Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again.
But what he wants is to make America great again for the plutocratic elite, while stripping the rest of us of any opportunity for the rest of us to live a peaceful, harmonious life of tolerance, free from the avaricious intrusiveness of always-tracking, all-hearing, ever-nudging mind-colonizing apparat of the corporate/state panopticon.
Note the headline omits the “again” part of his slogan, because the world he envisages is that of the county the way it was when he was born, at the very start of the post-World War II Baby Boom generation and before the modern Civil Rights, voting rights, and women’s rights movements caught fire.
It happens that I know that world quite well. Trump was born 16 June 1946, five week before I was born. Two other Presidents were born with weeks of Trump, George W. Bush on 6 July 1946, and William Jefferson Clinton 19 August 1946.
The world we arrived in saw an America at its peak, the world’s only nuclear power [the first Soviet nuke was detonated 25 August 1949] and the only major industrial nation with factories and other infrastructure untouched by the crisis, save for Pearl Harbor and Alaska’s Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska [yes, there actually was an invasion and occupation of American soil between 11 May 1942 and 19 August 1943, a fact often neglected from American history classes].
My, how things gave changed.
Let’s begin with a look at changes in taxes
In 1946, the richest Americans paid nominal maximum tax rate of 91 percent, enabling the federal government to launch major spending programs of education, infrastructure and other public benefit programs.
Rates remained high throughout the administration of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and plunged during the Republican Ronald Reagan years,
So what was the net effect of this drive to spare the poor rich? The uber-wealthy, the folks so envied by mere tyros like the Man Who Would Be President Again, are now paying taxes at a lower rate than a school teacher. a janitor, or a cocktail waitress.
Take a look at this, from the New York Times via Common Dreams:
In addition, in the Boomer world in which our three Presidents were raised the U.S. also taxed large inheritances at a healthy rate, a policy now hedged by vastly expanded exemptions:
Another major sector experiencing a major fiscal blessing has been the corporation, with taxes on earnings slashed dramatically since those days of the :great America worshipped by Trumpeteers:
The benefits to corporations were predictable:
The net result of all this high stakes tax jiggering is a massive shift in the tax burden from corporations to individuals:
And who has befitted most from all this Congressional largess?
We bet you can guess:
The net impact of cuts and to corresponding CEO pay packets has become so severe that in many cases XCEOs pocket more money than their firms make in profits.
Here are some examples, captured graphically by Inequality.org:
CBS News reported in 2019 that “CEO compensation rose 940% from 1978 to 2018, compared with a 12% rise in pay for the average American worker during the same period, according to the Economic Policy Institute.”
And when in the following year some corporations, acting in part over public outrage over reports of the pay disparity chasm, announce CEO salary cuts, the measures often turned out to be a bit of cosmetic bait-and-switch, as the Institute for Policy Studies noted in a 15 March 2021 analysis: presented to the Senate Budget Committee:
More than 500 publicly held U.S. companies announced cuts to their CEO’s base salary in 2020. These moves garnered considerable positive press coverage, but they had a negligible impact on pay levels since straight salary makes up on average only 10 percent of executive compensation packages.15 Some of the early proxy filings make this clear. A.O. Smith CEO Kevin J. Wheeler, for example, took a 25 percent salary cut while enjoying a 36 percent increase in his overall compensation. At Whirlpool, CEO Mark Bitzer accepted a 25 percent trim on his base salary.
And as the report notes:
We can and must do better, as a nation, than accept a corporate business model that creates prosperity for the few and precarity for the many. And we can’t afford to wait for corporations and their shareholders to solve this problem. Corporate boards have shown us — over a decade ago in the financial crash and over the last year with the pandemic — that we cannot rely on them to do the right thing when it comes to CEO pay.
Most Americans agree, according to an April 2022 SRSS survey of a cross section of the American public which asked “Do you think most CEOs of America’s largest companies are compensated too much, too little, or about the right amount?”
Too much, declared most folks allegiant to both the red and the blue [;And just how the hell did the Grand Old Party become the red party?; Marx must be spinning in his grave.
As federal funding for states shrinks with the impact of tax “reforms,” states and local governments are forced to resort to so-called regressive taxes, such as the sales tax, to make up for the shortfall.
A regressive tax is one exacted at the same rate for all, as opposed to, say, an income tax, where rates increase as earnings in crease. Therefore, the regressive tax hits hardest on the poor, as illustrated in this chart from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy:
So let’s make America great for people who aren’t trust fund tycoons, Harvard graduates, and trust fund nepo babies,and start be re-instituting taxes on the wealthiest.
Labor leader, radical, Socialist, presidential candidate: Eugene Victor Debs was a homegrown American original. He formed the American Railway Union, led the Pullman strike of the 1890s in which he was jailed and emerged a dedicated Socialist. An idealistic, impassioned fighter for economic and social justice, he was brilliant, eloquent and eminently human. As a “radical” he fought for women’s suffrage, workmen’s compensation, pensions and Social Security all commonplace today. Five times the Socialist candidate for president, his last campaign was run from federal prison where he garnered almost a million votes.
— From his entry in the U.S. Department of Labor’s Hall of Honor
No figure in American history better exemplifies the role socialism once played in American politics than Eugene V. Debs, whose role in the labor movement began with his time as a railroad fireman.
Shoveling tons of coal into the fireboxes of the massive steam engines that moved endless cars caring the raw materials and finished produced of American industry products and raw materials of industry and agriculture and kept people on the move in a vast and growing land.
As a union organizer he learned political skills he would then use to run for office, both as a successful legislative candidate and as presidential candidate, including one run from a prison cell after his incarceration for opposing America’s participation in the First Word War.
But today we focus on a unique work, a critique of America’s first grand film spectacle, D.W. Griffith’s infamous Birth of a Nation.
Griffith’s film, a Southerner’s paen to the “heroic” role of the Ku Klux Klan in defeating the North’s efforts at Reconstruction of the defeated South following the Civil War, is filled with execrable racist tropes and praises the lethal violence deployed against freed slaves attempting to claim their promised equality.
Debs took on the film in a letter to the editor of his hometown paper, the Terre Haute, Indiana, Post, which the editor ran as a standalone article in the paper’s January 1916 edition under the headline “Debs Says Local Elections Bad as Ones in Big Movie”:
The merits of the spectacular drama The Birth of a Nation excite bitter comment whenever it is presented. There is no question that it is a wonderful production, that many of its scenes are tense and thrilling, and that there is much in the play to approve and commend, but if the author’s studied purpose was to insult the black race and to revive and intensify the bitter prejudices which grew out of the war, he could not have better succeeded. It would be passing strange if the colored people did not protest against certain shocking features of the drama as doing them and their race grossest injustice.
If it be absolutely essential to the play to present those harrowing rape scenes, then why not round them out in their historic completeness and show the dissolute sons of the plantation owner ravishing the black daughter before her parents’ eyes?
For every white woman raped in the South by a black fiend, a thousand black women have been seduced and outraged by white gentlemen; but no hint of this is given in the series of pictures composing The Birth of a Nation. It is only the black brute that is guilty according to this and all other stories written about the Negro by Thomas Dixon, the author, who also calls himself a minister of Christ.
Four Million Mulattos
There are four million mulattos in this country, most of whom were born out of wedlock and all of whom have a white father or grandfather, and these white gentlemen are ready to fight at the drop of the hat for “white supremacy” and against “nigger equality.”
The pretended reverence for Lincoln in the play does not at all square with the facts of history. Lincoln was hated with a savage hate by the slaveowners of the South and it was this ferocious hate that culminated in his assassination. The reverence now shown him on the stage is a convenient mask behind which the same blind hate may vent itself upon the unoffending Negro.
Let it not be overlooked that all our histories have been written by white men and that Negroes had no hand in them. They simply had to take what was given them, but even at that there is no denying the fact that from the time the Negroes were first stolen from their native land by white slave-traders, whom it would be flattery to call brutes, until the last law disfranchising them in the South was put into effect and the last “Jim Crow” car put into commission to attest their standing as livestock, the whole history of the treatment of the Negro race is one of shameless exploitation and degradation, for which the white race can never atone in time nor eternity.
If the black people today could tell their story about The Birth of a Nation, it would be replete with scenes infinitely more cruel and damning than those based upon Dixon’s novel and flashed upon the screen to conceal the white man’s crimes behind the Negro’s misfortune.
Klan Glorified
The Ku Klux Klan are glorified in these pictures as spotless knights, the personification of chivalry and honor, and the audience applauds madly as they dash to the rescue of some imaginary white victim of a black fiend, but care is taken not to portray any of the outrages perpetrated upon defenseless, unoffending Negroes by these same lawless nightriders.
The pictures showing the scenes about the polling places of election day, under Negro domination, are especially calculated to subject the Negro to ridicule and contempt, and the white audience never fails to attest its appreciation by its sneers and cheers.
It’s true such election scenes with their black sluggers and their sodden corruption are disgraceful and revolting, but how much more disgraceful and revolting are they than the election scenes which have occurred in and about Terre Haute during the last few years — scenes in which the sluggers were white, instead of black, and insulted white ladies instead of black wenches; scenes unspeakably low and vile as everyone will admit who bore witness to them? How would it do to make pictures of some of these and travel through the South with them, flashing them upon a screen to show the Negroes in that section what an eminently respectable thing an election is when dominated by white men and by what pure and incorruptible methods the will of the people is expressed in a civilized white community?
Whites Also to Blame
If the white race has demonstrated its “superiority” in any one thing, it is in its politics and elections, and if Negroes should be disfranchised, the evident purpose of Dixon’s pictures, because of their disgraceful conduct at the tolls, then by the same token white men should also be stripped of the ballot and driven from the polling places.
The cheap commercial statistics exhibited at the close of the play to show the progress made by the Negro race is but a weak attempt to excuse the wanton insults heaped upon that race. Intelligent Negroes will not be deceived. The progress they have made is mainly due to themselves. They owe little to the white race as a whole, save their exploitation and degradation.
Let the colored people learn how to depend upon themselves, how to do for themselves, and to win their own way in the world. When they cut loose from the grafting politicians that use them as pawns in the political game and reward one of their number with a spittoon cleaning job in recognition of their race, and stand together; when they begin in earnest to educate themselves and to develop their minds and do their own thinking, they will then command the respect of the white race and of the world, but not before.
Debs’ essay attracted the attention of another remarkable figure, one of the first and perhaps the greatest of America’s early black journalists, Ida B Wells, whose heroic efforts to document lynchings of black Americans remain an iconic chapter in the history of the American press:
Born into slavery, Wells knew first-hand the viciousness of racism, and the terrorism employed to prevent black Americans from their aspirations for equality under the law.
For more on Debs, here’s a little documentary created in 1979 by another socialist who would later make runs at the White House, Sen. Bernie Sanders:
Swiss psychiatrist and disillusioned Freudian Carl Gustav Jung, pondering how people often turn their backs on ideals once espoused to become the opposite of their previous aspirations, coined a term for the phenomenon: Enantidromia, which he defined as “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.”
Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, no two ideologies were more violently opposed than internationalist communism and ultranationalist fascism, accounting for at least 30 million Soviet and Nazi German deaths in World War II alone.
Given those massive losses, it would be hard to predict that as of today, the country that spilled so much blood destroying the fascist Nazi empire would become today’s embodiment of the very evil they once shed oceans of blood to destroy.
But today, in a Russia headed by a man who once served in the anti-fascist organs of state security, fascism has emerged yet again, embodied in its President, ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin.
Just call it a textbook case of entantidromia,
Alexander Motyl, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and a New York native born to Ukrainian immigrants, makes the diagnosis in this essay from The Conversation. an plain language academic journal published under a Creative Commons license:
Yes, Putin and Russia are fascist – a political scientist shows how they meet the textbook definition
When Vladimir Putin unleashed an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the Ukrainian media, public and policymakers almost unanimously began calling the Russian president and the state he leads “rashyst.” The term is a hybrid of a derogatory moniker for Russia – “rasha” – and “fascist.”
Ukrainians did so for two reasons. First, they were countering Putin’s absurd insistence that the Ukrainian authorities – including Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy – were Nazis and that Ukraine needed to be “de-Nazified.” Since Ukraine’s tiny number of right-wing extremists are about as influential as the Proud Boys in the United States, what Putin really had in mind was Ukrainians with a distinct Ukrainian identity. De-Nazification thus meant de-Ukrainianization.
