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New Frontiers in Stigmatizing Others

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| Thu May. 16, 2013 7:57 AM PDT

Walking down the street the other day, Keith Humphreys ran into two people who were carrying on animated conversations about societal ills to no one in particular:

One works as a cashier at the pharmacy I use and the other is a long-term psychiatric patient with schizophrenia. One had on a barely visible Bluetooth, the other has been engaged in discussions with imagined others long before the technology was invented.

But without my prior contacts with these two people, I would never have known that one of them had a serious mental illness. These fortuitous encounters make me wonder if these new technologies have an unintended but welcome destigmatizing function. Where before people might have shunned a mentally ill person who seemed to be talking to himself, today they usually assume that he’s just chatting on a BlueTooth or similar device.

Unintended consequences! But I've had the same thought myself, though I confess sometimes in the opposite direction. Perhaps the mentally ill are now being unfairly stigmatized as political obsessives who watch too much cable TV?

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GOP Bill To Hogtie Wall Street Watchdog Heads for Vote

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| Thu May. 16, 2013 7:20 AM PDT
Loren Rodgers/Shutterstock

A bill designed to tie the hands of a key Wall Street regulator is headed for a vote in the House this week.

The SEC Regulatory Accountability Act, introduced by Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) and co-sponsored by 23 other Republicans, sounds innocuously administrative. The bill would direct the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) "to conduct cost-benefit analyses to ensure that the benefits of any rulemaking outweigh the costs," according to a statement by the House Financial Services Committee. Plus, says Garrett, the bill is good for jobs, job-creators, and people who want jobs. "The American people are hungry for common sense reform that will help unleash the economy," he said in a statement. "I regularly hear from constituents, especially job creators, about how Washington red tape needs to be cut."

But financial reform advocates say the bill could kill tons of new regulations designed to rein in the industry that crashed the economy a few years ago. "Cost-benefit has become a favorite club used by industry to try and kill legislation," Dennis Kelleher of the financial reform group Better Markets told me earlier this year. The SEC is in the process of finalizing scores of new rules required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, and reformers say Garrett's bill would force the agency to study the impacts of regulations before they are known, and require analysis that would delay final rules. Not only that, says Kelleher, but the cost-benefit analysis the bill calls for includes only "industry costs," not potential longer term costs to the broader economy that could result from killing these rules. For example, the SEC would have to consider the cost of to industry of making foreign banks adhere to US regulations, but not the cost to the global economy of allowing those banks to be regulated by potentially weaker foreign rules. (Many federal agencies are required to consider cost-benefit analyses when developing major rules, but the SEC and other independent agencies—those outside federal executive departments that are headed by a Cabinet secretary—are exempt.)

The White House slammed Garrett's bill when it was approved by the House rules committee Wednesday, arguing that it would keep the SEC from doing its job. "The Administration believes in the value of cost-benefit analysis," the White House Office of Management and Budget said in a statement. "However, [the bill] would add onerous procedures that would threaten the implementation of key reforms related to financial stability and investor protection." Still, the president stopped short of saying he'd veto the bill.

As my colleague Tim Murphy reported Wednesday, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House rules committee, attempted to stymie the deregulatory bill by attaching an amendment that would have required political intelligence operatives to register under the Lobbying Disclosure Act and disclose their clients. It was voted down.

Now the GOP bill is headed to the House floor for a vote by Friday. Kelleher has his fingers crossed that the bill doesn't make it into law.  "Financial reform does not exist to minimize cost on the industry that almost caused a second great depression," he says.

Tennessee Congressman Slams Holder on Pot Prosecution

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| Thu May. 16, 2013 7:17 AM PDT
Eric HolderAttorney General Eric Holder.

Attorney General Eric Holder's appearance before the House Judiciary Committee went exactly like you'd expect. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) grilled him on the excessive redaction of emails he'd requested relating to Secretary of Labor-nominee Tom Perez. Rep. Tom Marino (R-Penn.) grilled him on the investigation into leaked intelligence on the Benghazi attack. Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) grilled him on his failure to recuse himself in writing from said leak investigation. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said some crazy things about asparagus.

But not everyone was as focused on the scandals du jour (or asparagus). In a rare moment of actual congressional outrage over federal sentencing guidelines and drug policy, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) used his allotted five minutes to question the administration's near-total refusal to make use of its pardon power—and its continued prosecution of marijuana offenses. The money quote:

One of the greatest threats to liberty has been the government taking people's liberty for things that people are in favor of. The Pew Research Group shows that 52 percent of Americans think that marijuana should not be illegal. And yet there are people in jail, and your Justice Department continues to put people in jail for sale and use, on occasion, of marijuana. That's something the American public has finally caught up with. It was a cultural lag, and it's been an injustice for 40 years in this country, to take people's liberty for something that was similar to alcohol. You have continued what is allowing the Mexican cartels power, and the power to make money, ruin Mexico, hurt our country, by having a prohibition in the late 20th- and 21st-century. We saw it didn't work in this country in the '20s, we remedied it. This is the time to remedy this prohibition, and I would hope you would do so.

