Fortune | Theranos’ board of directors was assembled for its government connections, not for its understanding of the company or its technology.
“With three former cabinet secretaries, two former senators, and retired military brass, it’s a board like no other.”
So beginsFortuneEditor-at-Large Roger Parloff’s 2014 piece on theboard of directorsat Theranos, the blood-testing company that was the subject of a deeply reported story inThe Wall Street Journalthis morning questioning the reliability of its drug tests.Theranos disputesthe story, calling it “factually and scientifically erroneous and grounded in baseless assertions by inexperienced and disgruntled former employees and industry incumbents.”
Without taking a position one way or the other, I think it’s worth noting that this “board like no other” was assembled for its regulatory and governmental connections, not for its understanding of the company or its technology. That raises significant governance issues at a moment like this one, issues that may bedevil the company in the days and months to come.
Let’s take a look at Theranos’ 12-person board (which is an 11-man team if you don’t include CEO and Chairwoman Elizabeth Holmes—interesting given her stated commitment to women in STEM). We have former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Senators Sam Nunn and Bill Frist (who, it should be noted, is a surgeon), former Navy Admiral Gary Roughead, former Marine Corps General James Mattis, and former CEOs Dick Kovacevich of Wells Fargo and Riley Bechtel of Bechtel. There is also one former epidemiologist—William Foege, and, in addition to Holmes, one current executive, Sunny Balwani, who is Theranos’ president and CEO.
It’s quite an impressive group, isn’t it? But here’s what it’s not: an appropriate board of directors for a company that is valued at $9 billion. There are no sitting chief executives at other companies—a basic tenet of board best practices.
"Here's What Warren Buffett Thinks of Theranos and its Star Studded Board."
Finance.Yahoo.com By Daniel Roberts. Here.
May 4, 2016
"Everything You Need to Know About the Theranos Saga So Far."
Wired. By Nicholas Stockton. Here.
"FDA Looks to Clamp Down on Laboratory-Developed Tests and Put an End to ‘Wild West of Medicine’: Might CLIA Problems at Theranos Support FDA’s Position?" Dark Daily. By Andrea Downing Peck. Here. [Answer to the title question: Yes.] May 5, 2016 "The Fall of Theranos and the Future of Silicon Valley." TIME. By Lev Grossman. Here.
May 9, 2016 "Bleeding Out: Theranos Oozes with Corporate Governance Lessons."
Compliance Week. By Jaclyn Jaeger. Here.
May 11, 2016 "Theranos Executive Sunny Balwani to Depart Amid Regulatory Probes."
WSJ. By John Carreyou. Here.
CSMonitor | Dr. Church told The Washington Post that the meeting wasn’t open to the public or to media because its theme overlapped witha paper written by many scientists that’s pending publicationin a major scientific journal. The organizers didn’t want to be accused of "science by press release," reported the Post, so decided not to share their project publicly until they had a peer-reviewed article validating their research.
"It wasn't secret. There was nothing secret or private about it," said Church, who told the Post that the video of the event will be released when the scientific paper is published, likely soon.
Church also said that the project is not aimed at creating people, only cells, and not just for human genomes, despite that an invitation to the meeting at Harvard said that the primary goal “would be to synthesize a complete human genome in a cell line within a period of 10 years,” as the Times reports.
There has been tremendous progress in genomics since scientists finished sequencing the entire human genome in 2003. As the Times reports:
Scientists and companies can now change the DNA in cells, for example, by adding foreign genes or changing the letters in the existing genes. This technique is routinely used to make drugs, such as insulin for diabetes, inside genetically modified cells, as well as to make genetically modified crops. And scientists are now debating the ethics of new technology that might allow genetic changes to be made in embryos. But synthesizing a gene, or an entire genome, would provide the opportunity to make even more extensive changes in DNA.
A team headed by genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter firstsynthesized the chromosome of one bacterium in 2010 and inserted it into another species, thereby replacing the host species's DNA. The result, named Syn 1.0, was a microbial cell that was able to replicate and make a new set of proteins, powered by its synthetic genome, as the Monitor has reported.
libertyblitzkrieg | I write a lot about the middle class. It’s been one of the core themes here at Liberty Blitzkrieg
since inception, yet my posts tend to be filled with statistics and
sarcasm, and often lack the crucial element of heart. In order to truly
connect with the public and shift their sentiments from apathy to
action, it’s imperative to create a deep emotional connection. I
admittedly have not done a great job in this regard. Fortunately for all
of us, Eli Saslow of the Washington Post has done just that.
I read a lot of articles, and I can’t remember anything that hit me
as hard as what he published this past weekend. It tells the tale of the
spirit-crushing decimation of the American middle class through the
lens of eternal optimist, Chris Setser. Chris is a man who always went
above and beyond in order to provide a good life for himself and his
family. Working the graveyard shift at an Indiana United Technologies
plant so that he could be home when his kids came home from school, Mr.
Setser lived his entire life living by the mantra: “Things have a way of working in the end.” Until they didn’t.
Chris’ transformation from an optimistic Democrat, to a pissed off,
jaded Trump supporter, is a microcosm for what’s happening all across
the country. Through his eyes, you witness a justified desperation, and a
painful recognition that working hard and staying positive simply
aren’t good enough in America’s current hollowed out, oligarch-owned,
shell company of an economy.
Below, I provide some excerpts from the article, but these select
passages don’t do it justice. I think this piece is so important, it’s
imperative you read it in full and share it with everyone you know. The
future of America rests upon reversing this pernicious trend.
NYTimes | In
Indiana, Mark Dobson, president of the Economic Development Corporation
of Elkhart County, said that when he went to national conferences, the
topic was “such a common thread of conversation — whether it’s in an
area like ours that’s really enjoying very low unemployment levels or
even areas with more moderate employment bases.”
In Colorado, “to find a roofer or a painter that can pass a drug test is unheard-of,” said Jesse Russow, owner of Avalanche Roofing & Exteriors, in Colorado Springs. That was true even before Colorado, like a few other states, legalized recreational use of marijuana.
