Joe Nocera speaks the truth

The Limits of School Reform

I find myself haunted by a 13-year-old boy named Saquan Townsend. It’s been more than two weeks since he was featured in The New York Times Magazine, yet I can’t get him out of my mind.
The article, by Jonathan Mahler, was about the heroic efforts of Ramón González, the principal of M.S. 223, a public middle school in the South Bronx, to make his school a place where his young charges can get a decent education and thus, perhaps, a better life. Surprisingly, though, González is not aligned with the public school reform movement, even though one of the movement’s leading lights, Joel Klein, was until fairly recently his boss as the head of the New York City school system.
Instead, González comes across as a skeptic, wary of the enthusiasm for, as the article puts it, “all of the educational experimentation” that took place on Klein’s watch. At its core, the reform movement believes that great teachers and improved teaching methods are all that’s required to improve student performance, so that’s all the reformers focus on. But it takes a lot more than that. Which is where Saquan comes in. His part of the story represents difficult truths that the reform movement has yet to face squarely — and needs to.
Saquan lands at M.S. 223 because his family has been placed in a nearby homeless shelter. (His mother fled Brooklyn out of fear that another son was in danger of being killed.) At first, he is so disruptive that a teacher, Emily Dodd, thinks he might have a mental disability. But working with him one on one, Dodd discovers that Saquan is, to the contrary, unusually intelligent — “brilliant” even.
From that point on, Dodd does everything a school reformer could hope for. She sends him text messages in the mornings, urging him to come to school. She gives him special help. She encourages him at every turn. For awhile, it seems to take.
Meanwhile, other forces are pushing him in another direction. His mother, who works nights and barely has time to see her son, comes across as indifferent to his schooling. Though she manages to move the family back to Brooklyn, the move means that Saquan has an hour-and-a-half commute to M.S. 223. As his grades and attendance slip, Dodd offers to tutor him. To no avail: He finally decides it isn’t worth the effort, and transfers to a school in Brooklyn.
The point is obvious, or at least it should be: Good teaching alone can’t overcome the many obstacles Saquan faces when he is not in school. Nor is he unusual. Mahler recounts how M.S. 223 gives away goodie bags to lure parents to parent association meetings, yet barely a dozen show up. He reports that during the summer, some students fall back a full year in reading comprehension — because they don’t read at home.
Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute lists dozens of reasons why this is so, from the more frequent illness and stress poor students suffer, to the fact that they don’t hear the large vocabularies that middle-class children hear at home.
Yet the reformers act as if a student’s home life is irrelevant. “There is no question that family engagement can matter,” said Klein when I spoke to him. “But they seem to be saying that poverty is destiny, so let’s go home. We don’t yet know how much education can overcome poverty,” he insisted — notwithstanding the voluminous studies that have been done on the subject. “To let us off the hook prematurely seems, to me, to play into the hands of the other side.”
That last sentence strikes me as the key to the reformers’ resistance: To admit the importance of a student’s background, they fear, is to give ammo to the enemy — which to them are their social-scientist critics and the teachers’ unions. But that shouldn’t be the case. Making schools better is always a goal worth striving for, whether it means improving pedagogy itself or being able to fire bad teachers more easily. Without question, school reform has already achieved some real, though moderate, progress.
What needs to be acknowledged, however, is that school reform won’t fix everything. Though some poor students will succeed, others will fail. Demonizing teachers for the failures of poor students, and pretending that reforming the schools is all that is needed, as the reformers tend to do, is both misguided and counterproductive.
Over the long term, fixing our schools is going to involve a lot more than, well, just fixing our schools. In the short term, however, the reform movement could use something else: a dose of humility about what it can accomplish — and what it can’t.

Climate change and energy update

Why The Decline In World Oil Supply Will Be Faster Than Anyone Expects

The man who invented peak oil, M. King Hubbert, got a few things wrong. Indeed, he was too optimistic.
The Oil Drum's Gail Tverberg pointed out some problems with the Hubbert Curve in a presentation this week at the 3rd Biophysical Economics Conference.
Hubbert expected nuclear power to take over before oil reached peak. He also expected more development of wind, water and solar power. Finally, he didn't count on the rise of China and India.
All of which goes to say that the downside of the Hubbert curve will be faster and more brutal than expected.

10 Reasons to Still Be Pissed Off About the BP Disaster 

Wind power is growing rapidly

BP Sues Transocean for $40 Billion Over Oil Spill

Congress Fails To Pass A Single Oil Spill Law

Soon after his son Gordon died in the Deepwater Horizon explosion last April, Keith Jones made eight trips to Washington D.C. to push for stronger safety measures in offshore oil drilling and to increase the compensation paid to victims of the tragic accident. He met with President Obama, who apologized for the families' "unimaginable grief" and cradled Gordon's baby boy Maxwell in his arms.
When Jones arrived on Capitol Hill, he says he was mobbed by Senators and Representatives eager to express their condolences and to promise that they would swiftly pass legislation to make sure such a tragedy never happens again.
He is still waiting.
In the year since the worst environmental disaster in the nation's history, Congress hasn't adopted any major laws on oil and gas drilling -- despite introducing more than 150 bills to improve the safety and oversight of offshore drilling and holding more than 60 hearings to discuss the spill's causes and consequences with regulators, oil company officials, grieving relatives and Gulf-area fishermen.

The 15 Most Expensive Places To Buy Gas In The World

More Bad News For Natural Gas: An Accident In Pennsylvania Is Pouring Toxic Fracking Fluid Into A River

Economics and finance links

Ratings Downgrades Do NOT Equal Higher Interest Rates

Big US Companies: Hire Abroad, Fire At Home

More college graduates are delinquent on repaying student loans

For the dollar, a 'crisis' is relative

The World in 2030: Super-cycle or Grey Age?

That Home You Bought In 1979 Has Lost 8.5% Of Its Inflation-Adjusted Value

Home Builders Still See No Sign Of A Recovery

Rein In Rampant Speculation Or Face The Black Silver Swan 

And Now The Jumbo Mortgage Loan Squeeze Will Drive Home Prices Even Lower

Now, THIS Is What Two Decades Of Stagnation Look Like

America Is Not Even Close To Being Broke!