Watch:

VIDEO: 97 Percent of Climate Scientists Can't Be Wrong

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| Thu May. 16, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Telling Americans that scientists don't agree is the classic climate denial strategy. It's been over a decade since consultant Frank Luntz famously furnished the GOP with strategies to kill climate action during the Bush years, recommending in a leaked memo [PDF]: "you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue." Oh, yeah, and avoid truth: "A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth." It seems to have worked: Only a minority of Americans believes global warming is caused by humans: 42 percent, according to a 2012 Pew study.

That "consensus gap", as it's known, has proven fertile ground in which to sow resistance to climate action, says John Cook, a climate communications researcher from the University of Queensland in Australia. He has led the most extensive survey of peer-reviewed literature in almost a decade (published online this week in Environmental Research Letters). And what he found, just as in other attempts to survey the field, is that scientists are near unanimous.

A group of 24 researchers signed up to the challenge via Cook's website, Skeptical Science (the go-to website for debunking climate denial myths), and collected and analyzed almost 12,000 scientific papers from the past 20 years. Of the roughly 4,000 of those abstracts that expressed some view on the evidence for global warming, more than 97 percent endorsed the consensus that climate change is happening, and it's caused by humans.

His team pulled work written by 29,083 authors in nearly 2,000 journals across two decades. "People who say there must be some conspiracy to keep climate deniers out of the peer reviewed literature, that is one hell of a conspiracy," he said via Skype from Australia (watch the video above). That would make the moon landing cover-up look "like an amateur conspiracy compared to the scale involved here."

Cook is hoping to capitalize on the simplicity of his findings: "All people need to understand is that 97 out of 100 climate scientists agree. All they need to know is that one number: 97 percent."

Which States Use the Most Green Energy?

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| Thu May. 16, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Florida and Texas might be leading the nation's rollout of solar and wind power, respectively, but Washington, where hydroelectric dams provide over 60 percent of the state's energy, was the country's biggest user of renewable power in 2011, according to new statistics released last week by the federal Energy Information Administration.

Hydro continued to be the overwhelmingly dominant source of renewable power consumed nationwide, accounting for 67 percent of the total, followed by wind with 25 percent, geothermal with 4.5 percent, and solar with 3.5 percent. The new EIA data is the latest official snapshot of how states nationwide make use of renewable power, from industrial-scale generation to rooftop solar panels, and reveals an incredible gulf between leaders like Washington, California, and Oregon, and states like Rhode Island and Mississippi that use hardly any.

The gap is partly explained by the relative size of states' energy markets, but not entirely: Washington uses less power overall than New York, for example, but far outstrips it on renewables (the exact proportions won't be available until EIA releases total state consumption figures later this month). Still, the actual availability of resources—how much sun shines or wind blows—is far less important than the marching orders passed down from statehouses to electric utilities, says Rhone Resch, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

"Without some carrot or stick, there's little reason to pick [renewables] up" in many states, he says; even given the quickly falling price of clean-energy technology, natural gas made cheap by fracking is still an attractive option for many utilities.

[Read more]

Quote of the Day: Apostrophe Eradication in America

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| Wed May. 15, 2013 10:33 PM PDT

From Barry Newman of the Wall Street Journal, explaining why it's Earl's Court in London but Earls Court in Bloomington:

The U.S., in fact, is the only country with an apostrophe-eradication policy. The program took off when President Benjamin Harrison set up the Board on Geographic Names in 1890. By one board estimate, it has scrubbed 250,000 apostrophes from federal maps. The states mostly—but not always—bow to its wishes....The committee has granted only five possessive apostrophes in 113 years: Martha's Vineyard, Mass.; Ike's Point, N.J.; John E's Pond, R.I.; Carlos Elmer's Joshua View, Ariz.; and—in 2002—Clark's Mountain, Ore.

It's an apostrophe apocalypse! And there's no appeal from the Borglike efficiency of the naming board: "We don't debate the apostrophe," says Jennifer Runyon, one of the committee's three staffers. Resistance is futile.

(Except for Clark's Mountain. How did that one get through? I sort of understand the other four exceptions, but what kind of clout did the Clark's people bring to bear in order to browbeat their way into apostrophe nirvana?)

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Why Won't the Feds Rein In the Firms That Tanked America's Economy?

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| Wed May. 15, 2013 7:36 PM PDT
Pinon Road/Shutterstock

It looks like one of the primary causes of the 2007 financial crash may be here to stay.

Before the crisis, the credit-rating agencies (such as Fitch, Moody's, and Standard & Poor's) that evaluate the relative risk of investment products offered by Wall Street banks, routinely assigned their highest ratings to bonds built out of junky, high-risk mortgages. Because of those ratings, the bad bonds sold like hotcakes, which in turn encouraged lenders to make more high-risk loans to sell to the banks to package into more risky bonds—and so on until the house of cards came down. (For a great read on all of this, see Michael Lewis' "The Big Short.")

