We're still a week away from the beginning of season two, but here's a taster of Jeremy's interview on our sister podcast, Politically Re-Active. Jeremy clears the air on his cancelled appearance on "Real Time with Bill Maher" with hosts W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu, and much more. To hear the full interview, subscribe to Politically Re-Active or head to politicallyreactive.com.

Last week Puerto Rico officially became the largest bankruptcy case in the history of the American public bond market. On May 3, a fiscal control board imposed on the island’s government by Washington less than a year ago suddenly announced that Puerto Rico’s economic crisis had “reached a breaking point.” The board asked for the immediate appointment of a federal judge to decide how to deal with a staggering $123 billion debt the commonwealth government and its public corporations owe to both bondholders and public employee pension systems.

The announcement sparked renewed press attention to a Caribbean territory that many have dubbed America’s Greece. The island’s total debt, according to the control board, is unprecedented for any government insolvency in the U.S., and it is certain to mushroom quickly if no action is taken. Detroit’s bankruptcy, by comparison, involved just $18 billion — one-ninth the size of Puerto Rico’s.

Within days, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, acting under a provision of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (known as PROMESA), which was enacted last June, appointed federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain from the Southern District of New York to take over the Puerto Rico case. A former bankruptcy court judge who was appointed to the federal court by President Clinton, Swain famously presided over the long criminal trial of employees of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.

Few press reports on Puerto Rico’s troubles, however, have bothered to examine the deeper issues behind this crisis.

First, the colonial relationship that has prevailed between the U.S. and Puerto Rico since 1898 is no longer viable. Puerto Rico is the largest overseas territory still under the sovereign control of the United States, and it is the most important colonial possession in this nation’s history. That relationship produced uncommon profits for American subsidiaries on the island for more than a century, even as the federal government kept claiming that the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, created in 1952, was a self-governing territory. But now, with a Washington-appointed board directly overseeing the island’s economy, and with a pivotal Supreme Court decision last year affirming that Congress continues to exercise sovereign power over Puerto Rico, the mask of self-governance has been removed.

The old commonwealth is effectively dead. Absent a huge infusion of U.S. public dollars to prop up its collapsing economy, a scenario that is nearly impossible with a Trump White House and a Republican-controlled Congress, that relationship cannot be revived. Political leaders in both Washington and San Juan, whether they like it or not, are being propelled to fashion a new political and economic status for the territory. They will have to finally decide whether to completely annex Puerto Rico as the 51st state or acknowledge that it still remains a distinct nation, with the right to its own sovereignty and independence.

Second, the impact of Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy will continue to reverberate throughout the U.S. bond market, far more than most Wall Street analysts have so far acknowledged. The PROMESA control board has warned that even with massive cuts to government services and new projected revenues from higher taxes and fees, Puerto Rico will still generate slightly less than $8 billion in budget surpluses over the next 10 years, when some $35 billion in debt service comes due. In other words, three-quarters of the debt cannot be repaid. That is not just a haircut for bondholders; it is a head-shaving, one that will send shock waves throughout the municipal bond market. After all, bonds backed by the full faith-and-credit of local government entities have long been considered among the safest of investments.

Years of court battles between Puerto Rico and contending groups of creditors are now certain. “The economy of Puerto Rico will be put on hold for years,” Andrew Rosenberg, adviser to the Ad Hoc Group of Puerto Rico General Obligation Bondholders, told the Associated Press. “Make no mistake: The board has chosen to turn Puerto Rico into the next Argentina.”

The Debt Is Not Payable

Civil society groups contend that the plunder of the Puerto Rican people through predatory and even illegal bond deals that island politicians concocted together with top Wall Street firms will now be exposed.

Amazingly, the 23-page petition that the federal government’s own financial control board filed in U.S. District Court in San Juan reached the exact same conclusion that Puerto Rico’s former Gov. Alejandro García Padilla reached back in June 2015 — that the island’s debt is “not payable.”

In the nearly two years since García Padilla sounded the alarm, however, Washington has done almost nothing to alleviate the economic catastrophe afflicting 3.4 million U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico, except to establish the control board by enacting PROMESA.