Our "Let's Pretend" Economy

It's Time To Invest In Africa, Starting With These Three Countries

The Great Decisions And Lucky Breaks That Made Microsoft The Most Powerful Company In The World

Sewers, Swaps and Bachus

Environment update

Arctic ozone levels dropped by as much as half in the past year

The Sad Phenomenon Of Birds Feeding On Plastic They Mistake For Food

The First Foods That Will Disappear In A Global Water Crisis

G.O.P. Push in States to Deregulate Environment

In the past month, the nation’s focus has been on the budget battle in Washington, where Republicans in Congress aligned with the Tea Party have fought hard for rollbacks to the Environmental Protection Agency, clean air and water regulations, renewable energy and other conservation programs. 

But similar efforts to make historically large cuts to environmental programs are also in play at the state level as legislatures and governors take aim at conservation and regulations they see as too burdensome to business interests.

Let Us Eat Fish

The overall record of American fisheries management since the mid-1990s is one of improvement, not of decline. Perhaps the most spectacular recovery is that of bottom fish in New England, especially haddock and redfish; their abundance has grown sixfold from 1994 to 2007. Few if any fish species in the United States are now being harvested at too high a rate, and only 24 percent remain below their desired abundance. 

Much of the success is a result of the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which was signed into law 35 years ago this week. It banned foreign fishing within 200 miles of the United States shoreline and established a system of management councils to regulate federal fisheries. In the past 15 years, those councils, along with federal and state agencies, nonprofit organizations and commercial and sport fishing groups, have helped assure the sustainability of the nation’s fishing stocks.

Chart: The Precipitous Decline of Gulf Fishing

What’s Worse Than an Oil Spill?

Healthcare update

Is Sugar Toxic?

Sugar: The toxicity question and what to do about it

Obama administration eases pain of Medicare cuts

Millions of seniors in popular private insurance plans offered through Medicare will be getting a reprieve from some of the most controversial cuts in President Barack Obama's health care law.
In a policy shift critics see as political, the Health and Human Services department has decided to award quality bonuses to hundreds of Medicare Advantage plans rated merely average.
The $6.7 billion infusion could head off service cuts that would have been a headache for Obama and Democrats in next year's elections for the White House and Congress. More than half the roughly 11 million Medicare Advantage enrollees are in plans rated average.
The insurance industry says the bonuses will turn what would have averaged out as a net loss for the plans in 2012 into a slight increase.
In a recent letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, two prominent GOP lawmakers questioned what they termed the administration's "newfound support" for Medicare Advantage.
The shift "may represent a thinly veiled use of taxpayer dollars for political purposes," wrote Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan. Camp chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees Medicare. Hatch is his counterpart as ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.

Hospitals Shouldn’t Make You Sicker

70% of Tea Partiers Don't Want to Cut Medicare Either

Obama Panel to Curb Medicare Finds Foes in Both Parties

Patients Are Not Consumers

About that advisory board: We have to do something about health care costs, which means that we have to find a way to start saying no. In particular, given continuing medical innovation, we can’t maintain a system in which Medicare essentially pays for anything a doctor recommends. And that’s especially true when that blank-check approach is combined with a system that gives doctors and hospitals — who aren’t saints — a strong financial incentive to engage in excessive care.
Hence the advisory board, whose creation was mandated by last year’s health reform. The board, composed of health-care experts, would be given a target rate of growth in Medicare spending. To keep spending at or below this target, the board would submit “fast-track” recommendations for cost control that would go into effect automatically unless overruled by Congress.
Before you start yelling about “rationing” and “death panels,” bear in mind that we’re not talking about limits on what health care you’re allowed to buy with your own (or your insurance company’s) money. We’re talking only about what will be paid for with taxpayers’ money. And the last time I looked at it, the Declaration of Independence didn’t declare that we had the right to life, liberty, and the all-expenses-paid pursuit of happiness.
And the point is that choices must be made; one way or another, government spending on health care must be limited.

Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types, Scientists Say 

The discovery of enterotypes follows on years of work mapping the diversity of microbes in the human body — the human microbiome, as it is known. The difficulty of the task has been staggering. Each person shelters about 100 trillion microbes.
(For comparison, the human body is made up of only around 10 trillion cells.) But scientists cannot rear a vast majority of these bacteria in their labs to identify them and learn their characteristics.

A cadaver gets under her skin

Making a better artificial intestine

New study adds to concerns about animal-to-human resistance to antibiotics

Can antibiotic-resistant bacteria jump from animals to humans and cause disease?
Yes. The first documented instance of antibiotic-resistant staph transmission from animals to humans was in the Netherlands in 2003: A child had a MRSA infection and the only risk factor was that she lived on a pig farm. The bacterial strain she contracted matched that of the pigs, and her family also were found to be carriers, although they weren't sick.
"Now this strain makes up 30% of community-acquired disease in the Netherlands," Price says. "It's really emerging quickly."
In the U.S., a 2009 study published in the journal PLoS ONE found MRSA in 49% of 299 pigs tested at two different pig farms, as well as in nine of 20 tested farmworkers there. "We think pigs are reservoirs and transmit to humans," says study lead author Tara Smith, an infectious disease researcher at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. "But we don't know that for sure."

Family Physician Can’t Give Away Solo Practice

The 15 Highest Grossing Prescription Drugs In America

How Microbes Defend and Define Us

Random Links

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Why You Should Care About the iPhone Location-Tracking Issue

Apple Has Brainwashed The Whole Country -- How Else To Explain The Lack Of Outrage Over Apple's Secret Location Tracking

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How big an explosion could you realistically survive?

Politics and government links

Jeff Gundlach's Complete Guide To The Inevitable American Default

Here's Niall Ferguson's Complete And Definitive Guide To The Sovereign Debt Crisis

Niall Ferguson's New Presentation On THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

The government is not a household, and shouldn’t be run like one

17 Countries Facing An Economy Crushing Demographic Crisis

It Is PREPOSTEROUS For The Republicans To Pretend They're Not Going To Raise The Debt Ceiling

A Rational Budget for the Pentagon

Poll shows Americans oppose entitlement cuts to deal with debt problem

U.K. experience with ‘negative’ rating may be instructive for U.S.

Disasters: Gov. Rick Perry does a Texas two-step

Our fiscal problems did not begin in 2010

The Other Huge Lie About US Sovereign Debt

Americans Are Still In Deep Denial About The Deficit

The EU's Dirty Secret: Germany Is The Biggest Welfare Recipient There Is

Much corporate political spending stays hidden. A Times review finds only a few of America's major energy, healthcare and financial companies fully disclose their political spending.

Immigration update

Plunge in border crossings leaves agents fighting boredom: Arrests of illegal crossers along the Southwest border dropped more than two-thirds from 2000 to 2010, from 1.6 million to 448,000.

