Undernews For 1 May 2009

UNDERNEWS
The news while there's still time to do something about it

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We have 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the people in prison. Either we're the most evil people on earth, or we're doing something wrong . . .I saw more drug use at Georgetown University Law Center when I was a student there than I've seen anywhere else in my life. And some of those people are judges. - Senator James Webb
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CRASH TALK

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship - [Jo Becker and Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times] write that Geithner "repeatedly missed or overlooked signs" that the financial system was self-destructing. "When he did spot trouble, analysts say, his responses were too measured, or too late."

In choosing a man to manage the bailout of the banks who's so cozy with its players, and then installing as his White House economic adviser Larry Summers, who in the Clinton administration took a laissez-faire attitude toward the financial industry which would later enrich him, the president bought into the old fantasy that what's best for Wall Street is best for America.

With these two as his financial gatekeepers, President Obama's now in the position of Louis XVI being advised by Marie Antoinette to have another piece of cake until that rumble in the streets has passed on by.

In fact, other Wall Street insiders - many of them big contributors to the Obama presidential campaign, and progressive in their concern for the public interest - privately are expressing serious concerns that Geithner, Summers and their associates are leading the President and America's taxpayers down a path toward further economic disaster.

This week, as Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois unsuccessfully fought for a congressional amendment he said would have helped 1.7 million Americans save their homes from foreclosure, the senator told a radio station back home that, "The banks - hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created - are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." He could say the same of the White House.

NPR - A health care board linked to the UAW that owns a controlling stake in now bankrupt Chrysler needs to begin selling shares as soon as possible to raise cash to meet obligations to retired autoworkers, the union's president told NPR.

The Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association, or VEBA, which covers the health care needs of retired Chrysler workers "is going to be stressed in order to pay the benefits," United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger said Friday.

"We do not have the ability [to hold a long-term stake] because of the cash needed in the VEBA," he told NPR a day after the nation's third-largest automaker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The health care association will need "as soon as we possibly can …to start selling these shares."

In order to receive billions in government aid, Chrysler agreed to hand over the company's stock in lieu of paying back money it owed to the VEBA. . .Gettelfinger told NPR that the UAW had done everything possible to avoid the bankruptcy but he felt confident the alliance with Fiat would help turn the company around.

Pro Publica - In President Barack Obama's news conference, he said the $787 billion economic stimulus bill has already created or saved over 150,000 jobs. We decided to find out how the president arrived at that figure. The simple answer: guesswork.

It turns out the feds don't have a way to measure exactly how many jobs have been created or saved, so they use projections instead, and it's all rather academic.

The new estimate, like the original one predicting the stimulus bill would save or create 3 to 4 million jobs, came from the Council of Economic Advisers. To get the number Obama used, economists at the council simply prorated their earlier estimates based on stimulus outlays as of April 21.

As we've reported before, the administration's estimates are based on a guess at how much tax cuts and government spending will make the economy grow.

We asked Nigel Gault, an economist with the forecasting firm IHS Global Insight, about what he made of the administration's latest assumptions.

"The only thing they have to go on is how much money has been actually spent," Gault said. But that doesn't tell the whole story. The feds count the money that goes out the door. They don't have close tabs on what happens after that, he said.

"You have to ask, 'Has the money been effectively spent? Has it actually been spent in purchasing goods and services or whatever it was supposed to be purchasing?'" Gault said.

Gault noted that funding for larger projects probably won't be spent all at once. If a city or county starts work on a project, it doesn't hire every worker immediately.

For the record, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says employment at the end of March stood at 133,019,000 jobs. That compares with 133,682,000 jobs at the end of February, the month Obama signed the stimulus bill.

The administration acknowledges its estimate does not reflect a net gain in jobs.

"It doesn't mean that employment has risen by 150,000," Thomas E. Gavin of the White House budget office said in an e-mail. "Rather, it means that employment is 150,000 jobs better than it otherwise would have been."

HOW GOLDMAN SACHS TOOK OVER THE WORLD

FORGOTTEN WORDS

From the international Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions. . .

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political in stability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture. . .

No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.

Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.

Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature. . .

Upon being satisfied, after an examination of information available to it, that the circumstances so warrant, any State Party in whose territory a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is present shall take him into custody or take other legal measures to ensure his presence. The custody and other legal measures shall be as provided in the law of that State but may be continued only for such time as is necessary to enable any criminal or extradition proceedings to be instituted.