In
a sector where employers like himself tend to rely on Latino workers,
Mr. Russow tried to diversify three years ago by recruiting white
workers, vetting about 80 people. But, he said, “As soon as I say
‘criminal background check,’ ‘drug test,’ they’re out the door.”
A much broader data trove, the federal government’s annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health, reported in September that one in 10 Americans ages 12 and older reported in 2014 that they had used illicit drugs within the last month — the largest share since 2001.
Taken
together, Dr. Sample said, his data and the government’s indicate
higher drug use among those who work for employers without a
drug-testing program than workers who are tested, though use by the
latter increased as well in 2013 and 2014.
Testing
dates to the Reagan administration. The 1988 Drug-Free Workplace Act
required most employers with federal contracts or grants to test
workers. In 1991, Congress responded to a deadly 1987 train crash
in which two operators tested positive for marijuana by requiring
testing for all “safety sensitive” jobs regulated by the Transportation
Department. Those laws became the model for other employers. Some states
give businesses a break on workers’ compensation insurance if they are
certified as drug-free.
For
its proponents, transhumanism — the idea of using technology to
redesign humans beyond our biology — is just common sense. Who doesn’t
want to live a healthier, happier and wealthier life? And wouldn’t it be
great to live such an “enhanced” life indefinitely? For nearly as long
as we have written record, humans have rebelled at the limits of the
human condition, but with the development of modern science and
technology we have become increasingly able to overcome what once seemed
like absolute limits. Advances in fields such as genetics, synthetic
biology, neuropsychology, robotics, artificial intelligence and
nanotechnology are putting us on the verge of even more radical
breakthroughs, allowing us to imagine that we can ultimately rebuild
completely the flawed human product that evolution has bequeathed us.
thescientist | Harvard Medical School’s George Church and his collaborators invited
some 130 scientists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and government officials to
Boston last week (May 10) to discuss the feasibility and implementation
of a project to synthesize entire large genomes in vitro. According to a
statement Church provided to STAT News, such an endeavor could represent “the next chapter in our understanding of the blueprint of life.”
While the subject is an exciting one—on a smaller scale, Craig Venter’s group has synthesized the 1-million-base-pair genome of Mycoplasma mycoides—critics
immediately took issue with the fact that this meeting was not open to
the press. “This idea is an enormous step for the human species, and it
shouldn’t be discussed only behind closed doors,” Northwestern
University’s Laurie Zoloth told STAT News. She and Stanford University bioengineer Drew Endy published an article in Cosmos documenting their disapproval of the private nature of the meeting.
Church told STAT News that the original intention was to make
the meeting open, but in anticipation of an imminent, high-profile
publication on this project, he and his collaborators had to respect the
journal’s embargo. However, Endy tweeted
a photo of what appeared to be a message from the meeting organizers
stating that they chose not to invite media “because we want everyone to
speak freely and candidly without concerns about being misquoted or
misinterpreted.”
techcrunch | A species-wide conversation on our future has never before been
carried out. We didn’t do it at the dawn of the industrial or nuclear
ages for understandable reasons, even though we might have avoided some
terrible outcomes if we had.
With a growing percentage of the world population connected to the
information grid in one way or another, we now have a limited
opportunity to avoid making the same mistake and begin laying a
foundation for decisions we will need to collectively make in the
future. Given the political divisiveness of this issue, the window will
not stay open long.
Such a conversation would involve connecting individuals and
communities around the world with different backgrounds and perspectives
and varying degrees of education in an interconnected web of dialogue.
It would link people adamantly opposed to human genetic enhancement,
those who may see it as a panacea, and the vast majority of everyone
else who has no idea this transformation is already underway. It would
highlight the almost unimaginable potential of these technologies but
also raise the danger that opponents could mobilize their efforts and
undermine the most promising work to cure cancers and eliminate disease.
But the alternative is far worse. If a relatively small number of
even very well intentioned people unleash a human genetic revolution
that will ultimately touch most everyone and alter our species’
evolutionary trajectory without informed, meaningful, and early input
from others, the backlash against the genetic revolution will overwhelm
its monumental potential for good.
Homo Sapiens of the world, let us begin this conversation.
Most of the article turns on deep brain stimulation devices, which can
be used to stimulate or suppress activity in different parts of the
brain, already used to treat some forms of mental illness, chronic pain
and other disorders. The researchers round up a whole dystopia's worth
of potential attacks on these implants, including tampering with the
victim's reward system "to exert substantial control over a patient's
behaviour"; pain attacks that induce "severe pain in these patients";
and attacks on impulse control that could induce "Mania, hypersexuality,
and pathological gambling."
The researchers discuss some of the ways in which the (dismal) state of
medical implant security could be improved. I recently co-authored a set of comments to the FDA
asking them to require manufacturers to promise not to use the DMCA to
intimidate and silence security researchers who come forward with
warnings about dangerous defects in their products.
The paper has a delightful bibliography, which cites books like Neuromancer, anime like Ghost in the Shell, as well as papers in Nature, Brain, The Journal of Neurosurgery, and Brain Stimulation.
NYTimes | Those
who make the Very Large Mistake (of thinking they know enough about the
nature of the physical to know that consciousness can’t be physical)
tend to split into two groups. Members of the first group remain
unshaken in their belief that consciousness exists, and conclude that
there must be some sort of nonphysical stuff: They tend to become
“dualists.” Members of the second group, passionately committed to the
idea that everything is physical, make the most extraordinary move that
has ever been made in the history of human thought. They deny the
existence of consciousness: They become “eliminativists.”
This
amazing phenomenon (the denial of the existence of consciousness) is a
subject for another time. The present point — it’s worth repeating many
times — is that no one has to react in either of these ways. All they
have to do is grasp the fundamental respect in which we don’t know the
intrinsic nature of physical stuff in spite of all that physics tells
us. In particular, we don’t know anything about the physical that gives
us good reason to think that consciousness can’t be wholly physical.
It’s worth adding that one can fully accept this even if one is
unwilling to agree with Russell that in having conscious experience we
thereby know something about the intrinsic nature of physical reality.
So
the hard problem is the problem of matter (physical stuff in general).