"When the traffic stops … of course it's going to be difficult for the agents to stay interested," said Supervisory Agent Ken Quillin, from the agency's Yuma, Ariz., sector. "I understand guys have a tough time staying awake.... they didn't join the border patrol to sit on an X," Quillin added, using the slang term for line watch duty.
To stay alert, agents are encouraged to walk around or take coffee breaks. Some agents play video games on their mobile phones or read books. There are agents known as "felony sleepers" who intend to slumber — bringing pillows or parking in remote areas — but most dozers are victims of monotony who nod off despite their best efforts to stay awake.
In the agency's San Diego sector, where apprehensions are at their lowest since the early 1970s, a supervisor last year was caught dozing in his parked vehicle by a television news crew. In the agency's busiest region near Tucson, agents have been left glassy-eyed amid a steep drop in activity. "When you go from 700,000 arrests in a sector to 100,000 … of course boredom is going to settle in," said Brandon Judd, president of the local border patrol agents' union, using approximate apprehension figures.
...
Perhaps no area has more action-starved agents than the Yuma sector, a vast expanse of desert and agricultural fields straddling California and Arizona that shares a 126-mile border with Mexico. In 2005, it was the border's most trampled region, a place where immigrant rushes, called banzai runs, sent hundreds of people into backyards and lettuce fields, and teams of drug smugglers shot across the Colorado River atop sandbag bridges.
Outnumbered agents resorted to spinning doughnuts in their vehicles, trying to kick up mini-sandstorms to disorient the hordes. Agents had to prioritize pursuits, focusing on the groups closing in on front lawns. "We were overrun," said agent Jeff Bourne, 34, but "your brain was always working. We were always doing something."
Then double and triple fencing went up. Stadium lighting was installed. Every arrested immigrant, instead of being returned to Mexico, was jailed. Outside town, workers laid steel barriers on previously wide-open borders to block drug-smuggling vehicles from driving through.
From 2005 to 2010, apprehensions of immigrants dropped 95%, from 138,460 to 7,116. Vehicle drive-throughs fell from 2,700 to 21 during the same period. Farmers are now able to plant crops in once-trampled fields. And residents don't find immigrants hiding under their cars anymore.
More than 900 agents, triple the number from 2005, are now stationed in what is one of the slowest sectors along the entire border. On a recent day, Bourne and his partner, Fernando Salazar, rode their patrol bikes through Friendship Park, where immigrants ran through Little League baseball games until the border fence was extended through left field.

Ueli Steck speed solo Eiger record

Gay marriage's diamond anniversary

After the Netherlands acted, civilization as we know it didn't end.

Ten years ago this month, when the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, most Dutch people were in favor of the law, but a vocal minority insisted that gay marriage would mean the end of Western civilization. It took a political slugfest to get the law passed.
I was a member of parliament at the time and the initial sponsor of the same-sex legislation. The Netherlands had introduced gay civil unions in 1998; I regarded them as a step forward but still insufficient. Why should heterosexuals be able to fence off a part of civil law — marriage — and defend it as exclusively theirs? This "separate but equal" status reminded me of apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow in the United States. When two people decide to share their responsibilities and commit themselves to each other by entering civil marriage, their sexual orientation shouldn't matter to the government.

Economics and finance links

February Had the Most New Job Openings Since 2004

The Drought Is Over (at Least for C.E.O.’s)

Josh Birnbaum Made $10 Million At Goldman And Left Because It Wasn't Enough

JPMorgan Did A Cost-Benefit To See If It Was Worth Keeping A Ponzi Scheme As A Client

The Most Impoverished Countries In The Developed World

Larry Summers Identifies The Catch-22 Of Financial Regulation

QUESTION OF THE DAY: Why Does The Bond Market Not Care At All About The Debt?

Food Inflation: Still Wildly Overhyped

Two Simple Charts That Say Everything About Our Debt Situation

The Australian Housing Bubble Has Popped And Will Have Repercussions Across The Economy

The Definitive Guide To The Australian Housing Bubble And Coming Financial Crisis

Here's Richard Koo's New Blistering Presentation On Why QE2 Has Been A Disaster

The Fed Is Playing The Most Dangerous Game On Earth

Inflation, The Education Bubble And The Odds Of A Disastrous Retirement

S&P: There's Still A Huge Risk Of More Bailouts, More Money For Fannie And Freddie, And A Collapsing Student Loan Market

Here's Richard Koo's New Blistering Presentation On Why QE2 Has Been A Disaster

Simon Johnson Explains "What The Banks Did To Us" And Why "Seriously -- Goldman Sachs Can't Fail"

Letting the Banks Off the Hook

Healthcare update

Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall. 

Hamilton’s most recent work has examined how rapidly inactivity can cause harm. In studies of rats who were forced to be inactive, for example, he discovered that the leg muscles responsible for standing almost immediately lost more than 75 percent of their ability to remove harmful lipo-proteins from the blood. To show that the ill effects of sitting could have a rapid onset in humans too, Hamilton recruited 14 young, fit and thin volunteers and recorded a 40 percent reduction in insulin’s ability to uptake glucose in the subjects — after 24 hours of being sedentary. 

Over a lifetime, the unhealthful effects of sitting add up. Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40 percent higher. Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives.

More About the Budget and Health

In 2009 Dr. Dean Ornish testified before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Here’s the crux of what he argued: “Last year, $2.1 trillion were spent in this country on medical care, or 16.5% of the gross national product, and 95 cents of every dollar were spent to treat disease after it had already occurred.  Heart disease, diabetes, prostate/breast cancer, and obesity account for 75% of these health care costs, and yet these are largely preventable and even reversible by changing diet and lifestyle.” (Here’s the full text of Orish’s testimony.)

25 Facts That Show The U.S. Health Care Industry Is One Giant Money Making Scam

• The FDA reported 1,742 prescription drug recalls in 2009, which was a gigantic increase from 426 drug recalls in 2008
• There were more than two dozen pharmaceutical companies that made over a billion dollars in profits in 2008
• Between 2000 and 2006, wages in the United States increased by 3.8%, but health care premiums increased by 87%
• Over the last decade, the number of Americans without health insurance has risen from about 38 million to about 52 million
• The top executives at the five largest for-profit health insurance companies in the United States combined to receive nearly $200 million in total compensation in 2009

The case for rationing healthcare: Americans will have to decide what we can and cannot afford.

We want our doctors to go all-out for our loved ones and ourselves. But as voters and consumers, we send a different message. We pick politicians who promise to cut taxes, and we demand low-cost insurance. We're telling government and the healthcare industry to hold the line on healthcare costs, even if it means sacrificing clinical benefits. And we put doctors in the middle of this contradiction. 

