It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
(Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to examine the legality of one of former President Donald Trump's hardline immigration rules that bars immigrants deemed likely to require government benefits from obtaining legal permanent residency.
President Joe Biden, who has criticized Trump's immigration approach, is widely expected to dump the so-called "public charge" rule.
The justices agreed to take up an appeal that the Trump administration had filed of a lower court ruling that found the rule likely violated federal immigration and administrative law by impermissibly expanding the definition of who counts as a "public charge" and greatly increasing the number of people who would be rejected for residency.
Trump's hardline stance toward legal and illegal immigration was a hallmark of his presidency. Primarily at issue in the litigation, filed in federal courts in New York and Illinois, is which immigrants would be eligible for legal permanent residency, known as a "green card." U.S. immigration law has long required officials to exclude people likely to become a "public charge" from permanent residency.
U.S. guidelines in place for the past two decades had said immigrants likely to become primarily dependent on direct cash assistance or long-term institutionalization, in a nursing home for example, at public expense would be barred.
Trump's policy expanded the public charge bar to anyone deemed likely to receive a much wider range of public benefits for more than an aggregate of 12 months over any 36-month period including the Medicaid healthcare program, housing and food assistance.
The challengers in the New York case were three states - New York, Connecticut and Vermont - and a coalition of immigrant advocacy groups. A federal judge blocked the rule in 2019 for likely violations of federal law, and last August the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision.
The justices did not act in a separate dispute over the rule in which Cook County, Illinois, and an advocacy group sued in federal court in that state and the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an injunction as well last June. Then-Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who is now a justice on the Supreme Court appointed by Trump, dissented from that decision, finding that the government's rule was reasonable interpretation of the public charge law.
This is how the American Alligator survives in freezing temperatures
Next time you take a bite of a chocolate bar, consider the small hands that farmed the cocoa beans.
Industrial food heavyweights like Nestlé USA, Hershey and MARS Inc., rely on cocoa grown in Côte D'Ivoire, the Ivory Coast, to make their confections. And the West African nation relies on enslaved child laborers to farm its cocoa crops, a well-known fact in the candy world that keeps the cocoa at favorably low prices for the big companies.
A class-action civil suit brought against the big chocolate companies sheds stark light on the entire candy bar industry. It outlines the relationships between the candy makers and the cocoa farms in West Africa, which provide 70% of the world's cocoa supply. Half is grown in Ghana and Ivory Coast. Most American chocolate is made from Ivory Coast cocoa beans.
In cocoa-growing regions of Ghana and the Ivory Coast more than 43% of all children between the ages of 5 and 17 living in agricultural households are engaged in hazardous work.
The plaintiffs are eight former enslaved children who, the court papers charge, were trafficked from their home country Mali, and sold to cocoa farms in the neighboring West African country.
"This lawsuit against the cocoa and chocolate industry is about much more than the eight Malian citizens who were trafficked and exploited as child slaves to harvest cocoa," says Fernando Morales-de la Cruz, founder of Cacao for Change and Cartoons for Change. Both organizations in Strasbourg, France, seek to raise awareness of child labor in both the cocoa and coffee trades.
Low Price Business Model
"The business model of the chocolate industry is cruel, exploitative, and illegal because it exploits between 2.2 and 3 million children worldwide, besides exploiting millions of farmers and farmworkers, all to buy cocoa for less than one-third of the real price," Morales-de la Cruz said.
He noted that a number of chocolate companies run their revenues through Switzerland to avoid taxes in countries, like the United States, where they earn their profits selling chocolate confections. "With their Swissploitation business model the cartel of cocoa companies 'saves' more than $20 billion per year buying cheap cocoa," he said.
Make no mistake, chocolate is big business. The global chocolate market is a $136 billion business. It's expected to grow to $182 billion by 2025.
The plaintiffs filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Columbia just days ago, selecting the U.S. legal system for several reasons. In 2000, Congress and President Bill Clinton enacted a landmark law against human trafficking known as the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, or TVPA. It has been reauthorized five times, most recently in 2019 with Congress earmarking $250 million toward the effort. That law gives us extraterritorial jurisdiction.
