buy health insurance on our own through the so-called individual market because it’s not available to us through the workplace.

Although the CNN story focused exclusively on the individual market, nowhere in the story was it explained that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the vast majority of Americans — about 55 percent of us — are enrolled in health insurance plans sponsored by our employers. Another 32 percent of us are enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid and other public programs. That means that almost 9 out of 10 of us will not be affected at all by rates insurers will charge next year in the individual market.

The Americans who will be affected most by Obamacare are the millions who are uninsured because they either cannot buy coverage at any price today as a result of pre-existing conditions or they cannot afford what insurers are charging.

Although the CNN story didn’t mention that one of the main reasons for Obamacare was to make it possible for the uninsured to at long last buy affordable coverage, it is the uninsured who will be most directly affected by the reform law, and most likely to benefit. That’s because insurers next year will no longer be able to refuse to sell coverage to people who’ve been sick in the past. And because most people shopping for coverage on the online marketplaces will be eligible for federal subsidies to offset the cost of the premiums.

Not until deep in the CNN story are we informed that “Americans with incomes up to $45,960 for an individual and $94,200 for a family of four will be eligible for federal subsidies.” That’s a huge point to bury, especially considering that the median household income in this country is still just around $50,000. It’s just a small percentage of folks buying coverage through the online insurance marketplaces that will have to pay the full premium price on their own.
Below the headline of the CNN story was a startling graphic showing the states of Ohio and Florida with the numbers 41 percent and 35 percent right below them, leading one to believe that all residents of those states would see their health insurance premiums skyrocket.

As I did my own research of those claims, I found that not only did those numbers apply to just the individual market, but they did not take into account the subsidies that will be available. So not only will very few Ohioans and Floridians see their premiums increase by that much, many if not most will pay less than they do today thanks to the sliding-scale subsidies.
I also found that officials in those states were being disingenuous in the way they calculated their “Obamacare” figures. Ohio and Florida and many other states permit insurers to sell policies today that are so inadequate they will be outlawed beginning Jan. 1. The reason those kinds of policies are being outlawed is because, even though they are profitable for insurers that sell them, people who buy them often find out when it’s too late — after a serious illness or accident — that their policies are essentially worthless.

As The Miami Herald noted in a story about the projected rates announced recently by Florida’s Office of Insurance Regulation, the source for the CNN graphic, “The OIR compared ‘apples to oranges’ by failing to factor into its projections the fact that statewide averages for pre-Obamacare premiums included a wide variety of low-value plans — including plans with extremely limited benefits, such as no prescription drug coverage; and high-deductible plans, where the insured first must pay hefty out-of-pocket costs before the insurer begins to cover services.”

Considering all the intentionally misleading information we are being subjected to about Obamacare from politicians and special interests with an obvious agenda, it will be vitally important for reporters to be more responsible in their reporting. Sensational media stories with attention-grabbing headlines but inadequate analysis will only add to Americans’ confusion about a law that in reality will help the vast majority of us.

Climate change: Fact or fiction? (Video)

Climate change sceptic Richard Lindzen is challenged on his view that concern about global warming is alarmist nonsense.

   

 Head to Head  is Al Jazeera's new forum of ideas - a gladiatorial contest tackling big issues such as faith, the economic crisis, democracy and intervention in front of an opinionated audience at the Oxford Union. 

Many believe that climate change is now a fact of life. It seems that sea levels are rising, weather patterns are changing, and glaciers are melting.

Some scientists say the earth’s climate changes constantly and naturally, but the vast majority of them believe the current rise in global temperature is man-made, and could be catastrophic for the planet.

But is all this but a case of extreme ‘climate alarmism’?

If I'm wrong, we'll know it in 50 years and can then do something.

Richard Lindzen

Professor Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology and atmospheric physicist at MIT, the Massachusetts’s Institute of Technology, is perhaps the world’s leading climate sceptic.
In this programme, he goes head to head with Mehdi Hasan on the myth or reality of global warming - is concern about global warming alarmist nonsense?

"If I’m wrong, we’ll know it in 50 years and can then do something," says Lindzen.

Yet not all of the opinionated audience agree, and there is robust debate at the Oxford Union.

Joining our discussion are: Myles Allen, a professor of Geosystem Science in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford and head of the Climate Dynamics Group in the University's Department of Physics. His research focuses on how human and natural influences on climate contribute to observed climate change and risks of extreme weather and in quantifying their implications for long-range climate forecasts; Mark Lynas, a British author, journalist and environmental activist who focuses on climate change. He is a contributor to New Statesman, Ecologist, Granta and Geographical magazines, The Guardian and The Observer newspapers in the UK; and David Rose, an award-winning investigative journalist, columnist and author.

 

The Power of Rights (Video)

Source:Open Society Foundations
Open society and human rights are intimately bound together: one cannot today imagine either without the other. The threats to one are threats to both. The advance of one means the advance of both. The energetic defense and enlargement of human rights diminishes exploitation, oppression, and impunity.  Free expression, critical thinking, pluralistic debate all thrive in nations rich in rights and advance open society.

The Open Society Foundations have long been, and will remain, one of the world’s leading supporters of those defending and promoting human rights.

From New Orleans to Kampala to Jakarta, the Open Society Foundations have backed efforts to establish and protect the rights of all. And that commitment to the rights of all has required special commitment to minority rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, and the rights of physically and intellectually disabled people. We have supported international and transitional justice as well as efforts to press governments to protect and champion human rights themselves.

Today, commitments to human rights are under pressure everywhere.  Even while broad social movements grab attention with demands for bread, justice, and dignity, governments of all stripes are finding excuses to weaken their resolve, to let the cause slip away. Commitments are postponed or abandoned, defenders of rights are attacked as foreign agents or worse. And within the human rights movement itself, questions are raised about the use of force in defense of rights, about the particular ideologies embedded in universal claims, about the links between prosperity and rights.

We will resist the pressures that threaten rights and urge us to compromise our commitments. At the same time, we will continually revisit, revise, and strengthen the concepts that underpin our commitments and that give rights power in the world. When people see their rights eroded in countries where those same rights have so recently had the strongest champions, what are they to do? When claiming one’s rights is said to insult one’s family, to disrespect one’s tribe, to betray one’s nation, what is one to do, what are we all to do? Are the international human rights mechanisms our best safeguards, or must we build new structures for the defense of rights? If independent media have been essential to the advance of rights, how are we to understand the existential dangers that confront journalism today? What do human rights mean for millions of desperate individuals and families beyond the protection of law, beyond the reach of any human rights defender?  These are not just theoretical questions: they pose choices with life-and-death consequences for thousands every day. Even as we continue to act in support of human rights and open society, we must face these questions and integrate our answers—however tentative—in our actions.