Part of the reason the ratings agencies behaved so recklessly is that they were (and still are) paid by the banks whose products they rate. Yet even now, years after the financial crisis, the Securities and Exchange Commission isn't sure what it wants to do, if anything, about this loaded situation. So it held a roundtable discussion on Tuesday to think about it some more.

Credit-rating agencies "effectively took huge bribes from banks to misinform people about risk," says Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform. "This is a critical issue and [the SEC] has taken a complete pass on it" so far.

[Read more]

IRS Head Forced Out After Tea Party Scandal

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| Wed May. 15, 2013 5:55 PM PDT

President Barack Obama announced Wednesday that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has requested and accepted the resignation of acting Internal Revenue Service commissioner Steven Miller in response to news that the agency singled out some conservative organizations for extra scrutiny.

Beginning in March 2010, the IRS targeted groups with words like "tea party" and "patriot" in their names when applying tax laws relating to political activity. There's no evidence other groups got the same level of scrutiny, although according to a investigation by the Treasury Department's inspector general, that was due more to murky campaign finance laws than ideological discrimination.

"I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency, but especially in the IRS, given the power that it has and the reach that it has in all of our lives," said Obama, who took heat this week over the IRS affair as well as his administration's handling of the Benghazi attack and the Justice Department's seizure of journalists' phone records.

Miller wasn't at the IRS when the Tea Party targeting happened—Bush appointee Doug Shulman was in charge then. But according to the IRS, Miller failed to alert the Obama administration to the problem when he learn it in May 2012. Miller is scheduled to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday.

Obama also announced that he had told Treasury Secretary Lew to implement recommendations in the inspector general's report, which doesn't mention Miller's name, and said he will work with Congress "as it performs its oversight role."

White House Releases Benghazi Email Dump

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| Wed May. 15, 2013 3:58 PM PDT

The White House has released a dump of the email conversation that eventually produced the Benghazi talking points that were requested by Congress and then used by Susan Rice in her Sunday morning talk show interviews. The full set is here. Seven in particular struck me as interesting:

UPDATE: Amanda Terkel has more on State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland's objection to including a paragraph about previous CIA warnings regarding the threat of extremists in Benghazi:

Senior administration officials on Wednesday said that Michael J. Morell, then the deputy director of the CIA, also wanted that line removed, separately from Nuland. Morell believed it was irrelevant to the message of the talking points -- what happened in Benghazi -- and unprofessional to include those warnings but not allow State Department officials to include how they had responded to them.

Separate from Wednesday's document release, the CIA recently conducted an internal review of how and why the talking points were changed -- a move that also came in response to the continuing questions from Congress. That review showed that many changes were made to the original talking points -- drafted by a senior officer -- over concerns about accuracy, an FBI investigation and other bureaucratic matters.

Senior administration officials, discussing that internal review, relayed that some CIA officials didn't like that the original draft of the talking points said the government "know[s] that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa'ida participated in the attack," because at that time it was premature to name those responsible for the attacks.

Their concerns at other times were more mundane. For example, CIA officials also decided to change the phrase "attacks in Benghazi ... evolved into a direct assault against the US Consulate" to "demonstrations in Benghazi" because they believed "attacks" and "assault" were synonymous, making the phrase illogical.

CIA officers also removed the reference to al Qaeda in order not to prejudge the outcome of a FBI investigation into the incident. A reference to another terrorist group, Ansar al-Sharia, was left in, but later removed at the request of the State Department; the CIA agreed with that decision, again so as not to hinder the FBI investigation.

Yep, Immigrants Are Doing the Work We Won't

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| Wed May. 15, 2013 3:09 PM PDT

Via Dylan Matthews, here's a chart from a study that looks at the experience of the North Carolina Growers Association in hiring native-born workers. NCGA is required to heavily advertise for native workers before their applications for H-2A guest worker visas are approved, but these efforts seldom pay off. Even when unemployment was at its height in 2011, they received a grand total of only 268 referrals. They hired 90 percent of the applicants, but only 163 showed up for work on their first day—and that was the best response in NCGA's history. The chart below shows what happened next:

Within two months, 80 percent of the native workers had quit. By the end of the growing season, only seven were left.

Now, as Matthews notes, this report doesn't exactly come from a neutral source. It's from a pro-immigration group working with a group of pro-immigration farmers. But unless they're flat-out lying here, the numbers are pretty compelling. Most Americans just aren't willing to do backbreaking agricultural labor for a bit above minimum wage, and if the wage rate were much higher the farms would no longer be competitive.

Anyone want to send me some contrary evidence? I'd be interested to see it. But all the evidence I've seen in the past points in the same direction as this study: it's all but impossible to get native workers to fill field labor jobs. Immigrants really are doing the work we won't.