ANS -- Myth vs. Fact: Violence and Mental Health

This is about who perpetrates gun violence, from a scientific viewpoint.  This is what Brad Hicks says about it:

There's a lot of really interesting stuff in this article addressing the question: what would an actual evidence-based policy about school shootings really look like? What does the actual evidence say about school shootings and how they could be prevented? It's worth reading the whole thing before commenting.

But one thing in particular jumped out at me. Mental illness is not a reliable predictor of gun violence. Access to guns is only a weak predictor of gun violence. Social isolation is only a weak predictor of gun violence, and that only in smaller communities. Alcohol and drug law violations are a weak predictor of gun violence. But there is one fairly reliable predictor of gun violence, though: past non-gun violence.

Which, to me, makes for a very strong evidence-based case for a gun-law policy I've wanted for a while now: if you have a history of initiating violence (let's say indicted for any crime that involves violence, or some number of sworn affidavits that you attacked people who had not physically attacked you or anyone else) any time in the last so many years (let's say 10, or maybe 7, to allow for the fact that sometimes people do grow up and/or calm down), it ought to be flatly illegal for you to own, possess, or carry a firearm. Any objections?

Find it here:  http://www.propublica.org/article/myth-vs-fact-violence-and-mental-health    
--Kim


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Myth vs. Fact: Violence and Mental Health

A Q&A with an expert who studies the relationship between mental illness and violence.

by Lois Beckett
ProPublica, June 10, 2014, 3:30 p.m.
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 Dr. Jeffrey Swanson (Shawn Rocco/Duke Medicine)

After mass shootings, like the ones these past weeks in Las Vegas, Seattle and Santa Barbara, the national conversation often focuses on mental illness. So what do we actually know about the connections between mental illness, mass shootings and gun violence overall?

To separate the facts from the media hype, we talked to Dr. Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine, and one of the leading researchers on mental health and violence. Swanson talked about the dangers of passing laws in the wake of tragedy and which new violence-prevention strategies might actually work.

Here is a condensed version of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Mass shootings are relatively rare events that account for only a tiny fraction of American gun deaths each year. But when you look specifically at mass shootings how big a factor is mental illness?

On the face of it, a mass shooting is the product of a disordered mental process. You don't have to be a psychiatrist: what normal person would go out and shoot a bunch of strangers?

But the risk factors for a mass shooting are shared by a lot of people who aren't going to do it. If you paint the picture of a young, isolated, delusional young man that probably describes thousands of other young men.

A 2001 study looked specifically at 34 adolescent mass murderers, all male. 70 percent were described as a loner. 61.5 percent had problems with substance abuse. 48 percent had preoccupations with weapons. 43.5 percent had been victims of bullying. Only 23 percent had a documented psychiatric history of any kind which means 3 out of 4 did not.

People with serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, do have a slightly higher risk of committing violence than members of the general population. Yet most violence is not attributable to mental illness. Can you walk us through the numbers?

People with serious mental illness are 3 to 4 times more likely to be violent than those who aren't. But the vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent and never will be.

Most violence in society is caused by other things.

Even if we had a perfect mental health care system, that is not going to solve our gun violence problem. If we were able to magically cure schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, that would be wonderful, but overall violence would go down by only about 4 percent.

Federal law prohibits people who have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution from owning guns. Is that targeting the right people?

The criteria we have are both over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time. They capture a lot of people who are not really at risk, at least not anymore. For instance, think about someone who had a suicidal mental health crisis 25 years ago, was involuntarily hospitalized, but now they're recovered and fine, they haven't had problems in years. They want to get a job as a security guard and they can't because they can't possess firearms.

Under-inclusive, because think about someone who's in the middle of their first episode of psychosis, but hasn't been treated. This might be a serious, dangerous mental health crisis a person with paranoid delusions, believing that everyone else is out to get him, isolated, maybe drinking heavily but he is not disqualified from going and purchasing any number of guns.

Then there's another problem: Even if someone has a record of serious mental illness, these records might not actually make it into the background check system.

Reporting [of mental health records] is spotty. Mayors Against Illegal Guns put out this report [which found that, as of 2014, 12 states have still reported fewer than 100 mental health records to the national background check system.]

In one recent study, you found that adding more mental health records to the background check system can prevent some violence but only a very small amount. Can you explain what you found?

The state of Connecticut provided a natural experiment. Prior to 2007, they didn't report mental health records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, and after that they did.

We compared two groups of people over eight years. Everyone had been hospitalized and had a major diagnosable psychiatric disorder, such as schizophrenia. One group had been hospitalized involuntarily, and was disqualified from buying guns. One group had been voluntarily hospitalized.

The criteria for involuntary commitment are intertwined with dangerousness and violence. Before Connecticut began reporting mental health records [to the background check system], people who had been involuntarily committed had a higher likelihood, month by month, of committing violence. After the period when the gun provisions were enforced, the difference went away a 6 percent drop in their likelihood of committing a violent crime.

So blocking people with serious mental illnesses from buying guns worked but it didn't have a huge impact. Adding the mental health records only prevented an estimated 14 violent crimes a year, or less than one half of 1 percent of the state's overall violent crime. Why is that?

The people who were [actually disqualified from buying guns] were only 7 percent of the study population of people with serious mental illness and only a very, very small proportion of people at risk of engaging in violent crime.

It's like if you had a vaccine that was going to work against a particular public health epidemic, but only 7 percent of the people got the vaccine. It might work great for them, but it's not going to affect the epidemic.

After the Santa Barbara shootings, the House of Representatives approved an additional $19.5 million to help states add more mental health records to the background checks system a rare bipartisan move. Do we know if adding more records nationwide will have a big impact on violence?

[There's an idea that] once we do that, it's going to have a big effect. We haven't done a lot of research on it.

When one of these mass shootings has occurred, there's immediately a lot of attention and finger-pointing. Mental health becomes the one square inch of common real estate between people who want to reform the mental health care system, and gun rights people.

So, if our current standards for denying people gun rights based on mental illness doesn't work very well, what would a better policy look like?

We want to focus more on behavioral indicators of risk, and not so much on "mental health" and "mental illness" as a category.

Even though the large majority of people with mental illnesses are never violent, there may be times in the course of illness and treatment when we do know that risk is elevated. One of those times is the period surrounding involuntary hospitalization. We think that if there are indicators of risk, that should be a time when firearms are removed at least temporarily with an opportunity for restoration of gun rights when the person no longer poses a public safety risk

There are lots of states when people are involuntarily detained for a 72-hour hold, never have a commitment hearing, and are not prohibited from firearms. People in that time frame, if guns were temporarily removed from them, that might have a big impact, particularly on suicide.

California Democrats are pushing a new state law that would create a "gun violence restraining order," based on the model of a domestic violence restraining order. With a judge's order, law enforcement would be allowed to temporarily take away someone's guns. Is this a better model?

Yes. There are times when a family member, or people who know someone, can be legitimately concerned that person poses a threat. They might not have committed a crime. They might not even be having a mental health crisis. But if there were a way for family members to get law enforcement involved, that might actually save some lives.

In the Santa Barbara shooting, for example, the police were called. His family was concerned for him. But he didn't meet the criteria to be involuntarily detained.

Gun violence restraining orders would allow people to say that someone seems dangerous, and have their guns temporarily taken away. How do you protect against someone abusing this law?

Connecticut, Indiana and Texas already have a dangerous person gun seizure law.With the gun violence restraining order idea, a judge would make that decision. There has to be evidence there. There is a constitutional right at stake.

You talk a lot about the tension between the way the media portrays mental health and violence, and the reality of the problem. If 'mental health' isn't the key to violence in America, what is?

Violence is not distributed at random. If you look at the victims of homicide, for example young African American men are far more likely to be victims of homicide.

We need to think of violence itself as a communicable disease. We have kids growing up exposed to terrible trauma. We did a study some years ago, looking at [violence risk] among people with serious mental illness. The three risk factors we found were most important: first, a history of violent victimization early in life, second, substance abuse, and the third is exposure to violence in the environment around you. People who had none of those risk factors even with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia had very low rates of violent behavior.

Abuse, violence in the environment around you those are the kinds of things you're not going to solve by having someone take a mood stabilizer.

What are the best ways of figuring out who is likely to become violent?

If someone has a history of any kind of violent or assaultive behavior, that's actually a better predictor of future violence than having a mental health diagnosis. If someone has a conviction for a violent misdemeanor, we think there's evidence, they ought to be prohibited [from owning guns.] Things like a history of two DUI or DWI convictions, being subject to a temporary domestic violence restraining order, or convicted of two or more misdemeanor crimes involving a controlled substance in a five-year period.