13-year old with IQ higher than Einstein is also refreshingly modest

"They've achieved so much that I couldn't even dream of achieving," says Ramu

By Prachi Gupta

13 year-old Neha Ramu has earned the highest possible score on the Mensa test, with an IQ of 162 — outscoring geniuses like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

The BBC recently interviewed Ramu about her induction into Mensa and her future plans, but she hasn’t let the news get to her head. “Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein, they’ve achieved so much that I couldn’t even dream of achieving, so it’s not right to compare me to them just cause of my IQ. If I don’t put in my effort and make use of my IQ, then there is no point in having it,” said Ramu.

“Some people think I study loads and stuff, but I actually don’t really, at all. I just relax and do basic stuff.”

Ramu, who lives in the U.K., hopes to study neurology at Harvard.

Source: Salon

Financial elite at 'secretive' annual meeting (Video)

Politicians, business leaders and royalty from Europe and the US meet near London for a secretive three-day event.

 

Source: Al Jazeera's Charlie Angela
Politicians, business leaders and royalty from Europe and the US are meeting near London for a secretive three day event to discuss global policy.
Known as the Bilderberg Group, their annual conferences are not recorded, nor do they produce any statements.
Their lack of transparency often fuels theories that they are the secret rulers of the world.

Hero Rats

A very interesting program. How a team of super-rodents, trained to sniff out the bacterial infection tuberculosis, are saving thousands of lives.

 

Source: Al Jazeera  The Cure
Giant rats are not an obvious ally in the fight against deadly diseases but, in Tanzania, scientists are training a team of super-rodents to sniff out the bacterial infection tuberculosis (TB).

TB kills more people than any other infectious disease, apart from HIV, and can be difficult to diagnose without costly, sophisticated equipment.

The charity Apopo is already using native African giant pouched rats to sniff out landmines, and now the intelligent rodents have shown a talent for identifying infections.

The rats have improved detection rates in local TB clinics by over 30 percent; can screen patients’ samples dozens of times faster than humans can; and will work - literally - for peanuts.

Dr Javid Abdelmoneim visits the world's first laboratory that uses rats to diagnose disease.

US: Silencing news sources? (video)

After the seizure of AP's phone records, we ask if the US is still the land of the free for journalists and sources.

Source: Al Jazeera 

On May 10th, the Associated Press news agency received an email from the US Department of Justice saying that records of more than 20 phone lines assigned to its reporters had been secretly seized as part of an investigation into a government leak.

The government claimed it was a matter of national security, while the AP called it an unprecedented intrusion into its newsgathering operations. But should the journalistic community be so surprised? With the Obama White House’s track record on whistleblowers and WikiLeaks, the move to spy on AP seems consistent with an administration more committed to secrecy than ever before.

Is the United States still the land of the free for journalists and their sources? In this week's News Divide we speak to Laura Malone, legal counsel for the Associated Press; Jeremy Scahill, author of Dirty Wars; The World is a Battlefield; the investigative reporter Dana Priest of the Washington Post; and Ben Wizner from the American Civil Liberties Union.

This week’s Newsbytes: After two years in hiding, a prominent Bahraini blogger reappears in the UK; Globovision, a leading opposition outlet in Venezuela, is sold to businessmen allegedly friendly with the government; and Islamabad is missing one of the most prominent Western journalists based there - the New York Times' Declan Walsh was ordered to leave the country before the election.

One of the lesser-known consequences of the US-led 'war on terror' has been a wave of anti-terrorism legislation in other countries. One of them is Ethiopia. It is not a country known for its freedom of the press and, with ongoing internal conflicts with separatist groups, and the powers that be keeping a wary eye on the nearby Arab Spring, the government in Addis Ababa has been cracking down on the media.

It is doing so with an anti-terror law passed in 2009, which has led to the sentencing of 11 journalists, sent dozens of reporters into exile and has forced countless others to practice self-censorship. The Listening Post’s Nic Muirhead reports on the law that blurs the line between journalism and terrorism.

 

The scandalous erosion of US civil liberties

While the US media is focused on the latest political scandal, civil rights in the United States continue to be eroded. 

Catty Culhane @ Aljazeera

This week has been pretty scandal-ridden by Washington standards.  In all, four different stories are taking up all the oxygen on cable TV.  Here's a quick rundown for those who perhaps think it is more important to know what is going on in Syria, Iraq or anywhere where lives, rather than just political capital, are on the line.

First, the Internal Revenue Service, the US tax collecting agency was targeting conservative political groups.   No-one is asking why political groups should be tax exempt, but everyone involved is saying it was a very bad thing for the IRS to specifically target right-wing groups.
The next so-called scandal has to do with "the Benghazi talking points".  The White House released 100 pages of emails, showing that the State Department, not the White House, pushed to not reveal the fact that they had received intelligence warnings about the security situation in the Libyan city of Benghazi before the attack that killed four US citizens on September 11 last year.  Mention of this was left off the final version, along with any mention of al-Qaeda.  The US media is now focusing on the fact that the change did not come from the White House, instead of asking why officials did not want to admit that they knew about a threat in advance.  In fact, the now-released emails clearly say that the information could "be abused by Members [of Congress] to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings so why do we want to feed that…?" The fact that it was a political consideration is not the scandal: the back and forth political finger-pointing is.

The third issue is that is taking up the US media's time and attention has to do with umbrellas. Specifically, Barack Obama, the US President, had Marines hold umbrellas for him and  Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan when it started raining during a joint press conference. That is the complaint by some Republicans. and it has forced liberal media outlets to order their researchers to look for any and all pictures of former leaders having their umbrellas held.

The fourth controversy is the one getting the least amount of attention: in the course of investigating a national security leak, the US Justice Department subpoenaed two months of phone records from 100 Associated Press journalists.  They didn't tell the AP until after they had done it, meaning the respected news organisation could not ask a judge to intervene.  The Attorney General says his department's internal regulations allow them to do that.  That, in fact, is all he'll say. Other than, "It wasn't me."  I'm paraphrasing, but any attempt to ask him questions has been met with the response that he recused himself from the case so he knows nothing.  And no-one else is talking.