Second, Ukrainians were drawing attention to those features of Putin’s Russia that indicated that it was fascist and thus in need of “de-Nazification.” Putin’s Russia was aggressive, anti-democratic and enamored of Putin himself. Unsurprisingly, his Russia’s resemblance to the regimes built by Mussolini and Hitler had not gone unnoticed by Russian and Western analysts in the last decade or so.
Few policymakers, scholars and journalists listened, however, as the term fascism struck many as too vague, too political or too loaded to serve as an accurate description of any repressive regime. Having written about Putin’s Russia as quasi- or proto-fascist already in the mid-2000s, I know from personal experience that few took my claims seriously, often arguing tautologically that Putin had constructed a “Putinist” system.
But, first, a brief foray into the classification schemes that social scientists like to use, which most people find incomprehensible.
Classifications are essential for good social science, because they enable scholars to group political systems according to their shared features and to explore what makes them tick. Aristotle was one of the first to divide systems into those ruled by one, those ruled by a few and those ruled by many.
Authoritarian states rest on the state bureaucracy, military and secret police; they usually circumscribe most of the features of democracies; and they typically are led by juntas, generals or politicians who avoid the limelight.
Totalitarian states abolish all the features of democracy, empower their bureaucracies, militaries and secret police to control all of public and private space, promote all-encompassing ideologies and always have a supreme leader.
War is worshipped and justified by the state’s mendacious propaganda machine. As the brutal invasion of Ukraine shows, war is also practiced, especially if it is directed against a people whose very existence Putin regards as a threat to himself and to Russia.
Finally, fascist states are prone to wars, because members of the secret police and generals, whose raison d’etre is violence, are overrepresented in the ruling elite. In addition, the ideology glorifies war and violence, and a militarist fervor helps to legitimate the supreme leader and reinforce his charisma.
With the third year of the COVID pandemic well underway and as the second year of the Biden administration commences, Americans are becoming less trusting of traditional authority figures, a new survey from the Pew Research Center.
Trust of scientists and the military remains relatively high, although core support for the military drop the most sharply of all groups, while confidence in journalists, business executives, and politicians nears rock bottom.
Americans’ confidence in groups and institutions has turned downward compared with just a year ago. Trust in scientists and medical scientists, once seemingly buoyed by their central role in addressing the coronavirus outbreak, is now below pre-pandemic levels.
Overall, 29% of U.S. adults say they have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public, down from 40% who said this in November 2020. Similarly, the share with a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests is down by 10 percentage points (from 39% to 29%), according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
The new findings represent a shift in the recent trajectory of attitudes toward medical scientists and scientists. Public confidence in both groups had increased shortly after the start of the coronavirus outbreak, according to an April 2020 survey. Current ratings of medical scientists and scientists have now fallen below where they were in January 2019, before the emergence of the coronavirus.
Scientists and medical scientists are not the only groups and institutions to see their confidence ratings decline in the last year. The share of Americans who say they have a great deal of confidence in the military to act in the public’s best interests has fallen 14 points, from 39% in November 2020 to 25% in the current survey. And the shares of Americans with a great deal of confidence in K-12 public school principals and police officers have also decreased (by 7 and 6 points, respectively).
Large majorities of Americans continue to have at least a fair amount of confidence in medical scientists (78%) and scientists (77%) to act in the public’s best interests. These ratings place them at the top of the list of nine groups and institutions included in the survey. A large majority of Americans (74%) also express at least a fair amount of confidence in the military to act in the public’s best interests. Roughly two-thirds say this about police officers (69%) and K-12 public school principals (64%), while 55% have at least a fair amount of confidence in religious leaders.
The public continues to express lower levels of confidence in journalists, business leaders and elected officials, though even for these groups, public confidence is tilting more negative. Four-in-ten say they have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in journalists and business leaders to act in the public’s best interests; six-in-ten now say they have not too much or no confidence at all in these groups. Ratings for elected officials are especially negative: 24% say they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in elected officials, compared with 76% who say they have not too much or no confidence in them.
With trust in leading institutional leaders plunging, it’s no wonder that populism flourishes. . .
Back in the early 1960s I spent three teenage summers in an intimate relationship with 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. more commonly known as 2,4-D.
Employed by the corporation own a system of irrigation canals in two Northern Colorado counties, my job consisted of sitting on the bumpers of tanker trucks traveling easement roads along canals, hose and spray nozzle in hand, dousing Canadian Thistles with chemical to prevent the plants from flowering and spreading their pesky airborne seeds into the waters of the canals and thence on to farmers’ fields, where they crowd out crops of wheat, maize, and sugar beets.
I and another teenager who held the other hose were assured the chemical was harmless to humans, often sprayed each other to cool off during the frequent hot days of July and August.
2,4D gradually faded from the picture after American agroindustrial giant Monsanto delivered a new weed-killer, Roundup, along with seeds genetically engineered to resist the herbicidal properties of glyphosate, the patented active ingredient in the concoction.
The one-two combination of a potent new weed killer and corporate-owned seeds designed to protect crops from the chemical’s otherwise lethal onslaught made Monsanto king on Big Ag globally [the company was sold to German chemical giant Bayer in 2018].
But resistance to Monsanto’s purported panacea, a combination of concerns over the company’s insistence on barring farmers from using seeds from their harvest to plant next years crops and a forced sale of crops only to dealers authorized by the company along with a growing numbers of research papers challenging the chemical’s safety [which we have covered extensively] has led to a resurgence of that old standby 2.4-D, along with new GMO crops designed to resist it.
But a new study just published raises serious questions about the safety of 2,4-D and the revelation that the bodies of a third of Americans now harbor significant amounts of the chemical, with the most troublesome levels found in the bodies of children and women and child-bearing age.
One out of three people in a large survey showed signs of exposure to a pesticide called 2,4-D, according to a study published today by researchers at the George Washington University. This novel research found that human exposure to this chemical has been rising as agricultural use of the chemical has increased, a finding that raises worries about possible health implications.
“Our study suggests human exposures to 2,4-D have gone up significantly and they are predicted to rise even more in the future,” Marlaina Freisthler, a PhD student and researcher at the George Washington University, said. “These findings raise concerns with regard to whether this heavily used weed-killer might cause health problems, especially for young children who are very sensitive to chemical exposures.”
Lead author Freisthler and her colleagues looked for biomarkers of the pesticide found in urine samples from participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. They estimated agricultural use of 2,-D by studying public and private pesticide use data from 2001 until 2014.
Out of 14,395 participants in the survey nearly 33 percent had detectable levels of 2,4-D in their urine. The researchers found that participants with urine levels of this pesticide went from a low of 17 percent at the start of the study in 2001-2002 to a high of nearly 40 percent ten years later.
Other key findings of the new study:
▪ As the use of the herbicide increased during the study period so did human exposures.
▪ Children ages 6-11 had more than double the risk of increasing exposure to 2,4-D.
▪ In addition, women of childbearing age had nearly twice the risk of increased exposure compared to men in the same age group.
▪ Human exposures are likely to rise even more in the near future as this herbicide’s use continues to go up.
2,4-D was developed in the 1940s and soon became a popular weed-killer for farmers who wanted to increase crop yields. In addition, homeowners looking for a pristine, green lawn also turned to 2,4-D often in combination with other lawn chemicals.
Exposure to high levels of this chemical has been linked to cancer, reproductive problems, and other health issues. While scientists don’t know what the impact of exposure to lower levels of the herbicide might be, they do know that 2,4-D is an endocrine disruptor and this study shows children and women of childbearing age are at higher risk of exposure.
Children can be exposed if they play barefoot on a lawn treated with the weed-killer or if they put their hands in their mouths after playing outside, where the soil or grass might be contaminated with the chemical. People also can be exposed by eating soybean-based foods and through inhalation. The now widespread use of 2,4-D on GMO soybeans and cotton leads to more 2,4-D moving in the air, which can expose more people to this chemical, according to the researchers.
“Further study must determine how rising exposure to 2,4-D affects human health–especially when exposure occurs early in life,” Melissa Perry, a professor of environmental and occupational health and senior author of the paper, said. “In addition to exposure to this pesticide, children and other vulnerable groups are also increasingly exposed to other pesticides and these chemicals may act synergistically to produce health problems.”
Consumers who want to avoid exposures to pesticide can purchase organically grown food, which is less likely to be grown with weed killers. They can also avoid using 2,4-D or other pesticides on their lawn or garden, the researchers said.
Meanwhile, Roundup faces an uncertain fate in Europe, where its use is authorized only until 15 December, pending a further review of the compound’s safety.
And there are signs of troubles ahead, as the Guardian reported 26 November:
Only two out of a group of 11 industry studies given to European regulators in support of the re-approval of the main ingredient in Roundup herbicide are scientifically “reliable”, according to a new analysis of corporate-backed studies on the chemical glyphosate.
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In a report released on Friday, researchers from the Institute of Cancer Research at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria said their review of a set of safety studies submitted to EU regulators by Bayer AG and a coalition of other chemical companies showed that the vast majority do not meet current international standards for scientific validity.
While two of the corporate studies were considered reliable, six were considered partly reliable and three were not reliable, according to the report.
And as for 2,4-D, it was the one of two primary ingredients in Agent Orange, the notorious compound sprayed over much of South Vietnam to kill crops and the trees used by Viet Cong troops to hide from American air strikes during what folks there now call the American War.
One ailment conclusively linked to Agent Orange exposure is bladder cancer, a malady for which we underwent a surgical removal seven years ago, We can’t but wonder if that affliction stemmed from those cooling spays on hot summer days under the Colorado sun decades before.
At 400 square miles in area, the Columbia Glacier of southeastern Alaska is one of great wonders of nature, a mass of blue ice emptying into the waters of Prince William Sound.
But the glacier is vanishing, and the cause is clear, as a study from Oregon State University has determined:
Anthropogenic forcing was sufficient to trigger the recent retreat of Columbia Glacier from its extended position of the past [9,000 years], consistent with our data-driven assessment of the relationship between regional climate change and glacier extent. We conclude that the recent retreat of Columbia Glacier is a response to climate change rather than part of a natural internal tidewater-glacier oscillation.
And now, via NASA’s Earth Observatory, comes dramatic visual evidence of global warming in action:
Located in southeastern Alaska, the Columbia Glacier descends from the flanks of the Chugach Mountains and flows into a narrow inlet connected to Prince William Sound.
Prior to 1980, the glacier was generally stable. This photo from 1957 shows it reaching all the way to Heather Island.
It held a similar position in this aerial photo shot in 1969.
But in 1980, the glacier began to retreat, likely triggered by climate change. It became one of the fastest shrinking glaciers in the world.
Satellite images from the long-running Landsat program have documented the retreat.
This natural-color image shows the glacier as your eyes would see it.
But false-color images can help differentiate between snow and ice, open water, vegetation and exposed bedrock, and rocky debris on the glacier’s surface.
This series of false-color images, acquired over the span of 35 years, shows the glacier’s dramatic retreat as well as some key moments along the way.
1986: Six years into Columbia’s retreat, the glacier had withdrawn more than a mile from Heather Island.
1989: At this point, the glacier still had three branches: the West Branch, Main Branch, and a sliver of ice that flowed east of Great Nunatak Peak.
1995: In some years, patches of lighter colored ice float south of the glacier. This mixture, or “mélange,” consists of sea ice mixed with icebergs that have broken from the glacier.
1997: Notice the medial moraine—a line of debris deposited along the ice surface that shows where separate channels of ice merged.
2000: As Columbia Glacier thinned, rings of freshly exposed rock, known as trimlines, became prominent around the inlet.
2001-2006: The retreat stalled until 2006, when the glacier became constricted by peaks on either side of the channel.
2008: Then, as the glacier’s front retreated into deeper water, it began to float.
2009: As a result, larger chunks of ice started to break off.
2011: By 2011, Columbia’s West and Main branches had split. Icebergs now calved from two distinct fronts.
2013: The West Branch took a large step backward in 2013, surprising scientists who thought it had stabilized.