Our Government Knows
Since the 1990s, the U.S. State Department and the Department of Labor have recognized the existence of child slavery in the cocoa industry in the Ivory Coast. In 2004, State estimated there were at least 15,000 child laborers working on cocoa, coffee and cotton farms there. As the photo above shows these children wield machetes to do their dangerous harvesting.
A study conducted by Tulane University in 2015 found that the number of children engaged in the 'Worst Forms of Child Labor' on cocoa plantations grew substantially between 2009 and 2014.
In the 2018 to 2019 harvest season, the prevalence of children involved in hazardous child labor in the cocoa sector in the Ivory Coast and Ghana rose to almost 1.5 million children. That's also 1,000 times the official U.S. estimate in 2004. The Ivory Coast has fewer than 26 million people.
Hazardous Work
The study also found that in cocoa-growing regions of Ghana and the Ivory Coast more than 43% of all children between the ages of 5 and 17 living in agricultural households are engaged in hazardous work – not just child labor, but hazardous child labor.
Comparing a 10-year span concluding with the 2018-2019 harvest season, the NORC report found a 14% increase in child labor and a 62% increase in production over the same period.
"There is a large group of extremely poor, vulnerable boys in Mali and Burkina Faso who are on the verge of starving and will do about anything for the promise of a paying job," said Terry Collingsworth, who was arrested by the Ivory Coast police as he interviewed enslaved boys at a cocoa plantation. Collingsworth is executive director of International Rights Advocates.
Mali and Burkina Faso both border the Ivory Coast. Cacao refers to the beans harvested to make chocolate. Cocoa refers to the product after the beans are roasted.
Sweet Talk
So, what's the U.S. government doing besides bankrolling studies?
In 2001, the House passed a bill that would require U.S. importers and manufacturers to certify and label their products "slave-free." Have you seen those startling words on your recent candy wrappers? No? That's because of what's known as the Cocoa Cartel, the defendants in the lawsuit, rallied against it.
Instead, they were able to get themselves a sweet deal, the Harkin-Engel Protocol, a voluntary private inspection and enforcement system that all but guaranteed the continuance of enslaved child labor.
In fact, as part of the initial Harkin-Engel Protocol, the candy companies gave themselves an arbitrary deadline till 2005 to end their reliance on child labor for cocoa harvesting. That deadline got extended again and again. Now the industry has a goal to stop profiting from enslaved child labor by 2025, though an industry spokesperson admitted in 2018 that the industry would fail to meet that deadline.
As the class-action suit alleges, the defendants' "voluntary initiative is a sham, and they are getting away with and profiting from an international human rights crime while claiming they are making progress."
Given the fact that enslaved children are still picking the beans, it's fair to call it the Cocoa Cartel strategy "see no enslaved children." Clearly, this willful blindless strategy worked.
The U.S. government has several agencies monitoring human trafficking, in addition to the State Department and Department of Labor, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
A Loophole Hurts Kids
There are several federal laws going back to the Tariff Act of 1930 designed to reduce the profit motive for labor trafficking by barring the import of goods made with trafficked labor.
But these laws had a loophole. All importers had to do was show that domestic production could not meet demand and the use of enslaved children was irrelevant. Since the United States is not a cocoa bean country, that was as easy as breaking off a piece of a KitKat bar.
That loophole was supposedly closed in 2015, although almost no one noticed. The Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015 was intended to close a loophole in an earlier law that made it possible for goods produced using forced labor to still enter the United States.
The new law enhanced the Customs and Border Patrol's ability to block such products altogether.
Clearly, the chocolate titans found a workaround. The lawsuit brought on behalf of the enslaved children asserts that the "defendants have engaged in various deceptive practices to avoid taking responsibility for their long-term profiting from various forms of child slavery."
After the Tulane report came out, the defendants "renewed their false assurances to consumers and regulators that they would initiate programs to reduce child labor in their supply chains," according to the suit. As the NORC study showed, child labor increased.
The suit states, "Defendants control production and could, if they wanted to, stop profiting from child labor. Instead, they chose to delay taking action by creating ineffective programs that provide public relations cover for their obviously failed efforts."
