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Bonus Friday Cat Blogging – 10 April 2015

by GracieRBBN Posted on April 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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Quick health update: the stem cell collection went swimmingly this week. We now have loads and loads of fresh stem cells frozen and waiting for me when I go back for the final stage of chemotherapy. I got home yesterday, and at the moment I’m still fighting off some residual drowsiness from a week full of fairly powerful painkillers, but I’ve stopped taking them now and should be fine in a day or two. I hope.

The cats are fitting in nicely at my sister’s house. Last night they woke her up at 3 am to play, which is certainly a good sign. We have two pictures of the furballs this week. On the top is Hilbert, caught in the act of knocking over (1) Big Ben and (2) the Eiffel Tower from the top of a bookcase. On the bottom, both Hopper and Hilbert are staring intently at the front door even though nothing is there. But you never know. There might be something there any second. Best to keep ones eyes peeled, no?

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Bonus Friday Cat Blogging – 10 April 2015

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Cancer Experts Are Finally Feeling Optimistic. Here’s Why.

by BrendanPickel Posted on March 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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In Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies, a three-part documentary executive-produced by Ken Burns and set to air on PBS March 30-April 1, director Barak Goodman delivers a sweeping (and fascinating, and tear-jerking, and horrifying) history of the science, politics, and culture of the disease we fear most.

The film, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, escorts viewers from our dismal past into a more-hopeful modern era in which genomics and big data promise actual breakthroughs after decades of crushing defeats and blunt-force treatments ranging from poisoning (chemo) to radical mastectomy.

Goodman, whose previous work has earned him two Emmys and a Oscar nomination—that was in 2001, for Scottsboro: An American Tragedy—introduces us to contemporary doctors and patients coping with the vast gaps that remain in our understanding of the disease, as well as to the historical figures who had the most profound impact—for good and for ill—on the lives of the stricken. Watch the trailer first, and then we’ll chat with the director.

Mother Jones: What drew you to this history? Have you been personally affected?

Barak Goodman: My beloved grandmother died of colon cancer when I was 20. I remember it being very traumatic. It’s one of the most avoidable kinds, but they caught it late and she died very suddenly. So that was lurking in the background, but the proximate cause was I got a phone call from WETA, expressing their interest in making the book into a film. The book is really a wonderful piece of work. It opened my eyes to a lot of things.

Children receiving blood tranfusions. Getty Images

MJ: How would you rate our success in the so-called war on cancer?

BG: Certainly it’s been a failure if you hold it up to its own expectations. At the time they declared it, in 1971, the goal was to solve the problem within a decade or less. Mortality rates now are down somewhat, but not strikingly so. But in terms of our understanding of what cancer is and what the cancer cell is, it’s been a huge success. It’s striking how little we knew then. In the film, people say it was compared with going to the moon, only that was much easier because we knew how to get to the moon, we knew where the moon was. In this case we knew next to nothing. A lot of progress has been made, and we’re really poised to translate that knowledge into therapies, so knowledgeable people are quite optimistic.

A cancer surgeon operates at John Hopkins University hospital in 1904. Associated Press

MJ: And yet cancer has always proved unexpectedly elusive.

BG: Unbelievable! It is the most devilishly complicated, resilient disease—set of diseases—that is possible to imagine. First, it’s harnessing the very forces that give us life—it’s life unleashed, in a way. To defeat it without killing you is very difficult. The second thing is, it changes so fast, mutation upon mutation, and it becomes not a single target but 100. Figuring out how to combat it with any one drug or any set of drugs, for most kinds of cancer, is almost impossible.

MJ: Chemotherapy works well for childhood leukemia, but not much else. It strikes me as incredibly primitive. You’re literally poisoning people hoping it’ll kill the cancer before it kills the patient. Some of these drugs can actually cause cancer! Do we know how many people die from their treatments versus how many are saved by them?