If physics made any claim that couldn’t be squared with the fact that
our conscious experience is brain activity, then I believe that claim
would be false. But physics doesn’t do any such thing. It’s not the
physics picture of matter that’s the problem; it’s the ordinary everyday
picture of matter. It’s ironic that the people who are most likely to
doubt or deny the existence of consciousness (on the ground that
everything is physical, and that consciousness can’t possibly be
physical) are also those who are most insistent on the primacy of
science, because it is precisely science that makes the key point shine
most brightly: the point that there is a fundamental respect in which
ultimate intrinsic nature of the stuff of the universe is unknown to us —
except insofar as it is consciousness.
declineofempire | Chomsky's views on all the subjects he's talked about for
decades—power politics, elite repression of The People, elite-controlled
media, socioeconomic arrangements, and, recently, climate change—are vacuous unless he has based those views on some theory (or partial theory) of how humans work at a fundamental level (human nature).
And that's not true of Chomsky only; that's generally true. If this
vaunted "intellectual" is so damn smart, why hasn't he realized this?
Why hasn't he worked on the Human Nature problem as it pertains to, for
example, the human response to climate change, instead of lecturing us
over and over again about elite-controlled media or unreported,
U.S.-supported genocides?
Aren't genocides and elite-controlled media manifestations of aspects
of Human Nature? And what about the human response to climate change?
If these are not manifestations of human nature, then what the fuck are
we talking about? Here's my view.
For example, you can't talk about free market (albeit corrupt) capitalism versus anti-hierarchical anarcho-syndicalist blah blah blah (Chomsky's preferred arrangement) unless your views are based on how humans work, on what is possible
for humans to achieve. Otherwise, you're talking out your ass. I
discussed this foundational point at the very beginning of the first Flatland essay.
What I also explained in the beginning of that first Flatland essay
goes as follows: in order talk out your ass, you're forced to assume a
"blank slate" view of Human Nature which implicitly posits that humans
are infinitely malleable (our behavior is completely determined by our
social and physical environment).
The "blank slate"' in effect says that "anything goes" as far as
human socioeconomic arrangements go, to pick just one example. Now, we
might ask a simple question here: why is the world dominated by
market-based (though inevitably corrupt) capitalist systems instead of
anarcho-syndicalist blah blah blah? Is all this some kind of mistake?
Well, if you ask Chomsky, he would argue, at least implicitly, that the world-as-it-is is
indeed some kind of mistake, and humans can fix it (though not easily)
by inventing some kind of new sociopolitical system which would be
better in some undefined way. Chomsky has dedicated his life to this
viewpoint, despite clear and overwhelming evidence that humans do not have the capacity for change that he imagines.
At this point you might ask Chomsky why those malevolent elites (hierarchical kleptocracies) he goes on and on about have always existed
(and still do) in all large, complex human societies. Apparently, this
is a "mistake" humans have made over and over again for the last 6000
years or so, ever since large complex human societies first appeared.
topdocumentaryfilms | We heard rumors of a new kind of economy emerging in Argentina. With hundreds of factories closing, waves of workers were locking themselves inside and running the workplaces on their own, with no bosses. Where we come from, a closed factory is just an inevitable effect of a model, the end of a story. In Argentina today, it's just the beginning. In suburban Buenos Aires, thirty unemployed auto-parts workers walk into their idle factory, roll out sleeping mats and refuse to leave.
All they want is to re-start the silent machines. But this simple act - The Take - has the power to turn the globalization debate on its head. In the wake of Argentina's dramatic economic collapse in 2001, Latin America's most prosperous middle class finds itself in a ghost town of abandoned factories and mass unemployment. The Forja auto plant lies dormant until its former employees take action.
They're part of a daring new movement of workers who are occupying bankrupt businesses and creating jobs in the ruins of the failed system. But Freddy, the president of the new worker's co-operative, and Lalo, the political powerhouse from the Movement of Recovered Companies, know that their success is far from secure. Like every workplace occupation, they have to run the gauntlet of courts, cops and politicians who can either give their project legal protection or violently evict them from the factory.
The story of the workers' struggle is set against the dramatic backdrop of a crucial presidential election in Argentina, in which the architect of the economic collapse, Carlos Menem, is the front-runner. His cronies, the former owners, are circling: if he wins, they'll take back the companies that the movement has worked so hard to revive. Armed only with slingshots and an abiding faith in shop-floor democracy, the workers face off against the bosses, bankers and a whole system that sees their beloved factories as nothing more than scrap metal for sale.
zerohedge | As we reported yesterday, Maduro on Friday night declared a 60-day state
of emergency due to what he called plots from Venezuela and the United
States to subvert him. He did not provide specifics.
As Reuters adds today,
"the measure shows Maduro is panicking as a push for a recall
referendum against him gains traction with tired, frustrated
Venezuelans, opposition leaders said during a protest in Caracas."
"We're talking about a desperate president who is putting
himself on the margin of legality and constitutionality," said
Democratic Unity coalition leader Jesus Torrealba, adding Maduro was
losing support within his own bloc.
"If this state of emergency is issued without consulting the National Assembly, we would technically be talking about a self-coup," he told hundreds of supporters who waved Venezuelan flags and chanted "he's going to fall."
The people's will was already made clear late last year when the
opposition won control of the National Assembly in a December election,
propelled by voter anger over product shortages, raging inflation that
has annihilated salaries, and rampant violent crime, but the legislature
has been routinely undercut by the Supreme Court. The lit fuse is
therefore entirely in the hands of the increasingly more desperate
people. Protests are on the rise and a key poll shows nearly 70% of Venezuelans now say Maduro must go this year.
Maduro has vowed to see his term through, however, blasting
opposition politicians as coup-mongering elitists seeking to emulate the
impeachment of fellow leftist Dilma Rousseff in Brazil.
Saying trouble-makers were fomenting violence to justify a foreign invasion, Maduro
on Saturday hinted that a violent crackdown on enemies, both foreign
and domestic, may be imminent when he ordered military exercises for
next weekend.