Those are the evidence-based recommendations of the Consortium for Risk-Based Firearms Policy [a group of mental health, gun violence, and legal experts who came together after the Sandy Hook shootings. You can also read their full federal policy recommendations and state policy recommendations.]

Most of our peer high-income countries can take a different approach. They can say, it's just too dangerous for someone to have a personal handgun for their own protection. They broadly limit legal access to guns. That's why they have lower homicide rates. What we try to do is keep the guns out of the hands of dangerous people, and that's hard, because it's hard to predict, and we have almost more guns than people.

What do we know about the risk factors for school shootings, in particular?

Katherine Newman's book Rampage, which looks at school shootings, identifies five common factors. Every shooter in her study had some kind of "psychosocial problems," which may include mental illness.

The other factors: Shootings tend to happen in smaller communities, where everybody knows everybody, and the person who does the shooting perceives himself as purely marginal. And there are cultural scripts that give them a model: the idea that if you go out and shoot people, you're going to become this notorious anti-hero, on the front pages of every newspaper.

Then there's the failure of surveillance systems a teacher might have seen that the shooter was troubled, or it might be another kid. If everybody had been able to sit down together and connect the dots, they might have realized what was happening.

And the fifth factor is the availability of the weapons.

You've written a lot about the danger of making policy in the wake of high-profile tragedies. From the mental health perspective, what are the one or two worst laws pushed through in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings?

One was the particular feature of the New York SAFE Act, that put in place mandated reporting by mental health professionals of clients who disclosed a risk of harming themselves or others. They were required to report the names of individuals to the police, so that the names could be matched to the gun permit database and their guns taken away. A lot of mental health professionals in New York [did not support this] because of the potential chilling effect. It might keep people away from help-seeking and inhibit their disclosures in therapy.

You've estimated that preventing mental health-related gun deaths could save 100,000 lives over a decade but most of these would not be mass shooting victims, or even gun homicides.

Everyone has been through our National Mall and seen the Vietnam Memorial what a sobering sight it is to look at 58,000 names, over a 10-year period of time, U.S. military deaths. But if we were to build a monument to commemorate all the people who died as a result of a gunshot in the last 10 years, we would need a monument five times bigger than the Vietnam Memorial.

I've done these back-of-the envelope calculations. If you were to back out all the risk associated with mental illness that's contributing to the 300,000 people killed by gunshot wounds in the last ten years, you could probably reduce deaths by about 100,000 people. Ninety-five percent of the reduction would be from suicide. Only 5 percent would be from reducing homicide.

Mental illness is a strong risk factor for suicide. It's not a strong risk factor for homicide.

So if what matters is preventing suicides, why are we talking about guns?

Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Lots of times, it's the impulsive action of a young person who's intoxicated. There's a huge possibility to prevent it. If a person survives a suicide attempt, there's good evidence they're unlikely to go and die from another suicide.

But the fatality rate for gun suicide attempts is just huge. You might survive an overdose. You're not going to survive a shot to the brain at close range. At the time that someone is inclined to harm themselves, you don't want them to have a gun. I'm all for improved access to mental health care. But part of the suicide prevention puzzle has to do with limiting access to lethal means.

I don't think we're ever going to live in a world where we're not going to have troubled, confused, isolated young men. But we shouldn't live in a world where men like that have very easy access to semi-automatic handguns.

So what are some of the ways to limit access to lethal means?

We're not a country like the UK or like Australia, where we can say, "Let's just limit legal access to handguns." Guns are here to stay. Universal background checks, I would support. That, all by itself, wouldn't be sufficient. We need to do something about limiting access to the guns people already have when they are inclined to harm others or themselves. In some states, 50 percent of people live in homes where they have guns already.

I have colleagues who are psychiatrists. When they see patients with serious depression, they counsel them about the danger of having a gun in the house. They have a conversation with family members. You can do a lot without invoking law, by talking to people about harm reduction and locking up guns. Getting family members to voluntarily store guns somewhere else.

In Switzerland, an army policy reform in the mid-2000s effectively cut in half the number of soldiers with guns stored in their homes. Researchers were able to show that this change in gun access resulted in a very significant decrease in the overall suicide rate.

We talked about why the current standards for disqualifying someone from owning a gun don't work very well. But there's also an interesting historical angle here. Why is the bar having been "committed to a mental institution"? Where does this standard come from?

The 1968 Gun Control Act passed the year that Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated.

When the law was enacted, the mental health system was very, very different. We had massive numbers of people locked up involuntarily in psychiatric hospitals, often for long periods of time. In 1950, there were about 500,000 people in these institutions. Now, after deinstitutionalization, there are probably 50,000.

Fewer people now are disqualified on the basis of a mental health record. That's not to say that the overall number of people disqualified from owning guns is lower. Some of the people who, in the old days, would have been disqualified because they were involuntarily committed now some of them may have been disqualified due to a criminal record, and some would be incarcerated.

In Connecticut, we looked at 23,292 people with a history of serious mental illness. Only 7 percent of them were disqualified from owning guns because of mental health records. But 35 percent of them had a disqualifying criminal record.

But just because someone has a mental illness and they committed a crime the illness isn't necessarily why they did it. Among these people with serious mental illness, the risk factors for committing a violent crime appeared to have more to do with the overall risk factors for violence: being young, male, socially disadvantaged, and involved with substance misuse.

Correction 06/10/2014 4:22 p.m.: A sub-headline for this article incorrectly identified Dr. Swanson as a psychiatrist. Dr. Swanson, a professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine, is a medical sociologist.
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Lois Beckett

Lois Beckett is a ProPublica reporter covering politics, big data and information privacy issues.

ANS -- The French are right: tear up public debt – most of it is illegitimate anyway

This is interesting.
Find it here:   http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/09/french-public-debt-audit-illegitimate-working-class-internationalim?CMP=fb_gu   
--Kim

The French are right: tear up public debt – most of it is illegitimate anyway

Debt audits show that austerity is politically motivated to favour social elites. Is a new working-class internationalism in the air?

• Occupy Wall Street's debt buying strikes at the heart of capitalism

•  
  • Razmig Keucheyan
  • theguardian.com, Monday 9 June 2014 12.17 EDT
  • Jump to comments (1200)

 
Contracts for Chilean student loans worth $500m go up in flames – the 'imaginative auditing' of the artist Francisco Tapia, commonly known as Papas Fritas (Fried Potatoes). Photograph: David von Blohn/REX

As history has shown, France is capable of the best and the worst, and often in short periods of time.

On the day following Marine Le Pen's Front National victory in the European elections, however, France made a decisive contribution to the reinvention of a radical politics for the 21st century. On that day, the committee for a citizen's audit on the public debt issued a 30-page report on French public debt, its origins and evolution in the past decades. The report was written by a group of experts in public finances under the coordination of Michel Husson, one of France's finest critical economists. Its conclusion is straightforward: 60% of French public debt is illegitimate.

Anyone who has read a newspaper in recent years knows how important debt is to contemporary politics. As David Graeber among others has shown, we live in debtocracies, not democracies. Debt, rather than popular will, is the governing principle of our societies, through the devastating austerity policies implemented in the name of debt reduction. Debt was also a triggering cause of the most innovative social movements in recent years, the Occupy movement.

If it were shown that public debts were somehow illegitimate, that citizens had a right to demand a moratorium – and even the cancellation of part of these debts – the political implications would be huge. It is hard to think of an event that would transform social life as profoundly and rapidly as the emancipation of societies from the constraints of debt. And yet this is precisely what the French report aims to do.

The audit is part of a wider movement of popular debt audits in more than 18 countries. Ecuador and Brazil have had theirs, the former at the initiative of Rafael Correa's government, the latter organised by civil society. European social movements have also put in place debt audits, especially in countries harder hit by the sovereign debt crisis, such as Greece and Spain. In Tunisia, the post-revolutionary government declared the debt taken out during Ben Ali's dictatorship an "odious" debt: one that served to enrich the clique in power, rather than improving the living conditions of the people.

The report on French debt contains several key findings. Primarily, the rise in the state's debt in the past decades cannot be explained by an increase in public spending. The neoliberal argument in favour of austerity policies claims that debt is due to unreasonable public spending levels; that societies in general, and popular classes in particular, live above their means.

This is plain false. In the past 30 years, from 1978 to 2012 more precisely, French public spending has in fact decreased by two GDP points. What, then, explains the rise in public debt? First, a fall in the tax revenues of the state. Massive tax reductions for the wealthy and big corporations have been carried out since 1980. In line with the neoliberal mantra, the purpose of these reductions was to favour investment and employment. Well, unemployment is at its highest today, whereas tax revenues have decreased by five points of GDP.