These are the "scandals" occupying everyone's time these days.  So the president is going to talk about something this week that has been less controversial: the use of drones in targeted killings overseas. He apparently is going to lay out more details on the internal process, to make Americans understand what he is doing to "keep them safe".  So before he talks, I thought I should lay out what else we know about what his administration practices.

Drones have killed Americans overseas: The government's unmanned aerial vehicles have actually killed thousands of people in several different countries that the US is not at war with.  Those killings are not really controversial here in the US.  The killing of American citizens, however, has gotten some attention.  The US government says Anwar al-Awlaki, a citizen, was plotting against the US; they cite as proof his anti-American videos on YouTube.  Awlaki was killed along with Samir Khan in a drone strike in Yemen.  His 16-year-old son Abdulrahman was killed the same way, allegedly while sitting at an open air café in Yemen.  All three were US citizens, supposedly afforded the extra protection that bestows.  The president is expected to try to explain the legal rationale behind the killings.  We know a little bit about what they are thinking from leaked memos, which say that the executive branch  acting on its own, without oversight, can kill an American if he/she "presents an imminent threat".  It goes on to say that this "does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on US persons and interests will take place in the immediate future".  So, the president might try to explain how imminent doesn't really mean imminent.

There are a couple of other things he might want to talk about while being as he claims "the most transparent [US] president in history".

Here is my likely incomplete list of some of the things the government is now allowed to do, essentially because they say they can.

Indefinitely detain Americans: The president said he wouldn't use this authority, but his lawyers are fighting in court to keep the ability.

'Sneak and Peek': It may sound like a child’s game, but what it means is that government agents can sneak into your house or business without your knowledge, look around take pictures, replace things and they don’t have to tell you until after you are arrested.  It’s believed that these searches are happening mostly in cases that don’t involve terrorism.

Secret warrants: There is a special court that officials can go to and ask for warrants for surveillance inside the US in "terrorism" cases. No one knows who they are targeting but the court very rarely says no to any application.

'National Security letters': Tens of thousands of these letters have been sent demanding companies give the government records on their clients and the companies can’t tell anyone, they just have to give up your information.

Electronic eavesdropping: The government is reportedly trying to come up with a system that would force electronic communications companies to create a backdoor so the government can listen to internet phone calls.

These are just the things that we know about. What else is the government doing?  It may be much harder now to find out.  The Obama administration's intense targeting of "leakers" will likely mean sources are going to be less likely to talk about what they know.  Would you call the AP with information right now, given the seizure of their phone records?
So what happens next?

When it comes to drones, Congress would have to force the president to stop because according to the administration's legal memos, they believe this right is based on the law passed after September 11, 2001, authorising the use of force. That authorisation does not have an end date, and is not limited to a certain country.

The courts have, for the most part, sided with the administration on all cases involving civil liberties, but several lawsuits are pending that could force the government to curtail what it is doing - eventually.

Alternately, the people of the United States could get involved and demand that their rights be protected. It is not, however, an issue that most know about, given that it isn't a big "scandal". The media has not focused on what civil rights groups describe as shocking and illegal behavior. They're busy: it rained and the President was getting wet.

"The Retirement Gamble" Facing Us All (Video)

Watch The Retirement Gamble on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

April 23, 2013, 10:09 am ET · by Martin Smith

If you’ve been watching any commercial television lately, you are well aware that the financial services industry is very busy running expensive ads imploring us to worry about our retirement futures. Open a new account today, they say.

They are not wrong that we should be doing something: America is facing a retirement crisis. One in three Americans has no retirement savings at all. One in two reports that they can’t save enough. On top of that, we are living longer, and health care costs, as we all know, are increasing.

But, as I found when investigating the retirement planning and mutual funds industries in The Retirement Gamble, which airs tonight on FRONTLINE, those advertisements are imploring us to start saving for one simple reason. Retirement is big business — and very profitable. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the more we save into the industry’s financial products, the more money they make in fees and commissions trading our hard-earned cash. And as long as they don’t run away with our money or invest it in a Ponzi scheme, they have little in the way of accountability to us when something goes wrong. And even then it can be hard to fight back.

Big banks, brokerages, insurance companies and other financial service providers operate under something called a suitability standard — which says they don’t have to give you the best advice, just advice that isn’t too egregiously terrible.

Let’s say you sit down with an adviser at your brokerage or bank and ask for some advice on how you should allocate your retirement savings, or which funds you might want to choose for your IRA.

You’ll get lots of advice, but chances are it won’t be worth much. Eighty five percent of all financial advisers and financial planners are really just brokers or salesman. Their incentive is to sell you a product that makes them a higher commission, not necessarily a product that maximizes your chances of saving more. Only 15 percent of advisers are “fiduciaries” — advisers who by law must operate with your best interests in mind.

Last year, the Obama administration proposed a rule to mandate that all financial advisers, financial planners and other assorted financial wizards would have to adopt a fiduciary standard when it came to employee retirement accounts such as your 401(k) or IRA account. The financial services industry, which today manages something upwards of $10 trillion of our retirement nest eggs, thought this was a bad idea and pushed back hard. Scores of their protest letters poured into the U.S. Labor Department, the branch of our government responsible for regulating employee retirement accounts.

“As long as they don’t run away with our money or invest it in a Ponzi scheme, they have little in the way of accountability to us when something goes wrong. And even then it can be hard to fight back.”

Congress, too, was hit with a furious lobbying campaign. This would be way too expensive, the industry said; if we have to provide such a standard of service, we will either have to pack up and find another business line, or have to pass the increased costs on to our customers. The Obama administration pulled their proposal last fall.

How would a new fiduciary rule change things? Chances are you would be sold less expensive products, not only in your IRA accounts but inside your company 401(k) as well. It’s all about fees. While reporting on retirement plans for FRONTLINE, nothing has been more surprising to me than the corrosive effect of fees on our retirement savings.

It’s this simple: Fund fees can erode as much as half or more of your prospective gains.
For the sake of dramatizing the point, John Bogle, founder of Vanguard, the world’s largest mutual fund company and pioneer of low-cost index funds, gave me a startling example while we were filming. Assume you are invested in a mutual fund, he says, with a gross return of 7 percent, but that the mutual fund charges you an annual fee of 2 percent.