On an island that has lost 10 percent of its population in the last 10 years, where 46 percent of the population lives below the U.S. poverty level, where the unemployment rate is more than 11 percent, and where the labor force participation hovers around 40 percent, lawmakers in Congress have kept insisting on greater austerity from Puerto Rico’s population. The reality is such dire conditions would never be tolerated among U.S. citizens in any other jurisdiction, yet they are allowed to persist in Puerto Rico.

During the past two years, the commonwealth government has sharply raised electricity and water rates. It has increased the sales tax (now a value added tax) to 11.5 percent. It has proposed ending all pensions for new workers and cutting existing benefits by an average of 10 percent. And last week, it announced the closing of 179 public schools for the coming school year. In addition, the control board has called for a $450 million cut over the next four years to the island’s 70,000-student public university.

Under the control board’s pressure, Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, who took office in January, is eyeing the privatization of the government-owned electric company, the water and sewer authority, even the public transit system. But even massive cuts and selling off public assets can’t solve the problem that there aren’t enough jobs on the island, that young people keep fleeing to the United States, and that Puerto Rico’s government is powerless to fashion its own economic and trade policy independently from the U.S.

For decades, Puerto Rico was important to the American economy as a center of sugar cane growing, then as a tax haven for manufacturing and pharmaceutical companies, and as a military stronghold and bulwark against the spread of communism in Latin America. But now it is no longer needed for any of these things. Most of the U.S. military bases have closed, and Congress began in 1996 to phase out the island’s tax haven status. As soon as the last of the federal tax breaks — known as Section 936 — ended in 2006, corporations started leaving and the island plunged into a recession from which it has yet to recover. For the past 20 years, a succession of island governments has been closing structural operating deficits with borrowed funds supplied by Wall Street firms eager to market its triple tax-exempt bonds to wealthy and middle-class Americans and Puerto Ricans.

Investors were especially drawn to a provision of the Puerto Rico constitution that required the government to pay general obligation debt service ahead of any other expenses, and by the fact that Puerto Rico and its public corporations were legally prevented from resorting to Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the portion of the bankruptcy code that applies to most local governments and municipalities.

Until 1978, Congress had included all the territories and possessions of the United States under Chapter 9, so Puerto Rico had bankruptcy protection until then. But between ’78 and the early ’80s, there were several changes to U.S. bankruptcy law. In 1984, an amendment was inserted into the law by South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond that specifically excluded Puerto Rico from Chapter 9. No reason was given. No federal policy or interest in the change was spelled out in the amendment process. By a few simple phrases in an amendment that few people noticed, Congress laid the basis for the unique situation Puerto Rico confronted last year. It was not only broke, there was no established legal recourse for it to get a court to decide how its many creditors would get paid or how much.

The PROMESA bill Congress enacted at least created a new type of Chapter 9-like process for the island. The bill stipulates that if the Puerto Rican government and the control board cannot reach voluntary settlements with bondholders, a judge can be appointed and creditors forced to accept a settlement, known as a “cram-down.”

But the law’s constitutionality has yet to be tested, and with so much money at stake the various groups of bondholders are determined to wage a titanic legal battle against it.

On May 5, for instance, Ambac Assurance Corp., one of the major insurers of Puerto Rico bonds, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Puerto Rico against the Commonwealth and the Oversight Board, and did so with uncommonly strident language:

Sovereignty confers great power, but it does not authorize lawlessness. This action seeks to halt the latest in a series of unconstitutional and unlawful acts that have been the unfortunate modus operandi of the Commonwealth government in seeking to manage its financial and economic distress. Instead of rectifying these abuses, the Oversight Board created by Congress to restore fiscal responsibility to the Commonwealth has affirmatively exacerbated them, giving its imprimatur to an ongoing scheme of constitutional and statutory violations that can only be called theft.

Ambac has insured billions of dollars in sales tax revenue bonds, known as COFINA bonds, that Puerto Rico has issued since 2006, and the company, along with other bond insures, faces enormous losses from any cram-down.