BG: That’s very hard to pin down, because it varies from cancer to cancer enormously, and the stage of cancer. But you’re right. Chemotherapy is an incredibly blunt instrument—and yet it still is the predominant therapy. There’s been lots of talk about therapies that are more specifically aimed at what’s wrong with a cancer cell, but really only a fairly small number of those targeted therapies have been developed. As you point out, chemotherapy sometimes extends life a few months, but often not much more—and it’s hellacious to go through.

MJ: We’re essentially using the same treatments we did 30 years ago.

BG: We are. They’re somewhat more effective, somewhat more targeted, and they use them in combinations that make them more effective, but the paradigm is the same. Of course, we haven’t discussed prevention and early detection. The decline of smoking rates alone has had more impact on mortality than anything else by far. So that’s a promising way of getting to cancer.

A cancer operation, circa 1890. Harvard Medical School

MJ: Okay, so if everyone quit smoking right now, today, what sort of drop would we see in cancer rates?

BG: I believe 30 percent. We have a quote in the film that if all known prevention methods were put into effect—not only stopping smoking but controlling obesity, less exposure to UV rays, and other things—we could cut cancer by 50 percent right now.

MJ: If you were to graph cancer mortality for nonsmokers over time, what would that look like?

BG: Pretty much flat. It’s a little tough, because you have to correct for an aging population, but when you compare apples to apples from today to 25 to 30 years ago, I think it’d be slightly declining. Early detection has had an impact on breast cancer death rates and certainly colonoscopy has had a huge impact on colon cancer. Vaccinations have had a huge impact on cervical cancer. But overall it’s a pretty flat chart, and that’s disturbing after spending billions of dollars. But if you stop the clock right now, it doesn’t account for the undercurrent of basic science that’s set us up for much more rapid advances in the next 30 years. I’m not trying to be Pollyanna-ish. With a couple of exceptions, every major researcher feels we’ve turned a corner.

MJ: But people have been saying things like that for decades.

BG: Yes, but that’s deceptive. As Sid Siddhartha Mukherjee says at the end of the film, there’s this superficial cycle of optimism followed by crushing disappointment all through the history of cancer. From radical surgery to chemotherapy to targeted therapy, it happens again and again. But what that discounts is a steady upward trajectory in knowledge. Already, immunotherapy, probably the most exciting new avenue of cancer therapy, is making a significant difference. These clinical trials are extremely promising for a certain subset of cancers.

Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote the book on which the film is based. Ark Media/Florentine Films

MJ: What about all of the other cancers?

BG: The most common cancers are also the hardest to attack with conventional therapies. All the smoking-related cancers, including lung and kidney cancer, and also melanoma, have too many mutations to target with drugs. On the other hand, those cancer cells look very different from healthy cells and are more vulnerable to immunotherapy. So immunotherapy may have the easiest time with the most complicated cancers, and those caused by the fewest mutations are probably the ones for which we’ll develop targeted drug therapies. The ones in the middle are going to be the biggest problem.

Radical mastectomy. Johns Hopkins Medical Archives

MJ: Your film really underscores the hubris of the medical profession—the jealous guarding of clinical turf against emerging facts. It covers, for example, how radical mastectomy was developed on the false assumption that cancers grow in an orderly pattern. Will you talk about what happened when Dr. Bernard Fischer challenged that prevailing dogma?

BG: With radical mastectomy there was a very logical assumption that the more you cut out, the more lives you save, but it was never subjected to clinical trials. In fact, there were no such thing as clinical trials when it was first developed. As Sid says, these half-truths become full truths in peoples’ minds, and the mere suggestion that they’re wrong triggers a hysterical reaction.

Bernie Fischer just had a very independent streak and was not someone who accepted received wisdom without question—and he was tough enough to undergo the bruising that happened when he proposed clinical trials on radical mastectomy. He was cut off from his grants. He was vilified. He was ostracized. He didn’t care! It takes someone like that to puncture these entrenched ideas.

MJ: Millions of women owe a debt to that guy.

BG: Huge debt! He is one of the real heroes of the cancer story. They’re few and far between.

MJ: Would breast cancer treatment have developed differently had it mainly affected men?