"We're going to tell imperialism and the international right
that the people are present, with their farm instruments in one hand and
a gun in the other... to defend this sacred land," he boomed at a rally. He added the government would take over idled factories, and in the process "radicalize the revolution:"
"Comrades, I am ready to hand over to communal power the
factories that some conservative big wigs in this country have stopped.
An idled factory is a factory handed over to the people. We are going to do it, fuck it!"
Critics of Maduro, a former union leader and bus driver, say he should instead focus on people's urgent needs.
"There will be a social explosion if Maduro doesn't let the recall referendum happen," said
protester Marisol Dos Santos, 34, an office worker at a supermarket
where she says some 800 people queue up daily.But the opposition fear
authorities are trying to delay a referendum until 2017, when the
presidency would fall to the vice president, a post currently held by Socialist Party loyalist Aristobulo Isturiz.
"If you block this democratic path we don't know what might happen in
this country," two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles said
at the demonstration.
"Venezuela is a time bomb that can explode at any given moment."
NYTimes | This
nation has the largest oil reserves in the world, yet the government
saved little money for hard times when oil prices were high. Now that
prices have collapsed — they are around a third what they were in 2014 — the consequences are casting a destructive shadow across the country.
Lines for food, long a feature of life in Venezuela, now erupt into
looting. The bolívar, the country’s currency, is nearly worthless.
The crisis is aggravated by a political feud between Venezuela’s leftists, who control the presidency, and their rivals in congress.
The president’s opponents declared a humanitarian crisis in January,
and this month passed a law that would allow Venezuela to accept
international aid to prop up the health care system.
“This
is criminal that we can sit in a country with this much oil, and people
are dying for lack of antibiotics,” says Oneida Guaipe, a lawmaker and
former hospital union leader.
But
Mr. Maduro, who succeeded Hugo Chávez, went on television and rejected
the effort, describing the move as a bid to undermine him and privatize
the hospital system.
“I doubt that anywhere in the world, except in Cuba, there exists a better health system than this one,” Mr. Maduro said.
Late
last fall, the aging pumps that supplied water to the University of the
Andes Hospital exploded. They were not repaired for months.
So
without water, gloves, soap or antibiotics, a group of surgeons
prepared to remove an appendix that was about to burst, even though the
operating room was still covered in another patient’s blood.
Even in the capital, only two of nine operating rooms are functioning at the J. M. de los Ríos Children’s Hospital.
telesur | In 2004 and 2005, after winning the recall referendum against him, Chavez launched an offensive to boost local production. “Endogenous development” went hand in hand with declaring that the Bolivarian revolution was heading toward socialism. Land reform began in earnest. Mission Vuelvan Caras began to train the urban poor in agricultural and other skills. Tens of thousands of cooperatives were set up. Almost all of these failed.
The reasons were many, but one of the most potent was that oil prices began to rise sharply. It was just so much easier to import everything, than to build a whole new system of production. And with more people consuming much more, there was a lot that needed to be imported.
This presented Venezuela's traditional elite with an unexpected opportunity. For they still owned most of the companies that did the importing. Since losing control over the state oil company, they had been desperate to claw back their share of its income.
They set about developing one of the greatest scams of all time. It was based on acquiring cheap dollars from the Central Bank for false or manipulated imports, and then speculating on the growing gap in exchange rates.
This is how it worked. Private importer Mr. A applies for US$ 1,000 to import 100 cases of groceries. This costs him 6,300 bolivars (at the government's main preferential rate of US$ 1.00 = Bs. 6.30, in place until earlier this year). Mr. A then has several options. He could decide actually to import all 100 cases. But instead of selling them to his wholesalers at a price based on what he paid, US$ 10 or Bs. 63 per case, he sells them at a price based on the illegal, parallel exchange rate (US$ 1.00 = Bs. 500.00, early last year), that is Bs. 5,000 per case. In other words, he makes a killing in bolivars. But it is much more likely that Mr. A imports only 50 cases, or less, which he sells in the same way and still makes a handsome profit. With the rest of the dollars he was given, 500 or more, he can do several things. He can change them back into bolivars at the parallel rate, but he'd probably rather keep them for a while offshore until the rate goes up even further. Or invest them in something else abroad. Or keep them in his own private dollar account for a rainy day. In other cases, Mr A didn't import anything at all. He basically stole all of the dollars.
Big private companies in Venezuela did the same thing on a much larger scale. In 2013, the then head of the Venezuelan Central Bank, Edmee Betancourt, said that the country had lost between $15 and $20 billion dollars the previous year through such fraudulent import deals. The Central Bank's own figures show that between 2003 and 2013, the Venezuelan private sector increased its holdings in foreign bank accounts by over US$ 122 billion, or almost 230 percent. In 2014, Chavistas campaigning for an audit of the public debt estimated the total amount lost over the same period through fake imports and similar mechanisms amounted to an incredible US$ 259 billion.
It is likely that many of the 750 offshore companies linked to Venezuela in the database released from the Panama Papers have been used to recycle this money.
Venezuela's largest food manufacturer, Polar, has interrupted production several times in recent weeks because, it says, the government hasn't given it the dollars it needs to import its raw materials. But over the years, Polar has been one of the very biggest recipients of preferential dollars for imports. And from somewhere it has found enough dollars to develop new production facilities in the United States and Colombia.
zerohedge | As it turns out, the Temer presidency may be nothing more than the
latest manifestation of the US state department's implementation of yet
another puppet government. We know this because earlier today, Wikileaks
released evidence via a declassified cable that Brazil's new interim
president was an embassy informant for US intelligence and military.
Wikileaks brought attention to two cables, one dated January 11,
2006, the other June 21, 2006. One shows a document sent from Sao Paolo,
Brazil, to - among other recipients - the US Southern Command in Miami.
In it, Temer discusses the political situation in Brazil during the
presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Regarding the 2006 elections, when Lula was re-elected, Temer shared
scenarios in which his party (PMDB) would win the elections. He
declined to predict the race, however, but said there would be a run-off
and that "anything could happen."
Temer said the PMDB would elect between 10 and 15 governors that
year, and that the party would have the most representatives in the
Senate and thus the House of Representatives. This would mean that the
elected president would have to report to PMDB rule. "Whoever wins the presidential election will have to come to us to do anything," Temer reportedly said.