GREAT MOMENTS AT YALE UNIVERSITY

From History News Network

Twelve years after Yale rejected a $7 million endowment for a gay student center, the school's Gay and Lesbian Association invited legendary playwright and gay-rights activist Larry Kramer back to campus to receive its first Lifetime Achievement Award. The following is his speech.

I have come here to apologize to you.

It took a long time for Yale to accept Kramer money. After a number of years of trying to get Yale to accept mine for gay professorships or to let me raise funds for a gay student center, (both offers declined), my extraordinary straight brother Arthur offered Yale $1 million to set up the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies and Yale accepted it. My good friend and a member of the Yale Corporation, Calvin Trillin, managed to convince President Levin that I was a pussycat. The year was 2001.

Five years later, in 2006, Yale closed down LKI, as it had come to be called. Yale removed its director, Jonathan David Katz. All references to LKI were expunged from Web sites and answering machines and directories and syllabuses. . .

When this happened I thought my heart would break. I wanted gay history to be taught. I wanted gay history to be about who we are, and who we were, by name, and from the beginning of our history, which is the same as the beginning of everyone else's history. By chance, just as we opened for business, Jonathan Ned Katz, our first visiting scholar, and Jonathan David Katz discovered that John William Sterling, Yale's first really major benefactor, who died in 1918, had been gay and lived with one man only, James O. Bloss, all their adult lives.

We released this information to the world, with great pride and excitement. What a way to launch ourselves. In no time flat I received a phone call from a classmate who is a partner in Shearman & Sterling, the giant law firm John Sterling founded, telling me that this information had not gone down well there and indicating that Yale would hear about it. Jonathan David Katz, who is an art historian, put on an exhibition of the relationship of Robert Rauschenberg and his gay lover and how it affected his art. This, too, did not sit well. Jonathan David Katz's courses were taken away from him. He was told he could no longer teach.

When I set LKI up I didn't know that gay studies included all kinds of other things and these other things ruled the roost: gender studies, queer studies, queer theory. And that then-Provost Alison Richard, who immediately left to run Cambridge University, my attorney, Bill Zabel, and I were ignorant of the great semantic differences lurking in the words "studies" and "history." Thus I was not able as I might have been when initial negotiations were transpiring, to insist that my brother's money be funneled via the history department rather than leave it up to Yale, which plunked LKI just where it should not have been, in the women's and gender studies department.

The various queer and gender theories I came to quickly realize as relatively useless for a people looking to learn about our real history drowned us out completely. Month after month, over these five years, as I was sent constant email announcements of lectures and courses and activities that reflected as much about real history as a comic book, I slowly began to go nuts. . .

I brought letters to Provosts Long and Bakemeier from George Chauncey, then at Chicago and now, in no small part because of me, here at Yale, and from Martin Duberman, whom I had put on LKI's advisory board, two of our most distinguished gay historians. Martin stated in no uncertain terms, and George concurred with him, then: "Yale is doing it wrong. You do not teach gay history via gender studies, via queer theory. You are making the same mistake every other gay program makes."

Yes, I came to see this and this big deal activist came to see that he was powerless. I apologize to you. I bore witness to all this. I bore witness to the fact that the university was ridding itself of a teacher, Jonathan David Katz, who was exceptionally loved and admired. The kids stood up and cheered him nonstop with tears in their eyes. "He is the best teacher I have ever had for anything, period," is a direct quote from one young man.

On his last day at Yale, Jonathan somehow managed to get the Yale Art Gallery to remove from storage, for this one day, work by the following artists: Homer, Eakins, Sargent, Bellows, Demuth, Hartley, O'Keefe, Rauschenberg, Johns, Twombley, Nevelson, Martin, Indiana, Morris, and Warhol. Jonathan lectured in the Art Gallery to a packed house about why he considers each of these great American artists gay and how this is reflected in their work. I had brought one of the heads of the Phillips Collection in Washington. "What a brilliant piece of scholarship," she said. This event, also, did not go down well somewhere in the murky invisible inner sanctums of Yale's Soviet-style bureaucracy. Yale was getting rid of the only faculty member teaching the kind of gay history that I longed for and I was powerless to help rectify this great mistake. . .