2014: The Main Branch became increasingly unstable when thinning caused the glacier to lose traction with the floor of the inlet.
2019: Amid a hot summer, the West Branch appeared close to the limit of its retreat.
2021: Continuing to crumble away, the Main Branch in 2021 had retreated about 15 miles from its initial position.
While climate change likely started the retreat, mechanical processes kept the disintegration going.
Tidewater glaciers tend to cycle between periods of slow advance and rapid retreat. What Columbia Glacier will do next remains to be seen.
These dramatic images, coupled with today’s earlier post of the massive drought now afflicting the American Southwest, should, in a rational world, provide yet more conclusive evidence that the need for action to stem our fossil fuel addiction is long past due.
Cliff Place, an Anasazi dwelling complex in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, via Wikipedia.
But then, within the span of a few years, violence exploded, the Anasazi cities were abandoned, the roads and canals fell into disrepair, and cannibalism appeared among the haggard survivors..
A major factor in the collapse of the Anasazi civilization, scientists have learned, was a massive drought.
And now a similar crisis has struck the American Southwest, a drought as severe as that destroyed the world of the Anasazi, a drought in which the massive carbon releases of modern industrial civilization is playing a leading role, according to a new study.
Megadrought in southwestern North America is region’s driest in at least 1,200 years
The drought that has enveloped southwestern North America for the past 22 years is the region’s driest “megadrought” — defined as a drought lasting two decades or longer — since at least the year 800, according to a new UCLA-led study [$29 to read for non-subscribers] in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Thanks to the region’s high temperatures and low precipitation levels from summer 2020 through summer 2021, the current drought has exceeded the severity of a late-1500s megadrought that previously had been identified as the driest such drought in the 1,200 years that the scientists studied.
UCLA geographer Park Williams, the study’s lead author, said with dry conditions likely to persist, it would take multiple wet years to remediate their effects.
“It’s extremely unlikely that this drought can be ended in one wet year,” he said.
The researchers calculated the intensity of droughts by analyzing tree ring patterns, which provide insights about soil moisture levels each year over long timespans. (They also confirmed their measurements by checking findings against historical climate data.) Periods of severe drought were marked by high degrees of “soil moisture deficit,” a metric that describes how little moisture the soil contains compared to its normal saturation.
Since 2000, the average soil moisture deficit was twice as severe as any drought of the 1900s — and greater than it was during even the driest parts of the most severe megadroughts of the past 12 centuries.
Studying the area from southern Montana to northern Mexico, and from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, researchers discovered that megadroughts occurred repeatedly in the region from 800 to 1600. Williams said the finding suggests that dramatic shifts in dryness and water availability happened in the Southwest prior to the effects of human-caused climate change becoming apparent in the 20th century.
Existing climate models have shown that the current drought would have been dry even without climate change, but not to the same extent. Human-caused climate change is responsible for about 42% of the soil moisture deficit since 2000, the paper found.
One of the primary reasons climate change is causing more severe droughts is that warmer temperatures are increasing evaporation, which dries out soil and vegetation. From 2000 to 2021, temperatures in the region were 0.91 degrees Celsius (about 1.64 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average from 1950 to 1999.
“Without climate change, the past 22 years would have probably still been the driest period in 300 years,” Williams said. “But it wouldn’t be holding a candle to the megadroughts of the 1500s, 1200s or 1100s.”
As of Feb. 10, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 95% of the Western U.S. was experiencing drought conditions. And in summer 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, two of the largest reservoirs in North America — Lake Mead and Lake Powell, both on the Colorado River — reached their lowest recorded levels since tracking began in 1906.
Regulators have continued to implement water conservation measures in response to water shortages caused by the drought. In August, for example, federal officials cut water allocations to several southwestern states in response to low water levels in the Colorado River. And in October, California Gov. Gavin Newson declared a drought emergency and asked Californians to voluntarily decrease their water usage by 15%.
Williams said initiatives like those will help in the short term, but water conservation efforts that extend beyond times of drought will be needed to help ensure people have the water they need as climate change continues to intensify drought conditions.
The study was a collaboration among researchers from UCLA, NASA and the Columbia Climate School.
Here, from the report, is a look at Southestern droughts as revealed by the scientific record:
(a) Number of years in a running 22-year window when the 22-year mean summer soil moisture anomaly across southwestern North America (SWNA) was drier than the 800–2021 average. (b) The percentage of SWNA area where the 22-mean summer soil moisture was locally ranked in the top 5 driest 22-year periods in 800–2021.
In a rational world, this newest evidence of the profound impacts on climate change and its capacity to generate social collapse, mass violence, and the forced migration of whole peoples should serve as further impetus to change our self-destructive behavior and engage with the the consequences of our actions.
And in a truly rational world we would act, willingly and cooperatively.
As we’ve noted many times before, we are killing the Amazon rainforest, one of the most unique and diverse environments on the planet, and home to dozens of indigenous tribal groups.
While the Amazon rainforest had long been called “the lungs of the planet” for its ability to capture carbon through plant respiration, that role is now in danger.
A study by 18 international scholars [$32 to read for non-subscribers] published in the 14 July 2021 edition of Nature, the world’s per-eminent scientific journal, reaches a stunning conclusion: Part of the Amazon note emits more carbon that in captures, and fire is the culprit.
Here’s the summation, emphasis added:
Amazonia hosts the Earth’s largest tropical forests and has been shown to be an important carbon sink over recent decades. This carbon sink seems to be in decline, however, as a result of factors such as deforestation and climate change. Here we investigate Amazonia’s carbon budget and the main drivers responsible for its change into a carbon source. We performed 590 aircraft vertical profiling measurements of lower-tropospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide at four sites in Amazonia from 2010 to 2018. We find that total carbon emissions are greater in eastern Amazonia than in the western part, mostly as a result of spatial differences in carbon-monoxide-derived fire emissions. Southeastern Amazonia, in particular, acts as a net carbon source (total carbon flux minus fire emissions) to the atmosphere. Over the past 40 years, eastern Amazonia has been subjected to more deforestation, warming and moisture stress than the western part, especially during the dry season, with the southeast experiencing the strongest trends. We explore the effect of climate change and deforestation trends on carbon emissions at our study sites, and find that the intensification of the dry season and an increase in deforestation seem to promote ecosystem stress, increase in fire occurrence, and higher carbon emissions in the eastern Amazon. This is in line with recent studies that indicate an increase in tree mortality and a reduction in photosynthesis as a result of climatic changes across Amazonia.
The Amazon is a vast biome that spans eight rapidly developing countries—Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname—and French Guiana, an overseas territory of France.
The landscape contains:
▪ one in 10 known species on Earth ▪ 1.4 billion acres of dense forests, half of the planet’s remaining tropical forests ▪ the 3,977-mile-long Amazon River, the second-longest river on Earth after the Nile ▪ 2.6 million square miles in the Amazon basin, about 40% of South America
The Amazon contains millions of species, most of them still undescribed, and some of the world’s most unusual wildlife. It is one of Earth’s last refuges for jaguars, harpy eagles, and pink river dolphins, and home to thousands of birds and butterflies. Tree-dwelling species include southern two-toed sloths, pygmy marmosets, saddleback and emperor tamarins, and Goeldi’s monkeys. The diversity of the region is staggering:
▪ 40,000 plant species ▪ 2,400 freshwater fish species ▪ more than 370 types of reptiles
There is a clear link between the health of the Amazon and the health of the planet. The rain forests, which contain 90-140 billion tons of carbon, help stabilize the local and global climate. Deforestation releases significant amounts of this carbon, which is having negative consequences around the world.
Uncontacted tribes at risk, too
In addition to the vast array of plants and animals endangered by deforestation, the Amazon basin is also home to a wide array of indigenous tribal groups, manyu of which have had little contact with modern civilization.
Deep in the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest area containing isolated and uncontacted tribes is under increasing threat from illegal logging and gold mining, advancing coca plantations and drug trafficking violence, a new report warns.
An undetermined number of indigenous people that could number several thousand inhabit a vast swathe of forest twice the size of Ireland that overlaps the Brazil-Peru border.
Their longhouses in jungle clearings have been spotted from planes but encounters with outsiders or clashes with invaders are anecdotal.
In the most comprehensive study to date of the so-called Javari-Tapiche corridor, a Peruvian indigenous organization says the world’s largest number of uncontacted people are in danger. Anthropologists have recorded groups crossing to Brazil looking for food, metal utensils and clothing to the south of the corridor, reportedly moving away from violence in Peru.
Beefing up deforestation
While mining and logging pose considerable dangers to the rainforest and its inhabitants, as the WWF reports, feeding the global demand for beef is the leading driver of deforestation in the Amazon basin:
Extensive cattle ranching is the number one culprit of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country, and it accounts for 80% of current deforestation. Alone, the deforestation caused by cattle ranching is responsible for the release of 340 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year, equivalent to 3.4% of current global emissions. Beyond forest conversion, cattle pastures increase the risk of fire and are a significant degrader of riparian and aquatic ecosystems, causing soil erosion, river siltation and contamination with organic matter. Trends indicate that livestock production is expanding in the Amazon.
Brazil has 88% of the Amazon herd, followed by Peru and Bolivia. While grazing densities vary among livestock production systems and countries, extensive, low productivity, systems with less than one animal unit per hectare of pasture are the dominant form of cattle ranching in the Amazon.
And in Brazil, one company dominates, a Brazilian agroindustrial giants which just happens to dominate the U.S. meat market as well.
JBS S.A. is a Brazilian company that is the largest meat processing company [by sales] in the world, producing factory processed beef, chicken and pork, and also selling by-products from the processing of these meats. It is headquartered in São Paulo. It was founded in 1953 in Anápolis, Goiás. As of 2017, the company had 150 industrial plants around the world
In addition to its Brazilian operations, JBS also ranks as the leading meant supplier in the U.S., having acquired Swift & Company, Pilgrim’s Pride, Smithfield Foods’ beef operations, the prok business of Cargil, as well as Mexican and Brazilian operations of Tyson Foods, Inc.
More from Bloomberg on the company’s impact on the Amazonian rainforest:
Understanding how Brazil’s beef industry and rainforest destruction are inextricably intertwined reveals a truth that JBS doesn’t acknowledge: As the region’s biggest beef producer, its supply chain is also among the biggest drivers of Amazon deforestation the world has ever known. While marketing itself as a friend of the environment, JBS has snapped up more cattle coming out of the Amazon than any other meatpacker in an industry that’s overwhelmingly to blame for the rainforest’s demise. It has helped push the world’s largest rainforest to a tipping point at which it’s no longer able to clean the Earth’s air, because large swaths now emit more carbon than they absorb. Late last year, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, governments and financial institutions—including JBS investors—made ambitious green commitments to drastically alter their business models to save the environment. With Amazon deforestation at a 15-year high, JBS is a case study illustrating how difficult it is to keep such promises.
For more than a decade, JBS has committed to ridding its supply chain of animals born or raised on deforested land. Bloomberg analyzed about 1 million delivery logs that JBS accidentally posted online to show just how far its footprint has reached into the Amazon in that period. A 10-day trip into the heart of Brazil’s cattle country put on full display how easily and openly cows from illegally cleared land flood supply chains. JBS says it sets the highest standards for its suppliers, but it’s using a greenwashed version of an animal’s origin and working within a legal system so full of loopholes that prosecutors, environmentalists and even ranchers themselves consider it a farce.
Asked to respond to this article, JBS said “it has no tolerance for illegal deforestation.” The São Paulo-based company added that it “has maintained, for over 10 years, a geospatial monitoring system that uses satellite imagery to monitor its suppliers in every biome” in Brazil.
On a positive note, Reuters reported in December that six major European supermarket chains have announced they will stop all beef imports from Brazil.
For more on the role of Big Beef in the plunder of the Amazonian read Beef, Banks and the Brazilian Amazon. a December 2020 investigation by Global Witness.