BG: Without a doubt. As Rose Kushner says in the film, nobody would cut off a man’s limb without his permission while he was asleep, but if it came to a woman’s breasts, they did it all the time. There was this paternalistic attitude—a kind of disregard for the notion that women’s breasts might be important to them in some way other than to feed children. It took not only Bernie Fischer, but the activism of women with breast cancer to overturn that. I think it’s no accident that breast cancer has triggered the most intense activism of any kind of cancer. It’s these women who have underwent the worst, most disfiguring, most debilitating kinds of treatments.

MJ: Also, now, when you put a promising new cancer drug in clinical trials, you get a lot of people saying, “I don’t want to be in a randomized trial, I just want the drug.” Will you reflect on the ethics of that situation?

BG: It’s a difficult problem. This cycle of optimism followed by disappointment—the only solution is to subject these things to disciplined trials. In the case of Herceptin, Genentech responsibly resisted opening its trials to lots of women who simply wanted the drug. As then-CEO Art Levinson says in the film, you want to be able to look people in the eye and say, “I know this drug can help you,” and you can’t do that without a clinical trial. As harsh as that may seem, it’s the best way of determining efficacy. We have a scene with parents of a little girl who are weighing whether to enroll her in a clinical trial and they’re struggling with the idea that a computer is gonna randomly pick the treatment their child gets. It’s very hard for people to accept, but it’s scientifically necessary.

MJ: Knowing everything you know, how do you suppose you would approach treatment if you were diagnosed?

BG: I ask myself that all the time. I think I would probably try anything, simply because you hear these stories of miracles. They do happen. I was just with a woman the other night who had stage four metastatic melanoma, which was 100 percent fatal until recently. She was told she had months to live and she decided to take one more step and enroll in this immunotherapy trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Now she’s three years cancer-free with prospects of living a normal life. I certainly don’t judge anyone who decides not to do that. I admire, in a way, people and doctors who accept the overwhelming likelihood that you won’t be cured. But I probably would take the chance.

MJ: I’m still trying to get a handle on whether chemo even helps people, other than kids with Leukemia.

BG: The problem is, chemotherapy is a one-size-fits-all solution but cancer is different for every person—literally. I don’t understand all the intricacies, but it’s very hard to say, “You’re gonna benefit from chemotherapy, and you’re not.” You kind of gotta try it. One of the promising avenues of research, by the way, is getting a better sense for each person which mutations underlie their cancer. Almost like you’d get a blood test, you’d get a genetic test and then they are able to target those things.

MJ: How long before that’s routine?

BG: Not long at all. If you’ve got the money you can already do that. But the costs of these kinds of genetic tests are nose-diving. I’d say in 5 to 10 years almost everybody will have their cancer sequenced, and then a better set of decisions can be made. Right now they’re still throwing the kitchen sink at people. But that will change.

Lori Wilson, an oncologist featured in the film, found herself battling cancer. Ark Media/Florentine Films

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Cancer Experts Are Finally Feeling Optimistic. Here’s Why.

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What Does "Cage-Free" Even Mean?

by BethanyKORQ Posted on January 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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What kind of farm do you imagine when you think of organic or cage-free eggs? Images of hens frolicking in lush meadows?

That kind of farming exists, but such conditions aren’t mandated by organic code—not explicitly anyway. According to the USDA regulations, animals raised organically have “year-round access … to the outdoors, shade, shelter, exercise areas, fresh air, clean water for drinking, and direct sunlight, suitable to the species, its stage of life, the climate, and the environment.” Those rules are open to a wide variety of interpretations.,

Ten times over the course of a year and a half, under cover of night,a group of radical animal-rights activists snuck into the facilities of a large operation called Petaluma Farms, a major west-coast major supplier to Whole Foods and Organic Valley, according to The New York Times. The Petaluma egg complex produces both certified-organic and non-organic “cage free” eggs, the main difference between the two standards being that organic eggs must come from hens fed only organic feed.