The second factor is the increase in interest rates, especially in the 1990s. This increase favoured creditors and speculators, to the detriment of debtors. Instead of borrowing on financial markets at prohibitive interest rates, had the state financed itself by appealing to household savings and banks, and borrowed at historically normal rates, the public debt would be inferior to current levels by 29 GDP points.

Tax reductions for the wealthy and interest rates increases are political decisions. What the audit shows is that public deficits do not just grow naturally out of the normal course of social life. They are deliberately inflicted on society by the dominant classes, to legitimise austerity policies that will allow the transfer of value from the working classes to the wealthy ones.
 A sit-in called by Occupy France at La Défense business district in Paris. Photograph: Afp/AFP/Getty Images

A stunning finding of the report is that no one actually knows who holds the French debt. To finance its debt, the French state, like any other state, issues bonds, which are bought by a set of authorised banks. These banks then sell the bonds on the global financial markets. Who owns these titles is one of the world's best kept secrets. The state pays interests to the holders, so technically it could know who owns them. Yet a legally organised ignorance forbids the disclosure of the identity of the bond holders.

This deliberate organisation of ignorance – agnotology – in neoliberal economies intentionally renders the state powerless, even when it could have the means to know and act. This is what permits tax evasion in its various forms – which last year cost about €50bn to European societies, and €17bn to France alone.

Hence, the audit on the debt concludes, some 60% of the French public debt is illegitimate.

An illegitimate debt is one that grew in the service of private interests, and not the wellbeing of the people. Therefore the French people have a right to demand a moratorium on the payment of the debt, and the cancellation of at least part of it. There is precedent for this: in 2008 Ecuador declared 70% of its debt illegitimate.

The nascent global movement for debt audits may well contain the seeds of a new internationalism – an internationalism for today – in the working classes throughout the world. This is, among other things, a consequence of financialisation. Thus debt audits might provide a fertile ground for renewed forms of international mobilisations and solidarity.

This new internationalism could start with three easy steps.

1) Debt audits in all countries

The crucial point is to demonstrate, as the French audit did, that debt is a political construction, that it doesn't just happen to societies when they supposedly live above their means. This is what justifies calling it illegitimate, and may lead to cancellation procedures. Audits on private debts are also possible, as the Chilean artist Francisco Tapia has recently shown by auditing student loans in an imaginative way.

2) The disclosure of the identity of debt holders

A directory of creditors at national and international levels could be assembled. Not only would such a directory help fight tax evasion, it would also reveal that while the living conditions of the majority are worsening, a small group of individuals and financial institutions has consistently taken advantage of high levels of public indebtedness. Hence, it would reveal the political nature of debt.

3) The socialisation of the banking system

The state should cease to borrow on financial markets, instead financing itself through households and banks at reasonable and controllable interest rates. The banks themselves should be put under the supervision of citizens' committees, hence rendering the audit on the debt permanent. In short, debt should be democratised. This, of course, is the harder part, where elements of socialism are introduced at the very core of the system. Yet, to counter the tyranny of debt on every aspect of our lives, there is no alternative.

• This article was amended on 10 June to say that Greece and Spain had been "harder hit" by the sovereign debt crisis, not "hardly hit".

ANS -- Will Fracking Cause Our Next Nuclear Disaster?

this one is scary.  There is a nuclear waste site that is supposed to hold the waste for thousands of years, but they are fracking near it and not even inspecting to see what the fracking is doing to it.  Fracking is known to cause earthquakes, which could be a huge disaster for New Mexico if not the world. 
Find it here:  http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24201-will-fracking-cause-our-next-nuclear-disaster   
--Kim  

this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a frack.....

k

Will Fracking Cause Our Next Nuclear Disaster?

Monday, 09 June 2014 09:39 By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)The idea of storing radioactive nuclear waste inside a hollowed-out salt cavern might look good on paper. The concept is to carve out the insides of the caverns, deep underground, then carefully move in the waste. Over time, the logic goes, the salt will move in and insulate the containers for thousands of generations.

"The whole game is to engineer something that can contain those contaminants on the order of tens of thousands of years," Tim Judson, the executive director of the Nuclear Information Resource Service (NIRS), told Truthout. NIRS is intended to be a national information and networking center for citizens and environmental activists concerned about nuclear power, radioactive waste, radiation and sustainable energy issues, according to Judson.

Salt-cavern storage was the plan for the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP), the world's third-deepest geological repository, constructed and licensed to permanently dispose of radioactive waste for 10,000 years. The repository sits approximately 26 miles east of the town of Carlsbad in southeastern New Mexico.

Since shipments began in 1999, more than 80,000 cubic meters and 11,000 shipments of waste have been transferred to WIPP.

But at the moment, there are several ongoing critical problems at the site, which has been closed and unable to accept shipments of radioactive waste ever since a fire and radiation release in February. Dozens of barrels of radioactive waste from Los Alamos National Lab, like the one that caused the radiation leak, now pose an " imminent" or "substantial" threat to public health and the environment.

Yet, these problems could pale in comparison to what might happen at the site if an earthquake were to strike, or if the protective salt layer were compromised by nearby drilling for oil and gas, and in particular, hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking.

Fracking is a technique used in obtaining gas and petroleum, in which water is mixed with sand and toxic chemicals, and the mixture is injected at extremely high pressure into a wellbore to create small fractures.

Thus, one would logically deduce that fracking should never be done anywhere near WIPP. However, it is being done there, and experts expect it to increase.

"In the last three years, a dozen fracking wells have become operational within five miles of the site [WIPP]," Don Hancock, the director of the Nuclear Waste Safety Program at Southwest Research and Information Center, told Truthout.

Given that it is already well known that fracking causes earthquakes, it is clear that the nuclear waste storage site is now in danger of having its structural integrity compromised.

Given that it is already well known that fracking causes earthquakes, it is clear that the nuclear waste storage site is now in danger of having its structural integrity compromised.

"These are the major concerns," Hancock warned. "There is clearly a possibility that the deep fracking can affect the stability, but even more likely is fracking liquids nearing or entering the waste beds - which would be a very bad thing."

"They Are Drilling All Around It"

Truthout spoke with a state of New Mexico employee who is intimately familiar with the permitting and drilling processes related to WIPP. The employee spoke on condition of strict anonymity, due to a fear of reprisals from the pro-drilling administration of radical right-wing Tea Party Governor Susana Martinez.

"There is so much drilling coming online down there now," the employee explained. "They are going back into existing fields and drilling horizontally, and the WIPP site is located right in the middle of all these fields, so they are drilling all around it."

The source said that the oil and gas companies who are drilling and fracking near WIPP "have permission to go under the [WIPP] boundary to target the reservoirs there, so it appears as though most of the wells are horizontal, and that is a concern."

According to the employee, "The fracking fluids they are injecting are very unstable, and if it continues like this there could be big problems.... There was a 5.2 [earthquake] in West Texas from fracking, and that's a big concern given the sensitivity of the WIPP site and what the possible consequences could be."

The WIPP site was chosen in the mid-1970s because there was no oil or gas found within several miles of it. The thought at the time was that the area was outside the active oil and gas production area.

"One of the original criteria for siting is there shouldn't even be a borehole let alone active drilling within two miles of the site," Hancock explained. "But that ended up being reduced to a mile."

As time went on, oil and gas drilling started getting closer and closer to the site, so it started being something people paid attention to.

"We became concerned, because inadvertently drilling through nuclear waste containers on your way to find gas has generally had been thought of being a bad idea," Hancock added sarcastically.

Since the federal government "doesn't really control fracking" according to Hancock - and since most of the land around the site is controlled by the Bureau of Land Management and the state of New Mexico, whose governor is extremely pro-oil and gas and anti-environment - the area has been allowed to be treated just like any other in New Mexico, when it comes to being exploited for oil and gas.

"Those government agencies, federal and state, none of them have fracking restrictions, because the goal is to maximize mineral production because that is the law and it generates income for the feds and state from the royalties," Hancock added.

The 16-square-mile WIPP site is surrounded by more than 100 operating oil and natural gas wells within a mile of the boundary. There are at least 350 wells within three miles of the boundary, and the number is growing.

In addition to the eventuality of fracking causing earthquakes that could damage the natural salt container around the waste, Hancock also warned, "There is some likelihood of fracking fluids penetrating areas at or near waste emplacement."

[B]ecause water contamination that comes with fracking creates groundwater seepage that can compromise the integrity of the site, by allowing water into the area where the nuclear waste containers are stored.

Judson is also concerned about this possibility, because water contamination that comes with fracking creates groundwater seepage that can compromise the integrity of the site, by allowing water into the area where the nuclear waste containers are stored.

"There are also stable rock formations that evolved over millennia, and you are disturbing those rocks and that causes geologic instability," he added.

