Let's put some context to how progressive the "Left" is in the United States
Redditor Federal Reservations has made a handy post enumerating all the regressive, authoritarian, corporatist policies enacted by the Obama administration in its one-and-a-bit terms. You know, for someone the right wing press likes to call a socialist, Obama sure makes Richard Nixon look like Che Guevara. And what's more, this is only a partial list, and excludes the parade of copyright horrors and bad Internet policy emanating from the White House, via Joe Biden's push for Six Strikes, the US Trade Rep's push for secret Internet censorship and surveillance treaties like TPP and ACTA and TAFTA; the DoJ's push to criminalize every Internet user by expanding the CFAA, and much, much more.
Continues to approve drone strikes that kill thousands of innocent civilians including women and children in Pakistan, Yemen, and other countries that do not want the US intervening; meanwhile, according to the Brookings Institute's Daniel Byman, we are killing 10 civilians for every one mid- to high- level Al Qaeda/Taliban operative. This is particularly disturbing, since now any military-aged male in a strike zone is now officially considered an enemy combatant - [5] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/7361630/One-in-three-killed-by-US-drones-in-Pakistan-is-a-civilian-report-claims.html
Progressing ourselves right back to the 19th century!
A new ACLU report called The Outskirts of Hope (PDF) documents the rise of illegal debtors prisons in Ohio. A majority of municipal and mayors' courts (an unregulated and rare system of courts only permitted in two states) surveyed by the ACLU routinely imprison people for their inability to pay fines, a practice banned in both the US and state constitution. 20 percent of the bookings in the Huron County Jail are "related to failure to pay fines."
Taking care of a fine is straightforward for some Ohioans — having been convicted of a criminal or traffic offense and sentenced to pay a fine, an affluent defendant may simply pay it and go on with his or her life. For Ohio’s poor and working poor, by contrast, an unaffordable fine is just the beginning of a protracted process that may involve contempt charges, mounting fees, arrest warrants, and even jail time. The stark reality is that, in 2013, Ohioans are being repeatedly jailed simply for being too poor to pay fines.
The U.S. Constitution, the Ohio Constitution, and Ohio Revised Code all prohibit debtors’ prisons. The law requires that, before jailing anyone for unpaid fines, courts must determine whether an individual is too poor to pay. Jailing a person who is unable to pay violates the law, and yet municipal courts and mayors’ courts across the state continue this draconian practice. Moreover, debtors’ prisons actually waste taxpayer dollars by arresting and incarcerating people who will simply never be able to pay their fines, which are in any event usually smaller than the amount it costs to arrest and jail them.
The report documents heartbreaking cases, like Samantha Reed and John Bundren, a couple with a nine-month-old who were both ordered to pay fines they can't afford. John diverts whatever seasonal/part time wages he earns to Samantha's fines so she can look after their baby, while he goes to jail for ten-day stretches for failure to make payments. They are effectively indigent, but are not given access to counsel when they appear in court over their debts.
Are you up to date on what the anti-reality faction is going on and on about today?
“Against unreason, the gods themselves contend in vain.” —with apologies to Friedrich Schiller
Lately I’ve been trying to write more about science, rather than write about those who attack it. I love science, and I love promoting it. It gives us wonder, knowledge, advances in technology and medicine, increases our lifespan and the joy that fills it. It also reveals the world as it truly is, and while that may not always be comforting (or joyous), it’s the way things are. We need to acknowledge that.
But the forces of antireality keep plodding forward, shouting and frothing and making a mess of things. At some point I can no longer ignore it, and have to say something.
This is me, saying something. I tried to keep it brief—despite the urge to get shouty and long-winded-speechy myself—but wound up having to break this down into the different sectors of nonsense. Mix and match, or collect ‘em all.
A Jab at Antivaxxers
Vaccines save lives. Not just for the people who take them, but also for people who have weakened or no immune system—for example, undergoing some cancer treatments or with autoimmune issues, and, say, babies. Some people are allergic to the ingredients of some vaccines, but that’s a minority. Even they are protected if enough people get their vaccinations.
Vaccines don’t contain toxins in the way antivaxxers want you to believe. The amount is what’s critical. A pear has more formaldehyde in it than a vaccine. A can of tuna has about the same amount of mercury as a vaccine (at least, the small minority of vaccines that contain mercury at all), and the tuna has it in a form that makes it easy to get into your system, whereas in the vaccine it’s in a form that goes right through you. Heck, drinking a glass of water is good for you, but drinking too much will kill you. I’ll say it again, to be clear: The amount is what’s critical.
And, of course, vaccines don’t cause autism.
Oh, that last bit. The antivax crowd still crows about an imagined link between the two, but study after study shows autism rates are completely unrelated to vaccinations. A new study just came out in the Journal of Pediatrics once again and ad infinitum showing no connection exists… so of course the antivaxxers have attacked it. And of course, their attacks have little or no resemblance to reality. It’s tiresome to have to repeat the same things over and again, but that’s where we are.
I understand the fear a parent has over their child’s health; I’m a parent and along with my wife I had to make a lot of health decisions for my daughter, when she was a baby and even still today. Guess what? We did a lot of research, and decided to get her the full course of vaccinations, because that’s what was best for her health and the health of those around her. She’s also had a full course of Gardasil, as well as booster shots and flu shots as needed.
Also: My pal Tara Smith wrote an open letter to her father about his antivax leanings. Her post is a must-read. Besides being a fantastic compendium of evidence and links, it’s a great example of how to talk to your friends and family on this topic.