Fires accelerate ecological catastrophe
Published in the open source academic journal Remote Sensing last month, “Fires Drive Long-Term Environmental Degradation in the Amazon Basin,” a study by team of Brazilian and French scholars, offers an alarming look at the acceleration of ecological destruction wrought by the most commonly employed means of forest “clearance”:
In recent years, the frequency and intensity of fires have increased worldwide, especially during dry years. Globally, fires and deforestation are the main causes of biodiversity loss in the tropics], and the expectation is that without, a reduction in the present disturbance rates, undisturbed forests will have entirely disappeared in large tropical humid regions by 2050. In the Amazon, the use of fire is the fastest, most efficient, and least expensive way to clear a forested Amazonian agricultural frontier area and is often employed in protected areas, such as conservation units (CUs) and indigenous lands (ILs). Ranchers, farmers, miners, and land grabbers all employ this practice. A recent study that determined different types of fires that occur in the Amazon showed that deforestation fires are fires in areas that have been previously cleared and can invade standing forests; their drivers and positive feedbacks can lead to more fires in the region. Such fires lead to the release of a significant amount of GHGs [greenhouse gases] into the atmosphere.
In the Amazon region, fires are ubiquitous at the end of the dry season (September-October), but have often worsened in years of extreme drought (i.e., 2005, 2010, and 2015). Anomalously dry years are associated with tropical seas surface temperature anomalies; high temperatures and low humidity provide favorable conditions for the rapid spread of fires. These extreme-drought events have the potential to destabilize large areas by reducing rainfall and thereby increasing the risk of forest death, which could, in turn, lead to the further intensification of regional droughts as a result of vegetation loss. A warmer and drier climate can lead to the mortality of plant species adapted to wetter climates, as well as a decrease in water recycling in the central part of the Amazon Researchers forecast a possibility of doubling of the burned area south of the Brazilian Amazon in the coming decades]. This projection is in accordance with the scenarios proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which are based on global numerical models] that indicate increased environmental degradation in the near future. Indeed, the Amazon ecosystem has been identified as a region with the highest vulnerability index in ecosystem function, particularly in areas of large-scale forest degradation and fragmentation.
The great Brazilian land grab continues
Just as White settlers and corporations swallowed up land belong to indigenous tribes in the U.S. starting with the arrival of the first settlers [who were brought over from Europe to populate corporate-owned colonies, encouraged and assisted by an expropriating monarchy] so too the Amazon is being grabbed up with the aid of a government headed by a verybigoted Right-wing populist.
So show does it work?
Consider the following from three University of Florida scholars – Gabriel Cardoso Carrero, graduate student Fellow and doctoral candidate in Geography; Cynthia S. Simmons, Professor of Geography; and Robert T. Walker, Professor of Latin American Studies and Geography – and published in The Conversation, an open source online academic journal written in everyday language:
The great Amazon land grab – how Brazil’s government is turning public land private, clearing the way for deforestation
Imagine that several state legislators decide that Yellowstone National Park is too big. Also imagine that, working with federal politicians, they change the law to downsize the park by a million acres, which they sell in a private auction.
Outrageous? Yes. Unheard of? No. It happens routinely and with increasing frequency in the Brazilian Amazon.
The most widely publicized threat to the Amazonian rainforest is deforestation. Less well understood is that public lands are being converted to private holdings in a land grab we’vebeenstudying for the past decade.
Our research provides a complete account across all classes of public land. We looked at Amazonia’s most active deforestation frontier, southern Amazonas State, starting in 2012 as rates of deforestation began to increase because of loosened regulatory oversight. Our research shows how land grabs are tied to accelerating deforestation spearheaded by wealthy interests, and how Brazil’s National Congress, by changing laws, is legitimizing these land grabs.
How the Amazon land grab began
Brazil’s modern land grab started in the 1970s, when the military government began offering free land to encourage mining industries and farmers to move in, arguing that national security depended on developing the region. It took lands that had been under state jurisdictions since colonial times and allocated them to rural settlement, granting 150- to 250-acre holdings to poor farmers.
Federal and state governments ultimately designated over 65% of Amazonia to several public interests, including rural settlement. For biodiversity, they created conservation units, some allowing traditional resource use and subsistence agriculture. Leftover government lands are generally referred to as “vacant or undesignated public lands.”
Tracking the land grab
Studies have estimated that by 2020, 32% of “undesignated public forests” had been grabbed for private use. But this is only part of the story, because land grabbing is now affecting many types of public land.
Importantly, land grabs now impact conservation areas and indigenous territories, where private holdings are forbidden.
We compared the boundaries of self-declared private holdings in the government’s Rural Environmental Registry database, known as CAR, with the boundaries of all public lands in southern Amazonas State. The region has 50,309 square miles in conservation units. Of these, we found that 10,425 square miles, 21%, have been “grabbed,” or declared in the CAR register as private between 2014 and 2020.
In the United States, this would be like having 21% of the national parks disappear into private property.
In Pará State, Amazonas State’s neighbor, deforestation in the 1990s was dominated by poor family farms in rural settlements. On average, these households accumulated 120 acres of farmland after several decades by opening 4-6 acres of forest every few years in clearings visible on satellite images as deforestation patches.
Since then, patch sizes have grown dramatically in the region, with most deforestation occurring on illicit holdings whose patches are much larger than on legal holdings.
Land grabbers benefit by selling the on-site timber and by subdividing what they’ve grabbed for sale in small parcels. Arrest records and research by groups such as Transparency International Brasil show that many of them are involved in criminal enterprises that use the land for money laundering, tax evasion and illegal mining and logging.
In the 10-year period before President Jair Bolsonaro took office, satellite data showed two deforestation patches exceeding 3,707 acres in Southern Amazonas. Since his election in 2019, we can identify nine massive clearings with an average size of 5,105 acres. The clearance and preparation cost for each Bolsonaro-era deforestation patch, legal or illicit, would be about US$353,000.
Legitimizing land grabbing
Brazil’s National Congress has been making it easier to grab public land.
A 2017 change in the law expanded the legally allowed size of private holdings in undesignated public lands and in rural settlements. This has reclassified over 1,000 square miles of land that had been considered illegal in 2014 as legal in southern Amazonas. Of all illegal CAR claims in undesignated public lands and rural settlements in 2014, we found that 94% became legal in 2017.
Our research also shows that the federal government increased the amount of public land up for grabs in southern Amazonas by shrinking rural settlements by 16%, just over 2,000 square miles, between 2015 and 2020. Large ranches are now absorbing that land. Similar downsizing of public land has affected Amazonia’s national parks.
Other countries have helped Brazil with billions of dollars to protect the Amazon for the good of the climate, but in the end, the land belongs to Brazil. Outsiders have limited power to influence its use.
At the U.N. climate summit in 2021, 141 countries – including Brazil – signed a pledge to end deforestation by 2030. This pledge holds potential because, unlike past ones, the private sector has committed $7.2 billion to reduce agriculture’s impact on the forest. In our view, the global community can help by insisting that supply chains for Amazonian beef and soybean products originate on lands deforested long ago and whose legality is longstanding.
Following up on today’s earlier post reporting that women die more frequently than men under the care of male surgeons, CBC News in Canada reports of yet another study, this one revealing that black babies die at significantly higher rates when given hospital care by White physicians than when Black doctors oversee their care:
For Black babies, the race of their first doctors can be a matter of life and death.
The researchers looked at 1.8 million hospital birth records in Florida between 1992 and 2015, and found Black babies were three times more likely to die in hospital than white babies.
But when Black infants received care from a Black doctor, that disparity was cut by 39 to 58 per cent — whether the doctor was providing care before, during or after childbirth.
The same was not true in reverse. A doctor’s race has little to no impact on the health of a white infant, the study found.
Here’s a quote from the report:
[T]he mortality penalty for Black newborns treated by White physicians is 56% larger in hospitals managing a large number of Black newborns. This suggests, all else equal, that Black physicians are not performing better as the number of Black newborns increases. Instead, it appears that White physicians are underperforming. . . benefit varies with the hospital’s level of experience caring for Black newborns, not with White newborns or newborns in general. In hospital-quarters with large numbers of Black newborns, those born under the care of White physicians experience especially high mortality penalties.
The only possible conclusion is that while medical schools are great at teaching technical skills, they suck at teaching people skills.
Doctors need to taken to school about their own, unquestioned biases.
We would also ,like to see similar studies focusing on class biases as well.
All of which reminds me of a joke I heard from a malpractice attorney years ago”
Q: What’s the difference between God and a doctor?
If you’re a woman, chances of death within a month after a major surgical operation are a third higher if the physician holding the knife is a man than if the operation were conducted by a woman surgeon, while male patients fare equally well under scalpels wielded by either sex.
Non-fatal bad outcomes are also high for women surgical patients, according to the findings of a sobering survey conducted by scientists from the University of Toronto:
Female patients were more likely to die or experience complications after being operated on by a male – as opposed to a female – surgeon, according to a new study by researchers in the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine.
The paper, recently published in JAMA Surgery, looked at 1.3 million adult patients in Ontario over a period of 12 years. It suggests women were 15 per cent more likely to experience a bad outcome if their surgeon was a man.
There was also a 32 per cent greater chance that a female patient would die in the 30 days after a procedure.
The researchers say their findings underscore the need to understand the reasons for the apparent disparity.
“To deny the results of this study is both non-scientific and a marker of our own implicit bias,” saysAngela Jerath, an associate professor at Temerty Medicine’s department of anesthesiology and pain medicine, who worked on the study with Christopher Wallis, an assistant professor at Temerty Medicine’s division of urology.
The study also indicated female patients treated by a male surgeon had a 16 per cent increase in major complications following their surgery and an 11 per cent increase in the likelihood of re-admission, compared with having the same procedure done by a female surgeon.
“We believe that the issues that are causing this gap are extremely complicated, and likely to enter behavioural science. We need to understand these issues and fill the gap in care for female patients,” says Jerath, who is also an associate professor with the Dalla Lana School of Public Health’s Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation and a staff cardiac anesthesiologist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.
The study focused on 21 types of surgery, including procedures in cardiothoracic surgery, neurosurgery and orthopedic surgery.
The data also factored in procedures in otolaryngology, plastic surgery, thoracic surgery, urology and vascular surgery, as well as general surgery.
“Overall, male patients have comparable results when treated by either male or female surgeons while female patients have worse outcomes when treated by male surgeons than female surgeons,” says Wallis, who is also a urologic oncologist at the division of urology at Mount Sinai Hospital and University Health Network.
“As a male surgeon, these findings really highlight a learning opportunity for me personally and for our profession,” he adds. “An operating surgeon’s sex shouldn’t affect a female patient’s outcomes. We need to do more work to understand why these discrepancies are happening.”
“There are social and cultural factors that may get in the way of providing the best care for female patients, and we need to investigate that further.”
Of the study of sample of more than 2,900 surgeons, 82 per cent were male while 18 per cent were female.
Further work needs to be done examining ways male and female surgeons communicate with patients, the researchers say.
There is also the need to study the ways patients and surgeons of both sexes establish trust, they added.
“Beyond performing the actual surgical procedure, there are complex processes in the care pathway before and after surgery that male and female surgeons may do differently surrounding clinical decision making, exercising personal judgement and team management,” Jerath says.
“It’s also possible that male and female patients communicate differently with surgeons of different sexes. Understanding these differences is important in improving outcomes after surgery for all patients.”
Jerath, who is also a scientist at Sunnybrook Research Institute and adjunct scientist at ICES, says she was “astonished” by the findings.
She says further research will hopefully examine if there are some practices among female surgeons that are leading to better outcomes, especially for female patients.
“We know this is a really uncomfortable piece of work. I work with a lot of terrific male surgeons. The results we found are at a population level and do not reflect any one surgeon’s practice,” she says.
“Our advice to all patients – female or male – is that they should be able to speak and have a good, trusting relationship with their physician.”
The findings also indicate the importance of increasing the number of female surgeons, Wallis says.
“This research really supports the goal of diversifying the surgical workforce to better match the characteristics of the patients we’re treating,” he says.
This is one of the most fascinating studies we’ve ever encountered, and raises a number of questions:
And it’s not just surgeries
Throughout its history, Western medicine has trivialized many women’s complaints. Consider hysteria, which was long associated with the non-existent ability of the uteus to trvael though the body.