As a reminder, the last time the US instituted a puppet government,
was in 2014 when in yet another "bloodless coup", the president of
Ukraine was overthrown and replaced with a billionaire oligarch, a
scenario comparable to the one in Brazil.
We don't have to remind readers that as a result of the Ukraine coup,
relations between the US and Russia are multi-decade lows, the cold war
is back and - as of yesterday, so is the nuclear arms race. We are
curious what the consequence of yet another US state coup will be, this
time in Latin America's largest country.
theintercept | So if you’re a plutocrat with ownership of the nation’s largest and
most influential media outlets, what do you do? You dispense with
democracy altogether – after all, it keeps empowering candidates and
policies you dislike – by exploiting your media outlets to incite unrest
and then install a candidate who could never get elected on his own,
yet will faithfully serve your political agenda and ideology.
That’s exactly what Brazil is going to do today. The Brazilian Senate
will vote later today to agree to a trial on the lower House’s
impeachment charges, which will automatically result in Dilma’s
suspension from the presidency pending the end of the trial.
Her successor will be Vice President Michel Temer of the PMDB party
(pictured, above). So unlike impeachment in most other countries with a
presidential system, impeachment here will empower a person from a
different party than that of the elected President. In this particular
case, the person to be installed is awash in corruption: accused by
informants of involvement in an illegal ethanol-purchasing scheme, he
was just found guilty of, and fined for, election spending violations
and faces an 8-year-ban on running for any office. He’s deeply unpopular: only 2% would support him for President and almost 60% want him impeached (the
same number that favors Dilma’s impeachment). But he will faithfully
serve the interests of Brazil’s richest: he’s planning to appoint Goldman, Sachs and IMF officials to run the economy and otherwise install a totally unrepresentative, neoliberal team (composed in part of the same party – PSDB – that has lost 4 straight elections to the PT).
None of this is a defense of PT. That party – as even Lula acknowledged to me
in my interview of him – is filled with serious corruption. Dilma, in
many critical ways, has been a failed president, and is deeply
unpopular. They have often aligned with and served the country’s elite at the expense of their base of poor supporters. The country is suffering economically and in almost every other way.
But the solution to that is to defeat them at the ballot box, not
simply remove them and replace them with someone more suitable to the
nation’s richest. Whatever damage PT is doing to Brazil, the plutocrats
and their journalist-propagandists and the band of thieves in Brasilia
engineering this travesty are far more dangerous. They are literally
dismantling – crushing – democracy in the world’s fifth-largest country.
Even The Economist – which is hostile to even the most moderate left-wing parties, hates PT and wants Dilma to resign – has denounced impeachment as “a pretext for ousting an unpopular president” and just two weeks ago warned
that “what is alarming is that those who are working for her removal
are in many ways worse.” Before he became an active plotter in his own
empowerment, Temer himself said last
year that “impeachment is unthinkable, would create an institutional
crisis. There is no judicial or political basis for it.”
NYTimes | The new Brazilian president’s first pick for science minister was a creationist. He chose a soybean tycoon who has deforested
large tracts of the Amazon rain forest to be his agriculture minister.
And he is the first leader in decades to have no women in his cabinet at
all.
The government of President Michel Temer — the 75-year-old lawyer who took the helm of Brazil on Thursday after Dilma Rousseffwas suspended by the Senate to face an impeachment trial — could cause a significant shift to the political right in Latin America’s largest country.
“Temer’s government is starting out well,” Silas Malafaia, a television evangelist and author of best-selling books like “How to Defeat Satan’s Strategies,” wrote on Twitter.
“He’ll
be able to sweep away the ideology of pathological leftists,” Mr.
Malafaia added of a conservative lawmaker whom Mr. Temer chose as
education minister.
For
more than a decade, Brazil has been an anchor of leftist politics in
the region, less strident than the governments in countries like
Venezuela and Cuba, but openly supportive of them and committed to its
own platform of reducing inequality.
But
parts of Latin America are now drifting away from the left after
elections in neighboring countries like Argentina and Paraguay. Mr.
Temer seems to be embracing a more conservative disposition for his
government as well, with the country’s business establishment pressuring
him to privatize state-controlled companies and cut public spending.
dailyimpact |It’s a picture that’s worth a
thousand choruses of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Here in the Seventh
Straight Successful Year of the Recovery from the Great Recession,
tucked into a corner of the Arizona Desert, is a line of parked Union
Pacific locomotives. It was discovered on Google Earth, so it is, as
they say, visible from space. There are 292 of them, baking in the sun
like so many dinosaur skeletons, in a line stretching almost five miles.
They, and the people who used to run them, are now “excess capacity”
for one of the country’s largest freight haulers. In this, the Seventh
Straight Successful Year of the Great Recovery.
No one should be surprised. But even
when you know that trade — the buying and selling of stuff — has been
slowing down all over the world for years, it is startling to see such
stark, graphic evidence that we are all in deep trouble.
billingsgazette |GILLETTE —
Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad officials say they are keeping
about 150 locomotives and rail engines stored near Gillette because of
decreased demand.
BNSF
spokesman Matt Jones said the rail engines and two sets of box cars
remain at the railroad's yard in the Donkey Creek area because of a
downturn in rail shipping.
The problems can be attributed to
the decline in the coal sector. The passage of the federal Clean Power
Plan has pushed power plants away from coal and toward natural gas.
The impact can be seen in
the Powder River Basin, as nearby coal companies Alpha Natural Resources
and Arch Coal have filed for bankruptcy.
Jones said the declining demand for transportation has hit several sectors, not just coal.
inforum |FARGO -
An economic downturn involving a variety of commodities across various
parts of the United States has resulted in BNSF Railway parking about 45
of its train locomotives at the railroad’s train yard just off 12th
Avenue North west of the North Dakota State University campus.
“Customers’ volumes across a broad spectrum of commodities
have come down somewhat from their prior estimates,” said Amy McBeth, a
spokeswoman for BNSF. “As a result, we are strategically storing
locomotives in some yard locations across our network.”