[Update (14:00 UTC Apr. 5, 2013): In case you think this isn't really a problem, there is currently a measles outbreak in Swansea, Wales. I also received word recently that several students at my own daughter's high school tested positive for pertussis (whooping cough), an ongoing problem in my home town due at least in part to antivax leanings.]
Global Warming? In my planet?
The Earth is warming up, just as inevitably as there are ideologues who will deny it. They never rest, but neither will reality.
Recently, a big study was released which showed that the warming we are seeing over the past century is unprecedented for at least the past 11,000 years, and while there were warmer periods in the past, the rate of current warming is what’s so scary.
This study was well-done, carefully referenced, and clearly worded. So of course it’s under vicious attack by the usual suspects. Happily, there are people like Tamino who show these attacks are nothing but—to coin a phrase—hot air. He has a fantastic post about the Marcott et al. study, showing how robust it is. He also has a followup post about it that’s important as well. This quotation stood out for me:
“My opinion: the Marcott et al. reconstruction is powerful evidence that the warming we’ve witnessed in the last 100 years is unlike anything that happened in the previous 11,300 years.”
I’ll add I’m in the middle of reading climate scientist Michael Mann’s book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars”. It’s a fascinating read, and very, very upsetting. The vicious attacks on him—not just his data, but him—were and still are disgusting.
These global-warming-denying jokers are fiddling while the world burns.
If At First You Don’t Secede
Despite some tiresome claims I hear, I am not antireligious. I think people have the right to believe what they want, as long as they keep it to themselves, or at the very least keep it out of government.
The Founding Fathers agree, which is why they wrote the very First Amendment to the Constitution. But some legislators in North Carolina don’t agree. They have—and I do hope you’re sitting down for this—proposed a bill to allow North Carolina to establish a state religion.
This is not a joke. Well, yes, actually, it is, but what I mean is this is real. On the surface their logic seems marginally non-crazy; the Constitution says that the U. S. Congress will make no laws respecting religion, so it’s OK for states to go ahead and establish one. I’ll note the bill doesn’t actually specify a religion, so we can assume they mean Islam.
That loud sound you may have heard was my forehead smacking into my desk at near sonic speeds.
Now, I am not a lawyer, but apparently this argument is just so much nonsense; it’s been established many times that states must respect federal law in these matters. The legislators in question—Carl Ford (R-China Grove) and Harry Warren (R-Salisbury), for any BABloggees who happen to live in their districts—must know this. They must. This bill cannot possibly withstand any sort of scrutiny, so they must only be proposing it for political purposes. Which is interesting, given that the far right is all about fiscal conservancy and not wasting tax payer dollars, and this bill will no doubt cost millions of those dollars to defend, a fight it will ultimately lose.
Honestly, this kind of anti-federal move is second only to secession. That worked out great last time, didn’t it?
[Update 2 (15:00 UTC Apr. 5, 2013): And just like that, this bill is dead. According to WRAL Channel 5 in North Carolina, the State House Speaker Thom Tillis said the bill won't come to a vote, though no reason is given. I'll add that according to the Tenth Amendment Center, this bill was simply a resolution and would not have had the force of law—this was not obvious to me (and, of course, most people writing about it) upon reading it. I'm glad to hear that, though it was still a ridiculous bill and a colossal waste of time. And don't forget that it does represent the mindset of many people, something about which we need to be ever vigilant.]
Hey, remember when we changed our calendars to the freakin’ 21st century?
I guess a lot of people still don’t. There’s plenty of nonsense, hate, and bigotry out there to last us a long time. The best cure against the forces of darkness is light. We need to speak up, and we need to be heard.
Here's a rather graphic representation of the growth in income inequality in the USA since the 1960s; plotted on a chart where the income growth of the bottom 90 percent is represented by an inch-high bar; the growth of the top 10 percent needs a 163 foot-tall bar; while the top 0.01% need a 4.9 mile-high bar to represent their real wealth growth in the same period.
The income growth and shrinkage figures come from analysis of the latest IRS data by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, who have won acclaim for their studies of worldwide income patterns over the last century.
In 2011 entry into the top 10 percent, where all the gains took place, required an adjusted gross income of at least $110,651. The top 1 percent started at $366,623.
The top 1 percent enjoyed 81 percent of all the increased income since 2009. Just over half of the gains went to the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and 39 percent of the gains went to the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent.
Ponder that last fact for a moment -- the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent, those making at least $7.97 million in 2011, enjoyed 39 percent of all the income gains in America. In a nation of 158.4 million households, just 15,837 of them received 39 cents out of every dollar of increased income.
After a major recall of yoga pants for being too sheer, it’s not surprising that heads are rolling at Lululemon. The company announced yesterday that its top product executive is leaving, only a few weeks after Lululemon had to pull pants from the shelves as they were a bit too see-through.
Chief Product Officer Sheree Waterson will be stepping down on April 15, reports the Wall Street Journal, leaving her spot at the top supervising design, merchandise management and global production.
Meanwhile, Lululemon admits that its testing procedures perhaps weren’t up to snuff, which could’ve contributed to the sheer pants making it into stores and onto customers. The company said an evaluation showed that while the fabric might’ve met the same testing standards its had in place since 2006, it was on the low end of the scale. Sounds like the scale might need to shift, in this case.
“The resulting end product had an unacceptable level of sheerness,” the company said.
Lululemon says it will implement new procedures to make sure its testing protocols are complete and outline new specifications for the stretch, weight and tolerances of its fabrics.