In recent weeks, private insurers have revealed plans for double-digit rate hikes. Our medical bills are already close to a fifth of our national income, on track to reach one-third within 25 years. Soaring Medicare and Medicaid costs are the main reason for nightmarish federal deficit projections over the long term. Yet as Republicans and Democrats battle over the federal budget to the point of threatening a government shutdown, serious healthcare spending cuts remain unspeakable.

Can Medicare be saved? Does it require radical surgery, as proposed by GOP Rep. Paul Ryan, or will a less drastic remedy work?

Miami couple pleads guilty to $200M Medicare fraud

You Get the Judges You Pay For

Link

Rigorous recusal rules are an important step, but merely disqualifying a judge on occasion is insufficient. The most obvious solution is to limit spending in judicial races. States with elected judges should restrict how much can be contributed to a candidate for judicial office or even spent to get someone elected.
That solution has long been assumed to be off the table, though, because the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that while the government can limit the amount that a person gives directly to a candidate, it cannot restrict how much a person spends on his or her own to get the candidate elected. Nevertheless, large expenditures to get a candidate elected to the bench undermine both the appearance and reality of impartial justice.
The Supreme Court’s 2009 decision properly focused on the $3 million in campaign expenditures, not the $1,000 that was directly contributed. In the legislative and executive offices, it is accepted that special-interest lobbying and campaign spending can influence votes; but that is anathema to our most basic notions of fair judging.
Thus, the Supreme Court should hold that the compelling interest in ensuring impartial judges is sufficient to permit restrictions on campaign spending that would be unconstitutional for nonjudicial elections.
States should restrict contributions and expenditures in judicial races to preserve impartiality. Such restrictions are the only way to balance the right to spend to get candidates elected, and the due process right to fair trials.

California update

Redistricting poses challenge to candidates pondering a 2012 run. Politicians preparing to run by meeting voters and raising funds could find themselves campaigning in a district with far different boundaries after a citizens panel redraws Assembly, state Senate and congressional maps.

Cutting public pensions now won't save California

Here are the dollar data on the state's pension costs: For the next fiscal year, pension payments out of the $85-billion general fund are slated to total $3.7 billion. Of that, $2.4 billion is earmarked for state employees (CalPERS). The other $1.3 billion is for teachers (CalSTRS). An additional $1.8-billion payment to CalPERS will come from special funds that don't figure in the deficit. 

... 

Public pensions in California — state and especially local — not only are unsustainable fiscally, they're doomed politically. There's a lot of pension envy by private sector workers who have been stripped of the retirement benefits they once had banked on. Why, they ask, should they contribute tax money for a level of pension generosity denied them? 

When tax talks between Brown and Senate Republicans collapsed, the governor quickly unveiled his own pension ideas. Too bad for Republicans. If they had negotiated a deal, the credit for any pension reform could have been all theirs. 

Brown didn't go far enough for Republicans and reformers. He went too far for unions. Actually, he probably went about the right distance, considering the stormy political climate. There's still much, after all, to be negotiated. 

The governor's proposals would apply to state and local employees alike. It's a long list, but three of the more significant proposals would: 

-- Cap pensions at $106,000 annually. The cap would rise for retirees not eligible for Social Security. 

"We think that's a very reasonable pension, a very adequate amount for people to live a fine life on," says Brown's veteran labor director, Marty Morgenstern. "Beyond that, we think it's excessive." 

Tell that to some retired city managers, police chiefs and university administrators, speaking of excessive. 

-- Prohibit pension "spiking" by basing benefits only on base wages — no overtime or unused vacation — during the three highest consecutive earning years. State pensions now are pegged to a three-year average, but many local governments calculate retirements on the single highest year. 

-- Offer employees a "hybrid" system of reduced pension pay combined with a 401(k)-type plan that they could cart with them to a private-sector job. 

Republicans insist on making a hybrid system mandatory. Brown's proposal "assumes public employees will volunteer for lower benefits, which ignores reality," asserts Senate Republican Leader Bob Dutton of Rancho Cucamonga. 

"We're far from locked in concrete," Morgenstern says. 

The biggest criticism of Brown's plan is that the key changes would affect only new employees.

Morgenstern replies that altering prospective benefits for current workers is legally questionable. "We could say we're going to do that and win some political points and wind up in courts forever," he says. "It's a long shot." 

But it's a shot Brown should take. There would be big budget benefits in the future, even if absolutely none right now.

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Tuesday requiring the state to obtain a third of its electricity from renewable sources such as wind, solar and geothermal power by 2020, among the most ambitious such laws in the nation.

California Supreme Court Slaps Down Pension Reform

No good reform deed will go unpunished

Congratulations Los Angeles Times reporters

China update

1:834: That's the ratio of jobs to jobs seekers in China's civil service.

When A Planned Economy Becomes Unplannable

A Stunning Case Of Deadly Industrial Sabotage In China

Tainted Chinese products are nothing new. 

Back in 2008 there was a gigantic tainted milk scandal that left multiple infants dead. In that case, companies were adding contaminants to their milk to artificially boost their nutritiousness. 

Now there's a new tainted milk scandal, that's left at least three infants dead. The difference? The milk was purposely poisoned by a rival dairy, and now a couple has been arrested. According to LA Times, the milk was poisoned with nitrate. At least two farms have been shut down. 

Each one of these stories only underlines that China is in a stage of development similar to the US right after the 1900, during a period of great growth, but before basic institutions like the FDA were set up. The recent 5-year plan from Beijing -- to grow a bit slower, and also smarter -- fits in nicely with stories like these.