Over a 50-year investing lifetime, that little 2 percent fee will erode 63 percent of what you would have had. As Bogle puts it, “the tyranny of compounding costs” is overwhelming.

In short, fees matter. So what can you do? You aren’t going to find a fund that invests your money for free, but experts say you can come close by buying index funds. Their fees can be a tenth of what the average mutual funds charges. And over time, in bull and bear markets, on average, index funds perform better than their more expensive actively managed fund cousins. This is no secret to anyone who is paying attention.

So why aren’t our trusted financial advisers and those ads telling us to buy index funds? Why do some 401(k) plans not even offer them on their menus?

It’s because even though an index fund might be a better option for you and me, a broker operating under a suitability standard has no incentive to sell it to us. He or she will make higher commissions from options that have higher fees.

Sadly, a recent AARP study reported that 70 percent of mutual fund savers were not even aware that they were paying any fees at all.

Is there hope for change? The Labor Department says they plan to reintroduce a new fiduciary rule this summer that will force the financial services industry to think of us first when it comes to retirement. We’ll see how that goes.

In the meantime, The Retirement Gamble airs tonight (check your local listings here). What I uncovered while making this documentary made me rethink my financial future. It just might do the same for you.

Human infections with the emerging avian influenza A H7N9 virus from wet market poultry: clinical analysis and characterisation of viral genome

Source: The Lancet, Early Online Publication, 25 April 2013

Audio Link

Summary

Background

Human infection with avian influenza A H7N9 virus emerged in eastern China in February, 2013, and has been associated with exposure to poultry. We report the clinical and microbiological features of patients infected with influenza A H7N9 virus and compare genomic features of the human virus with those of the virus in market poultry in Zhejiang, China.

Methods

Between March 7 and April 8, 2013, we included hospital inpatients if they had new-onset respiratory symptoms, unexplained radiographic infiltrate, and laboratory-confirmed H7N9 virus infection. We recorded histories and results of haematological, biochemical, radiological, and microbiological investigations. We took throat and sputum samples, used RT-PCR to detect M, H7, and N9 genes, and cultured samples in Madin-Darby canine kidney cells. We tested for co-infections and monitored serum concentrations of six cytokines and chemokines. We collected cloacal swabs from 86 birds from epidemiologically linked wet markets and inoculated embryonated chicken eggs with the samples. We identified and subtyped isolates by RT-PCR sequencing. RNA extraction, complementary DNA synthesis, and PCR sequencing were done for one human and one chicken isolate. We characterised and phylogenetically analysed the eight gene segments of the viruses in the patient's and the chicken's isolates, and constructed phylogenetic trees of H, N, PB2, and NS genes.

Findings

We identified four patients (mean age 56 years), all of whom had contact with poultry 3—8 days before disease onset. They presented with fever and rapidly progressive pneumonia that did not respond to antibiotics. Patients were leucopenic and lymphopenic, and had impaired liver or renal function, substantially increased serum cytokine or chemokine concentrations, and disseminated intravascular coagulation with disease progression. Two patients died. Sputum specimens were more likely to test positive for the H7N9 virus than were samples from throat swabs. The viral isolate from the patient was closely similar to that from an epidemiologically linked market chicken. All viral gene segments were of avian origin. The H7 of the isolated viruses was closest to that of the H7N3 virus from domestic ducks in Zhejiang, whereas the N9 was closest to that of the wild bird H7N9 virus in South Korea. We noted Gln226Leu and Gly186Val substitutions in human virus H7 (associated with increased affinity for α-2,6-linked sialic acid receptors) and the PB2 Asp701Asn mutation (associated with mammalian adaptation). Ser31Asn mutation, which is associated with adamantane resistance, was noted in viral M2.

Interpretation

Cross species poultry-to-person transmission of this new reassortant H7N9 virus is associated with severe pneumonia and multiorgan dysfunction in human beings. Monitoring of the viral evolution and further study of disease pathogenesis will improve disease management, epidemic control, and pandemic preparedness.

Funding

Larry Chi-Kin Yung, National Key Program for Infectious Diseases of China.

America's War Games

How the Obama administration is redefining the US military's strategic priorities with far-reaching consequences.

Source: Al Jazeera

 

The United States' military expenditures today account for about 40 percent of the world total. In 2012, the US spent some $682bn on its military - an amount more than what was spent by the next 13 countries combined.

Now that the war in Iraq is over and the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan will be complete in 2014, the stage might therefore appear to be set for a decrease in US defence spending. Even in Washington DC, many have argued that the defence budget can be cut substantially and the resulting "peace dividend" could be diverted to more pressing domestic concerns, such as dealing with the nation's continuing economic problems.

You can't do anything about it [because] there's too much political support.

Chuck Spinney, a defence analyst

However, a battle to ward off cuts to the Pentagon's budget has begun and the way things are going, it seems likely that the US will have the smallest drawdown or reduction of the military budget after a period of conflict since World War II - in comparative terms, smaller than after Vietnam, Korea and the end of the Cold War. 

The Pentagon's joint chiefs of staff have appeared before Congress warning of dire results from the impacts of sequestration, a requirement to reduce defence spending by $500bn over 10 years that grew out of a 2011 budget deal between President Obama and Congress. In March, sequestration led to a $41bn cut in 2013 defence spending.

Pentagon officials, defence companies, politicians and conservative commentators argue that defence cuts will be devastating for the military and the economy. Others point out that after sequestration, the Pentagon's base defence budget, which does not include additional funds for the war in Afghanistan - will remain above the Cold War average, and close to the highest level since World War II.

Chuck Spinney, who worked as an analyst in the US secretary of defence's office for 26 years, believes it is difficult for the United States to reap the benefits of a peace dividend because of the workings of the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his final 1961 address.

"It's what in Washington we call an iron triangle," Spinney says, " you have an alliance between the private sector, the defence contractors, the executive branch, in this case the Pentagon, and the legislative branch."

Everyone benefits from expensive procurement projects - the Pentagon gets weapons, defence companies get to make profits, and politicians get re-elected by funding armaments that generate jobs for constituents and campaign contributions from defence companies.

The result, according to Spinney, is a defence budget "that is packed to the gills with weapons we don't need, with weapons that are underestimated in their future costs".