Meanwhile, another group of bondholders who were involved in $1.4 billion of Puerto Rico’s last major general obligation bonds, issued in 2014, filed suit in New York state Supreme Court. Those bondholders, led by hedge funds Aurelius Capital Management and Monarch Alternative Capital, insist that Puerto Rico’s Constitution requires them to be paid first from all available revenues. The general obligation bondholder group, along with many civil society groups, insist that all the COFINA bonds — and they represent nearly $18 billion of the total $74 billion bond debt — were illegally issued and should not be repaid.

That’s because the Puerto Rico constitution specifically forbids debt service and principal that surpasses more than 15 percent of annual government revenues. The Puerto Rico legislature specifically created COFINA to maneuver around that 15 percent limit, and it then guaranteed the payment of that debt from sales tax revenues. But the legality of that maneuver has never been tested in court.

While the contending bondholder groups battle in the courts, the PROMESA board has now sided with the Puerto Rico government that bondholders will have to accept major reductions in payments.

“From current revenues, the Commonwealth and its instrumentalities cannot satisfy their collective $74 billion debt burden and $49 billion pension burden and pay their operating expenses,” the fiscal control board concluded last week after months of poring over Puerto Rico financial records.

And the island’s budgetary crisis “is about to worsen exponentially,” the control board warned, “due to the elimination of approximately $850 million in Affordable Care Act Funds in fiscal year 2018.” The total loss of federal health care funds, according to the board, is expected to reach $16 billion over the next 10 years. On top of that, the government pension systems are almost out of cash and will need $1.5 billion a year just to keep up payments to current retirees. Unlike municipal workers in the U.S., most public employees in Puerto Rico are not part of the social security system, so those pensions are their only retirement income.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress insist there will be no bailout of Puerto Rico, no extra federal assistance to the island’s population.

They want to ignore the fact that back in the 1990s under Bill Clinton and the Newt Gingrich Congress, Washington’s leaders realized they had to take drastic measures to save the District of Columbia from economic collapse. Congress established a fiscal control board just as it has with Puerto Rico.

But that board soon concluded that DC had structural problems that required federal help. In 1997, a reform package accomplished the following: the federal government assumed the city’s debts, it took responsibility for the local courts and prisons, it increased the rate for Medicaid reimbursements to the district, and it took over the city’s underfunded employee pensions.

As a result, the district emerged from economic calamity. Today it is a vibrant and prosperous city.

Federal lawmakers will either have to provide massive assistance to Puerto Rico, or they will have to move rapidly to change the island’s political and economic status. After a century of colonial rule by Washington and decades of predatory debt from Wall Street, the bill has come due.

Top photo: Pedestrians walk past an old hotel in the Condado area of San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2015.

The post Puerto Rico’s $123 Billion Bankruptcy Is the Cost of U.S. Colonialism appeared first on The Intercept.

Democracy Now! 2017-05-10 Wednesday

• Headlines for May 10, 2017
• Glenn Greenwald on Trump's "Shocking" Firing of FBI Chief James Comey Amid Russian Probe
• Glenn Greenwald: Independent Probe Needed to Uncover Truth Behind Russia's Role in 2016 Election
• Greenwald: Hillary is to Blame for Losing 2016 Election, Not James Comey
• Could Firing of James Comey Mark the Beginning of the End for Trump Presidency?
• Greenwald: Supporting U.S.-Russia Relations Should Be Encouraged, Not Viewed as Sign of Treason

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Behind the News, 5/4/17 - guests: Margaret Corvid, Emre Ongun - Doug Henwood

Charlotte Woodford on the contribution of Katharina von Bora to Luther's Reformation.

The 1967 debut from The Velvet Underground didn't sell many records, but arguably no album in the past half century has had a greater influence on rock music. Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot offer a Classic Album Dissection of The Velvet Underground & Nico in celebration of the art-rock classic's fiftieth anniversary.

The French elections pitted global openness against nationalist isolation. So far openness has won.

From the Cottage Country Comedy Festival, Casey Corbin raises some important questions about dangerous animals in the wilderness and Efthimios Nasiopoulos tells us how to navigate the tricky waters…of a couples’ massage.

Under President Trump, the media has become a part of the story like never before. Journalistic probing has irritated our touchy president. But media outlets have also played a role in Trump’s rise. During the campaign, cable news outlets provided him with wall-to-wall free advertising and, more recently, lauded Trump as “presidential” because he decided to bomb Syria. Adam Johnson, a writer at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, breaks it down.