China Hikes Rates Again, As Inflation Blows Away Expectations

Why The Consensus May Be Wrong About Chinese Rebalancing And US Interest Rates

Hugh Hendry's Awesome New Presentation On Why He's Shorting China

Inflation in China Poses Big Threat to Global Trade

For example, housing prices continue to climb even though Beijing has long promised to curb the property market and to spend billions of dollars over the next few years on affordable housing.
The average apartment in central Shanghai now costs more than $500,000. Even in second-tier cities like Chengdu, in central China, the price of a typical home costs about 25 times the average annual income of residents.
Analysts say too much of the country’s growth continues to be tied to inflationary spending on real estate development and government investment in roads, railways and other multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects.
In the first quarter of 2011, fixed asset investment — a broad measure of building activity — jumped 25 percent from the period a year earlier, and real estate investment soared 37 percent, the government said on Friday.
Some of the inflationary factors, like global commodity and food prices, may be beyond Beijing’s ability to influence. Gasoline prices have also jumped sharply, in line with global oil prices. As the world’s largest car market, China’s demand for fuel is soaring, and gasoline prices are close to $4.50 a gallon, up from $3.82 a gallon in late 2009.
Rising food prices, meanwhile, are showing up in various ways — including higher prices at fast-food chains, like Master Kong, which in January raised the price of its popular instant noodles by about 10 percent.
China’s current supercharged boom began in early 2009, during the global financial crisis, when Beijing moved aggressively to increase growth with a $586 billion stimulus package and record lending by state-run banks.
The loose monetary policy, and big investments in local government projects, did revive economic growth. But even at the time there were already concerns about soaring property prices, undisciplined bank lending and the huge debts being amassed by local governments.
The fear among some experts is that the bubble will eventually burst, leading to a wave of nonperforming loans at the big state-owned Chinese banks, which have been the main financiers of the nation’s phenomenal growth dating to the economic reforms in the 1980s.
Some economists have begun to argue that high inflation may be around for some time. Here again, the tug of war is evident.
To encourage the growth of a consumer market that will help meet the Chinese people’s demand to share the nation’s wealth, Beijing and many municipal governments have required employers to raise wages.
The government has raised minimum wages in the hope of reducing the big income gap between the rich and the poor, and the urban and rural. But higher wages drive up the costs of production, leading to higher prices. Some experts say rising wages may be an unavoidable inflationary force for years to come.
“China is moving into a new era, a new norm,” said Dong Tao, an economist at Credit Suisse in Hong Kong. “In the previous decade, inflation was about 1.8 percent a year; in the next decade, it may be closer to 5 percent.”

The Fundamental Difference Between The Soviet Union And China

Climate change and energy update

The Truth, Still Inconvenient

Saudi net-exports of crude oil have entered terminal decline

A Record Number Of Land Oil Rigs Are Active In The U.S. Right Now

U.S. Nuclear Regulator Lets Industry Help With the Fine Print

In the fall of 2001, inspectors with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were so concerned about possible corrosion at Ohio’s Davis Besse Nuclear Power Station that they prepared an emergency order to shut it down for inspection. But, according to a report from the NRC inspector general, senior officials at the agency held off – in part because they did not want to hurt the plant’s bottom line.

When workers finally checked the reactor in February of 2002, they made an astonishing finding: Corrosive fluid from overhead pipes had eaten a football-sized hole in the reactor vessel’s steel side. The only thing preventing a leak of radioactive coolant was a pencil-thin layer of stainless steel.

Grim Photos Show What A Level 7 Nuclear Disaster Did To Chernobyl

14 Nuclear Disaster Sites That Are Still Unsafe For Humans

How The Oil Is Shipped

On climate change, the GOP is lost in never-never land

Automakers promote hydrogen cars; Obama administration remains skeptical

Two New Reports: Natural Gas Not as Clean as We Thought

A Few Problems With The 'Game-Changing' Shale Gas Breakthrough

POTENTIAL BLACK SWAN: $10 OIL

Portland Is The Only City In America That Is Ready For The Energy Crisis

Chemicals Were Injected Into Wells, Report Says

The Mountain

The Mountain from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

Japan earthquake and nuclear crisis

Take A 360 Degree Virtual Tour Of Japanese Tsunami Wreckage

11,500 Tons Of Radioactive Water Are About To Be Released Into The Pacific Ocean At Fukushima

VIDEO: Radioactive Cows And Empty Streets In The Fukushima Quarantine Zone

In Japan, a homecoming of desperation in the nuclear zone

You Can't Appreciate The Terror Of The Tsunami Until You See This Video

Taxes

The 3 Biggest Tax Breaks — and What They Cost Us

If there is one big-ticket budget item on which Democrats and Republicans should be able to find common ground, it’s tax breaks. Each of the various bipartisan deficit panels has called for a big reduction, saying such breaks — exemptions, deductions, credits and other loopholes — are inefficient and unaffordable. All told, they cost the federal government about $1.2 trillion in lost revenue last year. As it happens, the budget deficit was $1.3 trillion.

For richest, federal taxes have gone down; for some in U.S., they’re nonexistent

The Internal Revenue Service tracks the tax returns with the 400 highest adjusted gross incomes each year. The average income on those returns in 2007, the latest year for IRS data, was nearly $345 million. Their average federal income tax rate was 17 percent, down from 26 percent in 1992.
Over the same period, the average federal income tax rate for all taxpayers declined to 9.3 percent from 9.9 percent.
The top income tax rate is 35 percent, so how can people who make so much pay so much less than that in taxes? The nation’s tax laws are packed with breaks for people at every income level. There are breaks for having children, paying a mortgage, going to college and even for paying other taxes.
The top rate on capital gains is only 15 percent.
There are so many breaks that 45 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax for 2010, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.
“It’s the fact that we are using the tax code both to collect revenue, which is its primary purpose, and to deliver these spending benefits that we run into the situation where so many people are paying no taxes,” said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the center.
The sheer number of credits, deductions and exemptions has Democrats and Republicans calling for tax laws to be overhauled. House Republicans want to eliminate breaks to pay for lower overall rates, reducing the top tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent. Republicans oppose raising taxes, but they argue that a more efficient tax code would increase economic activity, generating additional tax revenue.
President Obama said last week that he wants to do away with tax breaks to lower the rates and to reduce government borrowing. Obama’s proposal would result in $1 trillion in tax increases over the next 12 years.
The proposals from the GOP and Obama included few details, putting off hard choices about which tax breaks to eliminate.
In all, the tax code is filled with $1.1 trillion in credits, deductions and exemptions, an average of about $8,000 per taxpayer, according to an analysis by the independent national taxpayer advocate within the IRS.
More than half of the nation’s tax revenue came from the top 10 percent of earners in 2007. More than 44 percent came from the top 5 percent. Still, the wealthy have access to much more lucrative tax breaks than people with lower incomes.

