By Ben Goad
November 29, 2013
Supermassive black hole...
At the center of spiral galaxy M81 is a supermassive black hole about 70
million times more massive than our sun.
A study using data from Chandra and ground-based telescopes, combined with
detailed theoretical models, shows that the supermassive black hole in M81 feeds
just like stellar mass black holes, with masses of only about ten times that of
the sun. This discovery supports Einstein's relativity theory that states black
holes of all sizes have similar properties
Birth-tourism industry
I Want an American Baby! Chinese Women Flock to the U.S. to Give Birth
Jiang Wenjun was getting ready to go to America. His wife, due to give birth to their son any day, was already there. Like any expectant parents, the Shanghai couple agonized over how best to prepare for the arrival — and upbringing — of their firstborn child. American citizenship, they decided, was one of the finest gifts they could bestow. “America is the strongest country in the world,” says Jiang, whose son was born just days after he eventually arrived in California this month. “We want our child to have the best future.”
The U.S. is one of the few nations where simply being born on its soil confers citizenship on a newborn. That policy has spawned a birth-tourism industry, in which pregnant foreigners flock to American hospitals to secure U.S. passports for their babies. Although the foreign couple can’t acquire U.S. nationality themselves, once their American-born offspring turn 21 they can theoretically sponsor their parents for future U.S. citizenship. Another perk: these American-born kids can take advantage of the U.S. education system, even paying lower in-state fees for public universities, depending on where they were delivered. (California is a popular birth-tourism destination because of its well-known university system.)
More rich Chinese than ever are sending their families and money abroad. One study of Chinese millionaires found that half had either emigrated or were thinking of doing so. Boston Consulting Group estimates that Chinese have some $450 billion stockpiled overseas. What’s driving the exodus? Some wealthy citizens are spooked about the impact of an anticorruption campaign on their murkily sourced income. Others worry about the long-term risks of raising their kids in a polluted environment with dirty air, water and food. The pressure-cooker atmosphere of Chinese schools makes overseas schooling attractive. And even though China’s draconian one-child policy is being loosened, some couples feel it’s easier to give birth overseas and circumvent meddling by Chinese family-planning bureaucrats.
All of which has led to a proliferation of so-called anchor babies. At least 10,000 such Chinese babies were born in America last year, according to an estimate by an online platform dedicated to monitoring and rating confinement centers for Chinese women giving birth in the States. Naturally, a thriving business catering to these tiny foreign passport holders has developed. The Jia Mei Canadian and American Baby Counseling Services Center, with offices across China, charges between $30,000 and $40,000 to women who want to deliver babies in the States. The fee includes a plane ticket, accommodation in Los Angeles or Chicago in a two- or three-bedroom apartment or house, plus all the citizenship paperwork for the newborn. Women spend two months in the U.S. before delivery and one month postpartum. Nannies, drivers and a chef will be shared among three women, promises Jia Mei. Of course, Chinese-speaking doctors will be on call.
Last month, Jia Mei, which has been in business for seven years, helped eight clients give birth in the U.S. and another six in Canada, according to an employee surnamed Lu. The agency’s extensive website features pictures of cheerful blond kids — though it’s not clear how the average Chinese couple will produce such a child. A 24-hour online hotline allows clients in the U.S. or China to write in with any question they might have. The agency even offers a primer on how the U.S. welfare system works and recommends the best organic beauty products for pregnant Chinese staying in the States.
Jiang and his wife, the Shanghai couple, didn’t use an agency. An English-speaking sales manager, his wife simply procured a business visa to the U.S. — something she had successfully done before — and set up camp in Rowland Heights, Calif. The L.A. County community, among others, has become notorious for a proliferation of “maternity hotels” for privileged expectant mothers from China. Jiang’s wife has hired a nanny for her son and expects to return to Shanghai with the newborn in a month’s time, after the U.S.-passport paperwork is completed.
China doesn’t allow for dual citizenship, so American-born babies will have to procure Chinese residency through sometimes shady means. (Yes, there are plenty of agencies that help with that task as well.) There are other catches. Eventually, young Americans, even those living abroad, are supposed to file tax returns and possibly pay taxes, something that’s not widely known among many Chinese parents. Jia Mei’s website, for instance, doesn’t mention this potential financial obligation.
Jiang, 31, doesn’t expect his son to return to America until he’s in junior high school and can profit from the relative freedom of the U.S. education system. But his wife has so enjoyed her time in California that she’s considering adjusting their timetable. “My wife thinks the air in L.A. is very good, and the food safety is good,” he says. “The weird thing is that many products are actually cheaper in America than in China. Maybe it makes sense for my son to live there sooner rather than later.”
Jiang Wenjun was getting ready to go to America. His wife, due to give birth to their son any day, was already there. Like any expectant parents, the Shanghai couple agonized over how best to prepare for the arrival — and upbringing — of their firstborn child. American citizenship, they decided, was one of the finest gifts they could bestow. “America is the strongest country in the world,” says Jiang, whose son was born just days after he eventually arrived in California this month. “We want our child to have the best future.”
The U.S. is one of the few nations where simply being born on its soil confers citizenship on a newborn. That policy has spawned a birth-tourism industry, in which pregnant foreigners flock to American hospitals to secure U.S. passports for their babies. Although the foreign couple can’t acquire U.S. nationality themselves, once their American-born offspring turn 21 they can theoretically sponsor their parents for future U.S. citizenship. Another perk: these American-born kids can take advantage of the U.S. education system, even paying lower in-state fees for public universities, depending on where they were delivered. (California is a popular birth-tourism destination because of its well-known university system.)
More rich Chinese than ever are sending their families and money abroad. One study of Chinese millionaires found that half had either emigrated or were thinking of doing so. Boston Consulting Group estimates that Chinese have some $450 billion stockpiled overseas. What’s driving the exodus? Some wealthy citizens are spooked about the impact of an anticorruption campaign on their murkily sourced income. Others worry about the long-term risks of raising their kids in a polluted environment with dirty air, water and food. The pressure-cooker atmosphere of Chinese schools makes overseas schooling attractive. And even though China’s draconian one-child policy is being loosened, some couples feel it’s easier to give birth overseas and circumvent meddling by Chinese family-planning bureaucrats.
All of which has led to a proliferation of so-called anchor babies. At least 10,000 such Chinese babies were born in America last year, according to an estimate by an online platform dedicated to monitoring and rating confinement centers for Chinese women giving birth in the States. Naturally, a thriving business catering to these tiny foreign passport holders has developed. The Jia Mei Canadian and American Baby Counseling Services Center, with offices across China, charges between $30,000 and $40,000 to women who want to deliver babies in the States. The fee includes a plane ticket, accommodation in Los Angeles or Chicago in a two- or three-bedroom apartment or house, plus all the citizenship paperwork for the newborn. Women spend two months in the U.S. before delivery and one month postpartum. Nannies, drivers and a chef will be shared among three women, promises Jia Mei. Of course, Chinese-speaking doctors will be on call.
Last month, Jia Mei, which has been in business for seven years, helped eight clients give birth in the U.S. and another six in Canada, according to an employee surnamed Lu. The agency’s extensive website features pictures of cheerful blond kids — though it’s not clear how the average Chinese couple will produce such a child. A 24-hour online hotline allows clients in the U.S. or China to write in with any question they might have. The agency even offers a primer on how the U.S. welfare system works and recommends the best organic beauty products for pregnant Chinese staying in the States.
Jiang and his wife, the Shanghai couple, didn’t use an agency. An English-speaking sales manager, his wife simply procured a business visa to the U.S. — something she had successfully done before — and set up camp in Rowland Heights, Calif. The L.A. County community, among others, has become notorious for a proliferation of “maternity hotels” for privileged expectant mothers from China. Jiang’s wife has hired a nanny for her son and expects to return to Shanghai with the newborn in a month’s time, after the U.S.-passport paperwork is completed.
China doesn’t allow for dual citizenship, so American-born babies will have to procure Chinese residency through sometimes shady means. (Yes, there are plenty of agencies that help with that task as well.) There are other catches. Eventually, young Americans, even those living abroad, are supposed to file tax returns and possibly pay taxes, something that’s not widely known among many Chinese parents. Jia Mei’s website, for instance, doesn’t mention this potential financial obligation.
Jiang, 31, doesn’t expect his son to return to America until he’s in junior high school and can profit from the relative freedom of the U.S. education system. But his wife has so enjoyed her time in California that she’s considering adjusting their timetable. “My wife thinks the air in L.A. is very good, and the food safety is good,” he says. “The weird thing is that many products are actually cheaper in America than in China. Maybe it makes sense for my son to live there sooner rather than later.”
Apocalyptic
How to Stop Apocalyptic Climate Change
Apocalyptic climate change is upon us. For shorthand, let’s call it a slow-motion apocalypse to distinguish it from an intergalactic attack out of the blue or a suddenly surging Genesis-style flood.
Slow-motion, however, is not no-motion. In fits and starts, speeding up and slowing down, turning risks into clumps of extreme fact, one catastrophe after another — even if there can be no 100 percent certitude about the origin of each one — the planetary future careens toward the unlivable. That future is, it seems, arriving ahead of schedule, though erratically enough that most people — in the lucky, prosperous countries at any rate — can still imagine the planet conducting something close to business as usual.
To those who pay attention, of course, the recent bursts of extreme weather are not “remote “or “abstract,” nor matters to be deferred until later in the century while we worry about more immediate problems. The coming dystopian landscape is all too real and it is already right here for many millions. (Think: the Philippines, the Maldives Islands, drowned New Orleans, the New York City subways, Far Rockaway, the Jersey Shore, the parched Southwest, the parched and then flooded Midwest and other food belts, the Western forests that these days are regularly engulfed in “record” flames, and so on.) A child born in the United States this year stands a reasonable chance of living into the next century when everything, from available arable land and food resources to life on our disappearing seacoasts, will have changed, changed utterly.
A movement to forestall such menaces must convince many more millions outside Bangladesh or the Pacific islands that what’s “out there” is not remote in time or geographically far away, but remarkably close at hand, already lapping at many shores — and then to mobilize those millions to leverage our strengths and exploit the weaknesses of the institutions arrayed against us that benefit from destruction and have a stake in our weakness.
There is a poetic fitness to human history at this juncture. Eons ago, various forms of life became defunct. A civilization then evolved to extract the remains of that defunct life from the earth and turn it into energy. As a result, it’s now we who are challenged to avoid making our own style of existence defunct.
Is it not uncanny that we have come face-to-face with the consequences of a way of life based on burning up the remnants of previous broken-down orders of life? It’s a misnomer to call those remains — coal, oil, and gas — “fossil fuels.” They are not actually made up of fossils at all. Still, there’s an eerie justice in the inaccuracy, since here we are, converting the residue of earlier breakdowns into another possible breakdown. The question is: will we become the next fossils?
The institutions of our ruling world have a powerful stake in the mad momentum of climate change — the energy system that’s producing it and the political stasis that sustains and guarantees it — so powerful as to seem unbreakable. Don’t count on them to avert the coming crisis. They can’t. In some sense, they are the crisis.
Corporations and governments promote the burning of fossil fuels, which means the dumping of its waste product, carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere where, in record amounts, it heats the planet. This is not an oversight; it is a business model.
Governments collude with global warming, in part by bankrolling the giant fossil fuel companies (FFCs). As a recent report written by Shelagh Whitley for the Overseas Development Institute puts it,
“Producers of oil, gas, and coal received more than $500 billion in government subsidies around the world in 2011… If their aim is to avoid dangerous climate change, governments are shooting themselves in both feet. They are subsidizing the very activities that are pushing the world towards dangerous climate change, and creating barriers to investment in low-carbon development and subsidy incentives that encourage investment in carbon-intensive energy.”
Of course a half-trillion dollars in subsidies doesn’t just happen. It cannot be said too often: the FFCs thrive by conniving with governments. They finance politicians to do their bidding. Seven of the ten largest companies in the world are FFCs, as are four of the ten most profitable (just outnumbering three Chinese banks, which presumably have their own major FFC connections). These behemoths have phenomenal clout when they lobby for fossil-fuel-friendly development and against remedial policies like a carbon tax. And if this were not enough, they flood the world with fraudulent claims that climate change is not happening, or is not dangerous, or that its dimensions and human causes are controversial among scientists whose profession it is to study the climate.