In ancient Greece specifically, it was believed that a uterus could migrate around the female body, placing pressure on other organs and causing any number of ill effects. This “roaming uteri” theory, supported by works from the philosopher Plato and the physician Aeataeus, was called ‘hysterical suffocation’, and the offending uterus was usually coaxed back into place by placing good smells near the vagina, bad smells near the mouth, and sneezing. The philosopher and physician Galen however disagreed with the roving uterus theory, believing instead that the retention of ‘female seed’ within the womb was to blame for the anxiety, insomnia, depression, irritability, fainting and other symptoms women experienced. (Throughout these classical texts, pretty much any symptom could be attributed to the female sex organs, from fevers to kleptomania).
Other writers and physicians at the time blamed the retention of menstrual blood for “female problems.” Either way, the obvious solution was to purge the offending fluid, so marriage (and its implied regular sexual intercourse) was the general recommendation. Male semen was also believed to have healing properties, so sex served two purposes. For young or unmarried women, widows, nuns or married women unable to achieve orgasm via the strictly penetrative heterosexual sex that was common at the time, midwives were occasionally employed to manually stimulate the genitals, and release the offending liquids. A 1637 text explains that when sexual fluids are not regularly released, ‘the heart and surrounding areas are enveloped in a morbid and moist exudation’, and that any ‘lascivious females, inclined to venery’ simply had a buildup of these fluids. It’s obviously laughable to think that doctors believed everything wrong with women could be attributed to their liquid levels, but contrarily it is interesting how close doctors got to the truth, in their belief that extreme sexual desire was caused by a lack of regular orgasm.
It was Jean-Martin Charcot, in 1880 France, who first took a modern scientific sense to the female-only disease of hysteria. He lectured to his medical students, showing them photos and live subjects, on the hysteria symptoms he believed were caused by an unknown internal injury affecting the nervous system. One of these medical students was none other than Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud, working with his partner Breuer in Austria, developed Charcot’s theories further, and wrote several studies on female hysteria from 1880-1915. He believed that hysteria was a result, not of a physical injury in the body, but of a ‘psychological scar produced through trauma or repression’. Specifically, this psychological damage was a result of removing male sexuality from females, an idea that stems from Freud’s famous ‘Oedipal moment of recognition’ in which a young female realizes she has no penis, and has been castrated. (I don’t have the time to open that particular bag of worms, but feel free to click here to read about it)
In essence, Freud believed that women experienced hysteria because they were unable to reconcile the loss of their (metaphoric) penis. With this in mind, Freud described hysteria as ‘characteristically feminine’, and recommended basically what every other man treating hysteria had through the years- get married and have sex. Previously this was done to allow for the ridding of sexual liquids, whereas now the idea was that a woman could regain her lost penis by marrying one, and potentially giving birth to one. If marriage wasn’t an acceptable or possible treatment however, there was another technique of treatment for hysteria, prolapsed uteri and any gynecologicals problem really, rising in popularity in the late 17th century- uterine massage.
Yes, uterine or gynecological massage was exactly what you think it was.
Richard Maurice Bucke, a Canadian psychiatrist active in the late 19th century, opted to perform invasive surgery, such as hysterectomies — where doctors remove the uterus — to “cure” female patients of mental illnesses.
[I]n 2016, the Brain Tumour Charity released a report on the treatment of brain tumour patients in the United Kingdom. It found that almost one in three of them had visited a doctor more than five times before receiving their diagnosis. Nearly a quarter weren’t diagnosed for more than a year.
Women, as well as low-income patients, experienced longer delays. They were more likely than men to see 10 or more months pass between their first visit to a doctor and diagnosis –and to have made more than five visits to a doctor prior to diagnosis.
One 39-year-old woman quoted in the report recalled: “One of the GPs I saw actually made fun of me, saying ‘what did I think my headaches were, a brain tumour?’ I had to request a referral to neurology. I went back repeated times to be given antidepressants, sleep charts, analgesia, etc. No one took me seriously.
[W]omen are generally under-represented in medical research, accounting for less than a third of all subjects in heart disease studies, according to a George Washington University report. Similarly, twice as many women suffer from depression, but female animals make up less than half of preclinical studies, and a study published in the journal Cancershows that women make up only 38 percent of cancer trials.
And research by clinical psychologist Bonnie J. Floyd published inSocial Science & Medicine in 1997 adds more:
Research in women’s health has revealed the difficulties female patients experience in their attempts to receive accurate medical diagnoses. Depression may be misdiagnosed in 30-50% of female patients. This difficulty is considerably enhanced when women have physical diseases characterized by symptoms that resemble a major depressive disorder. In addition, medical treatments may induce symptoms that are misdiagnosed as affective distress. Multiple causes contribute to an enhanced likelihood of misdiagnoses in women, including physicians’ androcentrically orientated medical training and the two-to-one female-to-male ratio of depression treatment. The adverse consequences of incorrect diagnoses range from unnecessary expenditures of a woman’s resources to potentially life-threatening medical conditions. Ironically, medical misdiagnoses of physical conditions may induce depressive reactions in female patients. A woman’s age, sexual orientation, menstrual, occupational, and/or parental status represent potential areas of discrimination in diagnostic determinations
Medicine has a ‘woman problem’
What other conclusion is possible, given the dismal evidence?
The arrival of COVID in all its varieties has laid bare another pandemic, one far more dangerous than a mere virus. It is, of course, the pandemic of raptor capitalism, that virulent plague of hyperconcentration of wealth that has infected the entire planet with wealth inequalities never before seen in the history of Homo sapiens.
While the COVID virus may be indiscriminate in its choice of human hosts, the vast majority face massive hurdles its victims face, ranging from lack of access to health care, lost income, and the collapse of the middle class to increased spousal abuse.
But one group has fared very well indeed during pandemic time, as the report notes:
In July 2021, the world’s richest man launched himself and his friends into space in his luxury rocket while millions were dying needlessly below him because they could not access vaccines or afford food. Jeff Bezos’ own iconic Marie Antoinette “let them eat cake” moment will forever be more accurately quoted: “I want to thank every Amazon employee and customer because you guys paid for all of this.” The increase in Bezos’ fortune alone during the pandemic could pay for everyone on earth to be safely vaccinated.
The world’s small elite of 2,755 billionaires has seen its fortunes grow more during COVID-19 than they have in the whole of the last fourteen years—fourteen years that themselves were a bonanza for billionaire wealth.
This is the biggest annual increase in billionaire wealth since records began. It is taking place on every continent. It is enabled by skyrocketing stock market prices, a boom in unregulated entities, a surge in monopoly power, and privatization, alongside the erosion of individual corporate tax rates and regulations, and workers’ rights and wages — all aided by the weaponization of racism.
Consider this graphic from the report:
More from the report:
The gap between rich and poor nations is now expected to rise for the first time in a generation. People who live in low- and middle-income countries are around twice as likely to die from COVID-19 infection as people who live in rich countries.
That at least 73 countries face the prospect of IMF-backed austerity risks worsening inequality between countries, and every type of inequality within countries. Women’s rights and progress toward gender equality will be hit hard by these austerity measures, amid a crisis that has already set back the goal of achieving gender parity by a whole generation to 135 years, when previously it was. What makes this situation even harsher is that women in many countries face a second pandemic of increased gender-based violence — while, as with every crisis, having to absorb the shock of a mountain of unpaid care work that keeps them trapped at the bottom of the global economy.
The cost of the profound inequality we face is in human lives. As this paper shows, based on conservative estimates, inequality contributes to the deaths of at least 21,300 people each day. Every four seconds, inequality contributes to the death of at least one person.
Want to know what the risks of heart disease are in your community?
You could look at a whole range of factors, everything from dietary patterns to economics, and there’s a good chance you’ll find some correlations.
But a team of scientists from the University of Pennsylvania went looking for a new way to assess community risks that tops all the existing means of prediction, and they found it the social medium that has itself become the subject of intense scrutiny in the wake of Donald Trump’s toxic deployment of the medium — Twitter.
Here’s the abstract of their findings, just published in the academic journal Psychological Science [$35 to access for non-subscribers], and available free via this link from from the National Library of Medicine:
Hostility and chronic stress are known risk factors for heart disease, but they are costly to assess on a large scale. We used language expressed on Twitter to characterize community-level psychological correlates of age-adjusted mortality from atherosclerotic heart disease (AHD). Language patterns reflecting negative social relationships, disengagement, and negative emotions—especially anger—emerged as risk factors; positive emotions and psychological engagement emerged as protective factors. Most correlations remained significant after controlling for income and education. A cross-sectional regression model based only on Twitter language predicted AHD mortality significantly better than did a model that combined 10 common demographic, socioeconomic, and health risk factors, including smoking, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. Capturing community psychological characteristics through social media is feasible, and these characteristics are strong markers of cardiovascular mortality at the community level.
Here’s more from the discussion of their findings at the end of their report:
Our study had three major findings. First, language expressed on Twitter revealed several community-level psychological characteristics that were significantly associated with heart-disease mortality risk. Second, use of negative-emotion (especially anger), disengagement, and negative-relationship language was associated with increased risk, whereas positive-emotion and engagement language was protective. Third, our predictive results suggest that the information contained in Twitter language fully accounts for—and adds to—the AHD-relevant information in 10 representatively assessed demographic, socioeconomic, and health variables
The following chart from their report reveals the specific words reflecting either a stronger risks for atherosclerotic heart disease [top] or for healthier hearts [bottom], Word size indicates relative frequency of use.:
Social media are magnifying lenses focused on our individual and collective psyches, and our choice of words reveals far more than we think.
By freeing up our ability to reveal the darkest and most hate-filled corners of of our hearts, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest may actually be killing us, and hate- and rage-spewing politicians like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Green, and Tucker Carlson [yes, he’s a politician, just not the elected sort], may be literally killing their followers just as surely as their opposition to vaccines and masks is also killingmany of them.
Until 2020, the word “radicalization” was linked most often with accounts of of groups like ISIS and the Taliban, defining the transformation of Muslims from believers to activists willing to die for a radical variant of a mainstream faith.
But with the growing violence accompany Donald Trump’s failed reelection bid, the word came to be applied primarily to Republicans stoked to violent actions by the inflammatory rhetoric of incumbent who fanned the flames of militant Christian zealotry, racism, resentment and xenophobia.
As Darren M. Slade, president of the Global Center of Religious Research, noted soon after the 6 January failed Capitol Hill coup:
“The radicalization of the Trump supporters in Washington, D.C., and the people who continue to support them, follows the same psychological pattern of radicalization that we see among Islamic terrorists (or, “Islamists”). This extremism typically occurs in a four-stage process where 1) a particular group undergoes an identity crisis due to feeling disenfranchised and subjugated by outside influences; 2) the group then refuses to abandon or adjust their ingroup’s mytho-identity about their own superiority, which causes cognitive dissonance and paranoia; 3) to maintain their mytho-identity, the group identifies a scapegoat to blame for their perceived subjugation; and finally 4) the group is provoked or incited to violence in order to correct a perceived cosmological and political injustice.
None of this goes to say that neither the Islamists nor the Trumpistas lacked legitimate grievances.
The United States and its allies have for more than a century ruthlessly exploited the Islamic world in the sustained effort to control their vast oil reserves, and both major U.S. political parties are subservient to plutocratic corporate and financial sector interests, the source of financial polarization of America that has seen the lion’s share of economic growth in urban, Democratic precincts while suburban and rural Republican districts have seen significant declines over the past decade, exemplified in this graphic from the Brookings Institution:
What other factors predispose to radicalization?
But economic despair isn’t the sole reason a motley horde of ever-Trumpers invaded the national legislature during the certification of the electoral vote. That mob numbered in the thousands, not the millions who still believe the Democrats stole an election Trump won.
What else differentiates those willing to, say, livestream themselves committing violent criminal felonies on behalf of an overtly malignant lie- and hate-spewing narcissist?
Perhaps more of the reasons lie in the realm of mental predispositions. And, if so, what are they?
A team of researchers from one of the world’s most elite universities has ideas, and they’re backed by extensive research.
Psychological ‘signature’ for the extremist mind uncovered
A new study suggests that a particular mix of personality traits and types of unconscious cognition – the ways our brain takes in basic information – is a strong predictor for extremist views across a range of beliefs, including nationalism and religious fervour.
These mental characteristics include poorer working memory and slower “perceptual strategies” – the unconscious processing of changing stimuli, such as shape and colour – as well as tendencies towards impulsivity and sensation seeking.