Good points in the conclusion on how traditional selective breeding can have unknown outcomes. Not as safe or natural as some might say it is.
Frying a potato is a tricky proposition. Doing it right isn’t just about your skill as a cook, but also your partner, the potato itself. Waxy potatoes — high in sugar, low in starch — brown a little too easily as the sugar in them is altered by heat. By the time the interior is cooked through, the exterior is burnt to a crisp.
Good potato chips come from starchy potatoes. But to get just the right chip color — that perfect, buttery golden brown — you have to pay attention to a lot of different factors, from the types of sugar found in the potato, to the internal chemistry that happens as the potato sits in a sack post-harvest.
In the late 1960s, researchers from the US Department of Agriculture, Penn State University, and the Wise Potato Chip Company teamed up breed a very special potato, which they named the Lenape. More than 30 years later, one of their colleagues still thought fondly of that spud. “Lenape was [wonderful],” Penn State scientist Herb Cole told journalist Nancy Marie Brown in 2003. “It chipped golden.”
Yes, the Lenape made a damn fine potato chip.
Unfortunately, it was also kind of toxic.
Despite an almost boring reputation as the squishy white bread of the plant kingdom, potatoes actually come from somewhat nasty roots. Their closest relatives are innocuous enough. Potatoes have strong genetic ties to tomatoes and eggplants. But their more distant cousins include tobacco, chili peppers, deadly nightshade, and the hallucinatory drug-producing flower, datura.
This is a phylogenetic family that is ready to throw down, chemically speaking. Called Solanaceae, its members are known for producing a wide variety of nitrogen-rich chemical compounds, called alkaloids. Nicotine is an alkaloid. So are caffeine, cocaine, and a host of other plant-derived chemicals that humans have taken a liking to over the millennia. Depending on the dose, and on the specific compound, alkaloids can have effects ranging from medicinal, to far-out crazy hallucinatory, to deadly.
Potatoes produce an alkaloid called solanine. All potatoes have it, and it’s a feature, not a bug — at least as far as the potato is concerned. Like a lot of other plant-produced alkaloids, solanine is a natural defense mechanism. It protects the potato from pests. Think of potato blight, the fungus-like disease partly responsible for the Irish Famine of the 19th century. The more solanine a potato contains, the less susceptible it is to blight. When a potato is put into a compromising situation — when it’s young and vulnerable, for instance, or when tubers get uncovered and, thus, more exposed to things that might eat it — solanine production can rev up.
Those triggers aren’t always the most convenient for the potato’s human predators. A sudden frost, for instance, can stunt the growth of tubers and promote the growth of vines and leaves, which mimics a younger stage of development and is accompanied by higher solanine concentrations. And if you leave potatoes exposed to the sun for too long after harvest, they start reacting as though they just got accidentally uncovered. They turn green and they produce more solanine. This is actually why you’re not supposed to eat green potatoes. Those spuds, and especially their skins, are rich in solanine. How much solanine varies; it might just be enough to make your stomach a little upset. Or, it could lead to serious illness accompanied by vomiting, diarrhea, loss of consciousness, and convulsive twitching. In very rare cases, people who ate green potatoes have even died.
Poor post-harvest handling was not the problem with the Lenape, however. In 1974, after Lenape potatoes had been recalled from agricultural production and relegated to the status of “breeding material”, the USDA published results of an experiment where they grew Lenape, and five other potato varieties, at 39 locations around the country. They carefully monitored growing and harvesting conditions and then compared the solanine content of all the potatoes.
The conclusion: Lenape was genetically predisposed towards producing an extraordinarily high amount of solanine, no matter what happened to it during growth and harvest. The average Russet potato, for instance, contained about 8 mg of solanine for every 100 g of potato. Lenape, on the other hand, was closer to 30 mg of toxin for every 100 g of food. That made it nicely resistant to a lot of agricultural pests. But it also explained why some of the people who were the first to eat Lenapes — most of them breeders and other professionals in the agriculture industry — ended up with severe nausea, like a fast-acting stomach bug.
What makes the Lenape really interesting, though, is its legacy as a cautionary tale. I first learned about it from Fred Gould, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, whom I met while I was working on a New York Times Magazine story about genetically modified mosquitoes.
He used Lenapes as an example of risk and uncertainty. Often, people frame genetically modified plants as this huge open question — a giant uncertainty, of the sort we’ve never dealt with before. There’s this idea that GM plants are uniquely at risk of producing unexpected side effects, and that we have no way of knowing what those effects would be until average consumers start getting sick, Gould told me. But neither of those things is really true. Conventional breeding, the simple act of crossing one existing plant with another, can produce all sorts of unexpected and dangerous results. One of the reasons Lenape potatoes are so infamous, I later found out, is that they played a big role in shaping how the USDA treats and tests new varieties of conventionally bred food plants today.
In fact, from Gould’s perspective, there’s actually a lot more risk and uncertainty with conventional breeding, than there is with genetic modification. That’s because, with GM, you’re mucking about with a single gene. There are a lot more genes in play with conventional breeding, and a lot more ways that surprising genetic interactions could come back to haunt you. “You try breeding potatoes for pest resistance, but you’re bringing in a whole chromosome from a wild potato,” he said. “We’ve found interactions between the wild genomes and the cultivated genomes that actually led to potentially poisonous chemicals in the potato.”
In 2004, a National Academies panel on the unintended health effects of genetic engineering reported that conventional potato breeders continue to try to increase the amount of solanine produced by the leaves and vines of their potato plants in hopes of making those plants more naturally pest-resistant. Because of that, the USDA actually has a recommended limit for solanine content of new potato varieties — but that limit isn’t strictly enforced.