Fossilized corporations do their thing while frozen governments produce (or opt out of) hapless and toothless international agreements. By default, initiative must arise elsewhere — in places where reason and passion have some purchase as well as a tradition, places where new power may be created and deployed. This counterpower is, in fact, developing.
Given the might and recalcitrance of the usual culpable and complicit institutions, it falls to people’s initiatives and to other kinds of institutions to take up the slack. This means universities, churches and other investment pools, now increasingly under pressure from mushrooming campaigns to divest funds from FFCs; and popular movements against coal, oil, fracking and other dangerous projects — in particular, at the moment, movements in the US, Canada, and elsewhere to stop tar sands pipelines.
Those in the growing divestment movement suffer no illusions that universities themselves wield the magnitude of power you find in investment banks or, of course, the FFCs themselves. They are simply seeking leverage where they can. The sums of capital held by universities, in particular, are small on the scale of things. Harvard, the educational institution with the largest endowment (some $32.7 billion at last count), reports that only 3 percent of its direct holdings are in the top 200 energy outfits. (The amount of its money held indirectly and opaquely, through private capital pools, and so also possibly invested in FFCs, is unclear.) Though millions of dollars are at stake, that’s a drop in the bucket for Harvard, whose holdings amount, in turn, to nowhere near a drop in the total market capitalization of those energy giants.
Set against a landscape in which people have lost faith in the principle sectors of power, however, universities still have a certain legitimacy that grants them the potential for leverage. Divestment will make news precisely because such movements are unusual: universities biting the hands of the dogs that feed them, so to speak.
We won’t know how much influence that legitimacy can bring about until the attempts are made. What we do know, from historical precedent, is that such efforts, even when they start on a small scale, tend to inspire more of the same. As Robert Kinloch Massie argues in his fine book on South African sanctions, Loosing the Bonds, divestment campaigns such as those over apartheid and Big Tobacco (phased out by Harvard in 1990) worked by creating a cascade effect.
With climate change, the stigmatization of the FFCs is already spreading from universities and churches to city and state pension funds. Eventually, if it works, the cascade changes the atmosphere around private and public investment decisions. Then those decisions themselves begin to change and such changes become part of a new market calculation for investors and politicians alike.
That’s why it matters so much that some 400 divestment campaigns are currently underway at American colleges and universities. Cascades of influence can move institutions, often in surprising ways. Every time a divestment demand is put forward, the conversation changes in elite board rooms where investment decisions are made. Children of FFC executives go home for Christmas and their nagging questions make their parents’ business-as-usual lives less comfortable. (This dynamic, though seldom credited, undoubtedly played some role in ending the Vietnam War.)
At Harvard, my alma mater, a fierce campaign by courageous and strategic-minded students has spun off a parallel campaign by alumni. They are being asked to withhold contributions to the university and to donate to an escrow fund until Harvard divests from its direct holdings in FFCs and undertakes to divest from its indirect holdings as well.
Is this sort of demand just a gesture of moral purity? Not necessarily. Indeed, there may well be an economic payoff for morally motivated divestment and reinvestment. My fellow alumnus Bevis Longstreth, a former commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission, makes a strong case that the policies of the FFCs are shortsighted and risky. (During the year 2012 alone, the top 200 sank $674 billion into acquiring and developing new energy reserves and working out ways to exploit them.) Significant parts of the capital they are now investing will likely be “wasted,” since in a climate-change world, large portions of those reserves will have to stay in the ground.
Looked at in the long term, the FFCs may not turn out to be such smart investments after all. Indeed, in the boilerplate language of financial prospectuses, past results are no guarantee of future results; and there are already investment models showing that non-FFC funds deliver better proceeds.
These efforts and arguments have yet to convince Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust that climate change is one of those “extraordinarily rare circumstances” when divestment is justified. Instead, she proposes “engagement” with the boards of the energy companies, as if sweet reason by itself stood a chance of outtalking sweet crude oil. She touts Harvard’s teaching and research on climate issues, while neglecting the way those corporations fund disinformation meant to blunt the effect of that teaching and research. Having declared that the issue is not “political,” she defends Harvard’s investments in the chief funders of propaganda against climate science. Some rejection of politics! Meanwhile, for saying no to divestment, President Faust wins the applause of an Alabama coal company front group.
Still, Divest Harvard is undeterred. By conducting referenda, organizing panels and rallies, gathering signatures, and activating alumni, it and like-minded groups are in the process of changing elite conversations about wealth and moral responsibility in the midst of a slow-motion apocalypse. They are helping ensure that previously unthinkable conversations become thinkable.
Something similar is taking place on many other campuses. At the same time, writers in influential conservative publications have already begun taking this movement seriously, and the first signs of a changing state of mind are evident. A report out of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, for example, recently warned against the risks of “stranded assets” (all those fossil fuels already bought and paid for by the FFCs that will never make it out of the ground). The Economist has begun to doubt that oil is such a great investment. The Financial Times heralds the spread of divestment efforts to city governments.
Transforming the world is something like winning a war. If the objective is to eliminate a condition like hunger, mass violence, or racial domination, then the institutions and systems of power that produce, defend, and sustain this condition have to be dislodged and defeated. For that, most people have to stop experiencing the condition — and the enemy that makes it possible — as abstractions “out there.”
A movement isn’t called that for nothing. It has to move people. It needs lovers, and friends, and allies. It has to generate a cascade of feeling — moral feeling. The movement’s passion has to become a general passion. And that passion must be focused: the concern that people feel about some large condition “out there” has to find traction closer to home.
Vis-à-vis the slow-motion apocalypse of climate change, there’s plenty of bad news daily and it’s hitting ever closer home, even if you live in the parching Southwest or the burning West, not the Philippines or the Maldive Islands. Until recently, however, it sometimes felt as if the climate movement was spinning its wheels, gaining no traction. But the extraordinary work of Bill McKibben and his collaborators at 350.org and the movements against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and its Canadian equivalent, the Northern Gateway pipeline, have changed the climate-change climate.
Now, the divestment movement, too, becomes a junction point where action in the here-and-now, on local ground, gains momentum toward a grander transformation. These movements are the hinges on which the door to a livable future swings.
Anti-Poverty
Anti-Poverty Leaders Discuss Need for Shared Agenda
I get it, we need to play defense.
There are 50 million people who are food insecure — meaning they can’t meet their basic food needs and don’t necessarily know where their next meal is coming from — and yet both Democrats and Republicans are debating how much more to cut from a food stamp program that was already cut on November 1 and now has an average benefit of only $1.40 per meal….
We need to play defense.
At a time when the economy needs to add 8.3 million jobs just to return to pre-recession employment levels — and sequestration will result in the loss of nearly 1 million more jobs by the third quarter of 2014….
We need to play defense.
At a time when we have reached crisis levels of poverty for children of color under age 5 — more than 42 percent of African-American children and 37 percent of Latino children live below the poverty line of $18,300 annually for a family of three — and sequestration has resulted in more than 57,000 children being kicked out of Head Start classrooms….
We need to play defense.
At a time when there are record levels of homeless students in US public schools — nearly 1.2 million in the 2011-12 school year — and sequestration will result in as many as 185,000 low-income families losing housing assistance by the end of 2014….
We clearly need to play defense.
But then there is also this: anger, frustration, worry, rage, sadness and despair across the nation. It’s combustible. Ninety-five percent of the recovery gains since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent, 60 percent have gone to the top .1 percent who earn more than $1.9 million annually. That doesn’t leave much for anyone else to get ahead.
So isn’t this actually the perfect moment for the anti-poverty community to pivot to offense? To rally around a tight, shared vision — one that appeals to people living in poverty or near poverty and to the middle class?
In January of this year, I proposed an anti-poverty contract to unite groups around the minimum wage, paid leave, affordable childcare, subsidized jobs/Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) reform and ending childhood hunger. I shared the contract with advocates in DC and outside of the nation’s capital as well. The reaction? Roll soundtrack: crickets chirping (with a few notable exceptions.)
As we approach the new year, I still think advocates are too segregated from one another, working on their specific issues, rather than increasing their power and numbers by coming together around a shared vision with popular appeal.
So I again sent some great leaders in the anti-poverty community a scaled back version of my previous proposal, asking whether they thought organizations could and should unite around three or so core issues. For purposes of discussion I proposed:
Raise the minimum wage: no one in America should work full-time, or two or even three part-time jobs and still be stuck in poverty. Historically, a full-time worker earning the minimum wage could lift a family of three out of poverty. The Harkin-Miller proposal of a $10.10 per hour minimum wage would return us to that standard. (It also would raise the tipped minimum wage — stuck at $2.13 per hour for more than twenty years — to 70 percent of the minimum wage.)
Paid sick and family leave: nobody in this country should have to choose between a paycheck and caring for themselves or a sick family member and yet only 34 percent of low-wage workers had access to paid sick leave in 2013.
Affordable, quality child care: it’s tough to go to work and get ahead when there isn’t a safe, affordable place to take your kids for child care and yet childcare assistance policies worsened in twenty-four states in 2012. The average annual fee for full-time child care ranges from $3,900 to $15,000.
I get it, we need to play defense.
There are 50 million people who are food insecure — meaning they can’t meet their basic food needs and don’t necessarily know where their next meal is coming from — and yet both Democrats and Republicans are debating how much more to cut from a food stamp program that was already cut on November 1 and now has an average benefit of only $1.40 per meal….
We need to play defense.
At a time when the economy needs to add 8.3 million jobs just to return to pre-recession employment levels — and sequestration will result in the loss of nearly 1 million more jobs by the third quarter of 2014….
We need to play defense.
At a time when we have reached crisis levels of poverty for children of color under age 5 — more than 42 percent of African-American children and 37 percent of Latino children live below the poverty line of $18,300 annually for a family of three — and sequestration has resulted in more than 57,000 children being kicked out of Head Start classrooms….
We need to play defense.
At a time when there are record levels of homeless students in US public schools — nearly 1.2 million in the 2011-12 school year — and sequestration will result in as many as 185,000 low-income families losing housing assistance by the end of 2014….
We clearly need to play defense.
But then there is also this: anger, frustration, worry, rage, sadness and despair across the nation. It’s combustible. Ninety-five percent of the recovery gains since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent, 60 percent have gone to the top .1 percent who earn more than $1.9 million annually. That doesn’t leave much for anyone else to get ahead.
So isn’t this actually the perfect moment for the anti-poverty community to pivot to offense? To rally around a tight, shared vision — one that appeals to people living in poverty or near poverty and to the middle class?
In January of this year, I proposed an anti-poverty contract to unite groups around the minimum wage, paid leave, affordable childcare, subsidized jobs/Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) reform and ending childhood hunger. I shared the contract with advocates in DC and outside of the nation’s capital as well. The reaction? Roll soundtrack: crickets chirping (with a few notable exceptions.)
As we approach the new year, I still think advocates are too segregated from one another, working on their specific issues, rather than increasing their power and numbers by coming together around a shared vision with popular appeal.
So I again sent some great leaders in the anti-poverty community a scaled back version of my previous proposal, asking whether they thought organizations could and should unite around three or so core issues. For purposes of discussion I proposed:
Raise the minimum wage: no one in America should work full-time, or two or even three part-time jobs and still be stuck in poverty. Historically, a full-time worker earning the minimum wage could lift a family of three out of poverty. The Harkin-Miller proposal of a $10.10 per hour minimum wage would return us to that standard. (It also would raise the tipped minimum wage — stuck at $2.13 per hour for more than twenty years — to 70 percent of the minimum wage.)
Paid sick and family leave: nobody in this country should have to choose between a paycheck and caring for themselves or a sick family member and yet only 34 percent of low-wage workers had access to paid sick leave in 2013.