This combination of cognitive and emotional attributes predicts the endorsement of violence in support of a person’s ideological “group”, according to findings published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
The study also maps the psychological signatures that underpin fierce political conservatism, as well as “dogmatism”: people who have a fixed worldview and are resistant to evidence.
Psychologists found that conservatism is linked to cognitive “caution”: slow-and-accurate unconscious decision-making, compared to the fast-and-imprecise “perceptual strategies” found in more liberal minds.
Brains of more dogmatic people are slower to process perceptual evidence, but they are more impulsive personality-wise. The mental signature for extremism across the board is a blend of conservative and dogmatic psychologies.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge say that, while still in early stages, this research could help to better identify and support people most vulnerable to radicalisation across the political and religious spectrum.
Approaches to radicalisation policy mainly rely on basic demographic information such as age, race and gender. By adding cognitive and personality assessments, the psychologists created a statistical model that is between four and fifteen times more powerful at predicting ideological worldviews than demographics alone.
“Many people will know those in their communities who have become radicalised or adopted increasingly extreme political views, whether on the left or right,” said Dr Leor Zmigrod, lead author from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology.
“We want to know why particular individuals are more susceptible.”
“By examining ‘hot’ emotional cognition alongside the ‘cold’ unconscious cognition of basic information processing we can see a psychological signature for those at risk of engaging with an ideology in an extreme way,” Zmigrod said.
“Subtle difficulties with complex mental processing may subconsciously push people towards extreme doctrines that provide clearer, more defined explanations of the world, making them susceptible to toxic forms of dogmatic and authoritarian ideologies.”
The research is published as part of a special issue of the Royal Society journal dedicated to “the political brain” compiled and co-edited by Zmigrod, who recently won the Women of the Future Science award.
The new study is the latest in a series by Zmigrod investigating the relationship between ideology and cognition. She has previously published findings on links between cognitive “inflexibility” and religious extremism, willingness to self-sacrifice for a cause, and a vote for Brexit.
A 2019 study by Zmigrod showed that this cognitive inflexibility is found in those with extreme attitudes on both the far right and far left of the political divide.
The latest research builds on work from Stanford University in which hundreds of study participants performed 37 different cognitive tasks and took 22 different personality surveys in 2016 and 2017.
Zmigrod and colleagues, including Cambridge psychologist Professor Trevor Robbins, conducted a series of follow-up tests in 2018 on 334 of the original participants, using a further 16 surveys to determine attitudes and strength of feeling towards various ideologies.
Study participants were all from the United States, 49.4% were female, and ages ranged from 22-63.
Part of the study used tests of the “executive functions” that help us to plan, organise and execute tasks e.g. restacking coloured disks to match guidelines, and keeping a series of categorised words in mind as new ones are added.
Additionally, results from various rapid decision-making tests – switching between visual stimuli based on evolving instructions, for example – were fed into computational models, allowing analyses of small differences in perceptual processing.
Researchers took the results of the in-depth, self-reported personality tests and boiled them down to 12 key factors ranging from goal-directedness and emotional control to financial risk-taking.
The examination of social and political attitudes took in a host of ideological positions including patriotism, religiosity and levels of authoritarianism on the left and right.
The Cambridge team used data modeling techniques such as Bayesian analyses to extract correlations. They then measured the extent to which blends of cognition and personality could help predict ideological attitudes.
From the report. Click on the image to enlarge
Political conservatism and nationalism was related to “caution” in unconscious decision-making, as well as “temporal discounting” – when rewards are seen to lose value if delayed – and slightly reduced strategic information processing in the cognitive domain.
Personality traits for conservatism and nationalism included greater goal-directedness, impulsivity and reward sensitivity, and reduced social risk-taking. Demographics alone had a predictive power of less than 8% for these ideologies, but adding the psychological signature boosted it to 32.5%.
Dogmatism was linked to reduced speed of perceptual “evidence accumulation”, and reduced social risk-taking and agreeableness but heightened impulsivity and ethical risk-taking in the personality domain. Religiosity was cognitively similar to conservatism, but with higher levels of agreeableness and “risk perception”.
Adding the psychological signatures to demographics increased the predictive power for dogmatism from 1.53% to 23.6%, and religiosity from 2.9% to 23.4%.
Across all ideologies investigated by the researchers, people who endorsed “extreme pro-group action”, including ideologically-motivated violence against others, had a surprisingly consistent psychological profile.
The extremist mind – a mixture of conservative and dogmatic psychological signatures – is cognitively cautious, slower at perceptual processing and has a weaker working memory. This is combined with impulsive personality traits that seek sensation and risky experiences.
Added Zmigrod: “There appear to be hidden similarities in the minds of those most willing to take extreme measures to support their ideological doctrines. Understanding this could help us to support those individuals vulnerable to extremism, and foster social understanding across ideological divides.”
Most of those arrested un the 6 January Capitol coup attempt were men and women whose desperation was, in part, fueld by personal fiancial crises, according to a study from the Washington Post.
Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.
The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public, The Post found. A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.
<snip>
The financial problems are revealing because they offer potential clues for understanding why so many Trump supporters — many with professional careers and few with violent criminal histories — were willing to participate in an attack egged on by the president’s rhetoric painting him and his supporters as undeserving victims.
<snip>
“I think what you’re finding is more than just economic insecurity but a deep-seated feeling of precarity about their personal situation,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a political science professor who helps run the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab at American University, reacting to The Post’s findings. “And that precarity — combined with a sense of betrayal or anger that someone is taking something away — mobilized a lot of people that day.”
The message for Democrats
Note the use of that word “precarity,” a term we’ve frequently used in describing the victims of 21st Century unbridled capitalism, a system in wealth is equated with virtue, and in which the poor and the marginalized are simply suckers, the dregs of of an all-against-all social Darwinian struggle.
In the 1930s, people in similar plights were the backbone of the Democratic Party, mobilized and energized by a vibrant left and the politics of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
And they are the same people abandoned by the Democrats starting with Jimmy Carter and even more by the neoiliberal regime of William Jefferson Clinton.
Abandoned by the Democrats as the party shifted to the Right, they were the natural prey for the rhetoric of Donald Trump, and so desperate they were willing to grasp at the thinnest of reeds with the hope of escaping a flood of debt and finding high ground.
By merging itself with the pastors of deeply reactionary but deeply media savvy megachurches, the Republicans made a pact with the devil, who arrived in the person of Donald Trump, a man who rejected the Sermon on the Mount and indulged in almost everything Christians once considered abominations.
And the greatest boost to his fame was The Apprentice, a show based on the rawest form of social Darwinism.
Trump promised change in jeremiads, a form familiar to any student of the Bible, and because most reactionary Christians fervently hope for the imminent onset of the End Times.
If the Democrats are ever to reach these people, the party must revive some of the fervor it possessed in the 1930s.
And his Christian followers would do well to remind themselves of a Bale verse, specifically Luke 16:13:
No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Watching the events of 6 January from start to finish and the current unfolding of the impeachment trial, it’s become clear that the American system is broken, leaving only the question of whether it can be repaired without the shedding of copious blood, or if the country is headed to a befuddled senescence that invariably accompanies the end of empires.
There can be no doubt in any reasonable person’s mind that Trump incited the violent insurrection, building on a foundation of five years of violent rhetoric and the repeated open declaration of his support for violent actions against those who challenge his lies and self-serving distortions.
With the Senate Republicans almost certain to block conviction, the specter of Donald Trump will endure long after his demise.
But how have we come to this pass? And what does the future hold?
Author, journalist, and Yale lecturer Jim Sleeper looks at the historical and behavioral roots of our dilemma in this powerful essay published in openDemocracy:
Trump’s impeachment trial already shows how far US democracy has been undermined
Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial is as confusing to many Americans as it is to others who are following it from abroad. The US Senate, which will try him, is not a criminal court, much less the International Court of Justice that some people wish it were on this occasion. Although Trump’s offenses are more egregious than those that were charged against him in the first, failed trial in 2020, he’s no more likely to be convicted now than before. That’s true even though the Senate chamber itself was part of the crime scene this year, as a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, and senators were among the targets and witnesses.
The present confusion has two fundamental causes, one constitutional and divisive by design, the other more opportunistic than malevolent.
The constitutional cause, which arises from the fact that the US is a federation of 50 semi-sovereign states, frequently leads to institutional obstruction in national politics. When a president is impeached, charges are brought by the House of Representatives, the lower house of Congress, but tried by the Senate, the upper body. Senators can remove the president for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but only if two-thirds, 67 of them, agree. But unlike jurors elsewhere, senators are elected to their positions, and each represents a particular state. They tend to be bound less tightly by their individual consciences, by the evidence, or by deliberation with other senators than by the voters who elevated them to their six-year terms in office.
Can beleaguered Americans rejuvenate their civil society to curb the poisons that Trump has carried into their politics?
Rational deliberation is skewed also by the fact that senators’ votes count equally, even though they can represent vastly different numbers of people. California, whose 40 million residents tend to elect relatively liberal Democratic representatives, sends two senators to Washington. So does Wyoming, whose population of less than 600,000 tends to be heavily right-wing and Republican. Whatever that imbalance does for state sovereignty, it produces a polity in which roughly 70% of US citizens, who live in states such as California, New York, Texas, and Florida, are represented by only 50% of senators.
The present Senate, controlled narrowly by Democrats, will need to find 17 Republicans to achieve the two-thirds vote to convict Trump. It won’t find them in today’s bitterly polarized polity, no matter what evidence and arguments Trump’s prosecutors present.
The consequences were anticipated by Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and a manager of Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2020, when he warned senators that if they don’t allow clear evidence and reason to determine what’s right, “it doesn’t matter how good the Constitution is. It doesn’t matter how brilliant the framers were. Doesn’t matter how good or bad our advocacy in this trial is … If the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost.”
If the Constitution facilitates deep division, so does an even more powerful sower of confusion. Trump’s characterization of impeachment proceedings as “political theater” mirrors the performance that he himself has staged ever since his defeat in the 3 November election. He staged it most fatefully on 6 January, at the rally that preceded the assault on the Capitol, showing his swooning, raging devotees a chillingly powerful film (assessed as proto-fascist propaganda by the Yale philosopher and scholar of fascism Jason Stanley) just before they began their assault, many of them videotaping it, unintentionally providing their and Trump’s prosecutors with useful documentation.
It’s strongly reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels’ tactic of accusing anti-fascists relentlessly of offenses that Nazis were committing far more often and more brutally. It also highlights the danger in seemingly apolitical, anodyne commercial forces – such as the appropriation of personal data by internet platforms and the rampant financialization of workplaces and homes – that turn active citizens into cogs and pawns.
A steady evisceration
On Trump’s ascent to the presidency in 2017, I summarized Edward Gibbon’s account of the analogous rise of ancient Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, who eviscerated what was left of the Roman Republic’s principles and liberties. In Gibbon’s account, Augustus knew that “the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom. A feeble senate and enervated people cheerfully acquiesced in the pleasing illusion.”
Augustus “reformed” the Senate by blackmailing and brutalizing some of its members: he expelled those “whose vices or whose obstinacy required a public example” and persuaded others “to prevent the shame of an expulsion by a voluntary retreat”. This terrified the rest so that they surrendered to the tyrant. Trump similarly terrifies senators, threatening to depose any who defy him, directing his mobs to replace them with more servile Republicans in the party’s primary elections.
“The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive,” Gibbon reflected. It was almost as if he anticipated a time when Americans, trapped like flies in a spider’s web of sticky-fingered but seductive surveillance machines, would ignore the insinuation of what he called “a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire”.
The more subtly impoverished and imprisoned people are by casino-like financing, predatory marketing, and media such as Rupert Murdoch’s that teach them to scapegoat others, the more they seek relief in pills, vials and empty spectacles that leave them too ill to bear their sicknesses or their cures, capable only of occasional eruptions and cries for a strongman. Trump is less the primary cause than the accelerant of a derangement of society that preceded and molded him.