Gould’s point isn’t that genetic modification is always better than conventional breeding. It’s not. Instead, they’re both tools — imperfect technologies that could produce unintended side effects. Which one you choose to use depends on what you’re trying to do. But, either way, you can’t say that one is scary and one is safe.
Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) has reintroduced to Congress the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act which aims to reduce the use of human antibiotics in animals and keep them working for human medicine.
The problems in our society that are so obvious and apparent no one is even talking about them
I’m totally in favor of gun control. After all, who could kill that many children in such a short time without a meticulously-designed, highly-optimized killing instrument? Some cold-hearted engineer put a lot of careful, loving thought into it. Imagine…. But gun control’s not even close to being a solution. What about giving mentally-ill people resources…
Unfit For Work: The Startling Rise Of Disability In America
by Chana Joffe-Walt
Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
Parts of this story will air on This American Life this weekend, and on All Things Considered today and next week. A version of this story with photos, graphics and a video is online here.
In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.
The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. Yet people relying on disability payments are often overlooked in discussions of the social safety net. The vast majority of people on federal disability do not work.[1] Yet because they are not technically part of the labor force, they are not counted among the unemployed.
In other words, people on disability don't show up in any of the places we usually look to see how the economy is doing. But the story of these programs — who goes on them, and why, and what happens after that — is, to a large extent, the story of the U.S. economy. It's the story not only of an aging workforce, but also of a hidden, increasingly expensive safety net.
For the past six months, I've been reporting on the growth of federal disability programs. I've been trying to understand what disability means for American workers, and, more broadly, what it means for poor people in America nearly 20 years after we ended welfare as we knew it. Here's what I found.
One In Four
In Hale County, Alabama, 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability. On the day government checks come in every month, banks stay open late, Main Street fills up with cars, and anybody looking to unload an old TV or armchair has a yard sale.
Sonny Ryan, a retired judge in town, didn't hear disability cases in his courtroom. But the subject came up often. He described one exchange he had with a man who was on disability but looked healthy.
"Just out of curiosity, what is your disability?" the judge asked from the bench. "I have high blood pressure," the man said. "So do I," the judge said. "What else?" "I have diabetes." "So do I."
There's no diagnosis called disability. You don't go to the doctor and the doctor says, "We've run the tests and it looks like you have disability." It's squishy enough that you can end up with one person with high blood pressure who is labeled disabled and another who is not.
I talked to lots of people in Hale County who were on disability. Sometimes, the disability seemed unambiguous.
"I was in a 1990 Jeep Cherokee Laredo," Dane Mitchell, a 23-year-old guy I met in a coffee shop, told me. "I flipped it both ways, flew 165 feet from the Jeep, going through 12 to 14,000 volts of electrical lines. Then I landed into a briar patch. I broke all five of my right toes, my right hip, seven of my vertebrae, shattering one, breaking a right rib, punctured my lung, and then I cracked my neck."
Other stories seemed less clear. I sat with lots of women in Hale County who told me how their backs kept them up at night and made it hard for them to stand on the job. "I used to cry to try to work," one woman told me. "It was so painful."
People don't seem to be faking this pain, but it gets confusing. I have back pain. My editor has a herniated disc, and he works harder than anyone I know. There must be millions of people with asthma and diabetes who go to work every day. Who gets to decide whether, say, back pain makes someone disabled?
As far as the federal government is concerned, you're disabled if you have a medical condition that makes it impossible to work. In practice, it's a judgment call made in doctors' offices and courtrooms around the country. The health problems where there is most latitude for judgment — back pain, mental illness — are among the fastest growing causes of disability.
In Hale County, there was one guy whose name was mentioned in almost every story about becoming disabled: Dr. Perry Timberlake. I began to wonder if he was the reason so many people in Hale County are on disability. Maybe he was running some sort of disability scam, referring tons of people into the program.
After sitting in the waiting room of his clinic several mornings in a row, I met Dr. Timberlake. It turns out, there is nothing shifty about him. He is a doctor in a very poor place where pretty much every person who comes into his office tells him they are in pain.
"We talk about the pain and what it's like," he says. "I always ask them, 'What grade did you finish?'"
What grade did you finish, of course, is not really a medical question. But Dr. Timberlake believes he needs this information in disability cases because people who have only a high school education aren't going to be able to get a sit-down job.
Dr. Timberlake is making a judgment call that if you have a particular back problem and a college degree, you're not disabled. Without the degree, you are.
Over and over again, I'd listen to someone's story of how back pain meant they could no longer work, or how a shoulder injury had put them out of a job. Then I would ask: What about a job where you don't have to lift things, or a job where you don't have to use your shoulder, or a job where you can sit down? They would look at me as if I were asking, "How come you didn't consider becoming an astronaut?"
One woman I met, Ethel Thomas, is on disability for back pain after working many years at the fish plant, and then as a nurse's aide. When I asked her what job she would have in her dream world, she told me she would be the woman at the Social Security office who weeds through disability applications. I figured she said this because she thought she'd be good at weeding out the cheaters. But that wasn't it. She said she wanted this job because it is the only job she's seen where you get to sit all day.
At first, I found this hard to believe. But then I started looking around town. There's the McDonald's, the fish plant, the truck repair shop. I went down a list of job openings — Occupational Therapist, McDonald's, McDonald's, Truck Driver (heavy lifting), KFC, Registered Nurse, McDonald's.
I actually think it might be possible that Ethel could not conceive of a job that would accommodate her pain.