The group, Direct Action Everywhere, seems to find all animal farming abhorrent—a point driven home in the video’s first third, wherein several group members denounce the killing of animals. Later, footage taken from within the Petaluma facilities shows lots of birds wallowing tightly together, often amidst what looks like significant buildup of their own waste. The narrators use words like “stench, ” “filth,” and “misery” to describe the scene; and show several birds in obvious bad health—birds with blisters, missing feathers, one clearly caked with shit—along with birds that appear to be in decent shape. The crew dramatically rescues one pathetically injured bird, handing her over the fence, one activist to another, and whisking her to a vet in Berkeley, who declares her in dismal shape.

In a media statement, Petaluma owners Judy and Steve Mahrt wrote that “The video in no way reflects our practices or the overall health of our flocks.” As for outside access, the statement adds the company maintains “sun porches for outdoor access while protecting from predators and disease.” All the filming in the video akes place at night, when most domesticated chickens go inside, anyway. So the video doesn’t tell us anything about the birds’ outdoor access.

Pressed for details, the company referred me to the below video. At about the 2:38 mark, there’s a depiction of one such sun porch—it’s a raised, triangular space jutting off the side of the building, made of chicken wire. By the company’s own admission, then, the birds never touch the ground outside—their “outdoor access” seems to conform to the letter of organic code, if not the spirit of organic farming conjured in the heads of consumers.

This is not Petaluma’s first PR problem. Michael Pollan famously used it as an example of industrial-organic farming in Omnivore’s Dilemma, observing that its meat-poultry buildings “don’t resemble a farm so much as a barracks,” and that the birds were conditioned to never make use of their access to outdoors. As for the company’s egg operation, Judy’s Family Farm, Pollan never got a look: “The company was too concerned about biosecurity to let a visitor get past the office.”

Last year, Petaluma settled a lawsuit brought by the Animal Legal Defense Fund over the depiction of the lives of its hens on its packaging. As part of the agreement, in which Petaluma did not admit to wrongdoing, the company agreed to modify its egg cartons “by removing the illustration of hens on a green field and removing the language that Plaintiff alleged could lead consumers to mistakenly believe the eggs come from hens with significant outdoor access.” Previously, the inside of the cartons claimed that “these hens are raised in wide-open spaces in Sonoma Valley, where they are free to roam, scratch, and play.”

A “sun porch” at a Petaluma Farms facility—the “access to outdoors” required by organic code. Screenshot from the video, above, provided by Petaluma Farms

So what’s to be taken away from the Direct Action Everywhere video? I see it as an important but problematic look behind the veil of what Pollan has deemed “supermarket pastoral”—the gauze of marketing that cloaks the often-harsh realities of large-scale organic farming.

Yet compared to the vast Iowa facilities that triggered a half-billion-egg salmonella recall in 2010 (the Food and Drug Administration’s stomach-turning post-outbreak inspection report can be found here), the Petaluma houses captured on tape by Direct Action Everywhere actually look pretty good. When you confine thousands of birds into a building and manage several buildings, problems like the ones caught on take by DAE are going to arise. I’d feel better about Petaluma if it represented standard practice for industrial egg production, and not the rarefied status implied by organic certification.

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What Does "Cage-Free" Even Mean?

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America Is the Developed World’s Second Most Ignorant Country

by Nina55Twyeiebi Posted on November 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago Vox ran a story about a new Ipsos-MORI poll showing that Americans think the unemployment rate right now is an astonishing 32 percent—higher than during the Great Depression. The correct answer, of course, is about 6 percent. And this is not just a harmless bit of ignorance, like not being able to name the vice president. “It matters,” we’re told, “because the degree to which people perceive problems guides how they make political decisions.”

My first thought when I saw this is the same one I have a lot: how has this changed over time? After all, if Americans always think the unemployment rate is way higher than it is, then it doesn’t mean much. But I couldn’t find any previous polling data on this. I made a few desultory attempts in between football games this weekend, but came up empty.

Luckily, John Sides is a stronger man than me, and also more familiar with the past literature on this stuff. It turns out there’s not very much to look at, actually, but what there is suggests that this Ipsos-MORI poll is a weird outlier. Generally, speaking, most people do know roughly what the unemployment rate is:

In this 1986 article….two-thirds, stated that the unemployment rate was 10 percent, 11 percent, or 12 percent — a substantial degree of accuracy.