Affordable, quality child care: it’s tough to go to work and get ahead when there isn’t a safe, affordable place to take your kids for child care and yet childcare assistance policies worsened in twenty-four states in 2012. The average annual fee for full-time child care ranges from $3,900 to $15,000.
Climate Policies
Four Climate Policies We’re Thankful For
Unless it’s immediately proceeded by the word “no,” the phrase “good news” rarely appears these days in stories about climate change. But in a year in which we found out that our oceans may rise this century by as much as three feet and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is higher than it has been in nearly a million years, there were still some bright spots. And in preparation for Thanksgiving, we’ve compiled a list of four environmental developments for which you can give thanks. You can see even more on Twitter by searching the hashtag #ClimateThanks.
1. The US and the World Bank will avoid financing coal-fired power plants abroad.
Burning coal is among the dirtiest ways to produce energy and quickest ways to accelerate climate change. So this July, when the World Bank announced that it would limit funding for new coal-burning plants to “rare circumstances” where countries have “no feasible alternatives,” green advocates were thrilled. At the same time, the global development giant also reversed its opposition to hydroelectric power, which many environmental activists had pushed as an alternative to cheap energy from coal. Last month, based on an announcement President Obama made in June, the United States Treasury Department also ceased financing any new coal projects abroad except in cases where coal was the only viable option for bringing power to poor regions. The US and World Bank decisions only affect coal projects that use public financing; around the world, many are built with private money. But a Treasury official told The New York Times that the Obama administration felt “that if public financing points the way, it will then facilitate private investment.”
2. The White House will push carbon limits for new and existing power plants.
Natural gas and coal-fired power plants are responsible for 40 percent of the United States’ carbon emissions and one-third of its greenhouse gas emissions. The country can’t address climate change without regulating this sector of the economy. In his June speech at Georgetown University, President Obama announced that for the first time ever, the Environmental Protection Agency will propose rules to cap carbon emissions from existing power plants. His administration also pushed forward a rule to limit pollution from new power plants, which had stalled last year. If the EPA finalizes the rule and it’s upheld in court, it would limit new coal-fired plants to 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per megawatt hour — the average coal power plant releases 1,800 pounds — and new gas power plants to 1,000 pounds. Obama said the rules were necessary for the US to meet its pledge to bring greenhouse gas emissions down by 17 percent — or below 2005 levels — by the year 2020.
3. The global warming “slowdown” showed us that international agreements can reduce climate change.
The so-called global warming “slowdown” you heard about over the summer certainly doesn’t mean that global warming has stopped — regardless of what climate skeptics may be saying. Although climate scientists determined that over the past 15 years, the rate of the warming of the planet has slowed — “kind of like a car easing off the accelerator,” as Chris Mooney wrote — the Earth’s surface and oceans are continuing to heat up at an alarming rate. (Other recent research suggests the “slowdown” might not have really occurred at all.) But one study found an unexpected factor contributed to the “slowdown”: the partial cause appears to be a planet-wide phaseout of greenhouse-trapping gases called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which more than 40 countries agreed to by signing the Montreal Protocol in 1988. “Without the Protocol, environmental economist Francisco Estrada of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México reports, global temperatures today would be about a tenth of a degree Celsius higher than they are,” Tim McDonnell explained earlier this month. “That’s roughly an eighth of the total warming documented since 1880.” Bottom line? The global warming “slowdown” actually seems to be a strong indication that international treaties aimed at reducing climate change can work — and that we need more of them.
4. The world’s largest economies will phase down the use of a potent greenhouse gas.
The phaseout of CFCs had another unexpected outcome. Manufacturers began to replace CFCs — used in air conditioners, refrigerators and aerosol cans — with hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). HFCs don’t eat away at the ozone layer like CFCs do. But scientists recently concluded that HFCs are a type of “super-pollutant” — gases that have exponentially more heat-trapping ability than carbon dioxide, although they dissipate from the atmosphere within a few years. Without intervention, HFCs were on track to make a huge contribution to global warming. If present trends hold steady, then by the year 2050, the amount of HFCs humans will have released into the atmosphere will cause as much warming as 90 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. But this year saw positive signs that world leaders are ready to curb this powerful greenhouse gas. In a deal that the White House announced in June, the US and China agreed to explore technologies and financial incentives to reduce the use of HFCs. Three months later, leaders of the Group of 20, which includes major economic powers like Russia, announced that their countries, too, would make plans to reduce the use of HFCs.
Why I Make Terrible Decisions........
Crowd-sourced Outpouring Lifts Struggling Mom
Last month Linda Tirado, a 31-year-old from Cedar City, Utah, was reading Gawker comment threads when she came across some of her online friends grousing about poor people’s self-defeating behavior. “They didn’t understand why poor people just kept doing these things that were counterproductive over and over instead of tightening the belt,” she says. And so Tirado, a mother of two with two low-paying jobs and a full college course load, tried to explain, writing under her commenter handle, KillerMartinis.
“You have to understand that we know that we will never not feel tired,” she wrote in an essay titled “Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, poverty thoughts.” “We will never feel hopeful. We will never get a vacation. Ever. We know that the very act of being poor guarantees that we will never not be poor. It doesn’t give us much reason to improve ourselves. We don’t apply for jobs because we know we can’t afford to look nice enough to hold them… I have missing teeth and skin that looks like it will when you live on b12 and coffee and nicotine and no sleep. Beauty is a thing you get when you can afford it and that’s how you get the job that you need in order to be beautiful. There isn’t much point trying.”
Tirado was trying to put flesh on the sort of ideas that Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir popularized in their much-discussed new book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Among other things, that book flipped the conventional wisdom about bad decisions leading to poverty, arguing instead that poverty impedes good decision-making. This was something Tirado understood intimately and she wanted to communicate what it feels like to live that way.
Initially, her piece, like most Internet comments, floated echoless in the ether. But a week and a half ago, it started going viral. After a few thousand people had read it, Tirado emailed Jessica Coen, the editor of Gawker’s sister site Jezebel and suggested that she highlight it on that site’s front page, which she did. Then the piece appeared on the front page of The Huffington Post. The Atlantic blogged about it. A literary agent got in touch and after a few readers emailed offers to contribute to a book project, Tirado started a GoFundMe page. Her initial goal was $10,500. As of this writing, she’s raised more than $60,000, well over twice what she typically earns in a year.
This crowd-sourced munificence has left Tirado less giddy than simply stunned. “I’ve never thought about the practicalities of what I would do and what my responsibilities would be if the Internet magically said, ‘Here’s $50,000,’” she says.
We spoke on Sunday while her 10-month-old napped, a few hours before her night shift as a cook at a cheap chain restaurant. At that point, she’d raised a little more than $54,000. She also had a new job offer. When her sudden fame hit, she’d just started a part-time contract with a disability-rights nonprofit and the boss, impressed with her evident fundraising abilities, invited her to come aboard full-time.
I was surprised that she hadn’t quit the restaurant job yet, especially since she had to drive an hour there and back. “I can’t screw over my bosses and my friends that hard just because something good happened to me,” she says. She’d told them to start finding other people to cover her shifts, but she’s still going to work on Thanksgiving, cooking for the Black Friday shoppers getting an early start at the nearby Wal-Mart.
Partly, this is the result of a work ethic that belies her description of herself as chronically shortsighted. But she also can’t quite get her head around the idea that her circumstances have suddenly, drastically changed. “I don’t trust that any of this is necessarily real for longer than ten minutes,” she says. The chronic anxiety born of scarcity doesn’t disappear overnight.
Meanwhile, there’s a backlash brewing against her and not just on the Internet. Angry people keep calling her on the phone, accusing her of exaggerating her desperation. And it’s true that her story seems, on the surface, to have certain inconsistencies. She depicts herself as hopeless — “We don’t plan long-term because if we do we’ll just get our hearts broken,” she writes — but also sketches a life of rather staggering discipline, saying she sometimes sleeps only three hours a night as she rushes from her restaurant job to her morning classes. Then there is the seeming discrepancy between Tirado’s eloquent, self-reflective voice and the punishing, thought-killing life she says she’s leading. It’s hard to believe that someone so poor she’s losing her teeth speaks in the same savvy idiom as Gawker readers.
But according to Ryan Clayton, one of Tirado’s former employers, that’s exactly the point — in this economy, intelligence won’t save you from desperation. “Linda’s a good person and she’s a great worker and any employer would be lucky to have her,” he says. “I think she’s a great writer. We need to figure out why so many people like Linda are falling through the cracks in our economy and our society.”
As Tirado describes it, she’s spent much of her life slipping in and out of the lowest tier of the middle class. Her mother, now dead, was an addict of some sort and Tirado was raised by her paternal grandparents, who she calls mom and dad. When she was young, the family lived in Michigan, where her grandmother ran a daycare. Then came the satanic sex abuse hysteria of the early 1990s. An accusation was made, baseless but still devastating. The family moved to Utah and Tirado’s grandparents converted to Mormonism. “I was a teenager, but one dealing with parents who were barely holding themselves together,” she wrote in a follow-up post to her viral essay. “It was hell for everybody involved.” She was rebellious and miserable but also smart; she graduated at 16 and went to community college.
There, she wrote, “I promptly made the sorts of decisions you would expect out of a kid that age with low self-esteem and no social skills and access to what I saw as the cool kids who saw me as an intelligent kid sister and were willing to include me in things. I didn’t make it long.” During vacation, she volunteered on a political campaign and loved it. She took time off from school and began bouncing around the country, canvassing in New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, Iowa and elsewhere. She was poor, but it was an insouciant, youthful poverty, the sort of poverty that doesn’t weigh you down because it seems temporary. “I was 22,” she says. “Who cares if you live in a crappy apartment and have two crazy roommates? It was an adventure.”
Her teeth held her back. They were damaged when, at 19, she was hit by a car and without treatment they kept deteriorating. “Having messed-up teeth is not something that normally gets you a professional job, even though she’s really smart, capable and competent,” says Clayton, the field director for an Ohio Democratic congressional campaign she worked on. “It’s probably why she wasn’t more successful long-term in the business.”
In 2007, Tirado married her boyfriend, an Iraq veteran, right before he was recalled to serve in Fallujah. He returned in 2008, she got pregnant and they moved to Cincinnati so he could go to college. But an administrative screw-up delayed the veterans benefits they were counting on and with nothing to live on, they took jobs at Burger King and moved into a cheap basement apartment, figuring they’d find something better when the money arrived. That, she says, is when “we realized what it really is like to be impoverished instead of playing at poverty.”
Things got worse. The money still didn’t come and the apartment flooded, destroying everything they owned, including the things they’d bought for the baby. Soon they found themselves living in a squalid motel.
Her grandparents came to Ohio for the birth, and seeing how she was living, they convinced her to return to Utah for the baby’s sake, setting up the young family in a trailer. Eventually they were able to move into a house, and they settled into the lives they’re living now. “I’m comfortably working-class, which is to say I’m exhausted and tired and cannot cover my bills,” Tirado says. “It’s frustrating to know you could do better if only you could focus, and life never lets you stop long enough to do it.”
And then, suddenly, it did. But Tirado doesn’t trust her new windfall enough to just focus on writing, so she’s planning on keeping her day job. “The thing that you learn is don’t chase a dream,” she says. “I have learned that stability is illusory. You can have it for a little while if you work very hard and you’re very lucky. The thing you have to do is make sure you are always keeping an eye on the next pay period.”
At the same time, the money, which a lot of writers would consider a respectable but not phenomenal advance, is more than she can imagine keeping; she’s talking about starting a nonprofit or giving some of it away. “Can I live with myself for taking this specifically because I spoke about what it is to not have chances?” she asks. “I don’t think I can take the whole amount and keep it for myself.”
It’s a generous impulse, and, at the same time, a sign of how far she still is from thinking like a person with privilege. After all, artists and writers crowd-fund creative projects all the time, and have no compunction about investing the money they raise in their own work. “It shouldn’t be on the whim of the Internet that people can get themselves out of poverty,” says Tirado. “It is so completely arbitrary.” Perhaps. But if she’s really going to have a middle-class life, she’s going to have to learn a bit of entitlement.