Judson also expressed concern about a highly pressurized brine reservoir directly beneath the site, which he says presents "lots of possibilities for problems."

"The brine is a big pool of very salty water underneath the site," he explained. "The repository itself is a salt repository. The concept is you hollow out salt caverns in the earth and move in the waste, and over time the salt moves in and insulates the containers for a long time. But under the site is this salt pond, and if disturbed, [it] can cause wastewater to leak up into the site and corrode waste canisters, and cause waste to migrate if it leaks, and compromise the integrity of the entire site."

Given that the principle behind WIPP is that it is built so that burying the waste there means the site will resist the dispersal of nuclear waste for thousands of years, Judson warned, "Anything allowing water migration or canister corrosion can compromise the stability of the site itself."

"A Massive External Release"

State and federal authorities who've granted permissions for the oil and gas drilling, along with fracking close to WIPP, say they don't believe any of these activities will be a problem, because the oil and gas they are going for are several thousand feet below WIPP, which is just over 2,000 feet deep at its deepest point.

According to Hancock, however, this argument is weak.

"Fracking causes earthquakes and other kinds of fracturing, and it's not like fracking is an exact engineering process. So if you're fracking at eight or nine thousand feet, this doesn't mean you can't have problems at two thousand one hundred feet, or close enough to WIPP to cause difficulties at the level where the waste is," he said.

Hancock believes that fracking near the site could cause a release from the underground containment area itself, which could have immediate and long-term effects. This is what we witnessed in February, by way of a small radiation release that shut the site down for nearly four months, and will likely keep it closed for several months to come.

Hancock issued a dire warning about the consequences of fracking near the site: "It [fracking] is potentially a shutting-down-the-facility kind of thing, and worst case scenario, that could cause catastrophic injuries to workers and a massive external [radiation] release which would be an extremely serious problem."

A Growing Number of Problems

Due to the ongoing problems at WIPP, the federal government's Department of Energy (DOE) recently notified the state of New Mexico that it would be unable to meet a June 30 deadline to remove 3,706 cubic meters of nuclear waste from the mesa at Los Alamos National Lab where it is stored.

"As we work to assess the conditions of the transuranic waste program at the lab, we have decided to halt further shipments until we can reassure the public that it is safe to do so," DOE Deputy Under Secretary David Klaus said.

As a result of the February radiation leak and fire within the facility, WIPP officials at the site discounted any effect of the current leak on human health, saying no radiation escaped to the surface. But they did not speak about the extent of the problem or how it eventually would be cleaned up.

"Officials at WIPP continue to monitor the situation," DOE spokeswoman Deb Gill said at the time of the leak. "We are emphasizing there is no threat to human health and the environment."

Contradicting Gill's assurances, plutonium readings were detected at a DOE field office half a mile from the site. Joe Franco, the manager of the DOE field office, confirmed the readings.

Nothing will change unless the left and progressives take seriously the subjective underpinnings of oppression in the United States.

If breathed or swallowed, plutonium generally stays in the body for decades and continues to expose the surrounding tissues to radiation.

The WIPP site remains shut down as the DOE and other groups investigate the cause of the release. There is no date set for when the site will reopen, which means areas like Los Alamos will continue to have to store radioactive waste on site.

Wildfires in 2011 burned precariously close to the radioactive waste site at Los Alamos, where the waste is stored aboveground in barrels.

Several times wildfires have come close to the nuclear waste at Los Alamos, nearly causing what would be a national disaster. (Photo: Erika Blumenfeld)

Given the ongoing severe drought in New Mexico and most of the rest of the western US, this wildfire season is expected to set records once again.

Meanwhile, the domino effect from WIPP's mounting problems is evident, as nuclear power plants across the US are already making preparations for long-term storage of nuclear waste at their sites, due in part to the ongoing crisis at WIPP.

Further complicating the situation at WIPP is the fact that it is located in Eddy County, where there were 592 oil and gas-related spills (63 percent of all the spills in New Mexico) in 2013.

During the first three months of 2014 there were 127 spills in Eddy County, which constituted 91 percent of the spills in the state. Not one enforcement action was referred to state Attorney General Tannis Fox, whose responsibility would have been to enforce state protocols against the spiller. Hence, by not referring actions to the attorney general, the state need not hold accountable the oil and gas companies responsible for spills. In fact, there has not been one enforcement action referred to the state attorney general during the entire time Governor Martinez has been in office.

As of May 2014, more than 3,600 reported violations of the New Mexico oil and gas drilling regulations had not been acted on. Several of these occurred in the vicinity of WIPP.

Despite these disconcerting statistics, the federal government has opted not to inspect high-risk wells and drilling in the area around WIPP.

Hancock pointed to yet another potentially catastrophic situation related to WIPP. "Eddy County has the highest highway accident rate in the state because of the heavy trucks with the fracking and oil and gas drilling, so we expect accidents with fracking and drilling vehicles and WIPP trucks, assuming the site gets reopened," he warned, as the trucks carrying large containers of radioactive waste en route to WIPP travel alongside those of the oil and gas companies. "Thus, traffic accidents could cause releases on the surface."

Thousands of Generations

Hancock, who has been monitoring WIPP since 1975 and is intimately familiar with the technical policy, regulatory and legal issues related to the site, reiterated what should be an obvious point: "Given that some of the wastes at WIPP are dangerous for thousands of generations, it is not an ideal place for storing wastes," he said. "That being the case, we can't predict what will happen with fracking ramifications that far into the future. The likelihood that the stability of the site will be disrupted is clear."

Judson was blunt about his assessment of what have been the formative years of the WIPP project.

"The issues of management and mismanagement just 15 years into the project speaks to the difficulties the government faces in managing nuclear waste," he said. "Given there is a renewed push to reopen Yucca Mountain, which has many of the same problems of WIPP, it raises a real question about the quality of management within DOE for the nuclear waste program."

WIPP contains plutonium and very toxic radio nuclides that could, if the integrity of the site is comprised as a result of the increasing fracking activity nearby, leak into New Mexico's groundwater and contaminate it for hundreds of thousands of years to come.

WIPP contains plutonium and very toxic radio nuclides that could, if the integrity of the site is comprised as a result of the increasing fracking activity nearby, leak into New Mexico's groundwater and contaminate it for hundreds of thousands of years to come.

Judson asked why there is not a mandatory 100-mile boundary around the site, and his concluding comment remains what is perhaps the most important unanswered question of all: "Isolating nuclear waste is a national priority, but how much of a priority is it if they are going to allow these kinds of activities near a site like this?"
This article was first published on Truthout and any reprint or reproduction on any other website must acknowledge Truthout as the original site of publication.

ANS -- The world can be powered by alternative energy, using today's technology, in 20-40 years, says Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson

Here's an article about how practical it would be to switch to renewable energy entirely.  Turns out we can do it with current technology.  Note, the article is three years old, and doesn't take into account new technologies (like the one we are inventing) or thorium/molten salt reactors ("clean nuclear").
Find it here:  http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1F2K5x  
--Kim




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January 26, 2011

The world can be powered by alternative energy, using today's technology, in 20-40 years, says Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson

A new study – co-authored by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson and UC-Davis researcher Mark A. Delucchi – analyzing what is needed to convert the world's energy supplies to clean and sustainable sources says that it can be done with today's technology at costs roughly comparable to conventional energy. But converting will be a massive undertaking on the scale of the moon landings. What is needed most is the societal and political will to make it happen.

By Louis Bergeron

If someone told you there was a way you could save 2.5 million to 3 million lives a year and simultaneously halt global warming, reduce air and water pollution and develop secure, reliable energy sources – nearly all with existing technology and at costs comparable with what we spend on energy today – why wouldn't you do it?

According to a new study coauthored by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson, we could accomplish all that by converting the world to clean, renewable energy sources and forgoing fossil fuels.

"Based on our findings, there are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources," said Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering. "It is a question of whether we have the societal and political will."

He and Mark Delucchi, of the University of California-Davis, have written a two-part paper in Energy Policy in which they assess the costs, technology and material requirements of converting the planet, using a plan they developed.

The world they envision would run largely on electricity. Their plan calls for using wind, water and solar energy to generate power, with wind and solar power contributing 90 percent of the needed energy.

Geothermal and hydroelectric sources would each contribute about 4 percent in their plan (70 percent of the hydroelectric is already in place), with the remaining 2 percent from wave and tidal power.

Vehicles, ships and trains would be powered by electricity and hydrogen fuel cells. Aircraft would run on liquid hydrogen. Homes would be cooled and warmed with electric heaters – no more natural gas or coal – and water would be preheated by the sun.

Commercial processes would be powered by electricity and hydrogen. In all cases, the hydrogen would be produced from electricity. Thus, wind, water and sun would power the world.