There were and are 22 courses offered in the Pink Book of LGBT studies for this year. Only one of them, the course George Chauncey teaches entitled U.S. Lesbian and Gay History, is a gay history course. . .

The word "queer" also embellishes most of the activities and lectures and fellowships and appointments announced in those various emails. It seems as if everything is queer this and queer that. Just as a point of information, I would like to proclaim with great pride: I am not queer. And neither are you. When will we stop using this adolescent and demeaning word to identify ourselves? Like our history that is not taught, using this word will continue to guarantee that we are not taken seriously in the world. . .

For those of you here celebrating Yale's acceptance of us, I am here to tell you that there is not quite so much to celebrate yet. Yes, it is a long way from my freshman year in 1953 when I tried to kill myself. But like so much that continues to happen to us, there is still too much invisible shit blocking the acceptance that we need and we are due.

So I receive GALA's award with a certain bittersweet acceptance. As I hope I have made clear, I feel very alienated from this university which took my brother's money and my dream and slammed the door in both our faces.

AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION NEEDS THERAPY, QUICK

British Medical Journal - Under the American Psychological Association's code of ethics, animals have more protection than detainees. Kenneth Pope, an independent psychologist, and Dr Thomas Gutheil, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, maintain that the APA has enforceable standards that support the "humane treatment" of laboratory animals but that detainees who may be vulnerable or at risk are not afforded the same protection. . . After 9/11, the APA changed its code of ethics which now runs contrary to Nuremberg principles and differs to how doctors operate, say the authors. The new code allows its members to set aside any ethical responsibilities that are in irreconcilable conflict with government authority, they say.

STUDY FINDS MEDICARE FOR ALL BEST HEALTH PLAN FOR POOR, BLACKS, LATINOS

New America Media - Medicare for all -- not only for those 65 and over -- appears to be the answer to dramatically reducing the level of poorer health among African American, Latino and low-income Americans, say researchers at Harvard University in research published in the April 21 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Their research team, led by J. Michael McWilliams, M.D., Ph.D., sifted through medical data for 6,000 people ages 40 to 85 with diabetes or cardiovascular disease. They tracked their conditions from 1999 to 2006.

The researchers found that despite overall improvements in controlling the diseases, black, Hispanic and poor patients under 65 -- those not yet old enough for Medicare -- fared no better, or got worse.

However, at age 65, when people become eligible for Medicare coverage, the differences in health by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status declined significantly.

McWilliams and his colleagues note American healthcare providers have engaged in widespread efforts in recent years to enhance medical quality. "However," they wrote, "quality of care may not necessarily lead to more equitable care, especially if improvements occur among providers who serve fewer disadvantaged patients . . . "

McWilliams and his coauthors points to universal health care coverage as a likely means of reducing health disparities in the United States. They conclude that "expanding insurance coverage before age 65 years may reduce racial, ethnic and socioeconomic differences in important health outcomes" for those coping with diabetes and cardiovascular conditions.

Common Dreams - In an unprecedented initiative, the leaders of four prominent groups in the 111th Congress - the Progressive Caucus, the Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, and the Asian Pacific American Caucus - have sent a joint letters to President Obama and the Democratic Leadership of the House and Senate stressing that "our support for enacting legislation this year to guarantee affordable health care for all firmly hinges on the inclusion of a robust public health insurance plan like Medicare."

Together, one hundred seventeen Members of the House and Senate belong to at least one of these four congressional caucuses. . . .

"As the debate on health care moves forward, we stand together with one voice for the communities that most need this reform," said Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, Chairwoman of the 24-Member CHC. "With one out of every three Hispanics in our country likely to be uninsured and with so many Latino small business owners, we have to provide all Americans with the choice of a public health insurance plan."

"The United States is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not provide universal health care," said Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus. "In a nation with 46 million uninsured individuals, it is time we put in place high quality comprehensive care for all."

BOOKSHELF

WORST INSTINCTS:
COWARDICE, CONFORMITY & THE ACLU

Wendy Kaminer

The story of a meltdown of a revered organization. Kaminer was a dissident member of the ACLU national board. She contests the ACLU's post-9/11hypocrisies, including conformity and suppression of dissent in the interests of collegiality, solidarity, or group image; self-censorship by members anxious to avoid ostracism or marginalization by the group; elevation of loyalty to the institution over loyalty to the institution's ideals; substitution of the group's idealized self-image for the reality of its behavior; ad homonym attacks against critics; and deference to cults of personality.