Your 2010 Federal Taxpayer Receipt 

Another Receipt

20 Tax Facts That Will Make Your Head Explode

The Top 10 Tax Breaks -- And How They Help The Wealthy The Most

America’s elites have a duty to the rest of us

Link

The American ruling class is failing us — and itself.
At other moments in our history, the informal networks of the wealthy and powerful who often wield at least as much influence as our elected politicians accepted that their good fortune imposed an obligation: to reform and thus preserve the system that allowed them to do so well. They advocated social decency out of self-interest (reasonably fair societies are more stable) but also from an old-fashioned sense of civic duty. “Noblesse oblige” sounds bad until it doesn’t exist anymore.
An enlightened ruling class understands that it can get richer and its riches will be more secure if prosperity is broadly shared, if government is investing in productive projects that lift the whole society and if social mobility allows some circulation of the elites. A ruling class closed to new talent doesn’t remain a ruling class for long.
But a funny thing happened to the American ruling class: It stopped being concerned with the health of society as a whole and became almost entirely obsessed with money.
Oh yes, there are bighearted rich people when it comes to private charity. Heck, David Koch, the now famous libertarian-conservative donor, has been extremely generous to the arts, notably to New York’s Lincoln Center.
Yet when it comes to governing, the ruling class now devotes itself in large part to utterly self-involved lobbying. Its main passion has been to slash taxation on the wealthy, particularly on the financial class that has gained the most over the past 20 years. By winning much lower tax rates on capital gains and dividends, it’s done a heck of a job.
Listen to David Cay Johnston, the author of “Free Lunch” and a columnist for Tax Notes. “The effective rate for the top 400 taxpayers has gone from 30 cents on the dollar in 1993 to 22 cents at the end of the Clinton years to 16.6 cents under Bush,” he said in a telephone interview. “So their effective rate has gone down more than 40 percent.”
He added: “The overarching drive right now is to push the burden of government, of taxes, down the income ladder.”
And you wonder where the deficit came from.
If the ruling class were as worried about the deficit as it claims to be, it would accept that the wealthiest people in society have a duty to pony up more for the very government whose police power and military protect them, their property and their wealth.
The influence of the ruling class comes from its position in the economy and its ability to pay for the politicians’ campaigns. There are not a lot of working-class people at those fundraisers President Obama has been attending lately. And I’d underscore that I am not using the term to argue for a Marxist economy. We need the market. We need incentives. We don’t need our current levels of inequality.
Those at the top of the heap are falling far short of the standards set by American ruling classes of the past. As John Judis, a senior editor at the New Republic, put it in his indispensable 2000 book, “The Paradox of American Democracy,” the American establishment has at crucial moments had “an understanding that individual happiness is inextricably linked to social well-being.” What’s most striking now, by contrast, is “the irresponsibility of the nation’s elites.”
Those elites will have no moral standing to argue for higher taxes on middle-income people or cuts in government programs until they acknowledge how much wealthier they have become than the rest of us and how much pressure they have brought over the years to cut their own taxes. Resolving the deficit problem requires the very rich to recognize their obligation to contribute more to a government that, measured against other wealthy nations, is neither investing enough in the future nor doing a very good job of improving the lives and opportunities of the less affluent.
“A blind and ignorant resistance to every effort for the reform of abuses and for the readjustment of society to modern industrial conditions represents not true conservatism, but an incitement to the wildest radicalism.” With those words in 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt showed he understood what a responsible ruling class needed to do. Where are those who would now take up his banner?

Politics and government links

The Facts About American 'Decline'

9 Things The Rich Don't Want You To Know About Taxes

Chart: Who's Bearing the Tax Burden?

Top Marginal Income, Corporate Tax Rates: 1916-2010 

Rainfall, Human Capital, and Democracy

The Biggest Entitlement Spenders In The World

Dear Congress: Government is Broken. These Guys Can Fix It.

Revolver: Why do some of the most capable public servants in America, people like economist Peter Orszag, keep circling back from Washington to Wall Street? One guess.

Feds Made Over $125 Billion In Improper Payments Last Year

The 12 Biggest Sovereign Wealth Funds In The World

The Most Heavily Taxed Countries In The World

America’s military spending in graph

China update

China surprises with small trade deficit in first quarter

Economists React: China’s Trade Deficit

Shenzhen Expels 80,000 Mentally Ill and Other ‘Threats’

China Watch: Dueling Rights Reports, Soros Warns on Inflation

Chinese Government Bans Television Time Travel

China's Scary Housing Bubble: What will happen if China's overheated real estate market goes bust?

Fast Growth and Inflation Threaten to Overheat Chinese Economy

This is the predicament China finds itself in today: Fast growth has fired up the country’s economic engines, but it has also led to stubbornly high inflation, which threatens to overheat the economy and undermine the long-running boom that the country has experienced. 

The latest evidence of this came Friday when China said its economy had grown 9.7 percent in the first quarter of this year, certainly the strongest performance among the world’s biggest economies. But the government also said that in March the consumer price index had risen 5.4 percent from the level of a year earlier, the sharpest increase in 32 months. 

Analysts were not surprised by the figures, but some experts say they believe they may understate the real rate of growth and inflationary pressure. Bank lending, for instance, picked up strongly last month, and food, energy and raw material prices have risen sharply this year. In March alone, the government said, food prices rose 11.7 percent.

For Many Chinese Men, No Deed Means No Dates 

But by the exacting standards of single Chinese women, it seems, Mr. Wang lacks that bankable attribute known as real property. Given that even a cramped, two-bedroom apartment on the dusty fringe of the capital sells for about $150,000, Mr. Wang’s $900-a-month salary means he may forever be condemned to the ranks of the renting. 

Last year, he said, this deficiency prompted a high-end dating agency to reject his application. In recent months, half a dozen women have turned down a second meeting after learning that he had no means to buy a home. 

“Sometimes I wonder if I will ever find a wife,” said Mr. Wang, who lives with his parents, retired factory workers who remind him of his single status with nagging regularity. “I feel like a loser." 

There have been many undesirable repercussions of China’s unrelenting real estate boom, which has driven prices up by 140 percent nationwide since 2007, and by as much as 800 percent in Beijing over the past eight years. Working-class buyers have been frozen out of the market while an estimated 65 million apartments across the country bought as speculative investments sit empty.

Has the Communist Party Abandoned Reform?

China's Central Bank Plans New Tightening Round After Inflation Blows Away Expectations

What China Will Really Do With Its $3 Trillion In Reserves

China’s foreign-exchange reserves exceeded $3 trillion for the first time, highlighting global imbalances that Group of 20 finance chiefs aim to tackle at meetings in Washington. 

China’s currency holdings, the world’s biggest, swelled by $197 billion in the first quarter to $3.04 trillion, the central bank said yesterday. New loans were a more-than-estimated 679.4 billion yuan ($104 billion) in March, it said. 

Premier Wen Jiabao’s policy of controlling the currency, along with trade surpluses and flows of capital into the fastest-growing major economy, have boosted the reserves by $1 trillion in two years.