McBeth said the locomotives will remain stored until traffic volumes warrant returning them to service.
Quarterly
profits for Forth Worth-based BNSF, which is owned by Berkshire
Hathaway, fell 25 percent in the first quarter of 2016.
The
railroad has been cutting staff in the wake of a changing economic
environment that includes low energy prices, the strong dollar and other
factors, McBeth said.
“Nationwide, while petroleum products volumes are down, coal is down, too, as are a number of other commodities,” she added.
newsok | BNSF Railway has parked dozens of its locomotives at a storage yard
north of downtown Oklahoma City over the past several weeks as slowing
traffic demand has left the units idle.
The engines parked along the east side of Interstate 235 north of NW
23 are from BNSF trains throughout the country, company spokesman Joe
Sloan said.
"We have a reduced amount of freight traffic now, and that storage point was available," he said.
Sloan said there is no timeline as to when the locomotives are expected back on the rails.
thepitch | "The best thing that’s happened so far is that all the cones are gone.”
This
is what Michael Smith — chef and co-owner of the Michael Smith and
Extra Virgin restaurants, in the Crossroads — tells me when I call him
to follow up on our last conversation about KC’s streetcar system.
That
doesn’t sound much more upbeat than what he and four other high-profile
restaurateurs said a couple of winters ago (“Sauce on the Tracks,”
January 6, 2015). At the height of streetcar construction, Smith and his
wife and business partner, Nancy Smith; Anton Kotar, of Anton’s Tap
Room; Martin Heuser, of Affäre; and Howard Hanna, of the Rieger Hotel
Grill & Exchange, spoke to The Pitch about how the project
was affecting their respective bottom lines. The port-a-potties, the
jackhammering, those countless cones — the sights and sounds of a city’s
costly transit project were repelling customers, said that roundtable.
A
year and a season later, the first Kansas City streetcar line in more
than half a century is finally about to begin taking passengers. With a
splashy opening for the 2.2-mile route set to start Friday, May 6
(coinciding with the Crossroads’ monthly First Friday art openings), and
carry on through the weekend, I was checking back in with the Smiths,
Kotar, Heuser and Hanna. Their businesses had survived. What now,
though? Are they confident that the free-to-ride streetcar will bring
fresh bustle to the sidewalks outside their doors — and send hungry
people inside?
“I’m not sure that the streetcar, once it’s in full
service, will have any impact on our business,” Michael Smith says.
“But there’s a lot of stuff happening in the Crossroads — new hotels, a
lot of activity. They have these same streetcars in Prague. We’re in the
big-time world now.”
democracynow | Well, Amy, we all know what Ponzi growth is—right?—what a Ponzi
scheme is. It’s when you pretend to be growing your income on the basis
of unsustainable debt. And the more debt you take, the more you pretend
that you’re growing. But then you have to have even more unsustainable
debt in order to maintain this illusion. Now, what is Ponzi austerity?
Once these bubbles burst, the only way you can continue to pretend that
you’re solvent is through even more debt, that will be utilized in order
to repay or to pretend to repay the previous debts. And if you’re going
through a period of belt tightening to impress creditors that you’re
doing the right—the good Protestant thing, which is, you know, to be
parsimonious and to tighten your belt, you have austerity, which
continuously reduces national income, because when you reduce pensions,
when you reduce investment, when you reduce all the determinants of
aggregate demand, income of the nation shrinks. And you keep tightening
that belt through more pension cuts, more reductions in public health
and so on, and public education, and you keep on taking new
unsustainable loans in order to pretend that you’re not insolvent.
That’s Ponzi austerity for you.
AMYGOODMAN:
Yanis Varoufakis, we’re going to continue this conversation after
break. Professor Varoufakis is the former finance minister of Greece,
now teaching economic theory at the University of Athens. His new book
is titled And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future. We’ll be back with him in a minute.
serendipity | The essential bond between capitalism and nationalism was broken in
1945, but it took some time for elite planners to recognize this new
condition and to begin bringing the world system into alignment with it.
The strong Western nation state had been the bulwark of capitalism for
centuries, and initial postwar policies were based on the assumption
that this would continue indefinitely. The Bretton Woods financial
system (the IMF, World Bank, and a system of fixed exchange rates among
major currencies) was set up to stabilize national economies, and
popular prosperity was encouraged to provide political stability.
Neoliberalism in the US and Britain represented the first serious break
with this policy framework — and brought the first visible signs of the
fission of the nation-capital bond.
The neoliberal project was economically profitable in the US and
Britain, and the public accepted the matrix economic mythology.
Meanwhile, the integrated global economy gave rise to a new generation
of transnational corporations, and corporate leaders began to realize
that corporate growth was not dependent on strong core nation-states.
Indeed, Western nations — with their environmental laws,
consumer-protection measures, and other forms of regulatory
"interference" — were a burden on corporate growth. Having been
successfully field tested in the two oldest "democracies," the
neoliberal project moved onto the global stage. The Bretton Woods system
of fixed rates of currency exchange was weakened, and the international
financial system became destabilizing, instead of stabilizing, for
national economies. The radical free-trade project was launched, leading
eventually to the World Trade Organization. The fission that had begun
in 1945 was finally manifesting as an explosive change in the world
system.
The objective of neoliberal free-trade treaties is to remove all
political controls over domestic and international trade and commerce.
Corporations have free rein to maximize profits, heedless of
environmental consequences and safety risks. Instead of governments
regulating corporations, the WTO now sets rules for governments, telling
them what kind of beef they must import, whether or not they can ban
asbestos, and what additives they must permit in petroleum products. So
far, in every case where the WTO has been asked to review a health,
safety, or environmental regulation, the regulation has been overturned.
Most of the world has been turned into a periphery; the imperial core
has been boiled down to the capitalist elite themselves, represented by
their bureaucratic, unrepresentative, WTO world government. The burden
of accelerated imperialism falls hardest outside the West, where loans
are used as a lever by the IMF to compel debtor nations such as Rwanda
and South Korea to accept suicidal "reform" packages. In the 1800s,
genocide was employed to clear North America and Australia of their
native populations, creating room for growth. Today, a similar program
of genocide has apparently been unleashed against sub-Saharan Africa.