Mortgages Without Risk, at Least for the Banks
No Risk for Banks
By FLOYD NORRIS
There was no single cause of the financial crisis, but a chief one was surely the way mortgage loans were made by people who believed they had no reason to care if the loan was repaid.
That was why the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law included risk retention — called “skin in the game” — as a major reform. For all but the safest loans, someone connected to the loan had to keep a stake in it. If such a loan went bad, then that lender would suffer along with those who bought securities containing it.
By FLOYD NORRIS
There was no single cause of the financial crisis, but a chief one was surely the way mortgage loans were made by people who believed they had no reason to care if the loan was repaid.
That was why the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law included risk retention — called “skin in the game” — as a major reform. For all but the safest loans, someone connected to the loan had to keep a stake in it. If such a loan went bad, then that lender would suffer along with those who bought securities containing it.
“To me,” said Barney Frank, the former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and co-author of the law, “the single most important part of the bill was risk retention.”
But it now appears that section will be rendered moot as multiple regulators give in to pressure brought by an odd coalition to classify virtually every mortgage as exempt from the risk retention law.
That coalition includes large parts of the banking industry, which seems to have no desire to stand behind its loans, as well as consumer advocates and the housing industry. The latter groups say they are worried that poorer people will be unable to obtain loans if all loans cannot be securitized.
On the other side, asking regulators not to gut the law is an equally unusual, if smaller, coalition. It includes Mr. Frank; Sheila C. Bair, the former chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; and the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group that has rarely, if ever, found itself in agreement with Mr. Frank on a regulatory issue.
The Dodd-Frank law told regulators to effectively set up three categories of mortgages. At the top were “qualified residential mortgages,” called Q.R.M. Those were to be the only mortgages that did not require skin in the game if they were pooled and sliced up into securities.
Under that were “qualified mortgages,” called Q.M. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was to establish standards for those, which it has done. Those rules, to take effect Jan. 10, were supposed to protect consumers, not the financial system. The bottom category was to include mortgages that met neither of those standards. They would require risk retention, as did the Q.M. mortgages.
The rules on qualified mortgages are meant to assure that consumers can afford them, and the requirements are rather low. Lenders must go to the trouble of verifying a borrower’s income, and the total monthly debt obligation must be no more than 43 percent of pretax income. There are no requirements for down payments, or limits on how much is lent relative to the value of the property.
Before the lending excesses that led to the crash, Ms. Bair said in an interview this week, banks generally refused to make loans on which repayments would be more than 35 percent of income, and often had lower limits. “There is,” she said, “a lot of room under Q.M. to make mortgages that should not be made.”
That brings us to Q.R.M. — the qualified residential mortgage. The six regulators that are supposed to agree on rules for that put out a proposal in 2011 that gave in to the banks on many issues, but not all. The banks reacted with anger, and the latest proposal is a virtual complete surrender. It essentially says that any mortgage that meets qualified mortgage standards will meet the higher ones as well.
“The result,” Mr. Frank wrote in a comment letter, “would be two categories, those that fall below standards and probably shouldn’t be made, and those that could be made and would not be subject to risk retention.”
“I am not surprised,” Mr. Frank added, that “the overwhelming majority of commenters who are interested in building, selling or promoting the sale of housing to lower-income people support effectively abolishing risk retention. I should note that if all of these people were correct in their collective judgment, we would not have had the crisis that we had.”
Three fellows of the American Enterprise Institute — Edward J. Pinto, Peter J. Wallison and Alex J. Pollock — agree. “With the demise of an independent Q.R.M.,” they wrote in a comment letter, “the credit quality objective of the Dodd-Frank law has been lost.”
Essentially, many of those who want to effectively abolish the Q.R.M. category fear that if lenders are forced to retain some risk, such loans will either not be made or will be prohibitively costly. They seem to take for granted that no bank will be willing to retain risk.
Thus the Virginia Housing Coalition, which supports affordable housing, warned in a comment letter that a 20 percent down payment requirement “would drastically limit access to mortgages and would put homeownership out of reach for low and moderate-income families, first-time home buyers, and disproportionally affect African-American and Latino families.”
That argument frustrates Mr. Frank. Speaking last week at a conference organized by the Clearing House, a group of large banks, he noted that until the 1980s risk retention was common for home mortgages. Banks made loans and kept them on their balance sheets, just as they did other types of loans. The securitization revolution changed that, and now the banks like the idea of collecting fees without risking their own capital.
To those who would defend the status quo, other reforms in the Dodd-Frank law mean there is no need for risk retention. The requirement that banks evaluate a customer’s ability to repay, along with new appraisal rules, “will help to discourage inaccurate or fraudulent appraisal practices,” wrote the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group. “Together, these restrictions will prevent the securitization of the type of predatory and unsustainable loans that inflated the housing bubble and led to the subsequent foreclosure crisis.”
A main reason it is not clear how this will turn out is that the Dodd-Frank law said many rules had to be jointly issued by numerous regulators, without providing any way to resolve differences.
The Q.M. definition was left up to one regulator, the consumer protection agency, whose director could decide. In the case of the Q.R.M. rule, however, unanimous approval of six regulators is required. They are the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the F.D.I.C.
They appear to be somewhat divided. While the primary proposal out for comments calls for no rules above the Q.M. standard, the regulators also asked for comment on requiring a down payment of as much as 30 percent to be able to avoid risk retention. The housing industry hates that idea. Ms. Bair thinks it is a good one.
Most of the regulators appear to have been convinced that there is too much risk that a nascent housing recovery would be threatened if banks had to be responsible for the lending decisions they made. The question is whether others will give in and agree.
The banks lost their fight to avoid “skin in the game” in Congress, but they may well win it in the regulatory agencies.
Undetectable guns
Deadline looms on undetectable guns
Guns that cannot be detected by X-ray machines will no longer be banned if Congress does not renew the decades-old prohibition by Dec. 9.
The 1998 Undetectable Firearms Act will sunset that day, ending the prohibition at a time when new technology has made it easier than ever before to manufacture plastic guns with 3-D printers.
Gun control activists warn that a lapse would allow anyone with a few thousand dollars to build a homemade gun that would be undetectable at airports, government buildings or schools.
That threat was little more than “science fiction,” when Congress overwhelmingly backed the ban 25 years ago,” said Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), who is pressing legislation to renew the law. “We didn’t think it would be a good idea to let the bad guys get a gun through metal detectors,” Israel said.
But with Congress away for a Thanksgiving recess and congressional Republicans in no apparent hurry to address the ban, the chances of a lapse in the ban are growing. “I’m getting more skeptical,” Israel told The Hill.
Before the Senate adjourned Thursday night, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) floated a request for unanimous consent to reauthorize the law for one year. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) objected, effectively blocking any action in the upper chamber until at least Dec. 9, they day the Senate returns and the law is set to expire.
Sessions signaled a willingness to renew the law after the holiday. “We will be glad to give it serious attention,” he said Thursday evening. “I know it is the kind of thing we probably can clear at some point, but I object.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said it was Senate Democrats who were to blame for refusing to work with Republicans on a separate proposal reauthorize the law for either five or ten years.
"Congressional Republicans support a lengthy extension of the ban on firearms that cannot be picked up by metal detectors," Grassley said Tuesday via a written statement. "The Senate Majority consciously and consistently rebuffed our efforts to continue the prohibition for five to ten more years." The law has traditionally enjoyed broad support in both parties, passing the House by a tally of 413 to four in 1988. It was renewed 10 years later and again five years after that, most recently via a noncontroversial voice vote.
But gun-control legislation has become increasingly controversial in recent years, as evidenced by the defeat in April of a bipartisan Senate measure seeking to extend federal background check legislation to all commercial gun sales.
The amendment from Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) was among a host legislative gun control measures offered in the months after last December’s elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn.
All failed in the face of fierce opposition from gun rights activists, who said the bills would violate the Second Amendment. Some groups oppose legislation to renew the undetectable gun ban on similar grounds.
“We would say, just leave it be — let it go,” said Erich Pratt, spokesman for the group Gun Owners of America. “We look at even that law as an infringement.”
Pratt argued that the law does nothing to keep undetectable guns out of the hands of criminals with no regard for the law in the first place. “It’s not going to stop bad guys from making them,” he said.
Earlier this year, a Texas man caused a stir after posting detailed instructions for making a plastic gun with a 3-D printer. Thousands of people downloaded the blueprints, as did the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The agency built and tested a model, and released videos showing the weapon being fired. Both Schumer and Israel stressed that they are supportive of 3-D printer technology, which is seen as having major upside for the American manufacturing industry.
Pro-gun groups note that it’s far easier to obtain guns — legally or otherwise — through longstanding channels than it would be to build one. But gun control advocates say the new technology presents real danger.
“We have a deep, deep concern about 3-D guns,” said Brian Malte, senior national policy director for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
Malte said the group is communication with legislative staffers about extending the ban. Those discussions could include consideration of whether to attach additional language to the law, he said.
“It’s just a question of whether the votes are there at the very end,” he said. But any additional restrictions could make extending the ban more contentious, particularly if the language includes targets 3-D printers, said Pratt of the gun owners group.
Israel emphasized that his bill does not single out the printers. The legislation would add language clarifying that all firearms contain metal parts, so that they would set off a metal detector, he said.
Ultimately, the law’s backers appear more focused on keeping in place than expanding its scope.
“We are looking at a world in which anyone with a little bit of cash can bring an undetectable gun, that can fire multiple bullets, anywhere — including planes, government buildings, sporting events and schools,” Schumer said in a written statement to The Hill.
“This ban cannot be allowed to expire.”
Festival Pilgrimage Begins..... To over eating and shopping
If It Happened There … America’s Annual Festival Pilgrimage Begins
On Wednesday morning, this normally bustling capital city became a ghost town as most of its residents embarked on the long journey to their home villages for an annual festival of family, food, and questionable historical facts. Experts say the day is vital for understanding American society and economists are increasingly taking note of its impact on the world economy.
The annual holiday, known as Thanksgiving, celebrates a mythologized moment of peace between America’s early foreign settlers and its native groups—a day that by Americans' own admission preceded a near genocide of those groups. Despite its murky origins, the holiday remains a rare institution celebrated almost universally in this ethnically diverse society.
During the holiday, more than 38.4 million Americans will make the long pilgrimage home, traveling an average of 214 miles over congested highways, often in inclement weather. The more prosperous citizens will frequently opt for the nation's airways, suffering through a series of flight delays and missed airline connections thanks to the country’s decaying transportation infrastructure and residual fears of foreign terrorist attacks.
Once home, the holiday’s traditions encourage Americans to consume massive quantities of food centered around the turkey, a flightless—and some would say tasteless—bird native to the American continent. All in all, 46 million of these animals will be slaughtered for the feast, nearly 20 percent of those raised each year. The average American will consume an almost unbelievable 4,500 calories, despite ongoing warnings about dangerous obesity rates nationally.
Once home, the holiday’s traditions encourage Americans to consume massive quantities of food centered around the turkey, a flightless—and some would say tasteless—bird native to the American continent. All in all, 46 million of these animals will be slaughtered for the feast, nearly 20 percent of those raised each year. The average American will consume an almost unbelievable 4,500 calories, despite ongoing warnings about dangerous obesity rates nationally.
Virtually the only break from the eating comes when Americans gather around the television to watch a special presentation of football, the country’s most popular sport. If the brutal violence of the game seems at odds with the holiday’s emphasis on thanks and good will, no one seems to mind.
Though rooted in America’s ancient history, the celebration of Thanksgiving today also reflects the transforming values of American society. One relatively recent tradition is the head of state’s public “pardoning” of a turkey—a sop to animal rights activists made somewhat moot by the fact that the country’s president simply dines on a different turkey. To outsiders, it can also seem like a somewhat macabre gesture since the United States is one of the last developed countries to employ the death penalty for humans.
Traditionally, the Friday and weekend following Thanksgiving have been set aside for another American institution—intense consumer activity and bargain shopping. (The availability of deeply discounted goods is increasingly beginning even sooner, sometime on the holiday itself, angering some purists.) More than $59 billion will be spent over these days, though the exact figure will be watched closely by economists looking for clues about the country’s national mood and economic well-being. The event is known as “Black Friday,” though contrary to popular belief, this is not due to the injuries and deaths that periodically occur during retail stampedes.