A Deep Dive Into China's Red-Hot Inflation Numbers

Fitch Sends A Warning About China, But Everyone Is Ignoring It

The Biggest Lie About The US Debt

Amid "Out Of Control" Wage Inflation, Apple's Big Chinese Manufacturer To Make Huge Investment In Brazil

China's hard landing

Healthcare update

Medical errors may be 10 times more common than previous estimates

Should there be a 'fat tax'?

Giving Doctors Orders

A couple years later, I read reports about how neckties and lab coats worn by doctors and clinical workers were suspected as carriers of deadly germs. Infections kill 100,000 patients in hospitals and other clinics in the U.S. every year.

A 2004 study of New York City doctors and clinicians discovered that their ties were contagious with at least one type of infectious microbe. Four years ago, the British National health system initiated a “bare below the elbow” dress code barring ties, lab coats, jewelry on the hands and wrists, and long fingernails. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that health care workers, even doctors and nurses, have a “poor” record of obeying hand-washing rules. 

A report in the April issue of Health Affairs indicated that one out of every three people suffer a mistake during a hospital stay.

How to Save a Trillion Dollars

For the first time in history, lifestyle diseases like diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and others kill more people than communicable ones. Treating these diseases — and futile attempts to “cure” them — costs a fortune, more than one-seventh of our GDP. 

But they’re preventable, and you prevent them the same way you cause them: lifestyle. A sane diet, along with exercise, meditation and intangibles like love prevent and even reverse disease. A sane diet alone would save us hundreds of billions of dollars and maybe more. 

This isn’t just me talking. In a recent issue of the magazine Circulation, the American Heart Association editorial board stated flatly that costs in the U.S. from cardiovascular disease — the leading cause of death here and in much of the rest of the world — will triple by 2030, to more than $800 billion annually. Throw in about $276 billion of what they call “real indirect costs,” like productivity, and you have over a trillion. Enough over, in fact, to make $38 billion in budget cuts seem like a rounding error.

What Planned Parenthood actually does

Most Americans have government-subsidized health care

Atul Gawande’s “Better.”

We’re having the wrong argument on health-care costs

Medicare controls costs better than private insurance in this country, and every other developed country controls costs using government-managed systems and most spend around half what we do, so I’d actually say the government comes out pretty well on this measure. But that’s not really the point I want to make in this post. 

Rather, I think a lot of very smart people — Tyler Cowen, Andrew Sullivan, Megan McArdle, etc. — are making a category error. They’re looking at Ryan’s Medicare reforms and seeing an ideological “bureaucrats vs. consumers” contrast from Democratic plans. There is some of that, though it’s mostly on Ryan’s side: Democrats try out the consumer-driven exchange model for most non-seniors and a mostly bureaucratic model for controlling costs in Medicare and Medicaid, while Ryan only uses a consumer-driven exchange model in his quest for savings. 

But from the perspective of health-care cost control, what matters is the sectoral contrast. The basic theory of Ryan’s plan is that you can control costs by focusing on the insurance system. Seniors become consumers and their decision-making holds down costs. The Affordable Care Act has a lot of the same insurance-system reforms that Ryan does, but the basic theory of that plan is you control costs through the care delivery system. It’s about knowing what treatments work and what treatments don’t, paying for value rather than quantity, cutting down on unnecessary readmissions and errors, doing more to manage chronic diseases, etc.

... 

I’m a big fan of exchanges. I’d use them systemwide if I could, as the Swiss and the Dutch do. But health-care costs are not all about, or even mostly about, insurance. Indeed, so much as I like exchanges, it’s very possible that you need the government putting pressure on the delivery system to control costs. What we tend to see with private insurers is that they just don’t have enough leverage over hospitals or doctors to get major changes done. Medicare does have that leverage, which is why it makes sense to use Medicare as a tool to reform the health-care system, as opposed to just the health-insurance system.

CHS admitting patients unnecessarily to pad bottom line

Hospitals shrinking as largest part of health spending pie

Health Insurance Exchanges: The Most Important, Undernoticed Part of Health Reform

Politics and government links

John Phillips: Why Hillary Clinton must run in 2012

What crisis? Inadequacies with the nation’s infrastructure have been oversold

Do-Nothing Congress as a Cure

The Do-Nothing Plan: How Congress can balance the budget in eight years by literally doing nothing. This is not a joke.

Lobbyists Won Key Concessions in Budget Deal

The crimes of the century (so far)

In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures

But several years after the financial crisis, which was caused in large part by reckless lending and excessive risk taking by major financial institutions, no senior executives have been charged or imprisoned, and a collective government effort has not emerged. This stands in stark contrast to the failure of many savings and loan institutions in the late 1980s. In the wake of that debacle, special government task forces referred 1,100 cases to prosecutors, resulting in more than 800 bank officials going to jail. Among the best-known: Charles H. Keating Jr., of Lincoln Savings and Loan in Arizona, and David Paul, of Centrust Bank in Florida. 

Former prosecutors, lawyers, bankers and mortgage employees say that investigators and regulators ignored past lessons about how to crack financial fraud. 

As the crisis was starting to deepen in the spring of 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation scaled back a plan to assign more field agents to investigate mortgage fraud. That summer, the Justice Department also rejected calls to create a task force devoted to mortgage-related investigations, leaving these complex cases understaffed and poorly funded, and only much later established a more general financial crimes task force. 

Leading up to the financial crisis, many officials said in interviews, regulators failed in their crucial duty to compile the information that traditionally has helped build criminal cases. In effect, the same dynamic that helped enable the crisis — weak regulation — also made it harder to pursue fraud in its aftermath.

Timelapse Video of San Francisco-to-Paris Flight Captures Aurora Borealis

SF to Paris in Two Minutes from Beep Show on Vimeo.

How to Fire Up U.S. Innovation

Link

What conditions give rise to innovation and facilitate its transforming effects? Contributing factors include the freedom to pursue ideas, the freedom to fail, and the freedom of access to information in the broadest sense. Occasional business failure in the U.S. is a mark of experience, while in other cultures it may be a permanent scar. Information sharing is generally considered a powerful means towards progress, hence the strong influence that the American university system has had on the economy. 

... 

Despite our well-developed college and post-college system, America simply is not producing enough of our own innovators, and the cause is twofold—a deteriorating K-12 education system and a national culture that does not emphasize the importance of education and the value of engineering and science. The American public focuses more on sports and entertainment figures and less on the scientists and engineers whose innovations make our lives easier, safer, healthier and more productive. 