The $30bn sex tech industry is about to unveil its biggest blockbuster: a $15,000 robot companion that talks, learns, and never says no • Read the text version here

You know the reasons why Bret Stephens should not be a New York Times columnist:

1. He’s a climate denier.

Here’s a question for the New York Times editors: Do you think there’s a meaningful chance that virtually all climate scientists are wrong and Bret Stephens is right when he says “temperatures will be about the same” in a hundred years as they are now (Wall Street Journal, 11/30/15)?

If they do believe this, I would suggest they have a lot to learn about climate science—and about probability. But that doesn’t seem to be their position; a month ago, the paper ran an editorial (3/28/17) rebuking Donald Trump for repudiating “the rock-solid scientific consensus that without swift action the consequences of climate change—rising seas, more devastating droughts, widespread species extinction—are likely to get steadily worse.”

But if the editors recognize that there’s a “rock-solid scientific consensus” on the dire effects of climate change, what’s the value in having a columnist who ridicules the “mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming” (Wall Street Journal, 7/1/08), who asserts that his opinion trumps that science—based on arguments like “a guy I know just had a baby and he’s a big global warming, climate change activist” and “my wife is German, so I know something about German energy policy” (Think Progress, 4/28/17)?

Is this how serious people discuss an ongoing global catastrophe? How is it more helpful than people on the Titanic telling their fellow passengers not to get into lifeboats, because the ship is unsinkable?

If it wasn’t abundantly clear that Stephens has no actual knowledge of or interest in climate science, the fact that the Times had to run a correction on the one fact about climate included in his inaugural column calling for more skepticism of climate scientists should have driven that home.

2. He advocates a crime against humanity.

“I am not sorry Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times,” Stephens wrote in the Wall Street Journal (12/15/14). Waterboarding, despite the word games the Bush administration liked to play (abetted by the New York Times), is torture—defined by the UN as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person.” And torture is a crime against humanity—included on the same list with murder, enslavement, extermination and rape.

Does the New York Times want to open the floor to debate over whether slavery is sometimes good? Genocide? Rape? By putting Stephens on its op-ed page, they’ve become the kind of paper that thinks the wrongness of such things is a matter of opinion.

3. He’s a racist.

Introducing Stephens, New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet (4/28/17) took pains to note that not just any opinion was allowed on the Times op-ed page: “There’s no place for bigotry or dishonesty in intelligent discussion,” he wrote.

So how did Stephens get his job? This is the writer (Wall Street Journal, 8/15/16) who insisted that “the Arab world’s problems are a problem of the Arab mind,” or to be more specific, “the disease of the Arab mind.” Elsewhere (Wall Street Journal, 10/12/15) he accused Palestinians of having a “communal psychosis” that debunked “comforting fictions about all people being basically good, or wanting the same things for their children, or being capable of empathy”—Palestinians, apparently, being different from regular humans in these respects.

Even one of Stephens’ new colleagues, Times Cairo bureau chief Declan Walsh, pointed out that “ascribing a pathological condition to an entire race of people” is “not cool.” The irony is that the rationale Stephens offers for his communal hatred of Palestinians is that they have been “perverted” by communal hatred of Jews. What do you suppose Stephens—or the Times—would make of a writer that talked about the “disease of the Jewish mind,” or suggested that Israeli violence proved that Jews were not “capable of empathy”?

But Palestinians are not the only group about which Stephens likes to make sweeping put-downs. Utilizing his disease metaphor again, he wrote (Wall Street Journal, 8/29/16) that

the Black Lives Matter movement…has metastasized into the big lie of America, land of the irredeemably racist. For BLM and its cadres, there is no moral agency in the black community, no choices African-Americans can make for themselves to shape their own destiny for good or ill. There is merely a nonstop conspiracy by the structures of white power to keep black people down.

“Institutionalized racism is an imaginary enemy,” Stephens wrote earlier (Wall Street Journal, 11/30/15) because “the future of liberal racialism…requires periodic sightings of the ghosts of a racist past”—this in a country where young black men are nine times more likely to be killed by police than other people, and where a major bank targeted “mud people” for predatory loans.