"The willingness to criticize your own based on principles you would apply to others is a measure of integrity. Kaminer's important book about her beloved ACLU has that integrity. She tells a startling, sad, and exceptionally well-documented story." - Ira Glasser, former executive director, ACLU

"Standing up to your political enemies is easy, fun, and often profitable. Taking public issue with your friends and allies on a matter of great principle is none of these, but it is a far more important service to others.." - -Congressman Barney Frank

THE COLLAPSE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS

Marie Cocco, Truth Dig - What is ending is not only a time when the American auto industry was a colossus in the domestic and world economies. What is ending is any genuine chance that the majority of American workers-most of whom do not acquire the pedigrees we've come to consider as the gate passes to personal prosperity-can attain anything resembling the middle-class life the generation entering adulthood during World War II achieved.

The consequences for this country are grave. Yet somehow, we do not consider this an emergency. It is only treated as a crisis now because the rest of the economy is in crisis. Wall Street and big banks, despite being at the root of the turmoil, still manage to rule.

The cool calculation with which President Barack Obama signaled that he was willing to let automakers go bankrupt but would not contemplate the failure of big financial institutions is one marker of his first 100 days in office. If he manages to rescue the auto industry, the callous double standard will be forgotten and forgiven.

What should not be forgiven is the three decades of public and political indifference about those whose life paths and prospects do not include college. Despite decades of national effort to make higher education more accessible, only about a quarter of Americans 25 and older now hold a bachelor's degree, according to the Census Bureau.

The work force breaks down into four segments, roughly evenly divided, according to Harry J. Holzer, a Georgetown University public policy professor who specializes in studying the labor pool. A quarter drop out of high school, another fourth earn high school diplomas, another fourth get some further education but not a college degree, and the top quarter earn bachelor's degrees or higher.

"We have really let go of career and technical education in the United States," says Holzer, a former chief economist at the U.S. Labor Department. "There are millions of kids on their way to prison who could have been electricians and plumbers. We all wrapped our heads around this idea that only if you go to college and get a B.A. are you a success. As a society, we demeaned people who worked with their hands.". . .

Holzer advocates direct policies to link skills training with economic sectors that are expected to grow-such as health care-to create a pool of what he calls "middle skilled" workers. Though this is being done in some states, no integrated, national policy that would effectively accomplish this match has been developed.

Instead we lurch from campaign to campaign, using plants as backdrops and hardy blue-collar workers as extras in a scene that keeps repeating itself until, perhaps, there are no such workers left.

MINNESOTA CENSORS INTERNET USE

CNET - The state of Minnesota has handed Internet providers a 7-page blacklist of gambling Web sites that they're supposed to prevent customers from accessing, a move that raises First Amendment and technical concerns.

"We are putting site operators and Minnesota online gamblers on notice and in advance," said John Willems, a Minnesota Department of Public Safety official, in a statement. Companies that received the list of off-limits Web sites -- which was made public on Thursday -- include AT&T, Comcast, Qwest, and Sprint/Nextel.

The Department of Public Safety's letters to the Internet providers say that "gambling is illegal within Minnesota" and claim that a federal law "requires upon notice by a law enforcement agency that you do not allow your systems to be used for the transmission of gambling information."

Federal law says that a "common carrier" must "discontinue or refuse, the leasing, furnishing, or maintaining" of any service if it's being used to transmit gambling-related information. (The U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal Communications Commission, however, have suggested that neither cable providers nor DSL providers are "common carriers.")

Joe Brennan of the Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association in Washington, D.C. said on Thursday evening that his group just found out about the blacklist and is consulting with First Amendment attorneys to evaluate its options.

Minnesota's move echoes what happened in Pennsylvania about six years ago. The Keystone State enacted a law permitting the state attorney general to deliver orders to Internet providers telling them to block possibly illegal Web sites.

But a federal judge in Philadelphia struck down the law in 2004 on First Amendment grounds, saying: "There is little evidence that the act has reduced the production of child pornography or the child sexual abuse associated with its creation. On the other hand, there is an abundance of evidence that implementation of the Act has resulted in massive suppression of speech protected by the First Amendment."