The researchers approached the conversion with the goal that by 2030, all new energy generation would come from wind, water and solar, and by 2050, all pre-existing energy production would be converted as well.

"We wanted to quantify what is necessary in order to replace all the current energy infrastructure – for all purposes – with a really clean and sustainable energy infrastructure within 20 to 40 years," said Jacobson.

One of the benefits of the plan is that it results in a 30 percent reduction in world energy demand since it involves converting combustion processes to electrical or hydrogen fuel cell processes. Electricity is much more efficient than combustion.

That reduction in the amount of power needed, along with the millions of lives saved by the reduction in air pollution from elimination of fossil fuels, would help keep the costs of the conversion down.

"When you actually account for all the costs to society – including medical costs – of the current fuel structure, the costs of our plan are relatively similar to what we have today," Jacobson said.

One of the biggest hurdles with wind and solar energy is that both can be highly variable, which has raised doubts about whether either source is reliable enough to provide "base load" energy, the minimum amount of energy that must be available to customers at any given hour of the day.

Jacobson said that the variability can be overcome.

"The most important thing is to combine renewable energy sources into a bundle," he said. "If you combine them as one commodity and use hydroelectric to fill in gaps, it is a lot easier to match demand."

Wind and solar are complementary, Jacobson said, as wind often peaks at night and sunlight peaks during the day. Using hydroelectric power to fill in the gaps, as it does in our current infrastructure, allows demand to be precisely met by supply in most cases. Other renewable sources such as geothermal and tidal power can also be used to supplement the power from wind and solar sources.

"One of the most promising methods of insuring that supply matches demand is using long-distance transmission to connect widely dispersed sites," said Delucchi. Even if conditions are poor for wind or solar energy generation in one area on a given day, a few hundred miles away the winds could be blowing steadily and the sun shining.

"With a system that is 100 percent wind, water and solar, you can't use normal methods for matching supply and demand.  You have to have what people call a supergrid, with long-distance transmission and really good management," he said.

Another method of meeting demand could entail building a bigger renewable-energy infrastructure to match peak hourly demand and use the off-hours excess electricity to produce hydrogen for the industrial and transportation sectors.

Using pricing to control peak demands, a tool that is used today, would also help.

Jacobson and Delucchi assessed whether their plan might run into problems with the amounts of material needed to build all the turbines, solar collectors and other devices.

They found that even materials such as platinum and the rare earth metals, the most obvious potential supply bottlenecks, are available in sufficient amounts. And recycling could effectively extend the supply.

"For solar cells there are different materials, but there are so many choices that if one becomes short, you can switch," Jacobson said. "Major materials for wind energy are concrete and steel and there is no shortage of those."

Jacobson and Delucchi calculated the number of wind turbines needed to implement their plan, as well as the number of solar plants, rooftop photovoltaic cells, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal and wave-energy installations.

They found that to power 100 percent of the world for all purposes from wind, water and solar resources, the footprint needed is about 0.4 percent of the world's land (mostly solar footprint) and the spacing between installations is another 0.6 percent of the world's land (mostly wind-turbine spacing), Jacobson said.

One of the criticisms of wind power is that wind farms require large amounts of land, due to the spacing required between the windmills to prevent interference of turbulence from one turbine on another.

"Most of the land between wind turbines is available for other uses, such as pasture or farming," Jacobson said.  "The actual footprint required by wind turbines to power half the world's energy is less than the area of Manhattan." If half the wind farms were located offshore, a single Manhattan would suffice.

Jacobson said that about 1 percent of the wind turbines required are already in place, and a lesser percentage for solar power.

"This really involves a large scale transformation," he said. "It would require an effort comparable to the Apollo moon project or constructing the interstate highway system."

"But it is possible, without even having to go to new technologies," Jacobson said.  "We really need to just decide collectively that this is the direction we want to head as a society."

Jacobson is the director of Stanford's Atmosphere/Energy Program and a senior fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy.

 

Fwd: Popular Resistance Newsletter - Raising Our Voices With Confidence

ANS group -- this is a newsletter I get.  It's very hope-inducing.  See the "Roadmap" wheel in the center for a beautiful vision of what we can do if we work together on it. 
--Kim

Thousands of people are working on multiple issues, often joining together across issues as a movement of movements.

This newsletter is also available
on the web here.


Last week was the one year anniversary of Popular Resistance. In the last year there have been some significant victories. Thousands of people are working on multiple issues, often joining together across issues as a movement of movements.

The #WorldwideWaveOfAction issued its first progress report this week.  They highlighted "An extensive report by the Initiative for Policy Dialogue [which] revealed that we are currently seeing the largest protests in world history, with a steady increase in the overall number of protests every year and a growing number of internationally coordinated actions. They also concluded that a 'demand for real democracy' was the primary driver of actions, with people from all age groups and walks of life participating."

Despite the lack of media coverage of this reality, people are noticing. For example, last month Citi Group published a report " Vox Populi: Taking It To The Streets." Citi was not advocating in favor of people power. They describe the classic battle of who should rule, the people or the elites, and how.

Citi describes the "Vox Populi risk" as "a structural change that will be a risk factor affecting both the investment and business environment for the foreseeable future." In fact, according to the eight stages of successful social movements, we are at the beginning of a broadening mass movement.  It will grow because government corrupted by the rule of money is unable to work on behalf of the interests of the people or to protect the planet.

The People Are Beginning To Show Their Power

There have been some important, if unheralded, victories in the last year for the movement for social, economic and environmental justice that should give all of us confidence to increase our involvement and persuade others to join the movement. Here's a recent one:

Saving The Internet. Within weeks after the leak of FCC Chair Tom Wheeler's plan to create a tiered Internet based on fees, people were able to build enough pressure to get the real solution on the FCC's agenda. Wheeler wants to avoid reclassifying the Internet as a common carrier which would prevent Internet discrimination. However, after two weeks of online and in-person protests, he included that option as one alternative to be discussed in the rulemaking process currently taking place. This is a major initial victory. Now people are submitting public comments in support of reclassifying the Internet as a common carrier. Already 50,000 comments have been received, dwarfing any other issue the FCC is considering; and more protests are planned. Coming up is a street theater performance outside the FCC on July 1 at noon called "Which side are you on, Tom?" You can find out how to participate in the "show" as well as submit comments to the FCC here.

Last week we wrote about successful environmental battles and pointed to research that showed blockades and other aggressive protest actions work – they can stall or stop extreme energy extraction. There have also been victories in stalling the Trans-Pacific Partnership, raising the minimum wage (though inadequate) and stopping cuts to Social Security.

From Stopping Harmful Policies to System Change

Stalling or stopping bad policies is necessary, but working for positive transformative change is also important. This Roadmap created by the Metta Center provides a tool for change that can be used by individuals or communities.

Democratic economic institutions are beginning to take root across the country with an increase in worker-owned cooperatives, land trusts to control housing costs and increased use of wind and solar energy. There is an expansion of organic gardening, including in urban areas. And, people are also developing new currencies that are complementary to the dominant currency while others are creating their own credit unions so they can have greater control over community wealth. Rethinking money and remaking the finance system are two parts of an overall movement toward economic democracy.

This weekend there is a conference in Boston, Commonbound, where hundreds will gather to examine how to build a new economy based on democracy, sustainability and community.  We recently held a similar conference in Baltimore, Building our New Economy Together, which continued efforts to create new economic institutions locally.  In Jackson, MS the Jackson Rising Conference brought together hundreds of people from across the nation to make Jackson a center of cooperative businesses.  These events build on a long history of cooperatives and worker ownership.

This is the one year anniversary of Edward Snowden's NSA leaks that exposed dragnet surveillance by the NSA.  In response, people are trying to make legislative change but that is showing itself to be challenging with members of Congress working more to protect the NSA then to protect the people's privacy. People are also working outside of legislation to put in place privacy protections as part of the Reset The Net campaign.  And, ExposeFacts.org is seeking to expand whistleblowing by putting in place new versions of Wikileaks-type software, SecureDrop, that will allow safe government and corporate whistleblowing.

This week a new campaign is being announced " The Rolling Rebellion for Real Democracy." The first phase of the campaign will go from July 5 to 12.  People are encouraged to plan events in their communities that will focus on the threats to our democracy posed by money being treated as speech, corporations being treated as humans and recent court decisions that have opened the floodgates of money into elections. Ending the "rule of money" has always been a key part of the vision of Popular Resistance and we are participating in this campaign. We urge you to plan an event in your community and put it on this map of actions as part of the Rolling Rebellion.