In this 2014 article….approximately 40-50 percent of respondents could estimate this rate within 1 percentage point.

In this 2014 article….most respondents gave fairly accurate estimates — which is reflected in the median.

So the whole thing is a little odd. In past polls, people weren’t too far off. In this one, they’re off by more than 25 points. Something doesn’t add up, but it’s not clear what. In any case, it’s worth taking this whole thing with a grain of salt.

But all is not lost. If you decide to take this poll seriously anyway, you might be interested to know that the unemployment results are merely one part of a broader report titled “Perils of Perception.” Basically, it’s an international survey showing just how wrong people in different countries are about things like murder rates, number of Muslims, teen birth rates, voting, and so forth. This is then compiled into a handy “Index of Ignorance.”

So who’s #1? Not us. We came in second to Italy. But that’s not too bad! We’re pretty damn ignorant, and with a little less effort we might take the top spot next year. Still, even though Germans and Swedes may feel smug about their knowledge of demographic facts, can they launch pointless wars in the Middle East whenever they feel like it? No they can’t. So there.

POSTSCRIPT: On a slightly more serious note, Sides tells us that not only is the Ipsos-MORI poll an odd outlier, but that his research suggests that ignorance of the unemployment rate has very little impact on people’s attitudes anyway. I’d say the Ipsos-MORI poll accidentally confirms this. The German public, for example, has a much more accurate view of the unemployment rate than the American public. So has that helped their policymaking? It has not. Over the past few years, Germany has probably had the worst economic policy of any developed country, while the US has had among the best. A well-informed public may be less important than we think.

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America Is the Developed World’s Second Most Ignorant Country

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Friday Cat Blogging – 14 November 2014

by Judith8el Posted on November 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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As you may recall, last week I regaled you with the news that cats (allegedly) love circles. Put a circular object on the floor, and they’ll flock to it. But is this true? On Saturday, my sister visited and we performed our experiment: she laid down a scarf on the floor in a circular shape and we waited. I insisted that we do nothing to influence the cats, since that would ruin all the lovely Science™, but we didn’t have to wait long. Hilbert came over first, and then Hopper followed. For the next 15 minutes they went nuts for the circle. By the time I took the picture on the right, the scarf was no longer all that circular, but it didn’t matter. They loved it.

So there you have it. Cats do love circles. The reason, however, remains a mystery, so let’s move on to this week’s official catblogging. I’ve already mentioned that I have a hard time keeping up with our little furballs unless they’re snoozing, so this week you get a picture of them snoozing (Hopper on the left, Hilbert on the right). I sent this to the shelter where we got them, and they thought it was hilarious. Our guys are not the kind of cats who curl up when they sleep. They stretch out as far as they can to air out their tummies, even if that means they’re often hanging over the edge of a chair. But the couch is better. Even they can only fill up half a couch.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 14 November 2014

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Democrats Take Careful Aim at Feet, Prepare Both Barrels For Firing

by Trinida9037 Posted on November 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Sen. Mary Landrieu has a tough runoff election next month, and energy policy is a big deal in Louisiana. So Senate Democrats are planning to help her out a bit by holding a vote on the Keystone XL pipeline. Paul Waldman calls this one right:

The current Democratic effort to help Mary Landrieu win her runoff election by scheduling a quick vote on the Keystone XL pipeline has to be one of the most politically idiotic moves in recent history. As I argued yesterday, not only is it guaranteed to fail in its goal of helping Landrieu, it gives Republicans a huge policy victory while getting nothing in return. Runoff elections have extremely low turnout, and the only way Landrieu stands a chance is if she can convince lots of Louisiana Democrats to go to the polls to save her. This kind of me-too policymaking—I’m just as pro-oil as Republicans are!—is about the last thing that’ll pump up Democratic enthusiasm.

Keystone XL isn’t really one of my hot buttons. I figure that all that oil is getting to market one way or another, and blocking the pipeline won’t really make much difference. I know that’s probably a little too fatalistic, but we all have issues that strike us that way. Keystone XL is one of mine.