'We're Just Hiding You Guys'
There's a story we hear all the time these days that doesn't, on its face, seem to have anything to do with disability: Local Mill Shuts Down. Or, maybe: Factory To Close.
Four years ago, when I was working as a reporter in Seattle, I did that story. I stood with workers in a dead mill in Aberdeen, Washington and memorialized the era when you could graduate from high school and get a job at a mill and live a good life. That was the end of the story.
But after I got interested in disability, I followed up with some of the guys to see what happened to them after the mill closed. One of them, Scott Birdsall, went to lots of meetings where he learned about retraining programs and educational opportunities. At one meeting, he says, a staff member pulled him aside.
"Scotty, I'm gonna be honest with you," the guy told him. "There's nobody gonna hire you ... We're just hiding you guys." The staff member's advice to Scott was blunt: "Just suck all the benefits you can out of the system until everything is gone, and then you're on your own."
Scott, who was 56 years old at the time, says it was the most real thing anyone had said to him in a while.
There used to be a lot of jobs that you could do with just a high school degree, and that paid enough to be considered middle class. I knew, of course, that those have been disappearing for decades. What surprised me was what has been happening to many of the people who lost those jobs: They've been going on disability.
Scott tried school for a while, but hated it. So he took the advice of the rogue staffer who told him to suck all the benefits he could out of the system. He had a heart attack after the mill closed and figured, "Since I've had a bypass, maybe I can get on disability, and then I won't have worry to about this stuff anymore." It worked; Scott is now on disability.
Scott's dad had a heart attack and went back to work in the mill. If there'd been a mill for Scott to go back to work in, he says, he'd have done that too. But there wasn't a mill, so he went on disability. It wasn't just Scott. I talked to a bunch of mill guys who took this path — one who shattered the bones in his ankle and leg, one with diabetes, another with a heart attack. When the mill shut down, they all went on disability.
I don't know what that rogue staffer meant when he told Scott Birdsall they were trying to hide those mill guys. But signing up for disability benefits is an excellent way to stay hidden in one key way: People on disability are not counted among the unemployed.
"That's a kind of ugly secret of the American labor market," David Autor, an economist at MIT, told me. "Part of the reason our unemployment rates have been low, until recently, is that a lot of people who would have trouble finding jobs are on a different program."
Part of the rise in the number of people on disability is simply driven by the fact that the workforce is getting older, and older people tend to have more health problems.
But disability has also become a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills. But it wasn't supposed to serve this purpose; it's not a retraining program designed to get people back onto their feet. Once people go onto disability, they almost never go back to work. Fewer than 1 percent of those who were on the federal program for disabled workers at the beginning of 2011 have returned to the workforce since then, one economist told me.
People who leave the workforce and go on disability qualify for Medicare, the government health care program that also covers the elderly. They also get disability payments from the government of about $13,000 a year. This isn't great. But if your alternative is a minimum wage job that will pay you at most $15,000 a year, and probably does not include health insurance, disability may be a better option.
But, in most cases, going on disability means you will not work, you will not get a raise, you will not get whatever meaning people get from work.[2] Going on disability means, assuming you rely only on those disability payments, you will be poor for the rest of your life. That's the deal. And it's a deal 14 million Americans have signed up for.[3]
Kids
As I got further into this story, I started hearing about another group of people on disability: kids. People in Hale County told me that what you want is a kid who can "pull a check." Many people mentioned this, but I basically ignored it. It seemed like one of those things that maybe happened once or twice, got written up in the paper and became conversational fact among neighbors.
Then I looked at the numbers. I found that the number of kids on a program called Supplemental Security Income — a program for children and adults who are both poor and disabled — is almost seven times larger than it was 30 years ago.
Jahleel Duroc (pictured above) is gap-toothed, 10 and vibrating with enthusiasm. He's excited to talk to someone new, excited to show me his map of his neighborhood in the Bronx. He's disabled in the eyes of the government because he has a learning disability.
"I like school," he told me. "My favorite periods are math and science and art, and lunch and recess and snack ... social studies and writing are my favorite."
His favorite thing about school, in other words, is everything.
When you are an adult applying for disability you have to prove you cannot function in a "work-like setting." When you are a kid, a disability can be anything that prevents you from progressing in school. Two-thirds of all kids on the program today have been diagnosed with mental or intellectual problems.
Jahleel is a kid you can imagine doing very well for himself. He is delayed. But given the right circumstances and support, it's easy to believe that over the course of his schooling Jahleel could catch up.
Let's imagine that happens. Jahleel starts doing better in school, overcomes some of his disabilities. He doesn't need the disability program anymore. That would seem to be great for everyone, except for one thing: It would threaten his family's livelihood. Jahleel's family primarily survives off the monthly $700 check they get for his disability.[4]
Jahleel's mom wants him to do well in school. That is absolutely clear. But her livelihood depends on Jahleel struggling in school. This tension only increases as kids get older. One mother told me her teenage son wanted to work, but she didn't want him to get a job because if he did, the family would lose its disability check.
I haven't taken a survey or anything, but I'm guessing a large majority of Americans would be in favor of some form of government support for disabled children living in poverty. We would have a hard time agreeing on exactly how we want to offer support, but I think there are some basic things we'd all agree on.
Kids should be encouraged to go to school. Kids should want to do well in school. Parents should want their kids to do well in school. Kids should be confident their parents can provide for them regardless of how they do in school. Kids should become more and more independent as they grow older and hopefully be able to support themselves at around age 18.
The disability program stands in opposition to every one of these aims.