The IMF destroys the economies, the CIA trains militias and stirs up
tribal conflicts, and the West sells weapons to all sides. Famine and
genocidal civil wars are the predictable and inevitable result.
Meanwhile, AIDS runs rampant while the WTO and the US government use
trade laws to prevent medicines from reaching the victims.
As in the past, Western military force will be required to control the
non-Western periphery and make adjustments to local political
arrangements when considered necessary by elite planners. The Pentagon
continues to provide the primary policing power, with NATO playing an
ever-increasing role. Resentment against the West and against
neoliberalism is growing in the Third World, and the frequency of
military interventions is bound to increase. All of this needs to be
made acceptable to Western minds, adding a new dimension to the matrix.
In the latest matrix reality, the West is called the "international
community," whose goal is to serve "humanitarian" causes. Bill Clinton
made it explicit with his "Clinton Doctrine," in which (as quoted in the
Washington Post) he solemnly promised, "If somebody comes after
innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their
race, their ethnic background or their religion and it is within our
power stop it, we will stop it." This matrix fabrication is very
effective indeed; who opposes prevention of genocide? Only outside the
matrix does one see that genocide is caused by the West in the first
place, that the worst cases of genocide are continuing, that
"assistance" usually makes things worse (as in the Balkans), and that
the Clinton doctrine handily enables the US president to intervene when
and where he chooses. Since dictators and the stirring of ethnic
rivalries are standard tools used in managing the periphery, a US
president can always find "innocent civilians" wherever elite plans call
for an intervention.
In matrix reality, globalization is not a project but rather the
inevitable result of beneficial market forces. Genocide in Africa is no
fault of the West, but is due to ancient tribal rivalries. Every measure
demanded by globalization is referred to as "reform," (the word is
never used with irony). "Democracy" and "reform" are frequently used
together, always leaving the subtle impression that one has something to
do with the other. The illusion is presented that all economic boats
are rising, and if yours isn't, it must be your own fault: you aren't
"competitive" enough. Economic failures are explained away as "temporary
adjustments," or else the victim (as in South Korea or Russia in the
1990s) is blamed for not being sufficiently neoliberal. "Investor
confidence" is referred to with the same awe and reverence that earlier
societies might have expressed toward the "will of the gods."
Western quality of life continues to decline, while the WTO establishes
legal precedents ensuring that its authority will not be challenged when
its decisions become more draconian. Things will get much worse in the
West; this was anticipated in elite circles when the neoliberal project
was still on the drawing board, as is illustrated in Samuel Huntington's
"The Crisis of Democracy" report discussed earlier.
The management of discontented societies
The postwar years, especially in the United States, were characterized
by consensus politics. Most people shared a common understanding of how
society worked, and generally approved of how things were going.
Prosperity was real and the matrix version of reality was reassuring.
Most people believed in it. Those beliefs became a shared consensus, and
the government could then carry out its plans as it intended,
"responding" to the programmed public will.
The "excess democracy" of the 1960s and 1970s attacked this shared
consensus from below, and neoliberal planners decided from above that
ongoing consensus wasn't worth paying for. They accepted that segments
of society would persist in disbelieving various parts of the matrix.
Activism and protest were to be expected. New means of social control
would be needed to deal with activist movements and with growing
discontent, as neoliberalism gradually tightened the economic screws.
Such means of control were identified and have since been largely
implemented, particularly in the United States. In many ways America
sets the pace of globalization; innovations can often be observed there
before they occur elsewhere. This is particularly true in the case of
social-control techniques.
The most obvious means of social control, in a discontented society, is a
strong, semi-militarized police force. Most of the periphery has been
managed by such means for centuries. This was obvious to elite planners
in the West, was adopted as policy, and has now been largely
implemented. Urban and suburban ghettos — where the adverse consequences
of neoliberalism are currently most concentrated — have literally
become occupied territories, where police beatings and unjustified
shootings are commonplace.
So that the beefed-up police force could maintain control in conditions
of mass unrest, elite planners also realized that much of the Bill of
Rights would need to be neutralized. (This is not surprising, given that
the Bill's authors had just lived through a revolution and were seeking
to ensure that future generations would have the means to organize and
overthrow any oppressive future government.) The rights-neutralization
project has been largely implemented, as exemplified by armed midnight
raids, outrageous search-and-seizure practices, overly broad conspiracy
laws, wholesale invasion of privacy, massive incarceration, and the rise
of prison slave labor (see "KGB-ing America.", Tony Serra, Whole Earth,
Winter, 1998). The Rubicon has been crossed — the techniques of
oppression long common in the empire's periphery are being imported to
the core.
In the matrix, the genre of the TV or movie police drama has served to
create a reality in which "rights" are a joke, the accused are
despicable sociopaths, and no criminal is ever brought to justice until
some noble cop or prosecutor bends the rules a bit. Government officials
bolster the construct by declaring "wars" on crime and drugs; the noble
cops are fighting a war out there in the streets — and you
can't win a war without using your enemy's dirty tricks. The CIA plays
its role by managing the international drug trade and making sure that
ghetto drug dealers are well supplied. In this way, the American public
has been led to accept the means of its own suppression.
The mechanisms of the police state are in place. They will be used when
necessary — as we see in ghettos and skyrocketing prison populations, as
we saw on the streets of Seattle and Washington D.C. during the
anti-WTO demonstrations there, and as is suggested by executive orders
that enable the president to suspend the Constitution and declare
martial law whenever he deems it necessary. But raw force is only the
last line of defense for the elite regime. Neoliberal planners
introduced more subtle defenses into the matrix; looking at these will
bring us back to our discussion of the left and right.
Divide and rule is one of the oldest means of mass control — standard
practice since at least the Roman Empire. This is applied at the level
of modern imperialism, where each small nation competes with others for
capital investments. Within societies it works this way: If each social
group can be convinced that some other group is the source of its
discontent, then the population's energy will be spent in inter-group
struggles. The regime can sit on the sidelines, intervening covertly to
stir things up or to guide them in desired directions. In this way most
discontent can be neutralized, and force can be reserved for exceptional
cases. In the prosperous postwar years, consensus politics served to
manage the population. Under neoliberalism, programmed factionalism has
become the front-line defense — the matrix version of divide and rule.