The Pentagon and defence contractors low-ball costs and exaggerate performance in the early stages of a project to "turn on the money spigot". Then the companies engage in "political engineering," they spread the contracts and employment for a weapon around to as many Congressional districts as possible. They do that, Spinney says, so that once cost-overruns and performance problems become apparent, "you can't do anything about it [because] there's too much political support".

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is a textbook case of a Pentagon procurement project that reveals why it is difficult to cut the defence budget. Three versions of the F-35 are being built for the Air Force, Navy and Marines by Lockheed Martin, the largest defence contractor in the US. The F-35 is the most expensive military weapons programme in US history, bigger than the Manhattan Project that produced nuclear weapons.

The F-35 was sold as a programme that would cost $226bn for about 2,900 aircrafts. It is now seven years behind schedule, and the price has increased almost 100 percent to $400bn for only 2,400 fighters. At least another $1 trillion will be required for operations and maintenance of the F-35 over its lifetime.

Pierre Sprey, an aircraft engineer and analyst who was one of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's 'whizz kids' in the 1960s, believes that the project should be cancelled or "there will be so little money left over for anything that's needed, it'll be unbelievable. They'll be cutting people, pilots, training, everything just to pay for this thing."

 

There will be so little money left over for anything that's needed, it'll be unbelievable.

Pierre Sprey, an aircraft engineer and analyst

Sprey played a key role in the design and procurement of the F-16 fighter and the A-10 ground support plane, two mainstays of the current US Air Force fleet.

Mike Rein, the F-35 spokesman for Lockheed, says that the company saw the period from 2012 and into 2013 as "a step of great progress for the programme and [something which is] certainly going in the right direction". He points to the tests of the F-35 that were completed in 2012. Sprey argues that "they're re-testing stuff they already failed. So this isn't progress. This is like every day that you're flying, you're finding new problems. And you're slipping the schedule worse and worse."

The F-35 was supposed to be operational by 2012, but critics say it is unlikely to be deployed before 2017 at the earliest.

Despite a litany of engineering and performance problems, Congress continues to support the programme. Lockheed has spread jobs and contracts to 47 states and Puerto Rico, according to its website.

The company also seems to have an international political engineering strategy - eight countries besides the US are involved in the aircraft's development program - including Britain, Italy, Canada, Australia and Turkey. Meanwhile, Israel, Singapore and Japan have plans to buy the fighter.

According to Spinney, that "makes it even more difficult to cut the programme because now you're creating an international incident of some kind. That's no accident. It was done deliberately."

Pork barrel deal-making that goes on in Congress over weapons projects also makes it hard to secure a peace dividend.

According to William Hartung of the Center for International Policy, "there will be a sort of log rolling process where you know, ‘I'll support your weapons system if you support my weapons system.' And so once that horse trading goes on, then it's much harder to cut anything."

Two years ago, the US army announced that it could save close to $2.8bn by pausing production of the Abrams M1 tank. Ray Odierno, the army chief of staff, said the M1 fleet was in good shape and no more tanks were needed. The Pentagon does not see much use for the M1 in confronting 21st century threats like terrorism and piracy. However, Congress did not go along. Over the last two years, it has provided $355bn to keep the M1 production line rolling at the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center in Lima, Ohio.

General Dynamics, which operates the tank plant, spent $22m on lobbying Congress over the past two years, and about $2m on campaign contributions. According to the David Berger, the mayor of Lima, General Dynamics also put together a study claiming that it would be more cost-effective to keep the tank plant open now than to reopen the plant in the future if it was needed.

The company would not send us the cost study, and declined our request for an interview.
Hartung says that Pentagon contractors have "for years used the jobs argument to revive weapons systems that have been cancelled. To push for things that even the Pentagon itself has not wanted." For months, a study has been circulating in Washington, underwritten by the Aerospace Industries Association, a major defence industry trade group. It claims that a million jobs would be lost as a result of sequestration cuts to defence spending.

Hartung, who has analysed the study, says it exaggerates the potential job loss number by a factor of three, and that many of those jobs will be replaced. He points out that spending on education, health care, and infrastructure "can create 1.5 to 2 times as many jobs. So the economy would be much better off spending on things other than the Pentagon."

Several recent reports examining ways to cut Pentagon spending call for changes in the US nuclear weapons posture. They claim that it would produce hundreds of billions of dollars of savings in coming decades, and the Obama administration is reportedly considering nuclear weapons cuts. But they will be difficult to achieve.

The economy would be much better off spending on things other than the Pentagon.

William Hartung, the Center for International Policy

"People are still mired in Cold War thinking and they feel like the more nuclear weapons we have the better," Hartung says. "And in addition to that the nuclear weapons industry has some of the biggest strongest companies in the military industrial complex."

Lockheed Martin builds submarines, launches ballistic missiles, and runs the nuclear weapons laboratories; General Dynamics builds nuclear subs; and Northrop Grumman, Boeing and Lockheed Martin are all hoping to build the next nuclear bomber.

Chuck Hagel, the new US secretary of defence, was a member of a US Nuclear Policy Commission sponsored by the anti-nuclear arms group Global Zero. Headed by a former vice chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, the commission called for shrinking the number of US nuclear warheads from 5,000 to 900. Commission members also thought there was little risk in eliminating ballistic missiles from the US nuclear delivery triad of submarines, bombers and missiles.

At his confirmation hearing, Hagel was attacked by senators whose states have a stake in the nuclear weapons business, and subsequently criticised by the staff of conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. Steve Bucci, the head of the Center for Foreign Policy Studies at Heritage, believes that any change in America's nuclear posture would be "a very foolish thing to do".

Along with two other think tanks, Heritage has launched a campaign called Defending Defence to ward off cuts to the US defence budget. A major reason is the potential threat they see from China, which Bucci says "cannot be underestimated. They are trying to make themselves a world power, not just a regional power."

In his view, the US needs to keep defence spending high, in case the Chinese become "more aggressive and hostile".

Concerns about China were reflected in the Obama administration's announcement last year that it is re-positioning US military resources to the Asia-Pacific region after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is estimated that China spends about one-fifth to one-quarter as much on its military as the US. Spinney and others see warnings about China and the administration's so-called Asia-Pacific "pivot" as a way to bolster defence spending in the face of pressure for cuts.

"We need a threat," Spinney says, "Al-Qaeda has sort of run out of strength and we have to have a new threat to justify continued spending." Spinney believes that there is little chance of a peace dividend after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We are going to pivot to Asia and increase the defence budget," he says.