The End Of Welfare As We Knew It
A federal program for disabled people was first proposed in the 1930s. Even then, a Social Security actuary was worried. "You will have workers like those in the Dust Bowl area, people who have migrated to California and elsewhere, who perhaps have not worked in a year or two, who will imagine they are disabled," the actuary wrote. The cost of the program could be higher than "anything that can be forecast."
The actuary's warning gets at a central tension in a much bigger debate: What should we, as a country, do for people who aren't making it? Americans want to be generous. But Americans don't want to be chumps.
The first key pieces of the modern safety net were created in the 1930s, under Franklin Roosevelt. The first federal disability program was created in the '50s. A few years later, Lyndon Johnson pushed to expand the federal safety net further.
In the '80s, Ronald Reagan argued that a robust economy would do more to eliminate poverty than any federal program. When Reagan used the term "welfare queen," it was clear where he stood. He didn't want to be a chump.
Bill Clinton tried to appease both sides. He expanded many programs for the working poor, but he also promised to "end welfare as we know it" — to nudge people off of public assistance, give them some job training, and force them to make it on their own. "A society rooted in responsibility must first promote the value of work, not welfare," Clinton said. History has judged Clinton's welfare reform a big success.
But when you include disability in the story of welfare reform, the picture looks more ambiguous.
Part of Clinton's welfare reform plan pushed states to get people on welfare into jobs, partly by making states pay a much larger share of welfare costs. The incentive seemed to work; the welfare rolls shrank. But not everyone who left welfare went to work.
"Can you think of anything else that's been bothering you and disabling you and preventing you from working?"
A person on welfare costs a state money. That same resident on disability doesn't cost the state a cent, because the federal government covers the entire bill for people on disability. So states can save money by shifting people from welfare to disability. And the Public Consulting Group is glad to help.
PCG is a private company that states pay to comb their welfare rolls and move as many people as possible onto disability. "What we're offering is to work to identify those folks who have the highest likelihood of meeting disability criteria," Pat Coakley, who runs PCG's Social Security Advocacy Management team, told me.
The company has an office in eastern Washington state that's basically a call center, full of headsetted women in cubicles who make calls all day long to potentially disabled Americans, trying to help them discover and document their disabilities:
"The high blood pressure, how long have you been taking medications for that?" one PCG employee asked over the phone the day I visited the company. "Can you think of anything else that's been bothering you and disabling you and preventing you from working?"
The PCG agents help the potentially disabled fill out the Social Security disability application over the phone. And by help, I mean the agents actually do the filling out. When the potentially disabled don't have the right medical documentation to prove a disability, the agents at PCG help them get it. They call doctors' offices; they get records faxed. If the right medical records do not exist, PCG sets up doctors' appointments and calls applicants the day before to remind them of those appointments.
PCG also works very, very hard to make the people who work at the Social Security happy. Whenever the company wins a new contract, Coakley will personally introduce himself at the local Social Security Administration office, and see how he can make things as easy as possible for the administrators there.
"We go through even to the point, frankly, of do you like things to be stapled or paper-clipped?" he told me. "Paper clips wins out a lot of times because they need to make photocopies and they don't want to be taking staples out."
There's a reason PCG goes to all this trouble. The company gets paid by the state every time it moves someone off of welfare and onto disability. In recent contract negotiations with Missouri, PCG asked for $2,300 per person. For Missouri, that's a deal — every time someone goes on disability, it means Missouri no longer has to send them cash payments every month. For the nation as a whole, it means one more person added to the disability rolls.
The Disability-Industrial Complex
In the past few decades, an entire disability-industrial complex has emerged. It has just one goal: Push more people onto disability. And, sometimes, it seems like the government is outmatched. This is especially true in the legal system.
Daytime TV in many places is full of ads from lawyers who promise to fight the government and win the disability benefits you deserve. There are tons of YouTube videos about getting disability — one lawyer, one webcam. The standard form is a let's-get-real chat about how to win this thing.
There is one man who takes much of the credit for this industry: Charles Binder. "When we started," Binder told me, "I don't think anybody else was advertising." What's more, most people who applied for disability were denied and never had a hearing. Binder, and the lawyers who followed him, changed that. "I've created some of the problems for the government because so many people appeal," Binder says.
When he started in 1979, Binder represented fewer than 50 clients. Last year, his firm represented 30,000 people. Thirty thousand people who were denied disability appealed with the help of Charles Binder's firm. In one year. Last year, Binder and Binder made $68.7 million in fees for disability cases.
The way Binder tells it, he's is a guy helping desperate people get the support they deserve. He is a cowboy-hatted Lone Ranger going to court to fight the good fight for the everyman.
Who is making the case for the other side? Who is defending the government's decision to deny disability?
Nobody.
"You might imagine a courtroom where on one side there's the claimant and on the other side there's a government attorney who is saying, 'We need to protect the public interest and your client is not sufficiently deserving,'" the economist David Autor says. "Actually, it doesn't work like that. There is no government lawyer on the other side of the room."
The Social Security Administration says disability hearings were never meant to be adversarial. In these courtrooms, the judges are employees of Social Security. So the judges are supposed to both represent the government and make a fair and objective determination. But the judges themselves say this role can be difficult.
Judge Randy Frye, who hears disability cases in North Carolina, told me he often finds himself glancing to where he imagines there should be a chair for the government attorney, as there would be in a normal case. "There are always moments where you are concerned maybe you missed something," he says.
"You would turn to that chair and say, 'Counsel, I'm having trouble with this issue. Why does the government think this case should not be reversed?'"