“It is quite terrifying when rational exchange is totally blocked by steely-eyed, unlistening dogmatic assertion,” the president of Yale, Kingman Brewster Jr, told my class shortly before our graduation in 1969. He recalled that in 1937, before entering Yale, he’d traveled “through National Socialist Germany,” where he “was taken in hand by a stormtrooper deputized to be hospitable to unwary young foreign tourists. We sat at a café on Unter Den Linden. I, of course, began to argue about National Socialist policy … Suddenly I realized there could be no argument, not because of the censorship of fear but because of the dogmatic dictate which said … ‘it is so because the Fuhrer wills it so.’
“Dogmatism is the enemy of a moral society,” Brewster added, “for without the morality of reason it is hard to see how there can be any higher standard than passion and force. And if passion and authority respond to no checkrein of reason, then neither authority nor its victims can avoid a crude confrontation of naked power.”
Can beleaguered Americans rejuvenate their civil society and sustain new social movements to curb the poisons of malevolence and mindlessness that Trump has carried into their politics? That will require more than a trial or a pie in Murdoch’s face.
Two tech giants have captured most of the world’s advertising dollars, dealing a potential death blow to newspapers across the globe.
Here in the United States, the shift from print to online has crushed the nation’s already declining newspapers, already stricken by mergers, hedge fund takeovers, and a radical decline in working journalists.
A chart from the 20 January edition of Financial Times captures the dramatic extent of the shift:
Digital ad revenues favor the giants
Just how profitable are these new media money machines?
Some numbers from a 2 February report from Deadline:
Google/YouTube parent Alphabet saw revenue jump last quarter driven by YouTube and search as advertising recovered. The giant company’s total sales surged to $56.9 billion for the last three months of 2020 from $46 billion the year before, smashing expectations.
YouTube ad revenue jumped to $6.9 billion from $4.7 billion last year and $5 billion last quarter. Google search and other advertising revenue was $31.9 billion, up from $27.2 billion the year before.
<snip>
YouTube ad revenue jumped to $6.9 billion from $4.7 billion last year and $5 billion last quarter. Google search and other advertising revenue was $31.9 billion, up from $27.2 billion the year before.
The money comes from a de facto monopoly
In the case of Google, a small spend can capture as many eyes as a costly print ad, making the search engine an financially unbeatable medium for the businesses seeking consumers.
Publishers can’t live with Google and can’t live without it. Years ago, before the Google-Facebook lockdown on ad revenue was even on the horizon, publishers would argue that Google should pay them. Google would counter that it was driving traffic to news sites, thus increasing the value of advertising on those sites. There was some logic to Google’s argument, though somehow it never worked out in favor of the publishers.
The problem in recent years is that Google acquired a number of advertising businesses and now controls not just search but also the advertising associated with search. Through the use of an automated auction system, the price of digital ads is being driven ever lower, making it all but worthless. As Nicco Mele, a former deputy publisher of the Los Angeles Times, explained several years ago, a full-page weekday ad in the paper that cost $50,000 had given way to Google ads on its website that brought in less than $20 to reach the same number of readers.
“To a large extent, Facebook and Google are sucking up revenue that publishers of content should be receiving,” Mele told an audience at Harvard.
It’s the ever-shrinking value of digital advertising that’s being targeted in the West Virginia lawsuit, brought by HD Media. The small chain owns seven newspapers, most notably the Charleston Gazette-Mail and The Herald-Dispatch of Huntington. Paul Farrell, the lawyer who represents the papers, told the trade magazine Editor & Publisher that Google is leveraging its control of two entirely different businesses in order to monopolize ad revenues and squeeze out anyone else.
“They have completely monetized and commercialized their search engine, and what they’ve also done is create an advertising marketplace in which they represent and profit from the buyers and the sellers, while also owning the exchange,” Farrell was quoted as saying. “Google is the broker for the buyer and gets a commission. Google is the broker for the seller and gets a commission. Google owns, operates and sets the rules for the ad exchange. And they are also in the market themselves.”
The Google war Down Under
As we’ve noted on other occasions, Google is fighting a war with the Australian government, which has enacted a law that the the company and the major online advertising giant, Facebook, must share some of their wealth with the newspapers whose content they exploit.
According to The Australian, Google captures 94% searches in the country, followed by Bing with 3.7%, and DuckDuckGo and Yahoo! with 0.7% each. And with the government demanding the digital giants share their largess with the publications cited in their searches, there’s lots at stake.
Google’s dominance of digital advertising technology in Australia needs to be addressed, the country’s competition watchdog said, opening up another front in its battle with the US giant.
In some areas of the market, Google takes in 100% of the revenue or ads traded, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission. That degree of influence means Google “is likely to have the ability and the incentive” to use its own ad tech businesses and distort competition, the regulator said.
The interim report, part of the ACCC’s inquiry into digital advertising services, stokes tensions further between the company and Australian authorities. The Alphabet Inc threatened to disable its search engine in Australia if the government enacts legislation forcing the company to pay publishers for news.
“There is a real lack of competition, choice and transparency in this industry,” ACCC Chair Rod Sims said in the statement. The ACCC said it’s seeking feedback on a number of ways to promote competition in advertising technology, including rules to manage conflicts of interest and prevent so-called self-preferencing in the supply of ad tech services.
As consumers spend increasing amounts of time online, advertising expenditure in Australia has similarly shifted online. This has resulted in considerable growth in spending on digital advertising in Australia over the past decade.
Digital advertising expenditure reached $9.1billion in the 2019-20 financial year, despite the impact of COVID-19 on ad spend. In 2019, digital advertising comprised 53.2%of the $16.6 billion spent on advertising in Australia.
From their report, the dramatic capture of advertising by digital platforms Down Under:
Australia’s other target is Facebook, which, as the ACCC report concludes, has already captured the lion’s share of digital display ads:
Facebook is a significant supplier of owned-and-operated display advertising inventory and has a substantial share of the overall supply of display advertising in Australia. In 2019, Facebook had a 62%of display advertising revenue in Australia.
However, the owned-and-operated display advertising supplied by Facebook is only available to advertisers through its own ad tech services, which function as an end to end ad buying solution for advertisers looking to purchase Facebook’s ad inventory.
Another benefit for publishers
As both a newspaper reporter and an avid reader of the medium, I’ve notice through the years that many of the most important stories get relatively little readership. Despite those low numbers, the stories often exert outsize influence because of who those fewer readers are, people n positions of power exposed to an intelligent presentation of critical facts and ideas.
The new Australian rules offer a way to ensure that those stories won’t necessarily be driven into journalistic purgatory by sleaze, celebrity, and scandal.
The news code also states that digital platforms should not discriminate against media outlets or their content based on the negotiations. For example, they should not stop showing news stories from an outlet because talks are not progressing well.
It also requires digital platforms give registered news outlets 14 days’ notice before changing its “algorithm or internal practice” in a way that would “significantly” affect the way news content is shown. That is defined as a change that would result in a “20 per cent or greater change in referral traffic”.
Digital platforms are also required to develop ways to recognise original news content.
Google makes a proactive move in the U.K.
As a major player in the Commonwealth of Nations [known in earlier times as the British Commonwealth], the country’s formal head of state is the the British monarch.
In what might amount to a move to preempt Ausralian-style state-mandated payments, Google has signed deals directly with publishers.
Google is rolling out a plan to pay for news to the UK.
The web search giant, which has been under pressure to share digital ad revenue with web content providers that drive traffic to its services, said it has signed deals to pay licensing fees to 120 British publications, including The Financial Times and Reuters, through its Google News Showcase.
The program, which Google CEO Sundar Pichai in October said would help the company pay $1 billion to publishers over the next three years, has reportedly signed 450 news partners worldwide from Germany to Brazil.
It’s the first time Google will pay for news in Britain.
“Google News Showcase, our new product experience and licensing program for news, will begin rolling out with local, national and independent publishers in the UK,” said Ronan Harris, vice president and managing director at Google UK and Ireland, who unveiled the latest rollout in a blog post on Wednesday.
In the U.S., a newspaper chain goes to court
In the U.S., where no such agreements or laws exist, one newspaper chain is taking Google to court.
A US-based news organisation has filed a lawsuit against Facebook and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, alleging that the tech giants with their dominance over the digital advertising market adversely affected an important revenue source.
The lawsuit makes the argument the Google and Facebook represent a digital monopoly that should be broken up, The Verge reported on Monday.
“Google and Facebook have monopolised the digital advertising market thereby strangling a primary source of revenue for newspapers across the country,” according to the complaint filed by HD Media.
HD Media operates Charleston Gazette-Mail, The (Huntington) Herald-Dispatch and several other West Virginia newspapers.
The organisation filed a complaint in the United States District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia.
And a Canadian move takes an Aussie approach
And it’s not about the money.
From CDOTrends, a Canadian news portal for chief data officers:
In recent days, the same issue has emerged in Canada. Here, an umbrella group of media organizations is calling on their legislators and regulators to copy the Australian example.
Last week, News Media Canada started a campaign called Disappearing Headlines, leaving front pages of papers across the country to protest against tech giants not paying for news content.
An editorial in the Toronto Star said the news was “under attack” from Google and Facebook.
“Without reliable, trusted journalism that informs you and keeps our governments accountable, our democracy and the future of our children will suffer,” it read.
“It costs real money to report trusted, fact-based news. Unfortunately, global tech giants such as Google and Facebook refuse to pay a fair price for content created by Canadian news outlets. At the same time, these titans drain off more than 80% of all digital advertising revenue in Canada.”
While Europe is taking aim at profitable surveillance
Part of the reason Google, Facebook, YouTube, and all the other platforms are so profitable is their ability to target audiences with ads tuned to their personal preferences by stalking our every move on the web.
New rules under consideration by the European Union would bad targeted ads, as well as giving users much greater control over personal data in corporate hands..
The European Union’s lead data protection supervisor has recommended that a ban on targeted advertising based on tracking internet users’ digital activity be included in a major reform of digital services rules which aims to increase operators’ accountability, among other key goals.
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), Wojciech Wiewiorówski, made the call for a ban on surveillance-based targeted ads in reference to the Commission’s Digital Services Act (DSA) — following a request for consultation from EU lawmakers.
The DSA legislative proposal was introduced in December, alongside the Digital Markets Act (DMA) — kicking off the EU’s (often lengthy) co-legislative process, which involves debate and negotiations in the European Parliament and Council on amendments before any final text can be agreed for approval. This means battle lines are being drawn to try to influence the final shape of the biggest overhaul to pan-EU digital rules for decades — with everything to play for.
The intervention by Europe’s lead data protection supervisor calling for a ban on targeted ads is a powerful pre-emptive push against attempts to water down legislative protections for consumer interests.
We love data protections, but we’re really excited about used Big Tech bucks to fund legacy media, the source of so much content on their their platforms.
Following up on our previous post about India’s war on Twitter comes news that Twitter and other social media are also under fire in Mexico, where new legislation is taking shape that would limits the ability of social media to revoke user posts.
Mexico is also looking at ways to manage Twitter’s output. According to Reuters, a prominent senator from Mexico’s ruling party has used ‘freedom of expression’ as a reason for the proposed regulating of major social media networks, including Twitter and Facebook. The reform is apparently aimed at “establishing the grounds and general principles of the protection of freedom of expression in social networks”.
More accurately, the proposed amendment to the federal telecommunications law would grant Mexico’s telecoms regulator oversight in establishing a framework for the suspension and elimination of accounts on social networks.
Ricardo Monreal, the leader of president Lopez Obrador’s MORENA party in the upper house, proposed the legislation. Lopez Obrador has been critical of social media recently, so it will be interesting to see whether he supports this move.
The draft bill, which is 52 pages long and comprises 175 paragraphs, would grant Mexico’s telecoms regulator, the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT), considerable authority over a new framework for blocking and removing user accounts, as well as the right to decide whether a service provider can continue operating in the country.
Monreal has defended the proposed legislation as a means of restricting the power of private companies. He said that the state had to ensure that user rights were respected and that freedom of information and opinion were guaranteed. “A private company cannot curtail your freedom of speech in an unchallenged way,” he said. “I am not bowing down to capital; I want to regulate it.”