RECOVERED HISTORY: HARD TIMES FOR MAY 1

Socialist Project, Canada - For more than 100 years, May Day has symbolized the common struggles of workers around the globe. Why is it largely ignored in North America? The answer lies in part in American labor's long repression of its own radical past, out of which international May Day was actually born a century ago.

The seeds were sown in the campaign for the eight-hour work day. On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of North American workers mobilized to strike. In Chicago, the demonstration spilled over into support for workers at a major farm-implements factory who'd been locked out for union activities. On May 3, during a pitched battle between picketers and scabs, police shot two workers. At a protest rally in Haymarket Square the next day, a bomb was tossed into the police ranks and police directed their fire indiscriminately at the crowd. Eight anarchist leaders were arrested, tried and sentenced to death (three were later pardoned).

These events triggered international protests, and in 1889, the first congress of the new socialist parties associated with the Second International (the successor to the First International organized by Karl Marx in the 1860s) called on workers everywhere to join in an annual one-day strike on May 1 -- not so much to demand specific reforms as an annual demonstration of labor solidarity and working-class power. May Day was both a product of, and an element in, the rapid growth of new mass working-class parties of Europe -- which soon forced official recognition by employers and governments of this 'workers' holiday.'

But the American Federation of Labor, chastened by the 'red scare' that followed the Haymarket events, went along with those who opposed May Day observances. Instead, in 1894, the AFL embraced president Grover Cleveland's decree that the first Monday of September would be the annual Labor Day. The Canadian government of Sir Robert Thompson enacted identical Labor Day legislation a month later.

Ever since, May Day and Labor Day have represented in North America the two faces of working-class political tradition, one symbolizing its revolutionary potential, the other its long search for reform and respectability. With the support of the state and business, the latter has predominated -- but the more radical tradition has never been entirely suppressed.

Guardian, UK - Why was there no Marxism in Britain? Both Marx and Engels spent the better part of their lives here, pamphleteering and electioneering, trying to organize the workers and accelerate the revolution. But it was abroad – in Germany, France, Italy and even America – where their ideas gained traction and Marxist parties prospered.

Historians have long emphasized economics and sociology as the insurmountable obstacles. Ross McKibbin has pointed to the lack of collectivism among an English working class employed, for the most part, in small firms, and a service sector with not enough antagonism towards the boss class. Furthermore, there was a traditional radical English hostility towards collectivism and a rich civil society of clubs and institutes not overly seduced by continental communism. . .

The hidden truth is that Engels bears a heavy responsibility. After Marx's death in 1883, "The General", as he was known, was in charge and it was a disastrous series of decisions on his behalf which crippled UK communism to this day.

Most debilitating was Engels's inability to get on with anyone. He could not forgive Henry Hyndman, the leader of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation, for inspiring G20-style riots in the West End and thereby equating "socialism with looting in the minds of the bourgeois public". The Fabians were even worse: "A dilettante lot of egregiously conceited mutual admirers." Engels invested some hope in William Morris, as a result of a shared enthusiasm for Old Norse mythology. But when Morris flirted with anarchism, Engels expelled him as "a sentimental dreamer pure and simple". And as for poor Keir Hardie – "a cunning, crafty Scot, a Pecksniff and arch-intriguer, but too ¬cunning, ¬perhaps, and too vain".

Such hostility would have been understandable if Engels had had an ¬outstanding candidate to lead the movement. Unfortunately, he anointed Edward Aveling – a brilliant philosopher and the lover of Marx's daughter Eleanor, but someone intensely disliked in socialist circles as a philanderer and thief with an infamously low character. Resentful at Engels's attempts to "foist" the distrusted Aveling "as a leader upon the English Socialist and Labour movement", activists shunned Engels and the Marxist influence over the political direction and ideology of British socialism diminished. Right from its birth, communism was denied an effective political voice in the UK and it has never recovered.

So as today's rally hears from the Cuban ambassador and messages of solidarity from workers' parties across the world, British activists might like to ponder the awkward fact that part of the reason why there is no Marxism in Britain is because Marx and Engels actually lived here.

PIG FLU UPDATE: MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT FACTORY FARMS

Mike Davis, Guardian, UK - Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly, including a variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (the other type-A flu circulating among humans).

What caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal "drift" and episodic genomic "shift". But the corporate industrialization of livestock production has broken China's natural monopoly on influenza evolution. Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger that "the continual cycling of viruses … in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human transmission." . . .