Somewhere around 30 years ago, the economy started changing in some fundamental ways. There are now millions of Americans who do not have the skills or education to make it in this country.
Politicians pay lip service to this problem during election cycles, but American leaders have not sat down and come up with a comprehensive plan.
In the meantime, federal disability programs became our extremely expensive default plan. The two big disability programs, including health care for disabled workers, cost some $260 billion a year.
People at the Social Security Administration, which runs the federal disability programs, say we cannot afford this. The reserves in the disability insurance program are on track to run out in 2016, Steve Goss, the chief actuary at Social Security, told me.
Goss is confident that Congress will act to keep disability payments flowing, probably by taking money from the Social Security retirement fund. Of course, the retirement fund itself is on track to run out of money by 2035.
Goss and his colleagues have worked out a temporary fix under which the retirement and disability funds will both run out of money by 2033. He says he hopes the country will have come up with a better plan by then.
Note: The following sentences were changed for clarity after publication. 1) The sentence that now reads "The vast majority of people receiving federal disability benefits do not work" originally read "People on federal disability do not work." (back to top) 2) The sentence that now reads "But, in most cases, going on disability means you will not work, you will not get a raise, you will not get whatever meaning people get from work" originally read "But going on disability means you will not work, you will not get a raise, you will not get whatever meaning people get from work." (back to top) 3) The sentence that now reads "And it's a deal 14 million Americans have signed up for" originally read "And it's a deal 14 million Americans have chosen for themselves." (back to top) 4) The sentence that now reads "Jahleel's family primarily survives off the monthly $700 check they get for his disability" originally read "Jahleel's family survives off the monthly $700 check they get for his disability." (back to top)
Late to the party but the conversation about privacy is still important.
I have long been a fan of Wired's coverage of privacy and security issues, particularly the insightful reporting and analysis by Ryan Singel, currently the editor of the Threat Level blog. It is for that reason that I am saddened to see Ryan stoop to twisting my words in support of a lengthy character assassination piece targeted against me.
Brief background
Two weeks ago, Wired published a glowing, 2000 word story by Quinn Norton about CryptoCat, an encrypted chat tool. Quinn was not the first journalist to shower praise upon Cryptocat -- writers at the New York Times and Forbes had previously done so too.
I subsequently published a lengthy blog post, which compared the media's coverage of Cryptocat, a relatively new, unproven security tool, to the media's previous fawning coverage of Haystack, a tool which, once analyzed by experts, was revealed to be pure snakeoil.
The message in my blog post -- that journalists risk exposing their readers to harm when they hype unproven security technologies -- was directed at the media as a whole. In support of my argument, I cited glowing praise for such technologies printed in the Guardian, the New York Times, Newsweek, Forbes and, Wired.
Today, Ryan Singel, the editor at Wired's Threat Level blog responded to my blog post, but incorrectly frames my criticism as if it were solely directed at Quinn Norton and her coverage of Cryptocat. In doing so, Ryan inaccurately paints me as a sexist, security-community insider who is unfairly criticizing a tool "created by an outsider to the clubby crypto community and one that’s written up by a woman and reviewed by a female security expert."
The importance of dissenting technical experts
One of the biggest criticisms of Norton's story I expressed in my blog post of was the fact that she did not quote a single technical expert that was critical of Cryptocat, even though there are quite a few who have been vocal with their concerns:
Other than Kobeissi, Norton's only other identified sources in the story are Meredith Patterson, a security researcher that was previously critical of Cryptocat who is quoted saying "although [Cryptocat] got off to a bumpy start, he’s risen to the occasion admirably" and an unnamed active member of Anonymous, who is quoted saying "if it's a hurry and someone needs something quickly, [use] Cryptocat."
As I also noted in my post:
Even though their voices were not heard in the Wired profile, several prominent experts in the security community have criticized the web-based version of Cryptocat. These critics include Thomas Ptacek, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, Moxie Marlinspike and Jake Appelbaum.
Singel frames my criticism here as sexist. Meredith Patterson is a woman, whereas the Cryptocat critics I named were all men. Singel claims that, "Patterson, one of the all-too few female security researchers, doesn’t seem to count for much in Soghoian’s analysis." He adds later, "instead, Soghoian believes, Norton should have turned to one of four more vocal critics he names — all of them men."
As an initial matter, let me say that I have genuine respect for Meredith and her skills as a security researcher. We've known each other for several years, have attended several privacy conferences together, and have a shared goal in keeping the communications of users out of the prying hands of the government. Nowhere in my prior blog post do I dismiss Patterson's skills, credentials, or technical opinions.
My criticism of Norton's piece, in this respect, is not about the specific technical expert who is quoted as saying positive things about Cryptocat, but rather, the total lack of any dissenting quotes. If the rest of the security community were agnostic about the merits of Cryptocat, then it would perhaps be fine to quote a single technical expert who has positive things to say. In this case though, there are several technical experts who have deep concerns about the security of Cryptocat, experts whose research and views Wired has covered at length in the past.
As Singel has described it, I would have liked Norton to talk to a more more qualified expert, and to not print Patterson's opinions. That is not the case. I just think that a dissenting expert should be quoted too.
To summarize, the gender of the technical expert quoted saying positive things about Cryptocat has absolutely nothing at all to do with my belief that a responsible journalist would have spoken to, and quoted at least one technical expert who is critical of the tool. Even more so when the headline of the story is "This Cute Chat Site Could Save Your Life and Help Overthrow Your Government."