In recent years, some experts have questioned whether the hidden costs of the Thanksgiving holiday have become excessive; whether the celebration is worth its massive environmental impact and the increased health risks due to traffic accidents and overeating. Still, the majority of the population holds fast to these pastimes. For them, they are part of a rare, quintessentially American tradition in a modernizing society that finds itself increasingly under the influence of the outside world.
Cheep.....
Joe Arpaio Offers Inmates, Fed Only Twice A Day, 56-Cent Thanksgiving Meal
Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio has planned a particularly economical meal for the roughly 7,500 to 10,000 inmates in his jail system this Thanksgiving.
The meal comes in at a cost of just 56 cents per inmate, and its main entrée will be 24-cent vegetarian turkey soy casserole. Arpaio tweeted the Thanksgiving menu Wednesday morning.
“Hope the inmates give thanks for this special meal being served in the jails tomorrow," Arpaio's tweet said.
The official Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office website features a bio of Arpaio that touts his accomplishments in providing inmates with “the cheapest meals in the U.S.” by feeding inmates “only twice daily, to cut the labor costs of meal delivery." Arpaio has “even stopped serving them salt and pepper” to save taxpayer money, according to the bio.
The average meal for an inmate in a Maricopa County jail costs between 15 and 40 cents, according to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office website.
In September, Arpaio implemented a vegetarian diet for inmates in an effort to save $100,000 on food costs for prisoners. He also announced in March a plan to charge inmates $1 for their meals, according to ABC15.
"Everybody else has to pay for their food, why should [inmates] get freebies?" Arpaio said in an ABC15 news video.
Last Thanksgiving, the controversial sheriff complained about the cost of providing a Thanksgiving meal to each inmate in a press release, calling the “whopping 68 cents” paid for every meal an “astronomical increase" from the cost of previous Thanksgiving dinners.
A 2012 East Oregonian article about a Thanksgiving dinner for inmates that cost 98 cents per prisoner quoted an assistant prison superintendent, who noted that treating inmates with a sense of humanity at the holidays helps prepare them for life after prison and may reduce recidivism rates. "We don't want to release angry inmates," the assistant noted. The Oregon meal included 634 pounds of sliced turkey breast, cranberry sauce and gravy.
In a Veteran’s Day press release earlier this month, Arpaio announced another questionable jailhouse initiative called “Patriotic Jails,” which introduced an exclusively “bread and water" diet for 30-day periods of time as punishment for allegedly unpatriotic acts.
“Any defacement or vandalism of the flags by inmates comes with the penalty of bread and water. Ten inmates are currently on bread and water for this infraction,” Arpaio said in the press release.
Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio has planned a particularly economical meal for the roughly 7,500 to 10,000 inmates in his jail system this Thanksgiving.
The meal comes in at a cost of just 56 cents per inmate, and its main entrée will be 24-cent vegetarian turkey soy casserole. Arpaio tweeted the Thanksgiving menu Wednesday morning.
“Hope the inmates give thanks for this special meal being served in the jails tomorrow," Arpaio's tweet said.
The official Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office website features a bio of Arpaio that touts his accomplishments in providing inmates with “the cheapest meals in the U.S.” by feeding inmates “only twice daily, to cut the labor costs of meal delivery." Arpaio has “even stopped serving them salt and pepper” to save taxpayer money, according to the bio.
In September, Arpaio implemented a vegetarian diet for inmates in an effort to save $100,000 on food costs for prisoners. He also announced in March a plan to charge inmates $1 for their meals, according to ABC15.
"Everybody else has to pay for their food, why should [inmates] get freebies?" Arpaio said in an ABC15 news video.
Last Thanksgiving, the controversial sheriff complained about the cost of providing a Thanksgiving meal to each inmate in a press release, calling the “whopping 68 cents” paid for every meal an “astronomical increase" from the cost of previous Thanksgiving dinners.
A 2012 East Oregonian article about a Thanksgiving dinner for inmates that cost 98 cents per prisoner quoted an assistant prison superintendent, who noted that treating inmates with a sense of humanity at the holidays helps prepare them for life after prison and may reduce recidivism rates. "We don't want to release angry inmates," the assistant noted. The Oregon meal included 634 pounds of sliced turkey breast, cranberry sauce and gravy.
In a Veteran’s Day press release earlier this month, Arpaio announced another questionable jailhouse initiative called “Patriotic Jails,” which introduced an exclusively “bread and water" diet for 30-day periods of time as punishment for allegedly unpatriotic acts.
“Any defacement or vandalism of the flags by inmates comes with the penalty of bread and water. Ten inmates are currently on bread and water for this infraction,” Arpaio said in the press release.
Massive Black Friday strike and arrests planned, as workers defy Wal-Mart
Exclusive: Wal-Mart strikers risk arrest in nine cities today. Here's what it means for future of U.S. work
Defying the nation’s top employer and a business model that defines the new U.S. economy, Wal-Mart employees and allies will try to oust shopping headlines with strike stories, and throw a retail giant off its heels on what should be its happiest day of the year. By day’s end, organizers expect 1,500 total protests in cities ranging from Los Angeles, Calif., to Wasilla, Alaska, including arrests in nine cities: Seacaucus, New Jersey; Alexandria, Virginia; Dallas; Minneapolis; Chicago; Seattle; and Ontario, San Leandro, and Sacramento, California.
“Like my mom always said, ‘You see something that’s not right, it’s your turn to fix it,” said 45-year-old Chicago Wal-Mart employee Myron Byrd, who plans to be arrested in his first act of civil disobedience today. “And you can’t do it by yourself — you have to do it with others.” Byrd said he was driven to action by “high school”-level pay and workplace disrespect, and inspired by the courage of fellow workers and his mother’s civil rights legacy. “I’m sacrificing myself, along with others, to do this,” he told me, “to show Wal-Mart that hey, I’m not afraid, they not afraid, we not afraid.” In an e-mail to reporters, Wal-Mart spokesperson David Tovar said that “planned arrests” were “just another way to make these orchestrated events seem newsworthy,” and that “these aren’t real protests by real Walmart associates.”
Whether today’s action is bigger than last year’s “Black Friday” showdown remains to be seen, and likely depends on how you count: Would more protests, and more protesters, make up for a retaliation-fueled reduction in the number of Wal-Mart employees who go on strike to join them?
Wal-Mart’s first 50 years were free of Black Friday strikes – indeed, free of any coordinated walkouts in the United States. Then, 14 months ago, a wave of Wal-Mart supply chain strikes that started with crawfish-peeling guest workers and subcontracted warehouse workers spread to include the corporation’s retail employees, first in Southern California and then in cities across the country. Strikers were members of OUR Walmart, a fledgling non-union workers group that first announced itself in 2011; it draws funding, staffing and direction from the United Food & Commercial Workers union.
For the UFCW, Wal-Mart poses an existential threat, driving down standards for competitors and endangering hard-fought gains. “Our companies are saying, ‘If Wal-Mart can get away with it, why can’t we?’” an employee from a unionized Safeway told me as she prepared to join a Black Friday protest at a Maryland Wal-Mart last year. But the Wal-Mart challenge extends far beyond the company’s 1.3 million U.S. employees, or the UFCW’s 1.3 million members. By pioneering tactics to cut labor costs and avert labor organizing, and instigating imitation among suppliers, subcontractors, competitors and admirers across industries, Wal-Mart is hastening a transformation in U.S. work, toward an ever-more-present future in which workers – whether fast food cashiers or adjunct professors — lack living wages, workplace democracy, job security or even legal recognition as employees.
Faced with a future of declining leverage and relevance, U.S. unions have taken up a range of tactics on full display in the Wal-Mart effort, including “comprehensive campaigns” that wield political, legal and media weapons against a company’s brand, growth ambitions and consumer loyalty; “minority union” tactics in which smaller numbers of workers take bold public action to embarrass management and engage more reticent co-workers; organizing in solidarity across supply chains and national borders; short-term strikes designed to maximize public engagement and minimize the risk of retaliatory firings; and working with or through “alt-labor” groups that aim to transform workplaces without seeking collective bargaining.
Together, these tactics have forged the most serious challenge to Wal-Mart’s control over its U.S. workforce since the company was founded in 1962. It’s far outpaced the previous decade’s well-funded but anemic union-backed anti-Wal-Mart efforts, which involved bloggers and presidential candidates but comparatively little in the way of Wal-Mart employees. But the current campaign still faces nearly impossible obstacles, some of which have only become more visible in the year since 400-some strikers and thousands of supporters pulled off Black Friday 2012.
Chief among the challenges is this: While U.S. law generally bans companies from punishing workers for organizing (whether toward unionization or as part of a non-union effort like OUR Walmart), it does precious little to avert or avenge such retaliation when companies are dead set on maintaining control. In the months after 100-some strikers staged a several-day work stoppage and protest caravan to Wal-Mart’s June 2013 shareholder meeting, 23 of them were fired – exactly the scenario that’s kept many Wal-Mart workers on the sidelines. While “I do not think I have ever hated any one thing in my life” as much as Wal-Mart, one employee told me shortly before those firings began, he’d be keeping his mouth shut because “Wal-Mart does not tolerate dissenters.”
Wal-Mart denies that it retaliated for striking (but not that it punished some strikers for violating its attendance policy, a pretty specious distinction). The federal National Labor Relations Board announced this month that it was prepared to issue a complaint – similar to an indictment – against the company for illegally trying to restrain strikes; that’s a symbolic victory for the campaign and one step in a potentially years-long legal process that could ultimately see fired employees returned to work.
But what neither Wal-Mart nor OUR Walmart can come out and say is this: While core activists say they’re only emboldened by the fear campaign, by all appearances Wal-Mart threats and firings have so far succeeded in stemming the growth of Wal-Mart strikes. (Alternate explanation, per Wal-Mart: “The opportunity is incredible…We’ve never held a good person back.”) Organizers have declined to say whether today’s protests will see more employees out on strike than last year, but touted growth in total protests, civil disobedience actions, worker support and community backing. (Wal-Mart employee participation in a September 2013 day of civil disobedience and protests – not strikes – also numbered in the hundreds, according to the campaign.)
Placerville Wal-Mart employee Dorothy Halvorson told me she was stirred to get more active with OUR Walmart when she saw the company crack down on her co-workers. But she said such retaliation “has put fear back into some of the people that were thinking about joining us.” When three activists were fired in her store, said Halvorson, others “stepped back into like, ‘Oh no, we’ve got to be careful — we might be fired too.’” She said that because of the NLRB’s planned complaint against Wal-Mart, “people are starting to feel more empowered again about doing it.”
“My sense is that all the firings and stuff that took place last year; I mean I think that scared people,” said Kim Bobo, whose group Interfaith Worker Justice has adopted 150 stores for protests this year. “I mean, that was the intent, and I think it was effective.” But Bobo, who told me back in June that OUR Walmart would have to get “fifty times bigger, probably” in order to win, said she believed the NLRB’s move “will give the organizing a real lift,” and that “I don’t think the only way workers organize and show solidarity and push the company is by striking.” UFCW President Joe Hansen told me in September that it would be “unrealistic” to expect that “somebody’s going to get 500,000 Wal-Mart workers to walk off their job, “ but that “what I think is happening, and I think Wal-Mart hates this as much as anything else, is it’s calling publicity to how they treat workers.” Similarly, asked Wednesday whether victory would require thousands of Wal-Mart workers to join protests, the Rev. Jesse Jackson told me that “the success may be in enough people saying, ‘I respect their mission’ and shopping someplace else…The success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott was that people stopped trying to ride.”