Stephens’ contempt for the “lack of moral agency” of those with dark skin doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. In a piece headlined “Haiti, Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire: Who Cares?” (Wall Street Journal, 1/11/11), Stephens described troubles in three mostly black nations and argued that “colonialism may be the best thing that could happen to at least some countries in the postcolonial world”—due to “the depravity of the locals.”

This is alt-right stuff. But none of it rises to the level of bigotry for Bennet, the editorial page editor.

For Times public editor Liz Spayd (4/22/17), who’s supposed to keep tabs on the paper for us readers, the idea of looking for bias in Stephens’ work was treated as faintly ridiculous: After his hiring was announced, she wrote, “readers and left-leaning critics…rummaged through his columns for proof that he is a climate change denier, a bigot or maybe a misogynist.”  (The last charge related to Stephens’ facile, casually race-baiting dismissal of campus rape statistics: “If modern campuses were really zones of mass predation—Congo on the quad—why would intelligent young women even think of attending a coeducational school?”—Wall Street Journal, 11/30/15.)

Spayd did acknowledge that she herself was “wary about some of his more inflammatory language,” but said it was “hard to tease apart objections to Stephens’ work from objections to hiring any conservative at all,” and declared she fully supported “Bennet’s aim of hiring people who don’t conform to a liberal orthodoxy of thought.”

The orthodoxy on the New York Times op-ed page, though, isn’t “liberalism”; note that Stephens is the third representative of his ideological niche, the anti-Trump conservative, to currently have a home there. What is glaringly missing from the paper’s opinion roster, as Adam Johnson (FAIR.org, 4/20/17) pointed out, is anyone to the left of Hillary Clinton—surely a larger portion of both the Times readership and the public at large than Republicans who find Trump distasteful.

To understand this anomaly—and the real reason that the New York Times would rather have a climate-denying bigot on its staff than a single-payer advocate—it helps to go back to the beginning of the Times dynasty, as Times veteran John L. Hess (Extra!, 1/00) did in his review of The Trust: The Powerful and Private Family Behind the New York Times, by Susan Tifft and Alex Jones (not that Alex Jones):

How did [Adolph] Ochs, a virtual bankrupt from Chattanooga, persuade Wall Street to set him up with the moribund New York Times? Answer: The financiers were anxious to keep the paper alive as a Democratic voice against the populist Democratic candidate for president, William Jennings Bryan, who was stirring the masses with that speech about the Cross of Gold. Ochs bought a fine new suit, set up a fake bank account as reference, and persuaded J.P. Morgan and others to bankroll the purchase. His paper promptly pilloried Bryan, and Ochs marched with his staff in a businessmen’s parade against him.

Much has changed since 1896, but in 2017, the Times still defends establishment, business-oriented liberalism against the populist left. In part it does this by attacking the left directly—see the columns of Paul Krugman during the 2016 Democratic primaries—but the more meaningful sustenance they give to the liberal elite is to validate them as the left-most pole of respectable discourse.

And that, in turn, requires that the neo-liberals have a right wing, and only a right wing, to argue with and present themselves as a bastion against. It can’t be a bomb-throwing right, as represented by Trump—the point is to preserve the liberal establishment, not to eradicate it—but it doesn’t pay for the right to be too polite, either.

After all, if it weren’t for the threat of the climate change-denying, torture-endorsing, race-baiting Bret Stephenses of the world—what would the New York Times’ pro-business liberals have to threaten the genuine left with?

---

You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or to public editor Liz Spayd  at public@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes or @SpaydL). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

The ways women age: Laurie Taylor talks to Abigail Brooks, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Providence College USA, and author of a study which asks why women choose or reject cosmetic anti ageing proceedures. Also, beauty politics in the Neoliberal age. Ros Gill, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at City University, discusses the ways in which women are required to be 'aesthetic entrepreneurs', maintaining a constant vigilance about their appearance. They're joined by Rachel Wood, Research Associate in the Department of Psychology, Sociology and Politics at Sheffield Hallam University. Revised repeat. Producer: Jayne Egerton.