After three decades of corporate trade agreements (falsely called "free trade") failing, people working to stop the TPP and TAFTA see an opportunity to move the debate on trade in a positive direction.  This would build on work done in the 1990s around the Seattle WTO protests where people began to develop fair trade practices that  put people and the planet before profits.  At the local level people are working on TPP Free Zones with help from the Alliance for Democracy. These efforts not only oppose the TPP and other corporate trade agreements, but also define what type of trade would be good for local economies.

Transformation Takes Time

While the crisis situations we face are immediate with millions in poverty, climate change bearing down on the planet, destructive war and militarism taking place – the reality is change is slow.

People need time for political education so that when a wave of propaganda comes they question, consider and look for alternative information. This week that election-year wave was President Obama's new rules for power plants. Cited as the greatest environmental steps in history by some, in reality they are inadequate, slow and rely on approaches like cap and trade that have not worked.  On top of that, the Friday before the announcement, Obama approved off-shore oil and gas leases for Exxon-Mobil.

We need time to build alternative systems, test them, improve them and show that they can work. This is more of an evolutionary process than a revolutionary one, but it can result in a solid transformation to a new system that reflects shared values.

And, we need to build relationships as we educate, organize and mobilize to achieve deep national consensus that all of our movements are connected and that we are seeking holistic change because the corruption is systemic. This " intersectionality" is what Brooke Anderson of the Oakland-based Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project describes as facing up to the challenge:

"We can either keep fighting for the five cents here and the ten cents there … or we can view this as an opportunity to pick our heads up from those very small contract fights that we're struggling so hard on and look around and say: What's the broader system, the reason why our … wages are going down?"

Past movements have been divided over the two tracks we recommend in our strategy for change: Stop the Machine and Create a New World because some get so focused on creating their new world that that they look inward and do not connect with those working for societal change with protest, sit-ins and other tactics. But, as Mark and Paul Engler conclude in their discussion of this divide,we can balance these approaches and "experience the power of a community that is committed to living in radical solidarity, as well as the joy of transforming the world around us."

In the last year we have seen various sub-movements come together over issues like stopping the TPP and keeping the Internet free of discrimination because these are issues that affect us in obvious and direct ways. These are first steps in developing the kind of movement of movements that can be a building block to the mass movement we need to succeed.

Challenge the Corporate Media Character Assassination of Sgt. Berghdahl: Make this image go viral, share it widely

Let's show that not all of us are fooled by the corporate mass media's pro-war propaganda and let others who may not realize it yet know that the media is manipulating them. Make this image viral in social media. Spread the world.
 

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ANS - Fwd: News Flash: They talked about solutions

Hi -- I don't usually forward these kinds of things, but I missed this (probably because I was at work) on the news, and just want to make sure you all didn't miss it too. 

--Kim

 

Dear Friend of Democracy,

Something unique happened this week in Washington: they actually had a real conversation about big solutions to the money in politics problem.

The reason was the Senate Judiciary Committee held a high profile hearing on a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, the decision that allows corporate spending in elections. You can read more about the amendment here, but in short, it restores authority to Congress and the states to regulate and limit the raising and spending of money for political campaigns.

There was an overflow crowd, with both Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell testifying.

In fact, McConnell claimed that the proposed amendment would curb free speech. This hasn't always been his position. It should come as no surprise that his views on raising big money in politics have changed precisely in step with how much power he has gained in Washington. 

There will be a vote on this amendment this fall on the Senate floor. We will let you know when there are more developments and we hope you will pay close attention to what your Senator has to say on the matter!

Thank you!

P.S. If you would like to check out our Facebook page or give us $5 to keep up this work, you can do that here.

ANS -- The way to stop corporate lawbreaking is to prosecute the people who break the law says Robert Reich

This seems obvious, but apparently it's not or we would be doing it --- maybe.  We will have to start doing this if we are to repair the brokenness of our government and our society and restore faith in America.  The new saeculum will demand it. 
Find it here:  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/05/1304712/-The-way-to-stop-corporate-lawbreaking-is-to-prosecute-the-people-who-break-the-law-says-Robert-Reich?detail=email #  
--Kim




Thu Jun 05, 2014 at 04:44 PM PDT

The way to stop corporate lawbreaking is to prosecute the people who break the law says Robert Reich

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Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy, at the University of California at Berkeley, calls for holding more corporate executive lawbreakers criminally liable for corporate crimes in The Way to Stop Corporate Lawbreaking Is to Prosecute the People Who Break the Law

After reviewing allegations that GM, Credit Suisse, and Arthur Anderson broke the laws, receiving relatively trivial fines, which they consider part of the cost of doing business, Robert Reich notes that no executives have been charged with any crimes and suggests that until we start putting senior corporate executives in jail, we will see no diminution of corporate wrong doing.

For a decade GM had been receiving complaints about the ignition switch but chose to do nothing. Who was at fault? Look toward the top. David Friedman, acting head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, says those aware of the problem had ranged from engineers "all the way up through executives." ...

Yet in neither of these cases have any executives been charged with violating the law. No top guns are going to jail. No one is even being fired.

Reich obviously wrote this prior to the late afternoon announcement of executives at GM losing their jobs. But, this announcement does not change the validity of his basic point. Relatively puny corporate fines are not a sufficient deterrent. The $35 million fine of GM is "peanuts" to a hundred-billion-dollar corporation. 

Reich also thinks it is absurd to have corporations pleading guilty to criminal conduct, as Credit Suisse did, it means nothing. He notes that in the rare case of corporations being "executed" as was the case with Arthur Andersen, the wrong people paid the price - the 28,000 employees who lost their jobs had nothing to do with the crimes. The guilty senior partners skulked off to work in other accounting or consulting firms.

The truth is, corporations aren't people -- despite what the Supreme Court says. Corporations don't break laws; specific people do. In the cases of GM and Credit Suisse, the evidence points to executives at or near the top.

Conservatives are fond of talking about personal responsibility. But when it comes to white-collar crime, I haven't heard them demand that individuals be prosecuted.

Yet the only way to deter giant corporations from harming the public is to go after people who cause the harm.

I agree.

Some of Robert Reich's best writing has been on income inequality which has been one of his top issues for as long as I can remember. He apparently has a movie coming out about it in September, although this may be a spoof, joking that the topic of income  inequality could make it to a movie coming to a theater near you in September. Maybe you can help me figure it out. Either way it seems like a clever way to call attention to a vital issue that gets way too little attention for its importance. 

[if you go to the website, there is a 1:48 min video at this point.]

ANS -- Why Did AIDS Ravage the U.S. More Than Any Other Developed Country? Solving an epidemiological mystery

Here's an interesting article comparing the AIDS epidemic in the USA to Germany and the UK. 
Find it here:  http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117691/aids-hit-united-states-harder-other-developed-countries-why  
--Kim

Why Did AIDS Ravage the U.S. More Than Any Other Developed Country? Solving an epidemiological mystery

By Michael Hobbes

So I'm getting AIDS tested the other day in Berlin. I'm sitting in the waiting room and feeling like a Bad Gay, because I've lived here for three years and this is my first time getting tested. I'm surrounded by all these scared-straight brochures about HIV and AIDS in Germany. Prevalence rates, treatment options, prevention methods, names and addresses of support groups. "Since the start of the epidemic," one of them says, "more than 27,000 people have died of AIDS in Germany."

Wait, that sounds triumphantly low for a country of 80 million people. I pull out my phone and check the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, which tells me that, in the United States, 636,000 people have died since the epidemic began. That's 23 times higher than Germany, for a country with four times the population.

This makes no sense. Germany has big cities, it has gay men and sex workers and drug users, it has all the same temptations for them to be uncareful that the United States does. How could so many fewer people have died?

Maybe it's a fluke. I visit the Public Health England website and it says 21,000 people have died of AIDS there in total. If the rates were the same as the United States, it would be 128,000.

The further down the Google-hole I go, the more mind-boggling the numbers get. Since the beginning of the epidemic, AIDS has claimed more people in New York City than in Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland combined.

Illustration by Álvaro Domínguez

The next day I start asking epidemiologists about this divergence. The first thing they tell me is that it is real, even accounting for differences in methodology. ¹ Scan the columns on the stats sheets­incidence, prevalence, deaths­and you find the United States with a two-digit lead going right back to the start of the epidemic. Still now, no matter how much we've learned about how to prevent and treat AIDS, the United States loses more than 15,000 people to it each year. Germany and the United Kingdom lose fewer than 800. ²

(Five Startling Statistics About America's Dreaful Record on HIV/AIDS)

The second thing they tell me is why. AIDS is the same virus no matter what country you're in. But when it arrived in the United States, how it spread, who got it, and why­that's more complicated, and not entirely flattering.

 

Looking at the data on AIDS deaths, you see that the virus hit the United States early­and hard. In 1982, the first year of nationwide CDC surveillance, 451 people died of AIDS in America. Just five died in Britain. In 1985, when Germany started reporting, it had 170 AIDS deaths. The United States had almost 7,000.