That said, Waldman is right. There’s simply zero chance that this is going to help Landrieu. There’s not a person in Louisiana who doesn’t know that she supports the oil industry and hates hates hates President Obama’s energy policy. She’s made that crystal clear, and everyone who’s persuadable has already been persuaded. A Keystone XL vote just won’t move the needle.

So Democrats would be giving something away and getting literally nothing in return. In fact, since this would outrage all the people who do care about Keystone XL, Democrats would probably be giving something away and losing support from key supporters at the same time. It’s crazy.

These are the same guys who whine endlessly about President Obama’s lousy negotiating skills. Someone just shoot me.

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Democrats Take Careful Aim at Feet, Prepare Both Barrels For Firing

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Can We Talk? Here’s Why the White Working Class Hates Democrats

by JonahYIIko Posted on November 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Noam Scheiber takes on one of the lessons du jour that always crop up after a party gets shellacked at the polls: how do we appeal to demographic group X that voted so heavily against us? In this case, the party is the Democrats, and the demographic group is the infamous white working class, which voted Republican by a 30-point margin last week:

At first blush, the white working class would appear to pose a real dilemma. The set of issues on which the Democratic Party is most coherent these days is social progressivism….But while these issues unite college-educated voters and working-class minority voters, they’ve historically alienated the white working class.

….How to square this circle? Well, it turns out we don’t really have to, since the analysis is outdated. The white working class is increasingly open to social liberalism, or at least not put off by it. As Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin observed this summer, 54 percent of the white working class born after 1980 think gays and lesbians should have the right to marry, according to data assembled from the 2012 election.

….Long story short, there’s a coalition available to Democrats that knits together working class minorities and college-educated voters and slices heavily into the GOP’s margins among the white working class….The basis of the coalition isn’t a retreat from social progressivism, but making economic populism the party’s centerpiece….The politics of this approach work not just because populism is a “message” that a majority of voters want to hear. But because, unlike the status quo, it can actually improve their economic prospects, as Harold Meyerson recently pointed out.

I’d like to offer a different interpretation. I don’t have a bunch of poll data readily at hand to back this up, so it’s possible I’m way off base. But I don’t think so, and at the very least I welcome pushback since it might clarify some things that need clarifying.

Here it is: I agree that social liberalism isn’t quite the deal killer it used to be. Scheiber and Teixera are right about that. It’s still an issue—especially gun control, which remains more potent than a lot of liberals like to acknowledge—but it’s fading somewhat in areas like abortion and gay marriage. There are still plenty of Fox-watching members of the WWC who are as socially conservative as ever, but I think it’s safe to say that at the margins social issues are becoming a little less divisive among the WWC than they have been over the past few decades.

But if that’s the case, why does the WWC continue to loathe Democrats so badly? I think the answer is as old as the discussion itself: They hate welfare. There was a hope among some Democrats that Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform would remove this millstone from around Democrats’ necks, and for a few years during the dotcom boom it probably did. The combination of tougher work rules and a booming economy made it a less contentious topic.

But when the economy stagnates and life gets harder, people get meaner. That’s just human nature. And the economy has been stagnating for the working class for well over a decade—and then practically collapsing ever since 2008.

So who does the WWC take out its anger on? Largely, the answer is the poor. In particular, the undeserving poor. Liberals may hate this distinction, but it doesn’t matter if we hate it. Lots of ordinary people make this distinction as a matter of simple common sense, and the WWC makes it more than any. That’s because they’re closer to it. For them, the poor aren’t merely a set of statistics or a cause to be championed. They’re the folks next door who don’t do a lick of work but somehow keep getting government checks paid for by their tax dollars. For a lot of members of the WWC, this is personal in a way it just isn’t for the kind of people who read this blog.

And who is it that’s responsible for this infuriating flow of government money to the shiftless? Democrats. We fight to save food stamps. We fight for WIC. We fight for Medicaid expansion. We fight for Obamacare. We fight to move poor families into nearby housing.