Any amelioration of this new pathogen ecology would have to confront the monstrous power of livestock conglomerates such as Smithfield Farms (pork and beef) and Tyson (chickens). The commission reported systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers .

This is a highly globalized industry with global political clout. Just as Bangkok-based chicken giant Charoen Pokphand was able to suppress enquiries into its role in the spread of bird flu in southeast Asia, so it is likely that the forensic epidemiology of the swine flu outbreak will pound its head against the corporate stonewall of the pork industry.

Scientific American - New evidence indicates that our agricultural practices are leading directly to the spread of human disease. Much has been made in recent years of MRSA, the antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria, and for good reason. In 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available, about 95,000 MRSA infections caused the deaths of nearly 19,000 Americans. . . .

Perhaps we should not be surprised. Modern factory farms keep so many animals in such a small space that the animals must be given low doses of antibiotics to shield them from the fetid conditions. The drug-resistant bacteria that emerge have now entered our food supply. The first study to investigate farm-bred MRSA in the U.S. amazingly, the Food and Drug Administration has shown little interest in testing the nation's livestock for this disease recently found that 49 percent of pigs and 45 percent of pig workers in the survey harbored the bacteria. Unfortunately, these infections can spread. According to a report published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, MRSA from animals is now thought to be responsible for more than 20 percent of all human MRSA cases in the Netherlands.

In April 2008 a high-profile commission of scientists, farmers, doctors and veterinarians recommended that the FDA phase out the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in farm animal production, to "preserve these drugs to treat sick animals, not healthy ones" in the words of former Kansas governor John Carlin, the commission's chair. The FDA agreed and soon announced that it would ban the use of one widespread antibiotic except for strictly delineated medical purposes. But five days before the ban was set to take effect, the agency quietly reversed its position. Although no official reason was given, the opposition of the powerful farm lobby is widely thought to have played a role.

James Ridgeway, Unsilent Generation - One of the unusual things about the current H1N1 virus, compared with the strains that cause our yearly seasonal flu outbreaks, is that it doesn't seem to discriminate on the basis of age. That may change as the pandemic develops, but it may not: The massive 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic is also known for killing across all age groups.

There is, nonetheless, an age angle here, and it has to do with those garden-variety annual influenza outbreaks, and how the medical, political, and media establishments have handled them. Because the great majority of the deaths caused each and every year by these "ordinary" flu viruses –some 36,000 on average in the United States alone, according to the CDC – are of people over 65 years old. Some years it's more, and some years it's fewer: During the 1990s, the number of deaths ranged from 17,000 to 54,000. But every year, tens of thousands of old folk succumb, with little fanfare and minimal media attention, to flu-related deaths.

One major public health initiative has been launched in response to these deaths, and that is to increase the number of older Americans who are vaccinated against the flu each year. The percentage of elders who are vaccinated has grown about four-fold in the last 30 years. But there's just one problem: The vaccine apparently doesn't work very well, if at all. . .

A study published in September 2008 in Britain's most respected medical journal, the Lancet, found no correlation at all between flu vaccination and a reduced risk of illness and death. . . .

Part of the problem, as AMNews notes, is "the nature of influenza vaccine, which aims at a constantly moving target. The viral strains it includes change every year. Circulating viruses shift constantly. And every season is different in regard to severity and spread." But it appears there's another problem with the vaccine, as well, when it comes to older people. Yet another recent study found that old folk might be better protected by a vaccine containing four times the usual dose. As Reuters reported, researchers concluded that "this is likely because their immune systems are not as active as those of younger people". .

The excellent public health blog Effect Measure had some other ideas on how to protect older people, since the vaccine seems to be proving ineffective. But this would involve shifting the focus of national public health efforts. . .

It makes perfect sense, when you think about it: Young people are more likely to infect their elders than vice versa, and since the vaccine apparently works better on them, why not push them to have it? But frankly, I can't see this working. I can't see young people, who know they aren't likely to die from the flu, going out and getting vaccinated just to protect older folk.

I can't see this, any more than I can see the newspapers running headlines every winter proclaiming: "30,000 Geezers Dead in Seasonal Flu Outbreak," or the president going on TV to say that the government would stop at nothing to protect granny from this dangerous virus. The fact that these things don't happen, I think, is proof that the older we get, the less our lives are worth in this society.