There are signs he could be right.

This month, President Obama released a 2014 federal budget proposal that called for $526.6bn in funding for the department of defense. It was widely expected that the defence total would be at least $50bn less.

The White House and the Pentagon chose to ignore the statutory requirement for a $50bn reduction mandated by sequestration. They apparently hope that sequestration can be overturned, and defence budget cuts already agreed to, reversed. Instead of laying the groundwork for a peace dividend by putting the Pentagon on a glide path to smaller budgets, the administration's proposal projects increases in America's base defence budget over the next five years.

Corruption, American Style

Bribery gets all the bad press, but lobbying is the real danger, because it affects everybody--whether they want it to or not.

 by Michael Maiello

 Source:Forbes Magazine
Con men, swindlers and cheaters pay bribes. Sophisticates hire lobbyists because lobbyists get better, more lasting results while only rarely landing in the slammer. We know intuitively that bribery and lobbying are related, and there are reams of academic papers that try to draw the line between legitimate issue advocacy and corruption. President Barack Obama isn't buying it. As he swore in his new staff, he banned them from future employment lobbying the White House, "for as long as I'm president."

Economists and sociologists don't tend to spend a lot of time arguing in favor of illegal activities like bribing bureaucrats, so their efforts tend to come down in defense of the K Street bandits. The common argument is that bribery happens in developing economies where the rule of law is questionable, while lobbying is a more civilized activity that brings economic benefits.

Bard Harstad of the Kellogg School of Management and Jakob Svensson of Stockholm University have approached the problem as one between developing and developed economies. But let's set aside the debate over third- and first-world corruption. Narco states, oligarchies, religious and secular dictatorships are ruled by graft because power and influence are traded in secret.

What's telling about the Harstad and Svensson paper is that in an open society like the U.S., our brightest minds are unable to draw meaningful distinctions between handing someone an envelope full of cash and flooding a senator's campaign war chest, except to point out that lobbying is far more effective. A briber wants a to circumvent the law. A lobbyist wants to change it.

The fact that laws affect everyone supposedly makes lobbying more legitimate, since the lobbyist isn't typically asking for special treatment the way a briber does. But maybe that's the problem. Someone who pays a bribe might be rich, powerful and dangerous, but they're also uniquely vulnerable. They open themselves to extortion by the corrupt official they're using, for example. Harstad and Svensson write: "Promises by individual bureaucrats not to ask (or extort) bribes in the future are not credible, since such contracts cannot be written when corruption is illegal and because firms deal with different officials over time."

The lobbyist takes no such risk. The lobbyist's goal is to make the government official depend on them for financing and support in elections. A bribe works once. Cajoling or inducing a congressional representative to help get a law changed is the gift that keeps on giving.

In his book Knowledge and Decisions, economist Thomas Sowell defends lobbyists as people who have acquired a great deal of technical knowledge so that they're better informed than the general public about whatever issue they care about most. They then become, as Sowell describes, a powerful force in government because "reform through democratic legislation requires either 'public consensus or a powerful minority lobby.'" Sowell defends this influence since it comes from knowledge fairly gained and deployed. But the power of the lobbyist is far greater than the power of the briber. A powerful lobbyist can get laws changed even if there's no public consensus to do so, and yet those laws still apply to everyone.

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, doesn't make a distinction between the two activities. When asked by e-mail, "What's the real difference between me bribing a customs agent so that I can bring a banned substance into the country or me contributing money to a senator and then cajoling him into making the substance legal for import?" Reich answered, "Frankly, I don't see much difference. A bribe is a bribe. People authorized only to act in the public interest may not use their office for private gain. Period."

In the recently published Creative Capitalism, a discussion of corporate philanthropy and social responsibility, Reich argues that the only thing corporations can do to make life better for the people around them is to "refrain from flooding Washington and any other seat of government with so many lobbyists and campaign contributions so as to stymie democracy."
Bribery is easily regulated because we all know it's a crime. Somebody is trying to break a rule. Getting rules changed, on the other hand, is part of the democratic system and our feelings about lobbyists depends on who they're lobbying for. The novel Thank You For Smoking is a funny book because it's about the misadventures of an unlikable tobacco lobbyist. Make the main character a lobbyist for furry little baby seals and it's somehow less amusing.

When Obama first entered politics, he took money from lobbyists. He gradually changed his mind and when he ran in both the primary and general elections in 2008 he said he wouldn't take money from lobbyists. But he meant only federally registered lobbyists. He had certainly taken money from interest groups that operated at the state level and he had taken money from people who lobbied for only one company, trade or interest group (such people are, in the Byzantine regulatory world of registered lobbyists, not technically lobbyists).

Obama's recent declaration that nobody on the White House staff is allowed to work on regulations or contracts that touch on areas where they had previously worked as lobbyists caused a minor kerfuffle because, of course, a couple of his staff picks do have some lobbying experience and, of course, they're best qualified to work in the areas where they worked as lobbyists. William J. Lynn III, who Obama wants to have working at the Pentagon, had been a lobbyist for Raytheon (nyse: RTN - news - people ). William Corr, who Obama wants at Health and Human Services, had lobbied for Tobacco Free Kids.

The only way to remove lobbyists and their corruptive influence is for companies and interest groups to voluntarily disarm and work on building a public consensus in support of their causes or to elect and appoint people who are entirely incorruptible. Obviously these will never happen. But perhaps those living in rich, Westernized nations should be grateful that political corruption occurs in the twilight world of lobbyists, where they can at least catch a glimpse of the action, rather than the midnight black deals struck daily in the poorer sections of the world.

NRA spends record money on lobbying this year

Pro-gun group ratchets up influence spending as debate rages

By Dave Levinthalemail

As gun control debates raged in Congress early this year, the National Rifle Association increased its federal government lobbying expenditures to record levels, new filings with the U.S. Senate indicate.

The NRA and affiliated National Rifle Association of America Institute for Legislative Action together spent at least $800,000 lobbying the federal government during the first quarter — more than any year covering the same period, according to federal records.

Such aggressive advocacy preceded a major legislative victory Wednesday for gun advocates, as the U.S. Senate defeated a proposal to expand background checks on guy buyers.

And it came as gun control advocates  — from President Barack Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the families of children killed last year in Newtown, Conn. — pressured lawmakers to pass laws limiting purchases of firearms.
The NRA groups' first-quarter lobbying expenditures have been steadily increasing in recent years, but never cracked the $700,000 mark.