This is a big problem because these are all things that benefit the poor but barely touch the working class. Does it matter that the working class barely pays for most of these programs in the first place, since their federal income taxes tend to be pretty low? Nope. They’re still paying taxes, and it seems like they never get anything for it. It’s always someone else.

It’s pointless to argue that this perception is wrong. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not. But it’s there. And although it’s bound up with plenty of other grievances—many of them frankly racial, but also cultural, religious, and geographic1—at its core you have a group of people who are struggling and need help, but instead feel like they simply get taxed and taxed for the benefit of someone else. Always someone else. If this were you, you wouldn’t vote for Democrats either.

I hate to end this with the usual cliche that I don’t know what to do about it, but I don’t. Helping the poor is one of the great causes of liberalism, and we forfeit our souls if we give up on it. And yet, as a whole bunch of people have acknowledged lately, the Democratic Party simply doesn’t do much for either the working or middle classes these days. Republicans, by contrast, offer both the concrete—tax cuts—and the emotional—an inchoate but still intense rage against a government that seems not to care about them.

So sure: full-throated economic populism? That might work, though everyone seems to have a different idea of what it means. But here’s one thing it better mean: policies that are aimed at the working and middle classes and that actually appeal to them. That is, policies that are simple, concrete, and offer benefits which are clear and compelling.

This is going to require policy wonks to swallow hard. Remember Cash 4 Clunkers? Economically, that was probably a dumb program that accomplished little. But it didn’t do any harm, and people sure loved it. Multiply that by a hundred and you’re on the right track.

1The Democrats’ problem with the white working class is far worse in the South than anywhere else. Nonetheless, I think we’re kidding ourselves if we crunch a bunch of numbers and somehow conclude that it’s not a problem elsewhere. It’s not as big a problem, but in an electorate that continues to be balanced on a tightrope, five or ten percentage points among a sizeable group of people is still a pretty big problem.

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Can We Talk? Here’s Why the White Working Class Hates Democrats

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The Case Against Postal Banking

by DaltonHauslaib Posted on November 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dean Baker thinks the Washington Post is wrong to imply that the postal service hasn’t been aggressive about improving its productivity. Agreed. Then this:

The other point is that the Postal Service could improve its finances by expanding rather than contracting. Specifically, it can return to providing basic banking services, as it did in the past and many other postal systems still do. This course has been suggested by the Postal Service’s Inspector General.

This route takes advantage of the fact that the Postal Service has buildings in nearly every neighborhood in the country. These offices can be used to provide basic services to a large unbanked population that often can’t afford fees associated with low balance accounts. As a result they often end up paying exorbitant fees to check cashing services, pay day lenders and other non-bank providers of financial services.

Color me skeptical. I know this sounds like a terrific, populist idea, but I can think of several reasons to be very cautious about expansive claims that the USPS is uniquely situated to provide basic banking services. Here are a few:

What’s the core competency that would allow USPS to excel at banking? The Inspector General says that “the first and possibly most important factor is the sheer ubiquity of the Postal Service.” In other words, they have lots of locations: 35,000 to be exact. But who cares? Physical real estate is the least compelling reason imaginable to think an organization would be great at basic banking. After all, you know who else has lots of branches? Banks. Even after years of downsizing, there are nearly 100,000 branch banks in the United States.
What else? The Inspector General suggests “trust and familiarity with the postal ‘brand.'” Meh. Americans trust McDonald’s too. That doesn’t mean they’d flock to do their banking there. This kind of thing reminds me of hundreds of really bad marketing presentations I’ve attended in my lifetime.
When you say “postal banking,” most people think about small mom-and-pop savings accounts. But that’s not really what the postal service has in mind. The IG report focuses more on (1) payment mechanisms (i.e., electronic money orders), (2) products to encourage savings, and (3) reloadable prepaid cards. The first is fine, but not really “postal banking.” The second is problematic since even the IG concedes that the reason poor people tend not to save is “largely due to a lack of disposable income among the underserved.” That’s quite an understatement, and it’s not clear what unique incentives the postal service can offer to encourage savings among people who have no money to save. That leaves prepaid cards—and maybe a good, basic prepaid card sponsored by the federal government is a worthwhile idea. But that’s really all we have here.
Finally, there’s the prospect of providing very small loans. But as much as we all loathe payday lenders, there’s a reason they charge such high rates: they also have high rates of default. The postal service can charge less only by (a) losing money or (b) providing loans only to relatively good customers. If you read the IG report, they basically recommend the latter. It’s not clear to me that this is truly an underserved niche.
Yes, other countries have postal banking services. But these were mostly established long ago, before commercial banking became ubiquitous. It may have been a good idea half a century ago, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea now.