He rejected allegations of censorship, which have come from many sides, including from the Latin American Internet Association (ALAI), which warned that the reform would violate “the free and open nature of the internet” by creating a supervisory authority and treating a global phenomenon from a national standpoint. The ALAI also said that the law would violate the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
The Yucatan Times links the origin of the proposed legislation to Twitters ban on Donald Trump, and Mexico’s President was one of the last two world leaders to recognize Trump’s loss as well as a fierce critic of Twitter’s decision to block Trump from the platform:
The new law proposed Monday by López Obrador’s Morena party would open the companies to fines of up to $4.4 million for violating users’ right to free speech. The law would apply only to platforms that have over one million users in Mexico, apparently covering only sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok or YouTube.
The proposal would allow anyone whose account is blocked or canceled to appeal the decision. The appeals would go first to the company’s own internal committees, which would have 24 hours to affirm or revoke the suspension. Users could then appeal to telecom regulators, and if they don’t like that decision, they could then further appeal cancellations through Mexican courts.
“After the blocking in January of the personal accounts of then President of the United States, Donald Trump, we had already warned on the risk of the emergence of disproportionate bills to regulate information on these platforms,” Jorge Canahuati, president of the InterAmerican Press Association. said in a statement.
The head of the group’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Carlos Jornet, wrote that “a bad law can generate a boomerang effect, deconstructing decades in which freedom of expression was consolidated in Mexico.”
As COVID burns its way through the world, there’s more bad news: Food prices are soaring
From the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, two charts the trends.
First up, trends across food categories compared with years past:
Nest, a look at specific categories and their recent price trends:
More from the FAO report [emphasis added], with the greatest rise in the price of cereals [and they’re not what you might think]:
The FAO Food Price Index (FFPI) averaged 113.3 points in January 2021, 4.7 points (4.3 percent) higher than in December 2020, not only marking the eighth month of consecutive rise but also registering its highest monthly average since July 2014. The latest increase reflected strong gains in the sugar, cereals and vegetable oils sub-indices, while meat and dairy values were also up but to a lesser extent.
The FAO Cereal Price Index averaged 124.2 points in January, marking a sharp increase of 8.3 points (7.1 percent) from December and the seventh consecutive monthly rise. International maize prices increased significantly, surging by 11.2 percent in January, up 42.3 percent above their January 2020 level, reflecting increasingly tight global supply with lower-than-earlier-expected production and stock estimates in the United States of America and substantial purchases by China. Concerns over dryness in South America and a temporary suspension of maize export registrations in Argentina added support, pushing international maize prices up to their highest level since mid-2013. Among other coarse grains, barley prices also increased in January, by 6.9 percent, supported by firmer demand and price rises for maize, wheat and soybeans, while sorghum prices remained stable. Wheat prices also registered strong increases in January, up by 6.8 percent, influenced by the strength in maize prices as well as strong global demand and expectations of reduced sales by the Russian Federation from March 2021, when the wheat export duty will double. As for rice, robust demand from Asian and African buyers, combined with tight supplies in Thailand and Viet Nam, continued to underpin export prices in January.
The spike in cereal prices is especially troublesome, given that cereals are the basis of diets of most of the world’s poorest.
Since a massive protests against new agricultural “reform” laws began 9 August, moire than 100,000 farmers have left their lands to converge on the national capital in what is perhaps India’s longest continuous protest.
The Hindu nationalist regime of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has been following the usual neoliberal tactics, handing over more and more of India’s economy to the ravages of multinational corporations.
Modi’s particularly agitated over Tweets supporting the farmers, and has taken action.
First up, threats to Twitter
Just as in the U.S., social media have been a major driver of protests, and the Indian government has struck back at Twitter, reports BuzzFeed:
India’s government has threatened to punish employees at Twitter with fines and jail terms of up to seven years for restoring hundreds of accounts it has ordered the company to block. Most accounts were critical of the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.
On Monday, Twitter complied with the government’s order and prevented people in India from viewing more than 250 accounts belonging to activists, political commentators, a movie star, and the Caravan, an investigative news magazine. Most accounts had criticized Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, and his government. But the company restored the accounts approximately six hours later after a Twitter lawyer met with IT ministry officials, and argued that the tweets and accounts constituted free speech and were newsworthy.
India’s government disagreed. On Tuesday, the IT ministry sent a notice to Twitter, ordering it to block the accounts once again. It also threatened people who work at Twitter’s Indian arm with legal consequences, which could include a fine or a jail term of up to seven years.
“This is really problematic,” said Nikhil Pahwa, editor of MediaNama, a technology policy website, and an internet activist. “I don’t see why the government of India should wade into this territory of trying to censor tweets when they have much bigger problems to deal with.”
A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment.
Celebrities add to Modi’s headache; action follows
The digital has deepened of late, with some pointed comments from international celebrities.
It took just one tweet from pop star Rihanna to anger the Indian government and supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party. “Why aren’t we talking about this?!” the singer wrote, with a link to a news story on the massive farmer protests that have gripped India for more than two months.
Now, senior Indian government ministers, celebrities and even the foreign ministry are urging people to come together and denounce outsiders who they say are trying to destabilize the country.
“It is unfortunate to see vested interest groups trying to enforce their agenda on these protests, and derail them,” India’s foreign ministry said in a rare statement Wednesday, without naming Rihanna and others who followed her example.
But it was another celebrity, a young Swede, who really got Modi’s blood boiling.
The creators of an Indian farmers’ protest “toolkit” shared by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg will be investigated by police, authorities said, claiming it was designed to “encourage disaffection and ill-will” against the government.
<snip>
Police in the capital New Delhi, where a farmers’ tractor rally last week turned into a deadly rampage where one person died and hundreds of police officers were injured, said they had filed a complaint against the toolkit’s makers.
The complaint does not name Thunberg.
“Preliminary enquiry has revealed that the ‘toolkit’ in question appears to have been created by a pro-Khalistani Organisation ‘Poetic Justice Foundation’,” police said in a statement, citing Sikh separatists who want to create a homeland of Khalistan in India’s northern Punjab state.
Many of the protesting farmers hail from Punjab.
Police said the toolkit creators appeared to “create disharmony among various social, religious and cultural groups and encourage disaffection and ill-will against the (government) of India”.
Police in New Delhi on Thursday registered a case against the creators of a “toolkit” that was previously shared online by climate activist Greta Thunberg. The Swedish environmental crusader responded to the backlash by the police saying that despite the “hate”, she still supports the widespread farmers’ protest in India. She tweeted:
“No amount of hate, threats or violations of human rights will ever change that.”
The “toolkit” document shared by Thunberg encourages people to sign a petition which condemns the “state violence” against the protesters. It also urges the Indian government to listen to the protestors rather than mock them. The toolkit also mentions different hashtags to use on Twitter to support the farmers’ protests. Additionally, it asks for people worldwide to organize protests near Indian embassies or local government offices on the 13th and 14th February.
,snip>
Indian news channels initially reported that a police case has been filed against Greta Thunberg. News channel reported that the police complaint included charges of sedition, an overseas “conspiracy” and an attempt to “promote enmity between groups.” However, the police was later quoted as saying that its case does not name the climate activist.
Why farmers are striking, and why it matters
Bhavani Shankar, Professorial Research Fellow in Food Systems and Health at University of Sheffield examines the roots of the massive protest in an article for The Conversation, an open source academic journal written in everyday English:
Why Indian farmers are so angry about the Modi government’s agricultural reforms
India’s farmers have been protesting since the autumn, with a growing intensity that culminated in a violent breaching of barriers in the Red Fort in Delhi during India’s Republic Day celebrations on January 26.
The protests were spurred by the passing of a set of agricultural reform bills in parliament in September 2020 that aimed to fundamentally transform the way in which farm produce is marketed in the country. India’s farming population of more than 100 million is comprised largely of small farmers who fear that the reforms will add considerable uncertainty to their already meagre livelihoods.
India has historically had a strongly regulated marketing system for agricultural produce, originally devised to enable farmers to sell to the market but at the same time to protect the small, often poor farmers from the vagaries of the open market.
Such regulation is a state-level responsibility in India’s federal governance structure. Accordingly, each state devised a system wherein the initial purchase and sale of agricultural products had to be conducted at state-regulated wholesale markets called mandis. These mandis had licensed middlemen and traders who could be regulated by the government to ensure that farmers were not exploited.
The broader legislative framework also acted to limit private sector storage of key food products (to prevent hoarding) and discourage direct contracting between private agribusiness and farmers. There were important variations in regulations across states, and legislation has changed over time, but the broad intention was to protect farmers by limiting the power of agribusiness.
However, the regulatory system did not always work as intended in practice, and deficiencies became apparent over time. Despite the idea of monitoring, traders and middlemen in wholesale markets were found to often collude to the disadvantage of the farmer. Pricing practices were opaque and farmers too often received a very low share of the price.
Variations in regulations across states also hindered interstate trade opportunities. As the Indian economy was liberalised, private enterprise and agribusiness was growing, but found itself shackled by the regulatory framework. Many commentators agreed that reform was needed.
The three bills
A set of three complementary bills was rushed through parliament by the Modi government in September 2020. The first seeks to erode the role of the regulated mandis in marketing farm produce by allowing parallel trade, including electronic trading, outside the mandi system within and across states.
The second loosens the restrictions on private sector storage and stocking of produce, allowing restrictions only in case of strong price spikes when hoarding becomes a strong concern.
The third bill sets up a framework for direct formal contracting between farmers and the agribusinesses that buy from them.
Taken together, these bills are a radical departure from the tightly regulated system for marketing agricultural produce that existed before. The bills would curb the regulatory power of states, allowing the central government to set the agenda more firmly.
The reforms provide a significant fillip to the operation of private enterprise, especially large agribusiness in India. The expectation of the government is that the strengthening of these parallel market channels will create competition for the farmers’ produce from both within and across states, leading to improved remuneration for farmers.
What are the farmers unhappy about?
Although the reforms are ostensibly about empowering farmers, there is deep concern that they will largely boost private agribusiness to the detriment of the livelihoods of small farmers. The bills propose new market channels that are largely unregulated, potentially leaving farmers at the mercy of powerful private sector players.
A related concern is that the emergence of these parallel channels will undermine the longstanding regulated mandi system that farmers understand and are used to operating in, despite its numerous flaws.
Contract farming, which would become more commonplace if the bills become law, theoretically offers farmers the option of cutting out middlemen and their fees to deal directly with a downstream buyer. But experience from India and around the world shows that large buyers often prefer to deal with larger farmers located in well-developed regions who can supply assured large volumes with minimal friction. Thus small farmers from less developed areas with poor infrastructure may find themselves frozen out of such channels.
These serious concerns have led protesting farmers to demand not just alterations to the new bills, but their complete repeal. The direction of travel of the bills – towards private sector entry and government withdrawal – has also left farmers worrying about the future of other government policies that have long supported their livelihoods, such as Minimum Support Prices (MSPs).
MSPs are minimum prices announced periodically by the government for certain essential farm products, and used when the government buys these crops from the farmers for distribution to poor consumers. The MSPs help provide a measure of stability and certainty to prices received by farmers, and the protesting farmers want MSPs to be legally guaranteed in the future. This and a set of other demands, ranging from the cancellation of penalties for crop residue burning that contributes to air pollution, to enhancements to energy subsidies, have now also been added to the farmers’ core demand to cancel reforms.
From the Atlantic, a look at the backgrounds of those arrested in the Capitol insurrection comparing their demographics with those of far-Right figures arrested for previous incidents, first in terms of membership in known radical groups:
And second, contrasting the age profiles of arrestees:
From the report:
In recent weeks, our team of more than 20 researchers has been reviewing court documents and media coverage for information on the demographics, socioeconomic traits, and militant-group affiliations (if any) of everyone arrested by the FBI, Capitol Police, and Washington, D.C., police for offenses related to the January 6 insurrection. As of late last week, 235 people fell into that category, and the number is expected to grow.
Of these suspects, 193 have been charged with being inside the Capitol building or with breaking through barriers to enter the Capitol grounds. We focused our research on these 193. We compared our findings on these suspected insurrectionists with demographic data that we had previously compiled on the 108 individuals arrested by the FBI and local law-enforcement agencies around the country for violence related to right-wing political causes from 2015 to 2020. We used the same methodology to analyze both groups: Our team reviewed all court documents related to each arrest—which include criminal complaints, statement of facts, and affidavits—and conducted searches of media coverage of each arrestee.
eats shoots 'n leaves 