Jonathan Engel, the author of The Epidemic: A Global History of AIDS, walks me through the timeline: AIDS first appears in humans in central Africa in the 1950s. A few isolated cases make it from there to the United States and Western Europe, but it fails to catch fire. The virus finally finds a host country in Haiti, ferried to and fro in the veins of guest workers in Africa. By the mid-'70s, Port-au-Prince is a popular tourist and cruise-ship destination­"a gay Bangkok" is how Engel's book puts it­and the virus jumps from male prostitutes to gay American vacationers, to their friends and lovers back home.

Or abroad. One of the first U.K. surveillance reports, from 1983, announces 14 cases of AIDS, then adds: "seven of the cases were known to have had contact with US nationals, suggesting that the present UK situation is simply part of the American epidemic."

But it isn't just that the virus arrived in the United States earlier. As Dr. James Curran, dean of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, points out, Belgium and France had significant central African and Haitian populations; Haiti was a destination for them, too. "But the disease wasn't able to spread through them like it went through American gays," he says.

Which leads to the next factor explaining the larger scale of the HIV epidemic in the United States: the clustering of our high-risk populations. The United States has more people than any Western European country, as well as more mobility, giving rise to larger numbers of and more tightly grouped gay men and intravenous-drug users. Engel's book quotes Frances FitzGerald, writing in The New Yorker in 1986, saying "the sheer concentration of gay people in San Francisco may have had no parallel in history."

These clusters were also engaged in riskier behavior. The United States had higher rates of STDs and intravenous-drug use (epidemiologists used to call shooting up "the American disease") before AIDS arrived. All of this, combined with the virus's devious characteristic of being maximally spreadable right after infection, laid the infrastructure for the disease to maraud through one population and jump to others.

The closest thing to a natural experiment on this clustering phenomenon is right in my own backyard. East and West Berlin had the same language, history, and culture­everything but the political and economic structures that allowed gay men to find each other and addicts to find drugs.

"Before the Berlin Wall came down, East Berlin had two gay cafés and two gay bars, for a population of 1.3 million people," says Michael Bochow, a sociologist in Berlin who has been researching HIV in Germany since the beginning of the epidemic. "East Berlin had no bathhouse, no bar with a back room."

Guys in East Berlin were still hooking up with each other­of course they were­but the low labor mobility, combined with the logistical barriers to participating in gay life and getting intravenous drugs, kept clusters from forming.

In 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, West Germany had about 35,000 people infected with HIV. East Germany had fewer than 500.

I don't want to overstate the case here. This clustering effect is almost inherently un-measurable (drug use and gayness weren't exactly on the census), and there's no way to know if San Francisco and New York really had higher proportions of gay people than London, Paris, or Berlin. We do know that the virus spread faster through U.S. cities than European ones, but we don't know, may never know, precisely why.

The third explanation for how the HIV epidemic in the United States got so severe so early has to do with intravenous-drug use­and the policies that tried to prevent it. One of the most staggering numbers I came across was that, from the beginning of the epidemic until HIV treatment became widely available in 1996, 124,800 intravenous-drug users were diagnosed with HIV in the United States. In the United Kingdom, it was just 3,400.

Don Des Jarlais, research director of the de Rothschild Chemical Dependency Institute in New York, says HIV in drug users followed a similar trajectory as HIV in gay men. It arrived earlier than in Europe, and it had a more fertile spreading ground thanks to the higher prevalence of drug use.

No one knew how severe the epidemic was among drug users until 1984, when the still-under-development antibody test found that 50 percent of drug users in New York City and Edinburgh and 30 percent in Amsterdam were already infected. (Des Jarlais says genetic tests have since shown that the epidemic in Amsterdam originated in New York.)

Here's where the differences come in. Almost immediately after those first tests, Western European countries installed needle-exchange programs, gave out free syringes, and established opiate-substitution treatment. Germany even got needle vending machines. By 1997, England and Wales were giving out 25 million free syringes per year. Anything to keep the virus from spreading, even if it meant making it a little easier to be a heroin addict that day.

The United States, on the other hand, refused to provide federal funds for needle exchanges or even fund research into whether they were effective. Exchanges were established in some cities­by 1990, New York City was distributing 250,000 syringes a year­but they never achieved the coverage of the countrywide programs in Western Europe.

This sounds like just another episode to file under "Western Europe enlightened, U.S. myopic," but remember how different the context was. The mid-'80s was America's heyday of stigmatizing drug users. This was the era of "Just Say No," Nancy Reagan on "Diff'rent Strokes," McGruff the Crime Dog. America was in the middle of a crack epidemic. All of the negative impacts of that epidemic­the gang violence to prolong it, the War on Drugs to end it­were concentrated in poor, mostly African American communities. Just possessing syringes was illegal in most states. Handing them out in the millions, facilitating one epidemic to end another, seemed like a cruel joke.

"They were saying, 'Why don't you just get rid of drug use from our communities?' " Des Jarlais says. " 'You're letting these drugs come in because you don't care about our communities, and now you want to make things worse by giving out syringes.' " This gave national politicians the excuse they needed. The ban on federal funding for needle exchanges wasn't lifted until 2009­and then got banned again in 2011.

As I'm calling up epidemiologists, hearing these explanations, it feels like something's missing: What about all those public-information campaigns I remember from growing up? After-school specials, PSAs, the time my Seattle public middle school gave us all a stack of condoms and told us to put them on fruit at home? Did Western European countries implement different, more effective kinds of programs?

Prevention efforts did indeed differ among countries. Germany threw funding at gay community NGOs and gave them carte blanche to devise their own prevention projects. Britain put a John Hurt voice-over on top of Mordor imagery, called it "AIDS: Don't Die of Ignorance," and beamed it to the whole country.

Engel points out that, in the United States, despite Ronald Reagan's sloth-like funding of HIV research and the government's stinginess in supporting NGOs, gay activists were on the streets and in the bathhouses from the earliest stages of the epidemic, condoms in hand, telling people how to protect themselves. At the national level, C. Everett Koop sent a pamphlet to every household in America (literally!), telling them about the disease and achieving the goal, like the British mass campaigns, of scaring us all shitless.

The efforts of gay community groups during this time have been (rightly) lionized in movies like We Were Here and How to Survive a Plague. Less well known is that intravenous-drug users were also educating each other about how to reduce risks. Drug users started sharing needles with fewer partners, even setting up their own needle exchanges, pilfering clean needles from hospitals, or importing them from Canada. Des Jarlais told me about doctors who used to place boxes of clean syringes around emergency rooms, knowing they'd be taken by drug users and sold or given onward.

The messages and methodologies of these efforts may have differed among the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, but their effect appears to be equally decisive. By the mid-'80s, gay men and drug users knew about HIV, they knew about their risks, and they were making changes to reduce them. In all three countries, HIV incidence­the number of people contracting HIV each year­peaked in the mid-'80s, then started to drop as people de-risked their sex and drug use.

But for those already infected, none of that mattered; the number of deaths rose steadily through the late '80s and early '90s. The avalanche had been loosed, and there was little anyone­NGOs, doctors, politicians­could do to stop it.

 


Graphs of AIDS deaths in almost every developed country look like a wave about to break on the shore. Starting from zero, deaths rise steadily through the '80s, a bit faster in the '90s, then suddenly, around 1995 or 1996, plummet downward.

"That's the beginning of the HAART era," says Caroline Sabin, a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at University College London. She's talking about highly active anti-retroviral therapy, the cocktail of medications that, 15 years after the virus appeared, marked the first truly effective rampart against it.

The next thing you notice about those graphs is that death rates in the United States didn't fall to the same lows as the rest of the developed world. (Check out how great the discrepancy is in the chart above.) Sabin points me to a 2013 study that found the United States with four-year HIV mortality rates roughly equal to those in South Africa.

And it's not just the death rates that stayed high. In 2010, the United States had 47,500 new HIV infections. The entire European Union­with a population more than one and a half times that of the United States­had just 31,400.

So what gives? "Keeping people alive is about getting them diagnosed, getting them into care, then making sure they stay in care and on HAART," Sabin says. "And that, unfortunately, is where the U.S. differs from the U.K." It turns out that, just as the AIDS virus seems almost designed to perfectly exploit the weaknesses of the human immune system, treating it seems designed to exploit the weaknesses of our national health care system.

Let's start with diagnosis, the first stage of what epidemiologists call the "cascade of care." An undiagnosed HIV infection is a ticking time bomb for the people carrying it. Each day that goes by, the virus chips away at their immune systems, reducing life expectancies and increasing the cost and chances of complications once they finally get on treatment. They also, crucially, remain more infectious. Up to 50 percent of new HIV infections are transmitted by people who don't know they have it.