During the first three months of 2012, they spent $695,000. That follows $675,000 in 2011 and $615,000 in 2010.

This year, the NRA's lobbying efforts were exclusively directed at the House and Senate, according to federal disclosures. The group lobbied on numerous U.S. House and Senate bills proposed by federal legislators.

Among them:

• H.R. 751, the Protect America's Schools Act of 2013
• H.R. 274, the Mental Health First Act of 2013
• H.R. 329, the Strengthening Background Checks Act of 2013
• H.R. 575, the Second Amendment Protection Act of 2013
• S. 54, the Stop Illegal Trafficking in Firearms Act of 2013
• S. 374, the Fix Gun Checks Act of 2013
• S. 146, the School and Campus Safety Enhancements Act of 2013
• S. 174, the Ammunition Background Check Act of 2013
• S. 480, the NICS Reporting Improvement Act of 2013
• H.R. 138 and S. 33, the Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Device Act
• H.R. 142 and S. 35, the Stop Online Ammunition Sales Act of 2013
• H.R. 437 and S. 150, the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013
•  

The NRA itself spent $700,000 lobbying the federal government during the first quarter, federal records show. Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's chief executive, was among 12 in-house NRA officials to lobby during the year's first three months.

Several contract lobbying firms, including Crossroads Strategies, Prime Policy Group, FTI Government Affairs and Shockey Scofield Solutions, combined to spend at least another $100,000 lobbying on behalf of the NRA or National Rifle Association of America Institute for Legislative Action from January through March.

Companies, unions and special interest groups that lobby the federal government have until Monday to submit mandatory first quarter lobbying disclosure reports to Congress.
The NRA and its affiliate spent nearly $3 million on federal-level lobbying in 2012 — more than it has during any previous year, according to data maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics, but spending during this year's first quarter puts it on pace to exceed that mark.

 

Monsanto controls your diet

The chemical company's influence extends across all three branches of government -- and affects our daily lives

By Jill Richardson
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.  

Forty percent of the crops grown in the United States contain their genes. They produce the world’s top selling herbicide. Several of their factories are now toxic Superfund sites. They spend millions lobbying the government each year. It’s time we take a closer look at who’s controlling our food, poisoning our land, and influencing all three branches of government. To do that, the watchdog group Food and Water Watch recently published a corporate profile of Monsanto.

Patty Lovera, Food and Water Watch assistant director, says they decided to focus on Monsanto because they felt a need to “put together a piece where people can see all of the aspects of this company.”

“It really strikes us when we talk about how clear it is that this is a chemical company that wanted to expand its reach,” she says. “A chemical company that started buying up seed companies.” She feels it’s important “for food activists to understand all of the ties between the seeds and the chemicals.”

Monsanto the Chemical Company

Monsanto was founded as a chemical company in 1901, named for the maiden name of its founder’s wife. Its first product was the artificial sweetener saccharin. The company’s own telling of its history emphasizes its agricultural products, skipping forward from its founding to 1945, when it began manufacturing agrochemicals like the herbicide 2,4-D.

Prior to its entry into the agricultural market, Monsanto produced some harmless – even beneficial! – products like aspirin. It also made plastics, synthetic rubber, caffeine, and vanillin, an artificial vanilla flavoring. On the not-so-harmless side, it began producing toxic PCBs in the 1930s.

According to the new report, a whopping 99 percent of all PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, used in the U.S. were produced at a single Monsanto plant in Sauget, IL. The plant churned out toxic PCBs from the 1930s until they were banned in 1976. Used as coolants and lubricants in electronics, PCBs are carcinogenic and harmful to the liver, endocrine system, immune system, reproductive system, developmental system, skin, eye, and brain.

Even after the initial 1982 cleanup of this plant, Sauget is still home to two Superfund sites. (A Superfund site is defined by the EPA as “an uncontrolled or abandoned place where hazardous waste is located, possibly affecting local ecosystems or people.”) This is just one of several Monsanto facilities that became Superfund sites.

Monsanto’s Shift to Agriculture

Despite its modern-day emphasis on agriculture, Monsanto did not even create an agricultural division within the company until 1960. It soon began churning out new pesticides, each colorfully named under a rugged Western theme: Lasso, Roundup, Warrant, Lariat, Bullet, Harness, etc.

Left out of Monsanto’s version of its historical highlights is an herbicide called Agent Orange. The defoliant, a mix of herbicides 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, was used extensively during the war in Vietnam. The nearly 19 million gallons sprayed in that country between 1962 and 1971 were contaminated with dioxin, a carcinogen so potent that it is measured and regulated at concentrations of parts per trillion. Dioxin was created as a byproduct of Agent Orange’s manufacturing process, and both American veterans and Vietnamese people suffered health problems from the herbicide’s use.

Monsanto’s fortunes changed forever in 1982, when it genetically engineered a plant cell. The team responsible, led by Ernest Jaworski, consisted of Robb Fraley, Stephen Rogers, and Robert Horsch. Today, Fraley is Monsanto’s executive vice president and chief technology officer. Horsch also rose to the level of vice president at Monsanto, but he left after 25 years to join the Gates Foundation. There, he works on increasing crop yields in Sub-Saharan Africa. Together, the team received the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1998.
The company did not shift its focus from chemicals to genetically engineered seeds overnight. In fact, it was another 12 years before it commercialized the first genetically engineered product, recombinant bovine growth hormone (rbGH), a controversial hormone used to make dairy cows produce more milk. And it was not until 1996 that it first brought genetically engineered seeds, Roundup Ready soybeans, onto the market.

By 2000, the company had undergone such a sea change from its founding a century before that it claims it is almost a different company. In Monsanto’s telling of its own history, it emphasizes a split between the “original” Monsanto Company and the Monsanto Company of today. In 2000, the Monsanto Company entered a merger and changed its name to Pharmacia.
The newly formed Pharmacia then spun off its agricultural division as an independent company named Monsanto Company.

Do the mergers and spinoffs excuse Monsanto for the sins of the past committed by the company bearing the same name? Lovera does not think so. “I’m sure there’s some liability issues they have to deal with – their various production plants that are now superfund sites,” she responds. “So I’m sure there was legal thinking about which balance sheet you put those liabilities on” when the company split. She adds that the notion that today’s Monsanto is not the same as the historical Monsanto that made PCBs is “a nice PR bullet for them.”