MIT | This talk examines the relation between Islamophobia as the dominant
form of racism today and the ecological crisis. It looks at the three
common ways in which the two phenomena are seen to be linked: as an
entanglement of two crises, metaphorically related with one being a
source of imagery for the other and both originating in colonial forms
of capitalist accumulation. The talk proposes a fourth way of linking
the two: an argument that they are both emanating from a similar mode of
being, or enmeshment, in the world, what is referred to as ‘generalised
domestication.’
Ghassan Hage has held many visting positions across the world
including in Harvard, University of Copenhagen, Ecoles des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales and American University of Beirut. He works in the
comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism, diaspora and
racism and on the relation between anthropology, philosophy and social
and political theory. His most well-known work is White Nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society (Routledge 2000). His is also the author of Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imaginary (Melbourne University Press 2015). He is currently working on a book titled Is Islamophobia Accelerating Global Warming? and has most recently published a piece in American Ethnologist,
titled: "Etat de Siege. A Dying Domesticating Colonialism?" (2016) that
engages with the contemporary “refugee crisis” in Europe and beyond.
There has been no rational attack on the problems of
sustainability within the local or national political dialogue. No candidate has come to grips with the concrete technical, interpersonal and political challenge of reducing our energy and material resource consumption while maintaining a satisfactory-to-improving quality of life for all U.S. citizens.
Our polity is our way of life, and the American polity is an ecosphere-destroying monstrosity due in large measure to our living memory history of in-group/out-group racist social allergy and the resulting flight into ridiculous and grossly inefficient suburban sprawl. There is, after all - short of catastrophic depopulation - only one way for your species to go within its ecosphere, and that way is toward intensive urban densification and concentration. We will either all learn to get along, or, we will perish in the process of our continuing inability to do so.
If we take a 1000 year viewpoint, it
becomes
obvious that our present living styles can not continue and ultimately the
shortage of
raw materials will force us to change. This means that conservation
must be a
principle activity and we need to start now. Geometry and values are the principle factors defining how we adapt to energy and resource scarcity. We must change our current living arrangements and interpersonal/social values so as to make the optimal use of what is available.
“Walking to
work will save the earth” must become our national anthem. Reforming society into very dense urban monads containing buildings and equipment needed for
most activities that will require almost no transportation will save
large amounts of energy.
Large
amounts of heating and cooling energy can be saved by living in apartment
buildings that are heated and cooled by solar, wind, and biomass. This is
much easier to do in apartments than in houses. Furnaces are
obsolete and must be replaced by engines. Cogeneration and advanced biological and nanomaterial manufacturing must be used to save energy. Biomass
can be used in buildings by direct combustion and steam, by
gasification and biodigestion.
We need to consider solar mirrors as a means of powering
buildings because they not only generate
electricity but can heat water, space, distill alcohol and other
chemicals, dry crops, and process sewage. Windmills and sterling motors that compress air
or refrigerants should be developed as a means of powering buildings. We need to reduce our
national consumption of energy from 97 quads to 50 quads and our
individual consumption from 360 million btus/yr to 100 million btus/yr.
We can start this by focusing on renovating our educational system to do a better (more Cuban) job of producing highly literate, highly educated, culturally enriched, and selflessly civic-minded scholar-athlete-citizens. Our military led the way toward social and interpersonal change. But the military is no longer a viable driver for the changes we need, having been co-opted for profit and predatory exploitation generations ago.
Sports and cultural production are the most integrated and meritocratic activities broadly available to the public in America. It is precisely here, in these meritocratic social activities that we find the common bond of civic identity which transcends petty and divisive sexual, racial, and gender identity squabbles - also nearly exclusively exploited for profit and political gain here-to-date.
Only when we reformat our public schools, re-centering them on active learning and meritocratic cultural enrichment in the arts and sports as primary vehicles for identity and individuation - and simultaneously - employ active learning methods and current technology tools to enrich and accelerate student acquisition of knowledge and skill in science and letters, will we find ourselves once again on the path forward. Failing this, we are already well along the path of an evolutionary blind alley and violent, catastrophic depopulation this way comes...,
WaPo | "We always think, well, we’re never going to have integrated schools
as long as we have such highly segregated neighborhoods," she says. "I
want to point out maybe we’ll never have integrated neighborhoods if we
have segregated schools."
If we found ways to integrate schools — as former District Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) controversially proposed two years ago —
that might take some of the exclusivity out of certain neighborhoods.
School quality is capitalized into housing prices, making
those neighborhoods unaffordable to many families. Imagine, for
instance, if all the public schools in the District or the Washington
region were integrated and of comparable quality. Families might pay
more to live in Northwest to be near Rock Creek Park. But you'd see
fewer home-bidding wars there just to access scarce school quality. More
to the point, homes families already paid handsomely to buy might lose
some of their value.
Politically, the two topics that most enrage
voters are threats to property values and local schools. So either of
these ideas — wielding housing policy to affect schools, or school
policy to affect housing — would be tough sells. Especially to anyone
who has secured both the desirable address and a seat in the best kindergarten in town. Parents in Upper Northwest, for instance, deeply opposed the idea of ending neighborhood schools in Washington. And Gray's proposal never came to pass.
But,
Owens says, "I feel more hopeful in studying these issues today than I
did five years ago." At least, she says, we are all now talking more
about inequality and segregation.
Rejuvenation Pills
-
No one likes getting old. Everyone would like to be immorbid. Let's be
careful here. Immortal doesnt include youth or return to youth. Immorbid
means you s...
Death of the Author — at the Hands of Cthulhu
-
In 1967, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes wrote of
“The Death of the Author,” arguing that the meaning of a text is divorced
from au...
9/29 again
-
"On this sacred day of Michaelmas, former President Donald Trump invoked
the heavenly power of St. Michael the Archangel, sharing a powerful prayer
for pro...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