OUR Walmart and its allies can point to real victories from their already unprecedented activism, from a single store that paid workers for time they spent on strike, to a public commitment to improve scheduling nationwide. Last week’s media onslaught over one Wal-Mart’s employee-to-employee charity collection and last summer’s high-profile showdown over a passed-but-vetoed D.C. “large retailer” living wage bill both show that comprehensive campaign tactics can pack some punch. But it was workers’ strikes that laid groundwork and fueled momentum for both. As past failed union-backed efforts proved, Wal-Mart would sooner concede money than power, and public scrutiny and embarrassment alone stand little chance of dislodging real decency or democracy without a serious threat of escalating Wal-Mart worker uprisings.
So the pressing question, for those concerned with the Wal-Mart-ization of U.S. work, is whether some combination of brave and savvy worker-to-worker organizing, bold minority activism and legal/political/media/consumer/community pressure can partially disarm or counteract the weapons Wal-Mart uses to inculcate a well-founded fear in its workforce. We’ll know more once we see what goes down today – and how Wal-Mart’s still-silent majority responds in the weeks and months to come.
Defying the nation’s top employer and a business model that defines the new U.S. economy, Wal-Mart employees and allies will try to oust shopping headlines with strike stories, and throw a retail giant off its heels on what should be its happiest day of the year. By day’s end, organizers expect 1,500 total protests in cities ranging from Los Angeles, Calif., to Wasilla, Alaska, including arrests in nine cities: Seacaucus, New Jersey; Alexandria, Virginia; Dallas; Minneapolis; Chicago; Seattle; and Ontario, San Leandro, and Sacramento, California.
“Like my mom always said, ‘You see something that’s not right, it’s your turn to fix it,” said 45-year-old Chicago Wal-Mart employee Myron Byrd, who plans to be arrested in his first act of civil disobedience today. “And you can’t do it by yourself — you have to do it with others.” Byrd said he was driven to action by “high school”-level pay and workplace disrespect, and inspired by the courage of fellow workers and his mother’s civil rights legacy. “I’m sacrificing myself, along with others, to do this,” he told me, “to show Wal-Mart that hey, I’m not afraid, they not afraid, we not afraid.” In an e-mail to reporters, Wal-Mart spokesperson David Tovar said that “planned arrests” were “just another way to make these orchestrated events seem newsworthy,” and that “these aren’t real protests by real Walmart associates.”
Whether today’s action is bigger than last year’s “Black Friday” showdown remains to be seen, and likely depends on how you count: Would more protests, and more protesters, make up for a retaliation-fueled reduction in the number of Wal-Mart employees who go on strike to join them?
Wal-Mart’s first 50 years were free of Black Friday strikes – indeed, free of any coordinated walkouts in the United States. Then, 14 months ago, a wave of Wal-Mart supply chain strikes that started with crawfish-peeling guest workers and subcontracted warehouse workers spread to include the corporation’s retail employees, first in Southern California and then in cities across the country. Strikers were members of OUR Walmart, a fledgling non-union workers group that first announced itself in 2011; it draws funding, staffing and direction from the United Food & Commercial Workers union.
For the UFCW, Wal-Mart poses an existential threat, driving down standards for competitors and endangering hard-fought gains. “Our companies are saying, ‘If Wal-Mart can get away with it, why can’t we?’” an employee from a unionized Safeway told me as she prepared to join a Black Friday protest at a Maryland Wal-Mart last year. But the Wal-Mart challenge extends far beyond the company’s 1.3 million U.S. employees, or the UFCW’s 1.3 million members. By pioneering tactics to cut labor costs and avert labor organizing, and instigating imitation among suppliers, subcontractors, competitors and admirers across industries, Wal-Mart is hastening a transformation in U.S. work, toward an ever-more-present future in which workers – whether fast food cashiers or adjunct professors — lack living wages, workplace democracy, job security or even legal recognition as employees.
Faced with a future of declining leverage and relevance, U.S. unions have taken up a range of tactics on full display in the Wal-Mart effort, including “comprehensive campaigns” that wield political, legal and media weapons against a company’s brand, growth ambitions and consumer loyalty; “minority union” tactics in which smaller numbers of workers take bold public action to embarrass management and engage more reticent co-workers; organizing in solidarity across supply chains and national borders; short-term strikes designed to maximize public engagement and minimize the risk of retaliatory firings; and working with or through “alt-labor” groups that aim to transform workplaces without seeking collective bargaining.
Together, these tactics have forged the most serious challenge to Wal-Mart’s control over its U.S. workforce since the company was founded in 1962. It’s far outpaced the previous decade’s well-funded but anemic union-backed anti-Wal-Mart efforts, which involved bloggers and presidential candidates but comparatively little in the way of Wal-Mart employees. But the current campaign still faces nearly impossible obstacles, some of which have only become more visible in the year since 400-some strikers and thousands of supporters pulled off Black Friday 2012.
Chief among the challenges is this: While U.S. law generally bans companies from punishing workers for organizing (whether toward unionization or as part of a non-union effort like OUR Walmart), it does precious little to avert or avenge such retaliation when companies are dead set on maintaining control. In the months after 100-some strikers staged a several-day work stoppage and protest caravan to Wal-Mart’s June 2013 shareholder meeting, 23 of them were fired – exactly the scenario that’s kept many Wal-Mart workers on the sidelines. While “I do not think I have ever hated any one thing in my life” as much as Wal-Mart, one employee told me shortly before those firings began, he’d be keeping his mouth shut because “Wal-Mart does not tolerate dissenters.”
Wal-Mart denies that it retaliated for striking (but not that it punished some strikers for violating its attendance policy, a pretty specious distinction). The federal National Labor Relations Board announced this month that it was prepared to issue a complaint – similar to an indictment – against the company for illegally trying to restrain strikes; that’s a symbolic victory for the campaign and one step in a potentially years-long legal process that could ultimately see fired employees returned to work.
But what neither Wal-Mart nor OUR Walmart can come out and say is this: While core activists say they’re only emboldened by the fear campaign, by all appearances Wal-Mart threats and firings have so far succeeded in stemming the growth of Wal-Mart strikes. (Alternate explanation, per Wal-Mart: “The opportunity is incredible…We’ve never held a good person back.”) Organizers have declined to say whether today’s protests will see more employees out on strike than last year, but touted growth in total protests, civil disobedience actions, worker support and community backing. (Wal-Mart employee participation in a September 2013 day of civil disobedience and protests – not strikes – also numbered in the hundreds, according to the campaign.)
Placerville Wal-Mart employee Dorothy Halvorson told me she was stirred to get more active with OUR Walmart when she saw the company crack down on her co-workers. But she said such retaliation “has put fear back into some of the people that were thinking about joining us.” When three activists were fired in her store, said Halvorson, others “stepped back into like, ‘Oh no, we’ve got to be careful — we might be fired too.’” She said that because of the NLRB’s planned complaint against Wal-Mart, “people are starting to feel more empowered again about doing it.”
“My sense is that all the firings and stuff that took place last year; I mean I think that scared people,” said Kim Bobo, whose group Interfaith Worker Justice has adopted 150 stores for protests this year. “I mean, that was the intent, and I think it was effective.” But Bobo, who told me back in June that OUR Walmart would have to get “fifty times bigger, probably” in order to win, said she believed the NLRB’s move “will give the organizing a real lift,” and that “I don’t think the only way workers organize and show solidarity and push the company is by striking.” UFCW President Joe Hansen told me in September that it would be “unrealistic” to expect that “somebody’s going to get 500,000 Wal-Mart workers to walk off their job, “ but that “what I think is happening, and I think Wal-Mart hates this as much as anything else, is it’s calling publicity to how they treat workers.” Similarly, asked Wednesday whether victory would require thousands of Wal-Mart workers to join protests, the Rev. Jesse Jackson told me that “the success may be in enough people saying, ‘I respect their mission’ and shopping someplace else…The success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott was that people stopped trying to ride.”
OUR Walmart and its allies can point to real victories from their already unprecedented activism, from a single store that paid workers for time they spent on strike, to a public commitment to improve scheduling nationwide. Last week’s media onslaught over one Wal-Mart’s employee-to-employee charity collection and last summer’s high-profile showdown over a passed-but-vetoed D.C. “large retailer” living wage bill both show that comprehensive campaign tactics can pack some punch. But it was workers’ strikes that laid groundwork and fueled momentum for both. As past failed union-backed efforts proved, Wal-Mart would sooner concede money than power, and public scrutiny and embarrassment alone stand little chance of dislodging real decency or democracy without a serious threat of escalating Wal-Mart worker uprisings.
So the pressing question, for those concerned with the Wal-Mart-ization of U.S. work, is whether some combination of brave and savvy worker-to-worker organizing, bold minority activism and legal/political/media/consumer/community pressure can partially disarm or counteract the weapons Wal-Mart uses to inculcate a well-founded fear in its workforce. We’ll know more once we see what goes down today – and how Wal-Mart’s still-silent majority responds in the weeks and months to come.
Stamp Out Campaign Cash Corruption in Our Lifetime
Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, has taken his frustration with the corruption of money in politics and channeled it into an ingenious campaign for a constitutional amendment that would overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.
Since he left his job as CEO of the Vermont-based ice cream company in 1996, Cohen has taken his marketing know-how into progressive politics and in 2012 began Stamp Stampede — the manufacture and sale (at cost) of rubber stamps to be used on paper currency — all perfectly legal — to spread the word to rid government and politics of outside corporate and anonymous cash. There’s a wide assortment of stamps — “Not to Be Used for Bribing Politicians” reads one message, “The System Isn’t Broken, It’s Fixed” is another.
“Every stamped bill will be seen by an average of 875 people,” Cohen claims “and will help grow the movement to #GetMoneyOut of politics. Stamp 5 bills a day for a year and that’s a million eyeballs.”
He writes:
This holiday season, Cohen proposes using the stamps as stocking stuffers. Check them out at Stamp Stampede. Maybe, as he suggests, “We can create a stamping tsunami to cleanup Washington and restore our democracy.” In which case, we suggest, the ice cream’s on him.
Since he left his job as CEO of the Vermont-based ice cream company in 1996, Cohen has taken his marketing know-how into progressive politics and in 2012 began Stamp Stampede — the manufacture and sale (at cost) of rubber stamps to be used on paper currency — all perfectly legal — to spread the word to rid government and politics of outside corporate and anonymous cash. There’s a wide assortment of stamps — “Not to Be Used for Bribing Politicians” reads one message, “The System Isn’t Broken, It’s Fixed” is another.
“Every stamped bill will be seen by an average of 875 people,” Cohen claims “and will help grow the movement to #GetMoneyOut of politics. Stamp 5 bills a day for a year and that’s a million eyeballs.”
He writes:
We’re already making big waves. So far, 16 states and over 500 municipalities have passed ballot initiatives calling on Congress to propose a constitutional amendment that says: 1) Money is not free speech and 2) Corporations are not people. Over 150 congressmen and President Obama say they would support an amendment. 80 percent of Americans – Democrats and Republicans – think there is too much money in politics. But change won’t happen if we sit back and let other people do the dirty work.
This holiday season, Cohen proposes using the stamps as stocking stuffers. Check them out at Stamp Stampede. Maybe, as he suggests, “We can create a stamping tsunami to cleanup Washington and restore our democracy.” In which case, we suggest, the ice cream’s on him.
Do black holes dream of electronic sheep?
Black holes can be petite, with masses only about 10 times that of our sun -- or
monstrous, boasting the equivalent in mass up to 10 billion suns. Do black holes
also come in size medium? NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or
NuSTAR, is busy scrutinizing a class of black holes that may fall into the
proposed medium-sized category.
"Exactly how intermediate-sized black holes would form remains an open
issue," said Dominic Walton of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
"Some theories suggest they could form in rich, dense clusters of stars through
repeated mergers, but there are a lot of questions left to be answered."
The largest black holes, referred to as supermassive, dominate the hearts of galaxies. The immense gravity of these black holes drags material toward them, forcing the material to heat up and release powerful X-rays. Small black holes dot the rest of the galactic landscape. They form under the crush of collapsing, dying stars bigger than our sun.
Evidence for medium-sized black holes lying somewhere between these two extremes might come from objects called ultraluminous X-ray sources, or ULXs. These are pairs of objects in which a black hole ravenously feeds off a normal star. The feeding process is somewhat similar to what happens around supermassive black holes, but isn't as big and messy. In addition, ULXs are located throughout galaxies, not at the cores.