Behind the News, 4/27/17 - guests: Sebastian Budgen, Sofia Japaridze - Doug Henwood

Brazilian diplomat Celso Amorim was once described by the magazine Foreign Policy as the world's best foreign minister. He served as foreign minister under two Brazilian presidents, mostly recently Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Amorim is known for supporting South-South cooperation between developing nations, recognizing the state of Palestine, diplomatically negotiating a resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue and reversing widespread economic inequality in Brazil through an income transferral program called "Bolsa Famíliar." He has just come out with a new book, "Acting Globally: Memoirs of Brazil's Assertive Foreign Policy."

Welcome to Radio Ecoshock. Sometimes I have to step aside, and let someone else do all the talking. This week you will hear a full-length presentation called “Racing to the Precipice: Global Climate, Political Climate”. The speaker is the world-famous Professor Noam Chomsky.  …

In recent years, references to such attacks have become inescapable. But this lazy term obscures the real nature of the threat against us • Read the text version here

Democracy Now! 2017-04-21 Friday

• Headlines for April 21, 2017
• As U.S. Preps Arrest Warrant for Assange, Glenn Greenwald Says Prosecuting WikiLeaks Threatens Press Freedom for All
• Shocking Exposé Reveals Trump Associates & ISIS-Linked Vigilantes Are Attempting Coup in Indonesia

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Behind the News, 4/20/17 - guests: Thea Riofrancos; Harrison Fluss and Landon Film - Doug Henwood

The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth largest inland body of water, it covered 62,000 square kilometres and a yearly commercial fishing catch of 42,000 tonnes.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange hits back at Trump’s CIA director Mike Pompeo after Pompeo accused Wikileaks of being a “hostile non-state intelligence agency.” In a wide-ranging interview, Assange discusses the allegations Wikileaks was abetted by Russian intelligence in its publication of DNC emails, and the new-found admiration for him by FOX News and Donald Trump. Also, why Assange believes he and Hillary Clinton may get along if they ever met in person. And we premiere an unreleased song by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine.

Alex talks with Dan Kahan, professor of law and psychology, at Yale Law School. Cited is a podcast and radio show funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and produced out of the produced out of the world class Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Follow us on iTunes (apple.co/2hW3B4c), Twitter (twitter.com/citedpodcast), Facebook (www.facebook.com/citedpodcast/), and email feedback to cited.podcast@ubc.ca.

At the age of 20, Christopher Knight parked his car on a remote trail in Maine and walked away with only the most basic supplies. He had no plan. His chief motivation was to avoid contact with people. This is his story • Read the text version here

Steve Punt, Luke Kempner, Pippa Evans, Al Porter, Rich Peppiatt, Vikki Stone & Lucy Porter present the week in news through stand-up and sketches. Produced by Joe Nunnery A BBC Studios Production

Author (Photo: Macaw and Parrot Clay Licks in the Rainforest of Peru) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow Pueblo Macaw-keeping in Chaco Canyon. Host "...Fladeboe examined the wing bones of 17 scarlet and military macaws (Ara militaris) from three pueblos. Fifteen of the birds had small bumps marring the upper surfaces of their wing bones. A macaw’s flight feathers are rooted in the bone, so pulling them out can cause bleeding and infection, Fladeboe says. Multiple infections, or a combination of infection and malnutrition, lead to bumps like those on the skeletons. Macaws do sometimes yank out their own feathers, but the ancient bones show traces of multiple feather loss along their entire lengths and on both right and left wings. To Fladeboe, it seems unlikely that 15 of the 17 macaws she studied would strip themselves so methodically. Tough old birds One macaw had suffered two broken wings, and its beak bore signs of attacks from other macaws. Its bones also show irregularities from either malnutrition or illness. This macaw probably would not have survived without hand-feeding and protection, Fladeboe says. Fladeboe makes a “good preliminary case” that the birds were plucked by humans, says zooarchaeologist Erin Keenan Early at Texas State University in San Marcos, who thinks the evidence that the birds were well cared for is also credible. Fladeboe plans to do computerized tomography scanning of the bones to confirm her early results...." http://www.nature.com/news/prehistoric-native-americans-farmed-macaws-in-feather-factories-1.21803