Since 1990, U.S. scientists and engineers have invented the lithium-ion battery that powers all manner of devices from tablet computers to electric cars, developed GPS for civilian use to keep us on the right path to our destinations, and created both remote-controlled military aircraft (drones) to keep our soldiers safe overseas and robots that keep our floors clean at home. But how many among us know the names of the creators of the lithium-ion battery at Bell Laboratories, or the founder of iRobot Corp. and inventor of the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner now sold around the world?

The graph all budget discussions should start with

Link

Budgeting for Opportunity

Link

When politicians are fortunate, they get to choose the goals their budgets set. In periods of recession, they can budget for growth. Facing huge deficits, they can budget for austerity. In times of plenty, they can budget for upward mobility and equality of opportunity. 

Our leaders are not so lucky: they somehow need to budget for all three goals at once. 

... 

Conservatives have spent a lot of time talking about American exceptionalism of late. But not every threat to the American dream comes from runaway spending. The United States was increasingly stratified, and the middle class increasingly squeezed, well before Barack Obama won the presidency. Against this backdrop, conservatives will deserve to win the looming fiscal battle only if they find a way to budget not only for austerity, but for opportunity as well. 

The President Is Missing

Link

What’s going on here? Despite the ferocious opposition he has faced since the day he took office, Mr. Obama is clearly still clinging to his vision of himself as a figure who can transcend America’s partisan differences. And his political strategists seem to believe that he can win re-election by positioning himself as being conciliatory and reasonable, by always being willing to compromise. 

But if you ask me, I’d say that the nation wants — and more important, the nation needs — a president who believes in something, and is willing to take a stand. And that’s not what we’re seeing. 

Stat of the day

Federal Debt Grew by $54.1 Billion During Fight to Cut $38.5 Billion

Five excellent op-eds and articles about the future of the USA

The Geezers’ Crusade

America's grim budget outlook

Social Security, Medicare have to be pared down

How much do we spend on children and the elderly?

Losing Our Way

Excellent columns on Congress by Nicolas Kristof

Our Cowardly Congress

This isn’t government we’re watching; this is junior high. 

It’s unclear where the adults are, but they don’t seem to be in Washington. Beyond the malice of the threat to shut down the federal government, averted only at the last minute on Friday night, it’s painful how vapid the discourse is and how incompetent and cowardly our leaders have proved to be. A quick guide: 

• Democrats excoriated Republicans for threatening to shut down the government, but this mess is a consequence of the Democrats’ own failure to ensure a full year’s funding last year when they controlled both houses of Congress. 

That’s when the budget should have been passed, before the fiscal year began on Oct. 1. But the Democrats were terror-stricken at the thought of approving spending bills that Republicans would criticize. So in gross dereliction of duty, the Democrats punted. 

• Republicans say they’re trying to curb government spending and rescue the economy — but they threatened to shut down the government, even though that would have been both expensive and damaging to our economy.

Why Pay Congress?

If we careen over a cliff on Friday and the American government shuts down, hard-working federal workers will stop getting paychecks, but the members of Congress responsible for the shutdown are expected to be paid as usual. 

That’s partly because Congressional pay is not subject to the regular appropriations process, and partly because of Constitutional concerns. The Senate passed a bill proposed by Barbara Boxer of California that would suspend Congressional paychecks in any government shutdown, but the Republican-controlled House has blocked it. House Republicans approved a similar pay suspension, but it was embedded in legislation that has zero chance of becoming law.

Food

What's in the popcorn? Cinemas would rather not have to say

Food: Six Things to Feel Good About

Americans Eat So Much They'd Have To Run An Hour Each Day To Burn It Off

Bank Of America Picks 10 Stocks That Will Boom In The Food Price Spike

Don't Touch Anything But My Junk: If movie theaters can make you eat their junk food, shouldn't they tell you what's in it?

Random Links

The 11 Most Desired Jobs Of Young Professionals

Swedish Couple Experiences Natural Disaster-Plagued Honeymoon From Hell

15 Facts About The Cigarette Industry That Will Blow Your Mind

Thomas Edison's 31 Greatest Inventions

The Unknown Geniuses Behind 10 Of The Most Useful Inventions Ever

15 Life-Changing Inventions That Were Created By Mistake

The World Could End Like This: Stunning Video Simulation Of An Asteroid Hitting Earth

The Prosecution Rests, but I Can’t Related: Cruel but Not Unusual: Clarence Thomas writes one of the meanest Supreme Court decisions ever

The 18 Smartest People In The World

The 24 Coolest, Most Cleverly Placed Ads Ever

Check Out These 10 Crazy Phone Concepts From Nokia

Economics and finance links

Federal Accounting Board Finally Calls BS On The States -- Demands Better Pension Disclosure

The 15 Countries That Are Buried Under The Most Debt

10 Companies That Will Save The American Economy

One Chart That Explains Why The American Housing Bubble Wasn't As Bad As You Think

How A Major U.S. Bank Laundered Billions In Mexican Drug Money

The authorities uncovered billions of dollars in wire transfers, traveller's cheques and cash shipments through Mexican exchanges into Wachovia accounts. Wachovia was put under immediate investigation for failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering programme. Of special significance was that the period concerned began in 2004, which coincided with the first escalation of violence along the US-Mexico border that ignited the current drugs war. 

Criminal proceedings were brought against Wachovia, though not against any individual, but the case never came to court. In March 2010, Wachovia settled the biggest action brought under the US bank secrecy act, through the US district court in Miami. Now that the year's "deferred prosecution" has expired, the bank is in effect in the clear. It paid federal authorities $110m in forfeiture, for allowing transactions later proved to be connected to drug smuggling, and incurred a $50m fine for failing to monitor cash used to ship 22 tons of cocaine. 

As The Guardian points out, this case is likely just the tip of a massive iceberg, illustrating the key role that the international banking sector plays in the multi-billion drug trafficking industry.

Deutsche Bank: "It's Not Just Food And Energy Inflation Anymore"

CEOs are upbeat -- and that means more jobs for the rest of us

What Is The Size Of The Average Bank Robbery?

The Complete History Of How The Economy Imploded, Improved, Faded And Then Finally Got Better

The 7 Headwinds Facing The Market

In Portugal Crisis, Worries on Europe’s ‘Debt Trap’

Pressure builds on Fed over inflation

The 20 Banks That Could Bring The Entire Financial System To Its Knees

15 Gigantic Corporations That Are Still Growing Like Mad