The bright glow of X-rays coming from ULXs is too great to be the product of typical small black holes. This and other evidence indicates the objects may be intermediate in mass, with 100 to 10,000 times the mass of our sun. Alternatively, an explanation may lie in some kind of exotic phenomenon involving extreme accretion, or "feeding," of a black hole.
NuSTAR is joining with other telescopes to take a closer look at ULXs. It’s providing the first look at these objects in focused, high-energy X-rays, helping to get better estimates of their masses and other characteristics.
In a new paper from Walton and colleagues accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, the astronomers report serendipitously finding a ULX that had gone largely unnoticed before. They studied the object, which lies in the Circinus spiral galaxy 13 million light-years away, not only with NuSTAR but also with the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite. Archival data from NASA's Chandra, Swift and Spitzer space telescopes as well as Japan's Suzaku satellite, were also used for further studies. "We went to town on this object, looking at a range of epochs and wavelengths," said Walton.
The results indicate the black hole in question is about 100 times the mass of the sun, putting it right at the border between small and medium black holes.
In another accepted Astrophysical Journal paper, Matteo Bachetti of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie and colleagues looked at two ULXs in NGC 1313, a spiral galaxy known as the "Topsy Turvy galaxy," also about 13 million light-years way.
These are among the best-studied ULXs known. A single viewing with NuSTAR showed that the black holes didn't fit with models of medium-size black holes. As a result, the researchers now think both ULXs harbor small, stellar-mass black holes. One of the objects is estimated to be big for its size category, at 70 to 100 solar masses.
"It's possible that these objects are ultraluminous because they are accreting material at a high rate and not because of their size," said Bachetti. "If intermediate-mass black holes are out there, they are doing a good job of hiding from us."
NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Va. Its instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech; JPL; the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University, New York; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; the Danish Technical University in Denmark; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif.; ATK Aerospace Systems, Goleta, Calif., and with support from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) Science Data Center.
NuSTAR's mission operations center is at UC Berkeley, with the ASI providing its equatorial ground station located at Malindi, Kenya. The mission's outreach program is based at Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, Calif. NASA's Explorer Program is managed by Goddard. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.
The largest black holes, referred to as supermassive, dominate the hearts of galaxies. The immense gravity of these black holes drags material toward them, forcing the material to heat up and release powerful X-rays. Small black holes dot the rest of the galactic landscape. They form under the crush of collapsing, dying stars bigger than our sun.
Evidence for medium-sized black holes lying somewhere between these two extremes might come from objects called ultraluminous X-ray sources, or ULXs. These are pairs of objects in which a black hole ravenously feeds off a normal star. The feeding process is somewhat similar to what happens around supermassive black holes, but isn't as big and messy. In addition, ULXs are located throughout galaxies, not at the cores.
The bright glow of X-rays coming from ULXs is too great to be the product of typical small black holes. This and other evidence indicates the objects may be intermediate in mass, with 100 to 10,000 times the mass of our sun. Alternatively, an explanation may lie in some kind of exotic phenomenon involving extreme accretion, or "feeding," of a black hole.
NuSTAR is joining with other telescopes to take a closer look at ULXs. It’s providing the first look at these objects in focused, high-energy X-rays, helping to get better estimates of their masses and other characteristics.
In a new paper from Walton and colleagues accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, the astronomers report serendipitously finding a ULX that had gone largely unnoticed before. They studied the object, which lies in the Circinus spiral galaxy 13 million light-years away, not only with NuSTAR but also with the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite. Archival data from NASA's Chandra, Swift and Spitzer space telescopes as well as Japan's Suzaku satellite, were also used for further studies. "We went to town on this object, looking at a range of epochs and wavelengths," said Walton.
The results indicate the black hole in question is about 100 times the mass of the sun, putting it right at the border between small and medium black holes.
In another accepted Astrophysical Journal paper, Matteo Bachetti of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie and colleagues looked at two ULXs in NGC 1313, a spiral galaxy known as the "Topsy Turvy galaxy," also about 13 million light-years way.
These are among the best-studied ULXs known. A single viewing with NuSTAR showed that the black holes didn't fit with models of medium-size black holes. As a result, the researchers now think both ULXs harbor small, stellar-mass black holes. One of the objects is estimated to be big for its size category, at 70 to 100 solar masses.
"It's possible that these objects are ultraluminous because they are accreting material at a high rate and not because of their size," said Bachetti. "If intermediate-mass black holes are out there, they are doing a good job of hiding from us."
NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Va. Its instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech; JPL; the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University, New York; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; the Danish Technical University in Denmark; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif.; ATK Aerospace Systems, Goleta, Calif., and with support from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) Science Data Center.
NuSTAR's mission operations center is at UC Berkeley, with the ASI providing its equatorial ground station located at Malindi, Kenya. The mission's outreach program is based at Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, Calif. NASA's Explorer Program is managed by Goddard. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.
Well.... Maybe ISON IS alive.....
As ISON appeared to dim and fizzle in several observatories and later could not be seen at all by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory or by ground based solar observatories, many scientists believed it had disintegrated completely. However, a streak of bright material streaming away from the sun appeared in the European Space Agency and NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory later in the evening. The question remains whether it is merely debris from the comet, or if some portion of the comet's nucleus survived, but late-night analysis from scientists with NASA's Comet ISON Observing Campaign suggest that there is at least a small nucleus intact.
Throughout the year that researchers have watched Comet ISON – and especially during its final approach to the sun – the comet brightened and dimmed in unexpected ways. Such brightness changes usually occur in response to material boiling off the comet, and different material will do so at different temperatures thus providing clues as to what the comet is made of. Analyzing this pattern will help scientists understand the composition of ISON, which contains material assembled during the very formation of the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago.
ISON is no more....
Comet ISON went around the sun on Nov. 28, 2013. Several solar observatories
watched the comet throughout this closest approach to the sun, known as
perihelion. While the fate of the comet is not yet established, it is likely
that it did not survive the trip. The comet grew faint while within both the
view of NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, and the joint European
Space Agency and NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The comet was not
visible at all in NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
"We didn't see Comet ISON in SDO," said Dean Pesnell, project scientist for SDO.
"So we think it must have broken up and evaporated before it reached perihelion."
While this means that Comet ISON will not be visible in the night sky in December, the wealth of observations gathered of the comet over the last year will provide great research opportunities for some time. One important question will simply be to figure out why it is no longer visible.
"We didn't see Comet ISON in SDO," said Dean Pesnell, project scientist for SDO.
"So we think it must have broken up and evaporated before it reached perihelion."
While this means that Comet ISON will not be visible in the night sky in December, the wealth of observations gathered of the comet over the last year will provide great research opportunities for some time. One important question will simply be to figure out why it is no longer visible.
 |
| Point where ISON broke-up |
 |
| Remainder of ISON flying away... |
November 27, 2013
Economics
Pope Francis understands economics better than most politicians
By Heidi Moore, The Guardian
Pope Francis is a pontiff who has constructively broken all the rules of popery – so far to widespread acclaim. He’s faulted the Catholic church for its negative obsession with gays and birth control, and now he has expanded his mandate to economics with a groundbreaking screed denouncing “the new idolatry of money“.
As the Pope wrote in his “apostolic exhortation“:
The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings.
His thoughts on income inequality are searing:
How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality.
The pope’s screed on “the economy of exclusion and inequality” will disappoint those who considers themselves free-market capitalists, but they would do well to listen to the message. Francis gives form to the emotion and injustice of post-financial-crisis outrage in a way that has been rare since Occupy Wall Street disbanded. There has been a growing chorus of financial insiders – from the late Merrill Lynch executive Herb Allison to organizations like Better Markets – it’s time for a change in how we approach capitalism. It’s not about discarding capitalism, or hating money or profit; it’s about pursuing profits ethically, and rejecting the premise that exploitation is at the center of profit. When 53% of financial executives say they can’t get ahead without some cheating, even though they want to work for ethical organizations, there’s a real problem.
Unlike Occupy, which turned its rage outward, Pope Francis bolstered his anger with two inward-facing emotions familiar to any Catholic-school graduate: shame and guilt, to make the economy a matter of personal responsibility.
This is important. Income inequality is not someone else’s problem. Nearly all of us are likely to experience it. Inequality has been growing in the US since the 1970s. Economist Emmanuel Saez found that the incomes of the top 1% grew by 31.4% in the three years after the financial crisis, while the majority of people struggled with a disappointing economy. The other 99% of the population grew their incomes 0.4% during the same period As a result, federal and state spending on social welfare programs has been forced to grow to $1tn just to handle the volume of US households in trouble. Yet income inequality has been locked out of of the mainstream economic conversation, where it is seen largely as a sideshow for progressive bleeding hearts.
In the discussions of why the US is not recovering, economists often mention metrics like economic growth and housing. They rarely mention the metrics that directly tell us we are failing our economic goals, like poverty and starvation. Those metrics of income inequality tell an accurate story of the depth of our economic malaise that new-home sales can’t. One-fifth of Americans, or 47 million people, are on food stamps; 50% of children born to single mothers live in poverty; and over 13 million people are out of work. Children are now not likely to do as well as their parents did as downward mobility takes hold for the first time in generations.
The bottom line, which Pope Francis correctly identifies, is that inequality is the biggest economic issue of our time – for everyone, not just the poor. Nearly any major economic metric – unemployment, growth, consumer confidence – comes down to the fact that the vast majority of Americans are struggling in some way. You don’t have to begrudge the rich their fortunes or ask for redistribution. It’s just hard to justify ignoring the financial problems of 47 million people who don’t have enough to eat. Until they have enough money to fill their pantries, we won’t have a widespread economic recovery. You can’t have a recovery if one-sixth of the world’s economically leading country is eating on $1.50 a day.
It’s only surprising that it took so long for anyone – in this case, Pope Francis – to become the first globally prominent figure to figure this out and bring attention to income inequality.
Income inequality is the issue that will govern whether we ever emerge from the struggling economy recovery and it determine elections in 2014. The support for Elizabeth Warren to rise above her seat in the US Senate, for instance, largely centers on her crusade against inequality. The White House’s chirpy protestations that the economy is improving are not fooling anyone.
Into this morass of economic confusion steps Francis with clarifying force:
Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.
It’s a historic and bold statement, mainly because it’s rarely heard from clergy. Money has always been at odds with religion, going back to the times when God had a fighting chance against Mammon. Moses grew enraged by the golden calf, Jesus by moneychangers in the temple, Muhammad by lending money at interest, or usury. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven, the Bible tells us.
There have been criticisms from prominent men of religion before, but they didn’t stick. In 2008, the Archbishop of Canterbury endorsed Marx against the forces of “unbridled capitalism“, and the Archbishop of York disdained traders as “bank robbers and asset strippers”, but those cries went unheeded in the subsequent flood of corporate profits.
At the time, those criticisms seemed extreme, throwing pitchforks into frozen ground. Francis is speaking at a when the ground has been thawed. Outrage against the financial sector is lurking so close to the surface that the US government can extract a $13bn fine from the nation’s largest bank, throwing it into its first financial loss in nine years, and find significant approval.
Still, popes have been largely content to leave these particular issues of economic inequality behind in favor of focusing on social issues. There was, after all, a problem of throwing stones. The church’s rich trappings and vast wealth, as well as its scandal-plagued Vatican bank, made an ill fit to preach too loudly about austerity.
Pope Francis, in his simple black shoes and unassuming car and house, is the first pontiff in a long time to reject flashy shows of power and live by the principle of simplicity. That makes him uniquely qualified to make the Vatican an outpost of Occupy Wall Street. His message about spiritual salvation applies mainly to Catholics but it would be sensible for economists and lawmakers to recognize his core message about the importance of income inequality applies to those even those who have no belief in religion.
Capitalism has always seen itself as an amoral pursuit, where the guiding stars were not “good” or “bad”, but only “profit” and “loss”. It’s going to be harder to sustain that belief over the next few years.