Getting an HIV test is, logistically speaking, pretty easy in all three countries. The next stage of the cascade, getting linked to another round of tests and into treatment, is more challenging. In the United Kingdom and Germany, if you test positive for HIV, you'll immediately be referred to an HIV clinic for tests to measure how much of the virus is in your blood and how well your immune system is holding up.

Three-quarters of Brits diagnosed with HIV get to this next stage of care within two weeks, and 97 percent make it within three months. This is not just some nationwide codification of English politeness. Clinics that provide testing are required to get HIV-positive people to the next round of tests or they don't get fully reimbursed. If you screen positive and skip your viral-load test, you'll get a call from the clinic asking why you didn't show up. Some testing centers will walk you straight to the hospital to make an appointment.

In the United States, only 65 percent of people with HIV get linked to a hospital or clinic within three months. A survey in Philadelphia published in 2010 found that the median time between diagnosis and treatment was eight months. The effect of the wait can be devastating. A 2008 study found that gay men who had full-blown AIDS before they were diagnosed were 75 percent more likely to die within three years, even if they got on treatment. For people whose viral load is high and T-cell count is low, getting on HAART is like putting on sunscreen after they've already been at the beach for two hours.

The next stage of HIV care is receiving HAART pills and staying on them. People who get medication rapidly and take it consistently aren't just less likely to die of the virus; they're less likely to pass it on. The epidemio-speak term for this is having a "suppressed viral load": The levels of the virus in your blood are so low that tests can't pick them up anymore­and your sex and drug partners are also a lot less likely to.

This is the holy grail of HIV treatment, and arriving there requires at least 90 percent adherence to the pill regimen. If you stop taking the pills then start again, or forget to take them more than once in awhile, the virus could spike or you could develop resistance to the drugs.

In Britain and Germany, two-thirds of people with HIV have a prescription for HAART. In America? Only one-third. Forty-eight percent of Brits with HIV have a suppressed viral load. In the United States, only 25 percent of them do.

The most obvious reason for this gap is cost. In the United Kingdom, HIV treatment is completely free. Some clinics even reimburse you for your bus fare. In Germany, drugs might cost you a co-pay of 5 euros ($7.50), but that's subsidized if you're unemployed or below an income threshold.

Neither the CDC nor the National Institutes of Health tracks the out-of-pocket costs of anti-retrovirals, but Stephanie Cohen of the San Francisco Department of Public Health tells me that someone without insurance and earning too much to qualify for Medicaid could pay as much as $2,000 a month. And that's just the pills. Clinic visits, infections, hospitalizations: The costs of treatment multiply as fast as the virus does without it.

But before we all rush to Twitter to make easy political points about how America is the land of the nothing-is-free, again consider the context. The United States has put tremendous effort and resources ($14 billion per year now) into HIV treatment and has considerable achievements to show for it. Medicaid covers HAART for the poor. The Ryan White Program, with $2.4 billion in annual federal funding, provides it for the less poor. Some cities, including San Francisco, have better treatment stats than the United Kingdom or Germany.

Consider, too, the scale of the epidemic in the United States. When HAART first became available in 1995, the United Kingdom had around 30,000 people diagnosed with HIV. Germany had 38,000. The United States had 759,000 and more new infections every year than the United Kingdom or Germany had in total. Providing testing, treatment, and follow-up to all those people would have been a Hoover Dam–size investment. One we were not, as a country, willing to make.

It's not just a question of money or political will. In the last two decades, as the United States has put so much effort into filling the cracks in HIV care, the virus has moved into the populations most likely to fall into them.

From its origins as a concentrated, urban epidemic, HIV has migrated resolutely outward and southward. "People test positive and they just go home. Then they come and get tested again," says Susan Reif of Duke University's Center for Health Policy and Inequality Research.

I didn't know it was possible to get a lump in your throat from lists of two-digit numbers, but then Reif shows me the data on HIV in the Deep South versus the rest of the country. HIV prevalence: 2.3 cases per 100,000 people in Vermont; 36.6 in Louisiana. Death rates: 9.6 per 1,000 person-years in Idaho; 32.9 in Mississippi. In 2011, nine of the top ten cities for new HIV infections were in the South. In Louisiana, only 68 percent of people with HIV saw a doctor that year.

Meanwhile, in 2012, AIDS dropped off the list of New York City's top ten causes of death for the first time since 1983.

As the geography of HIV has shifted, so have its demographics. Ethnic minorities, rural drug users, impoverished heterosexuals: The virus has found the people least likely to seek­and have access to­health insurance and specialized clinics.

You could drown in the numbers on this if you wanted to, but a study that stuck out to me was one from 2012 that found uneducated black men had an AIDS mortality rate 30 times higher than educated white men. Among uneducated black women, it found that the introduction of HAART barely dropped mortality rates at all. In 2011, AIDS was the ninth-highest cause of death for blacks and twenty-fourth for whites.

Higher levels of stigma, poor infrastructure for treatment in rural areas, abstinence-only education­Reif says they all contribute to the higher rates of diagnoses and deaths. Syringe exchanges are still illegal in almost every Southern state. An estimated 60,000 uninsured or low-income people with HIV live in states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.

"Each state has a different Medicaid program in terms of whether you're eligible and what your co-pays are," she says. "Some Medicaid programs will only cover a certain number of drugs. So you get five. And you have to pick which five."

Just as explaining the differences between Europe and America requires accounting for the weight of their histories and social structures, so does explaining the differences between the South and the rest of the United States. "The disease burden in the South is high for other diseases, too," Reif says. "A lot of it goes back to institutionalized racism, poverty, the legacy of Tuskegee. There's a lack of trust in health care. The states say they don't have the money [to expand Medicaid]­and there's some truth to that."

No health care system in the world has solved the problem of AIDS. The United Kingdom and Germany have gaps in their cascades, too. They struggle to control costs and reach marginalized populations the same as the States. They just have less margin to reach.

But in trying to explain these numbers, I don't want to excuse them. Some of the reasons the AIDS epidemic has been so devastating in the United States were chosen for us by history. Others we have chosen ourselves.

"At the end of the day, it's best understood as a function of health disparities writ large," says Chris Beyrer, the director of the Johns Hopkins Fogarty AIDS International Training and Research Program. The core difference between the United States and Western Europe, he says, is that "we're a much bigger, much more complex, and much more unjust country."

Clarification: This piece has been updated to note that federal funding for needle exchange, permitted after 2009, was banned again in 2011.
¹

Each country has a slightly different system for reporting HIV cases and AIDS deaths, and epidemiologists are often reluctant to make apples-to-apples comparisons: "It's more like Red Delicious to Granny Smith," one of them told me.

It's better to think of the surveillance numbers as a range, subject to updates and back-calculations as more data comes in. But still, the differences in measurement are nowhere near enough to account for the gaps among countries. Measuring my income against, say, Oprah Winfrey's would be subject to methodological fuzziness, too­she has capital gains, real estate appreciation, tax acrobatics­but it's still fair to say she makes more money than I do
²

I'm comparing the United States with these two countries for the sake of simplicity and because I speak the languages and have access to epidemiologists there. The United Kingdom and Germany are on the high and low side, respectively, of the severity of the AIDS epidemic in Western Europe, but they're not outliers by any means. You could compare the United States with France, the Netherlands, Italy, wherever, and you'd come up with basically the same story.

Michael Hobbes is a human rights consultant in Berlin. He has written for Slate, Pacific Standard, and The Billfold. Follow him on Twitter @rottenindenmark.

ANS -- THE THREE BIGGEST RIGHT-WING LIES ABOUT POVERTY:

Here's a brief bit by Robert Reich, from Facebook.  It sums it up pretty well.


find it here:   https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/806733906005874?fref=nf   
--Kim

Robert Reich

2 hrs ·

THE THREE BIGGEST RIGHT-WING LIES ABOUT POVERTY:

(1) Economic growth cures poverty. "The federal government," Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, "needs to remember that the best anti-poverty program is economic growth." Baloney. Since the late 1970s, the economy has grown 147 percent per capita but nothing has trickled down. The poverty rate remains around 15 percent. That's higher than it was in the early 1970s.

(2) Jobs cure poverty. More baloney. A higher percentage of the poor now work than has been the case in thirty years, and a smaller share of their income now comes from government programs. But they're still poor. The only thing that's different is the number of "working poor" – a term that should be an oxymoron – has exploded.

(3) Ambition cures poverty. Still more baloney. The poor aren't poor because they lack ambition; what they lack is opportunity. America is the only rich nation that spends less on educating kids in poor communities than in middle-class and wealthy ones.

Don't buy the right-wing lies about poverty. Know the truth, and share it.