If the government wants to provide basic banking services for the poor, it’s not clear to me why USPS should do it. They have literally no special competence at this, and the motivation behind it is to provide a revenue stream that offsets losses from mail services. That’s just dumb. Why on earth should public banking services subsidize public mail services? They have nothing to do with each other.

If we really want some kind of government-sponsored basic banking service, we should simply create one and partner with commercial banks to offer it. If this is truly profitable, banks will bid to host these accounts. If it’s not, the subsidies will show up directly in the annual budget accounts. That’s the way it should be.

I’m not yet convinced that this is a good idea to begin with, but I could be persuaded. However, if it is a good idea, there’s honestly no reason to get the postal service involved in this. We already have a Treasury Department, and we already have a commercial banking industry. They truly do have core competencies in offering financial services. Why not use them instead?

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The Case Against Postal Banking

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Tons of BP Oil Is Still on the Bottom of the Gulf of Mexico

by JoeannCoghlan Posted on October 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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We all saw the images of oil-coated birds and shorelines in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill. These were the most visible impacts of the catastrophe, but much of the oil that gushed from the busted Macondo wellhead 5,000 feet underwater never made it to the surface. Of the estimated 5 million barrels that spilled, approximately 2 million stayed trapped in the deep ocean. And up to 31 percent of that oil is now lying on the ocean floor, according to a new study.

Based on an analysis of sea-floor sediment samples collected from the the Gulf of Mexico, geochemists at the University of California-Santa Barbara were able to offer the first clues about the final resting place of hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil. Their results were published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The data, which was gathered as part of the ongoing federal damage assessment, shows “a smokingly clear signal, like a bulls-eye” around the Macondo well, said lead author David Valentine.

When oil first began to shoot out of the broken well, some 2 million barrels’ worth broke up into microscopic droplets before reaching the surface and became suspended in the deep ocean, Valentine said. His goal was to discover the fate of that oil, beyond the reach of any cleanup efforts, four years after the spill. The researchers combed through the sediment samples for traces of hopane, a chemical compound found in crude oil that doesn’t break down over time. Hopane was also used as a indicator of oil distribution following the Exxon-Valdez spill in 1989.

To test whether traces of hopane originated from the Macondo blowout—rather than from a natural seep or some other well—Valentine scrutinized both where they appeared in individual sediment cores and how concentrations changed at varying distances from the well. Both indicators strongly implicate the Macondo well, the study found. Close to the well, hopane concentrations were very high in the top half-inch of sediment, a sign that the chemical had been deposited recently and in great volumes. Even more telling was the spacial distribution: Within 25 miles of the well, hopane concentrations were 10 times higher than outside that boundary, Valentine said. A further clue was the distinctive splatter pattern in which hopane concentrations were found, which matched the pattern that would be expected from oil leaking from a well.

Add it all up, the study finds, and between 4 and 31 percent of the oil that originally was suspended in the deep ocean (roughly 80,000 to 620,000 barrels) has now come to rest on the ocean floor. The remainder, Valentine said, is still unaccounted for: It could still be suspended in the water column; it could have risen to the surface; it could have been eaten by bacteria, etc.

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Tons of BP Oil Is Still on the Bottom of the Gulf of Mexico

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Inside the Biggest Climate March in History

by JessikaSegura Posted on September 21, 2014

Mother Jones

View the story “Live: Thousands Take to the Streets Around the World to Demand Climate Action” on Storify

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Inside the Biggest Climate March in History

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