By Heidi Moore, The Guardian
Pope Francis is a pontiff who has constructively broken all the rules of popery – so far to widespread acclaim. He’s faulted the Catholic church for its negative obsession with gays and birth control, and now he has expanded his mandate to economics with a groundbreaking screed denouncing “the new idolatry of money“.
As the Pope wrote in his “apostolic exhortation“:
The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings.
His thoughts on income inequality are searing:
How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality.
The pope’s screed on “the economy of exclusion and inequality” will disappoint those who considers themselves free-market capitalists, but they would do well to listen to the message. Francis gives form to the emotion and injustice of post-financial-crisis outrage in a way that has been rare since Occupy Wall Street disbanded. There has been a growing chorus of financial insiders – from the late Merrill Lynch executive Herb Allison to organizations like Better Markets – it’s time for a change in how we approach capitalism. It’s not about discarding capitalism, or hating money or profit; it’s about pursuing profits ethically, and rejecting the premise that exploitation is at the center of profit. When 53% of financial executives say they can’t get ahead without some cheating, even though they want to work for ethical organizations, there’s a real problem.
Unlike Occupy, which turned its rage outward, Pope Francis bolstered his anger with two inward-facing emotions familiar to any Catholic-school graduate: shame and guilt, to make the economy a matter of personal responsibility.
This is important. Income inequality is not someone else’s problem. Nearly all of us are likely to experience it. Inequality has been growing in the US since the 1970s. Economist Emmanuel Saez found that the incomes of the top 1% grew by 31.4% in the three years after the financial crisis, while the majority of people struggled with a disappointing economy. The other 99% of the population grew their incomes 0.4% during the same period As a result, federal and state spending on social welfare programs has been forced to grow to $1tn just to handle the volume of US households in trouble. Yet income inequality has been locked out of of the mainstream economic conversation, where it is seen largely as a sideshow for progressive bleeding hearts.
In the discussions of why the US is not recovering, economists often mention metrics like economic growth and housing. They rarely mention the metrics that directly tell us we are failing our economic goals, like poverty and starvation. Those metrics of income inequality tell an accurate story of the depth of our economic malaise that new-home sales can’t. One-fifth of Americans, or 47 million people, are on food stamps; 50% of children born to single mothers live in poverty; and over 13 million people are out of work. Children are now not likely to do as well as their parents did as downward mobility takes hold for the first time in generations.
The bottom line, which Pope Francis correctly identifies, is that inequality is the biggest economic issue of our time – for everyone, not just the poor. Nearly any major economic metric – unemployment, growth, consumer confidence – comes down to the fact that the vast majority of Americans are struggling in some way. You don’t have to begrudge the rich their fortunes or ask for redistribution. It’s just hard to justify ignoring the financial problems of 47 million people who don’t have enough to eat. Until they have enough money to fill their pantries, we won’t have a widespread economic recovery. You can’t have a recovery if one-sixth of the world’s economically leading country is eating on $1.50 a day.
It’s only surprising that it took so long for anyone – in this case, Pope Francis – to become the first globally prominent figure to figure this out and bring attention to income inequality.
Income inequality is the issue that will govern whether we ever emerge from the struggling economy recovery and it determine elections in 2014. The support for Elizabeth Warren to rise above her seat in the US Senate, for instance, largely centers on her crusade against inequality. The White House’s chirpy protestations that the economy is improving are not fooling anyone.
Into this morass of economic confusion steps Francis with clarifying force:
Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.
It’s a historic and bold statement, mainly because it’s rarely heard from clergy. Money has always been at odds with religion, going back to the times when God had a fighting chance against Mammon. Moses grew enraged by the golden calf, Jesus by moneychangers in the temple, Muhammad by lending money at interest, or usury. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven, the Bible tells us.
There have been criticisms from prominent men of religion before, but they didn’t stick. In 2008, the Archbishop of Canterbury endorsed Marx against the forces of “unbridled capitalism“, and the Archbishop of York disdained traders as “bank robbers and asset strippers”, but those cries went unheeded in the subsequent flood of corporate profits.
At the time, those criticisms seemed extreme, throwing pitchforks into frozen ground. Francis is speaking at a when the ground has been thawed. Outrage against the financial sector is lurking so close to the surface that the US government can extract a $13bn fine from the nation’s largest bank, throwing it into its first financial loss in nine years, and find significant approval.
Still, popes have been largely content to leave these particular issues of economic inequality behind in favor of focusing on social issues. There was, after all, a problem of throwing stones. The church’s rich trappings and vast wealth, as well as its scandal-plagued Vatican bank, made an ill fit to preach too loudly about austerity.
Pope Francis, in his simple black shoes and unassuming car and house, is the first pontiff in a long time to reject flashy shows of power and live by the principle of simplicity. That makes him uniquely qualified to make the Vatican an outpost of Occupy Wall Street. His message about spiritual salvation applies mainly to Catholics but it would be sensible for economists and lawmakers to recognize his core message about the importance of income inequality applies to those even those who have no belief in religion.
Capitalism has always seen itself as an amoral pursuit, where the guiding stars were not “good” or “bad”, but only “profit” and “loss”. It’s going to be harder to sustain that belief over the next few years.
Shut Off Cellphones and the Internet
The Government’s Secret Plan to Shut Off Cellphones and the Internet, Explained
This month, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Department of Homeland Security must make its plan to shut off the Internet and cellphone communications available to the American public. You, of course, may now be thinking: What plan?! Though President Barack Obama swiftly disapproved of ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak turning off the Internet in his country (to quell widespread civil disobedience) in 2011, the US government has the authority to do the same sort of thing, under a plan that was devised during the George W. Bush administration. Many details of the government’s controversial “kill switch” authority have been classified, such as the conditions under which it can be implemented and how the switch can be used. But thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), DHS has to reveal those details by December 12 — or mount an appeal. (The smart betting is on an appeal, since DHS has fought to release this information so far.) Yet here’s what we do know about the government’s “kill switch” plan:
What is a kill switch? A kill switch refers to the government’s authority to disconnect commercial and private wireless networks — affecting both cellphones and the Internet — in the event of an emergency, such as a viable threat of a terrorist attack.
How does a kill switch work? There isn’t any kind of big red button the Obama administration can push to turn off the wireless networks in the United States. Instead, there are a few ways the federal government could exercise its power to shut down and restore Internet and cellphone service (see below). It’s also unlikely that a “kill switch” would cause a nationwide blackout. Instead, the government is explicitly authorized to target a ”localized area” — such as a bridge — or potentially an “entire metropolitan area,” according to a recent Government Accountability Office report. (Both DHS and the White House declined to comment for this article.)
Is it harder for the US government to kill cellphones or the Internet? Communications experts say that killing phone service is probably easier, because there are only a few companies the government has to deal with to smother cellphone communications (the kill switch doesn’t generally govern land lines). Most mobile-phone service passes through physical connection points that are controlled by the big-name phone companies, including AT&T and Verizon. The US government would essentially have to compel these companies to turn off their cellphone towers. The feds could also use cellphone jammers to interrupt service in a localized area.
Experts say that shutting off the Internet could be tougher. There are thousands of Internet service providers in the United States. According to Allan Friedman, research director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, in Egypt, the government spent a lot of time prior to the anti-Mubarek protests making sure all of the nation’s Internet service providers ran through a single entryway, so that it could easily shut things off. China is working on nationalized routing. That’s not the case in the United States, where trying to cut off Internet in one office in Washington, D.C., could mean trying to map cables in Baltimore and Virginia. ”If the government attempted to disrupt the largest physical networks in the US, it would also likely disrupt its own communications,” Friedman notes. But Harold Feld, vice president at Public Knowledge, an advocacy group focused on communications and technology policy, says that big Internet companies still control a large portion of subscribers in the United States and if the top 10 service providers cooperated with the government, “you could shut things down fairly easily.”
Is it legal for the Obama administration to activate a kill switch? Yep and kill switches aren’t new. In 1918, a congressional joint resolution authorized the president to assume control of US telegraph systems, in order to operate them during World War I. Then, in 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Communications Act, which decreed, “Upon proclamation by the President that there exists war or a threat of war, or a state of public peril or disaster or other national emergency, or in order to preserve the neutrality of the United States, the President, if he deems it necessary in the interest of national security or defense, may suspend or amend” both wireless radio and phone services, which means it’s not clear whether this could apply to Internet service (although the Federal Communications Commission has used that argument before, when deregulating Internet service over telephone lines in 2005).
What is clear is that in 2006, the Bush administration entered into a secret agreement with telecom giants and came up with a specific plan as to when and how the government can actually shut down these networks — called Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) 303. This is the plan that the US government is required to release under the federal district court ruling. In 2011, the White House asserted again that the administration has the legal authority to control private communications systems in the United States during national emergencies. And in 2012, President Obama reaffirmed that DHS could seize private facilities and shut down communications in a July executive order.
Why would the US government need to exercise a kill switch? The US government has always considered it a good idea to have full control over communications networks during a war. During peacetime, government officials could conclude that suspending cellphone service on a particular channel might stop would-be terrorists from setting off one or more bombs. There’s certainly the chance that some government official might consider shutting down communications to stop or hamper protests. This did happen in 2011 in San Francisco’s subway stations (see below), although not on the federal level. It’s possible that a wide-scale cyberattack that targets major financial and government institutions could require an immediate shutdown of Internet service. In 2010, Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-ME) attempted to pass legislation that would have allowed the president to take over private computer systems during a “national cyberemergency” for such a purpose. The controversial bill didn’t pass.
Critics contend that activating any kind of kill switch will do more harm than good. “I find it hard to imagine why an Internet kill switch would ever be a good idea, short of some science fiction scenario wherein the network comes alive a la Terminator/Skynet,” Feld says. “At this point, so much of our critical infrastructure runs on the Internet that a ‘kill switch’ would do more harm than anything short of a nuclear strike. It would be like cutting off our own head to escape someone pulling our hair.” The same argument applies to smothering cellphone service. “The benefit of people being able to communicate on their cellphones in times of crisis is enormous and cutting that off is in and of itself potentially very dangerous,” argues Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Has the government ever turned off cell phones or the Internet? Yes — but the only known reports concern cell service. In 2005, shortly after suicide bombers attacked the London tube, federal authorities disabled cell networks in four major New York tunnels. The action was reportedly taken to prevent bomb detonation via cellphone and according to a National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee review, it “was undertaken without prior notice to wireless carriers or the public.” (In an April statement to Mother Jones, Verizon denied have any role in shutting down cell service in New York.) In 2009, during Obama’s inauguration, the feds used devices that blocked cellphones from receiving signals to prevent bomb detonation. In 2011, officials for the San Francisco transit system cut off cellphone service in four Bay Area Rapid Transit stations for several hours to preempt a planned protest over BART police fatally shooting a homeless man.
What are the constitutional problems? Civil liberties advocates argue that kill switches violate the First Amendment and pose a problem because they aren’t subject to rigorous judicial and congressional oversight. “There is no court in the loop at all, at any stage in the SOP 303 process,” according to the Center for Democracy and Technology. ”The executive branch, untethered by the checks and balances of court oversight, clear instruction from Congress, or transparency to the public, is free to act as it will and in secret.” David Jacobs of EPIC says, “Cutting off communications imposes a prior restraint on speech, so the First Amendment imposes the strictest of limitations…We don’t know how DHS thinks [the kill switch] is consistent with the First Amendment.” He adds, “Such a policy, unbounded by clear rules and oversight, just invites abuse.”
What don’t we know about the kill switch plan? A lot. We don’t know the “series of questions” that help DHS determine whether it should activate a kill switch, how DHS will go about implementing the kill switch, how long a shutdown will last and what the oversight protocols are. For example, Jacobs from EPIC says that, it appears that “DHS wouldn’t have to call up the president to implement this, he would be involved in the same indirect way that he is with all kinds of executive branch actions.” This information was requested in the FOIA lawsuit filed by (EPIC) and could be revealed as early as December. “Hopefully exposure of such a lunatic idea will allow the public to beat some common sense into these agencies,” says Feld.
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By Shadee Ashtari