Johann Hari, Independent, UK - A swelling number of scientists believe swine flu has not happened by accident. No: they argue that this global pandemic – and all the deaths we are about to see – is the direct result of our demand for cheap meat. . .

To understand how this might happen, you have to compare two farms. My grandparents had a pig farm in the Swiss mountains, with around 20 swine at any one time. What happened there if, in the bowels of one of their pigs, a virus mutated and took on a deadlier form? At every stage, the virus would meet stiff resistance from the pigs' immune systems. They were living in fresh air, on the diet they evolved with, and without stress – so they had a robust ability to fight back. If the virus did take hold, it would travel only as far as the sick hog could walk. So if the virus would then have around 20 other pigs to spread and mutate in – before it would hit the end of its own evolutionary path, and die off. If it was a really lucky, plucky virus, it might make it to market – where it would come up against more healthy pigs living in small herds. It had little opportunity to fan out across a large population of pigs or evolve a strain that could be transmitted to humans.

Now compare this to what happens when a virus evolves in a modern factory farm. In most swine farms today, 6,000 pigs are crammed snout-to-snout in tiny cages where they can barely move, and are fed for life on an artificial pulp, while living on top of cess-pools of their own stale faeces.

Instead of having just 20 pigs to experiment and evolve in, the virus now has a pool of thousands, constantly infecting and reinfecting each other. The virus can combine and recombine again and again. . .

As Dr Michael Greger, director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States, explains: "Put all this together, and you have a perfect storm environment for these super-strains. If you wanted to create global pandemics, you'd build as many of these factory farms as possible. That's why the development of swine flu isn't a surprise to those in the public health community. In 2003, the American Public Health Association – the oldest and largest in world – called for a moratorium of factory farming because they saw something like this would happen. It may take something as serious as a pandemic to make us realise the real cost of factory farming.". . .

It's no coincidence that we have seen a sudden surge of new viruses in the past decade at precisely the moment when factory farming has intensified so dramatically. For example, between 1994 and 2001, the number of American pigs that live and die in vast industrial farms in the US spiked from 10 per cent to 72 per cent. Swine flu had been stable since 1918 – and then suddenly, in this period, went super-charged. . .

We always knew that factory farms were a scar on humanity's conscience – but now we fear they are a scar on our health. If we carry on like this, bird flu and swine flu will be just the beginning of a century of viral outbreaks. As we witness a global pandemic washing across the world, we need to shut down these virus factories – before they shut down even more human lives.
BREVITAS

GALLERY: RAINBOWS
OBAMALAND

Pro Publica - Our ever-watchful Change Tracker tool spied a flurry of activity at whitehouse.gov yesterday - the administration updated more than two dozen web pages. Changes included some sweeping edits and complete rewrites to "The Agenda" area of the site, now renamed as "Issues." A few specific changes we noticed:

- The Iraq page was deleted and replaced with a single paragraph on the foreign policy page.

- Like many issues pages the civil rights page was dramatically cut. 756 words devoted to supporting the LGBT community have been replaced with two sentences.

MID EAST

JTA - Prosecutors asked a judge to drop charges against two ex-AIPAC staffers accused of passing along classified information. The acting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia said restrictions on the government's case imposed by Judge T.S. Ellis III made conviction unlikely. Given the diminished likelihood the government will prevail at trial under the additional intent requirements imposed by the court and the inevitable disclosure of classified information that would occur at any trial in this matter, we have asked the court to dismiss the indictment," Dana Boente said. The motion all but guarantees a dismissal. . . The dropping of the case comes just days before the start Sunday of AIPAC's annual policy conference in Washington.

Philip Weiss reports that ten billboards opposing aid to Israel, mounted in the Albuquerque area, have been removed despite a contract to leave them up for eight weeks. No explanation at this point.

HEALTH & SCIENCE

TMZ - The folks at Porky's BBQ said their number one seller -- the juicy, tasty, mouth-watering pulled pork -- has dropped in sales by 40 percent since the "epidemic" struck Earth.

ECO CLIPS

BBC - Scientists have identified why excessive fertilization of soils is resulting in a loss of plant diversity. Extra nutrients allow fast growing plants to dominate a habitat, blocking smaller species' access to vital sunlight, researchers have found. As a result, many species are disappearing from affected areas. A team from the University of Zurich, writing in Science, warned that tighter controls were needed in order to prevent widespread biodiversity loss.