After I published my blog post, Singel criticized me for quoting Norton's tweets, claiming that I was using "an outsider's critique of your boys club as a way to discredit them."
Although Singel clearly disagrees, I felt, and still feel that it is relevant to highlight the fact that Norton believes that the crypto community, and in particular, the critics of Cryptocat, are just privileged, paranoid geeks who have no real problems.
As I mentioned in my blog post, two of the most vocal critics of Cryptocat's web based chat app, Jake Appelbaum and Moxie Marlinspike, have faced pretty extreme real world problems of surveillance and government harassment.
After Appelbaum was outed by the press as as being associated with WikiLeaks, Twitter, Google and Sonic.net were forced to provide his communication records to the FBI as part of its investigation into WikiLeaks. At least one of Appelbaum's friends and colleagues has been forced to testify at a federal grand jury, and he has been repeatedly stopped at the border, harassed, and had digital devices seized by the authorities.
Likewise, for some time, Marlinspike was routinely stopped at the border by US authorities, had his laptop and phones searched, and in at least one case, was questioned by a US embassy official, who had a photo of Marlinspike at hand, before he could get on a plane back to the US.
While Appelbaum and Marlinspike have (thankfully) not been physically tortured by government agents, their paranoia and dedication towards improving the state of Internet security is by no means theoretical. Their concerns are legitimate, and their paranoia is justified.
On telling journalists to unplug
Singel's most vicious, yet totally unfair criticism relates to the two paragraphs that concluded my Cryptocat blog post:
Although human interest stories sell papers and lead to page clicks, the media needs to take some responsibility for its ignorant hyping of new security tools and services. When a PR person retained by a new hot security startup pitches you, consider approaching an independent security researcher or two for their thoughts. Even if it sounds great, please refrain from showering the tool with unqualified praise.
By all means, feel free to continue hyping the latest social-photo-geo-camera-dating app, but before you tell your readers that a new security tool will lead to the next Arab Spring or prevent the NSA from reading peoples' emails, step back, take a deep breath, and pull the power cord from your computer.
Singel states that the main point of my post "seemed to be to tell a woman to shut up and unplug from the net." He further twists my words by writing:
Moreover, Soghoian suggesting that if Quinn Norton ever wanted to write about about encryption tools in the future, she ought to "step back, take a deep breath, and pull the power cord from your computer" isn't just rude and obnoxious, it’s border-line sexist and an outright abuse of Soghoian's place in the computer security world."
The harsh words in my conclusion, which Singel quotes, were aimed at "the media." This of course includes Wired, but also many other journalists and news organizations who regularly publish stories on the latest new snake-oil product that uses "military-grade encryption."
In fact, the words "ignorant hyping" in the blog post's conclusion link to a recent New York Times article about Wickr, a new mobile app that the Times reveals will let "users transmit texts, photos and videos through secure and anonymous means previously reserved for the likes of the military and intelligence operatives."
(This is, of course, rubbish. There are no anonymity technologies that have been "reserved for the likes of the military and intelligence operatives.")
Finally, in support of his charge that I am sexist, Singel twists my words by stating that "Soghoian suggest[s] that if Quinn Norton ever wanted to write about about encryption tools in the future, she ought to 'step back, take a deep breath, and pull the power cord from your computer.'"
Let me be clear: Nowhere in my blog post do I tell Quinn that she should never again write about encryption tools. Instead, I warn journalists who are planning to write that "that a new security tool will lead to the next Arab Spring or prevent the NSA from reading peoples' emails." That is very different than "ever writing about encryption tools in the future."
Of course I want journalists to write about encryption, privacy, security and the importance of protecting data. I want users to be safe, and one of the best ways for them to discover and then adopt safe practices is by reading about them in the media.
(Strangely enough, Wired's chilling coverage this week of the devastating hack against Mike Mat Honan has been absolutely fantastic, offering a clear demonstration of how difficult it is for users to protect their data even when using tools and services created by billion dollar corporations.)
What I wish to avoid though, is news stories that hype technologies that simply cannot, and will not deliver what has been promised to users. By all means, please tell users about two-factor authentication, encrypted cloud backups with keys not known to providers, and VPN services. Just don't claim that these technologies will plunge the NSA into darkness or lead to the overthrow of authoritarian governments.
I do not hate female journalists
As an activist that uses media coverage to pressure companies to change their privacy invading practices, I regularly work with journalists around the world, feeding them stories, tips, and when they want them, quotes. In the more than six years that I have been working with the media (including Wired on countless occasions), never once has the gender of the reporter played any role in whether or not I went to them with a scoop, or returned their phone calls or emails.
The media are of course not equal in their understanding of technology or their willingness to dig deep into a tech issue. In my experience, gender plays absolutely no role in determining the quality of a tech journalist.
For example, of the entire news media, the What They Know team at the Wall Street Journal (Julia Angwin and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries) are by far the best in the business when it comes to covering privacy and security. They break major stories, do great investigative research, and routinely seek the confirmation of multiple technical experts in order to verify claims before they print them. On this beat, their coverage is first rate, and quite frankly, puts the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired, Ars and others to shame. It is not surprising then, that when a great scoop lands in my lap, I take it to the WSJ first.
I judge, praise and criticize journalists on the tech beat based on the quality of their reporting, not by their gender. In this case, I criticized Quinn Norton's Wired story because it was deeply flawed, not because she is a woman. To claim otherwise is pure bullshit.
Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) has reintroduced to Congress the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act which aims to reduce the use of human antibiotics in animals and keep them working for human medicine.
Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
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