But, she adds, “even taking that at face value, that they are an agriculture company now, they are still producing seeds that are made to be used with chemicals they produce.” For example, Roundup herbicide alone made up more than a quarter of their sales in 2011. The proportion of their business devoted to chemicals is by no means insignificant.

Monsanto’s pesticide product line includes a number of chemicals named as Bad Actors by Pesticide Action Network. They include Alachlor (a carcinogen, water contaminant, developmental/reproductive toxin, and a suspected endocrine disruptor), Acetochlor (a carcinogen and suspected endocrine disruptor), Atrazine (a carcinogen and suspected endocrine disruptor), Clopyralid (high acute toxicity), Dicamba (developmental/reproductive toxin), and Thiodicarb (a carcinogen and cholinesterase inhibitor).

Roundup: The Benign Herbicide?

Defenders of Monsanto might reply to the charge that Roundup is no Agent Orange. In fact, the herbicide is viewed as so benign and yet effective that its inventor, John E. Franz, won the National Medal of Technology. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, kills everything green and growing, but according to Monsanto, it only affects a metabolic pathway in plants, so it does not harm animals. It’s also said to break down quickly in the soil, leaving few traces on the environment after its done its job.

Asked about the harmlessness of Roundup, Lovera replies, “That’s the PR behind Roundup – how benign it was and you can drink it and there’s nothing to worry about here. There are people who dispute that.” For example there is an accusation that Roundup causes birth defects. “We don’t buy the benign theory,” continues Lovera, “But what’s really interesting is that we aren’t going to be having this conversation pretty soon because Roundup isn’t working anymore.”

Lovera is referring to “Roundup-resistant weeds,” weeds that have evolved in the past decade and a half to survive being sprayed by Roundup. Nearly all soybeans grown in the United States is Monsanto’s genetically engineered Roundup Ready variety, as are 80 percent of cotton and 73 percent of corn. Farmers spray entire fields with Roundup, killing only the weeds while the Roundup Ready crops survive. With such heavy use of Roundup on America’s farmfields, any weed – maybe one in a million – with an ability to survive in that environment would survive and pass on its genes in its seeds.

By 1998, just two years after the introduction of Roundup Ready soybeans, scientists documented the first Roundup-resistant weed. A second was found in 2000, and three more popped up in 2004. To date, there are 24 different weedsthat have evolved resistance to Roundup worldwide. And once they invade a farmer’s field, it doesn’t matter if his crops are Roundup-resistant, because Roundup won’t work anymore. Either the weeds get to stay, or the farmer needs to find a new chemical, pull the weeds by hand, or find some other way to deal with the problem.

“We’ve wasted Roundup by overusing it,” says Lovera. She and other food activists worry about the harsher chemicals that farmers are switching to, and the genetically engineered crops companies like Monsanto are developing to use with them.

Currently, there are genetically engineered crops waiting for government approval that are made to tolerate the herbicides 2,4-D, Dicamba and Isoxaflutole. (These are not all from Monsanto – some are from their competitors.) None of these chemicals are as “benign” as Roundup. Isoxaflutole is, in fact, a carcinogen. Let’s spray that on our food!

Corporate Control of Seeds

No discussion of Monsanto is complete without a mention of the immense amount of control it exerts on the seed industry.

“What it boils down to is between them buying seed companies outright, their incredible aggressive legal maneuvering, their patenting of everything, and their enforcement of those patents, they really have locked up a huge part of the seed supply,” notes Lovera. “So they just exercise an unprecedented control over the entire seed sector. Monsanto products constitute 40 percent of all crop acres in the country.”

Monsanto began buying seed companies as far back as 1982. (One can see an infographic of seed industry consolidation here.) Some of Monsanto’s most significant purchases were Asgrow (soybeans), Delta and Pine Land (cotton), DeKalb (corn), and Seminis (vegetables). One that deserves special mention is their purchase of Holden’s Foundation Seeds in 1997.

George Naylor, an Iowa farmer who grows corn and soybeans, calls Holden’s “The independent source of germplasm for corn.” Small seed companies could buy inbred lines from Holden’s to cross them and produce their own hybrids. Large seed companies like Pioneer did their own breeding, but small operations relied on Holden’s or Iowa State University. But Iowa State got out of the game and Monsanto bought Holden’s.

Monsanto’s tactics for squashing its competition are perhaps unrivaled. They use their power to get seed dealers to not to stock many of their competitors products, for example. When licensing their patented genetically engineered traits to seed companies, they restrict the seed companies’ ability to combine Monsanto’s traits with those of their competitors. And, famously, farmers who plant Monsanto’s patented seeds sign contracts prohibiting them from saving and replanting their seeds. Yet, to date, U.S. antitrust laws have not clamped down on these practices.

With the concentrated control of the seed industry, farmers already complain of lack of options. For example, Naylor says he’s had a hard time finding non-genetically engineered soybean seeds. Most corn seeds are now pre-treated with pesticides, so farmers wishing to find untreated seeds will have a tough time finding any. Once a company or a handful of companies control an entire market, then they can choose what to sell and at what price to sell it.

Furthermore, if our crops are too genetically homogenous, then they are vulnerable to a single disease or pest that can wipe them out. When farmers grow genetically diverse crops, then there is a greater chance that one variety or another will have resistance to new diseases. In that way, growing genetically diverse crops is like having insurance, or like diversifying your risk within your stock portfolio.

Food and Water Watch Recommendations

At the end of its report, Food and Water Watch lists several recommendations. “There are a lot of ways that government policy could address the Monsanto hold on the food supply,” explains Lovera. “The most important thing is that it’s time to stop approval of genetically engineered crops to stop this arms race of the next crop and the next chemical.”

She also calls Monsanto “the poster child for the need for antitrust enforcement” – something that the Justice Department has yet to successfully deliver up. In fact, last November the government ended a three-year antitrust investigation of Monsanto.

A third recommendation Lovera hopes becomes a reality is mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods. “If we had that label and we put that information in consumers’ hands, they could do more to avoid this company in their day-to-day lives,” she says.

In the meantime, all consumers can do to avoid genetically engineered foods is to buy organic for the handful of crops that are genetically engineered: corn, soybeans, canola, cotton, papaya, sugar beets, and alfalfa.