QUESTION OF THE DAY

Dean Baker, Prospect - How Do You Distinguish an "Enraged" Republican from a Republican Who Claims to Be "Enraged?" I don't know the answer to that one but perhaps the [Washington] Post can tell us. It told readers that Republican members of Congress "were enraged" over the $1.2 trillion deficit projected for the 2010 budget. Given that the major cause of the deficit is an economic crisis brought about by the policies pursued by a Republican president, some people may wonder whether the Republicans really were enraged, as opposed to just trying to score political points. However, the Post was able to determine that the Republican rage was genuine. Perhaps they can share their method for distinguishing real rage from feigned outrage with their readers.

GALLERY: METEOR SHOWERS

POLICE BLOTTER

St Louis Today • A woman has filed a lawsuit against Chuck E Cheese, claiming the beloved mouse character at a child-theme restaurant put his paws where they didn't belong. Jennifer Sorbello, 22, of Arnold, filed the suit in St. Louis County Circuit Court, accusing a man dressed in the mascot costume, William Thigpen, of groping her breast. . . "He looked at her, reached out, grabbed her breast and moved along," said Mark Potashnick, Sorbello's attorney. "Her jaw dropped in shock and disgust."

NY Post - Teresa Tambunting, who is charged with stealing as much as $12 million in gold from her Queens jewelry-manufacturer employer, gave a wry grin when she spotted a Post photographer outside her Scarsdale home yesterday. Tambunting allegedly swiped 500 pounds of gold belonging to Jacmel Jewelry by stashing small pieces in her handbag with a false bottom over six years. Sources said the 50-year-old married mother of three may have a form of obsessive-control disorder that leads her to hoard items, including the gold. Investigators have recovered about $7.3 million in gold pieces that Tambunting allegedly kept stashed in 12 large plastic treasure chests in her home. But they are still probing what happened to another $4.7 million of gold that could still be missing.

NOTES FROM THE DC HOMELAND

The Review is moving soon to its New England regional office on Casco Bay, Maine, but will leave an occasional note for readers in its DC homeland.

Excellent piece by Harry Jaffe about the wonderful Tom Blagburn who just died. As Jaffe notes: " Before community policing became a buzz phrase, Blagburn was building bridges between cops and schools and government agencies and churches. He saw decades ago that the fabric of Washington’s urban community was in tatters, and he sought to knit it back together."

According to the Post, cab drivers are complaining that income is down 30% thanks to the switch to meters (of which the Review was a lonely opponent). Now the powers that be want to suspend the cab driver licensing course for more than two years to prevent a "potentially catastrophic oversupply" of new cabbies. Michael Neibauer tells the grim story of a legislative body in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s actually trying to prevent people from getting a job - and a job that historically has been one of the most important for local upward mobility.

SINCERE REGRET AT KILPATRICK STOCKTON

Above the Law - Mark Levy, Washington-based counsel and chair of Kilpatrick Stockton's Supreme Court and Appellate Advocacy practice, died in the firm's D.C. office. . .

"We in the legal community are losing someone who is hard to replace," says Kilpatrick Stockton partner Dennis Gingold, who has worked with Levy and calls him one of the District's finest appellate lawyers.

In fact Levy had been laid off by Kilpatrick Stockton a couple of days earlier

FOUND MAGAZINE

FIELD NOTES

Russ Baker Podcast - Russ Baker's Family of Secrets is a difficult and disturbing book, but a very important one. Russ, an investigative journalist for twenty years, has a propensity to follow the trail of a story wherever it leads, often to the consternation of others. Here, he's taken several years to trace out the Bush family's involvement in political intrigue and intelligence skullduggery. He places, for example, "Poppy" Bush in the middle of both the JFK assassination and Nixon's Watergate drama. Not speculatively, mind you, but in a massively documented way. It's shocking and frightening material, too much for the mainstream media to handle. Nevertheless, book blurbs from the likes of Roger Morris and Bill Moyers attest to its legitimacy. Russ scrupulously avoids drawing conclusions that can't be proven - actually, a weakness of the book, in my view - letting documented facts speak for themselves. - George Kenney, Electric Politics

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