Helping 1 in 1,000
One such example is Nestlé's remediation assistance for some 15,000 children. By remediation, they mean handing out school kits, birth certificates, tutoring and other provisions – not assistance ending their enslaved labor conditions.
Other chocolate heavyweights named as defendants are Cargill Inc., Barry Callebaut USA LLC, Mars Wrigley Confectionery, Olam Americas Inc. and Mondelēz International Inc. (Nestle's American candy division has been sold to the Ferraro Group.) In addition, the suit lists 10 unidentified 'Corporate Does' as defendants. These candy companies have higher profits because using child laborers keeps the cost of cocoa down. If the farms paid adult workers using proper protective equipment to maintain the crops and harvest the beans, prices would rise. Chocolate makers would see profits fall unless they could raise their prices. Upping consumer prices, whether by subtly shrinking candy bars or slapping on a higher price, runs the risk that people will eat fewer chocolate treats, causing sales volume to fall, lowering the profit margins of the Cocoa Cartel companies.
Dangerous Jobs for Kids
We've already noted that the work done by children on cocoa plantations is classified as hazardous and the "worst forms of child labor," according to the Tulane and NORC studies.
So, what are these enslaved children doing exactly? Children who work on cocoa plantations burn and clear fields, fell trees to expand cocoa plantations, spray hazardous pesticides without any personal protection, wield machetes to break cocoa pods and transport heavy loads of cocoa pods and water.
Add to that claims of negligent supervision, intentional infliction of emotional distress and physical abuse. Enslaved child laborers are not usually paid. They are forced to work long hours. That's true even when sick. The lawsuit says they are underfed and locked in their housing at night to prevent them from running away. Industry Standard
Though the defendants, the Hershey's, MARS' and Nestlés, do not own cocoa farms – a fact they like to hide behind – they maintain and protect a steady supply of cocoa by forming exclusive buyer-seller relationships with Ivorian farms, according to the lawsuit. This is similar to the practice with chicken farms in the United States where companies like Perdue and Tyson Foods require chicken ranchers to rear the birds in cages of specific sizes, to feed them exact amounts of food bought from the big meat companies or at their direction and many more details that effectively make the farmers not independent businesspeople, but 21st century American serfs.
The Cocoa Cartel manages its relationships with the cocoa farms through memorandums of understanding and written and oral agreements and contracts, according to the suit. These companies dictate the terms by which such farms produce and supply cocoa to them, including "specifying labor conditions under which the beans are produced."
The candy companies control so much of the world chocolate business that they can easily wield economic leverage over the West African farmers, effectively controlling the production of Ivorian cocoa while insisting they have not seen any enslaved children.
Willful Blindness
To cultivate and keep their exclusive relationships with the farms, candy makers offer both financial assistance and technical farming assistance designed to support cocoa agriculture. Financial assistance includes advanced payment for cocoa and spending money for the farmers' personal use, according to the lawsuit. Tech support includes equipment and training in various growing techniquesnand even appropriate labor practices. Just what do these conglomerates consider appropriate?
The defendants or agents working for them visit the cocoa plantations regularly throughout the year and therefore must see firsthand the enslaved children working the crops. They know the deal. Instead of using their position to effect change for the sake of the enslaved children, they choose profit via willful blindness and zero accountability.
"The chocolate industry owned by multibillionaires and large corporations exploits millions of children and women, paying them less than the price of a candy bar," Morales-de la Cruz says. "They also deceive consumers claiming that they are fair and ethical. "This has to stop!" Meanwhile, Nestlé USA Inc. and Cargill Inc., which is also named in the class-action suit, are facing a consolidated legal battle before the U.S. Supreme Court with an anonymous defendant for their responsibility in the human rights violations in the cocoa industry. A third defendant, Archer Daniels Midland, reportedly was dropped from the suit after settling with the plaintiffs.
That case goes back to an initial filing in 2005. It was dismissed in 2010 by Judge Stephen V. Wilson of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. He held that "corporations could not be sued under the current understanding of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS)." In 2013, that decision was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The candy companies filed petitions for review by the Supreme Court after being denied an en banc hearing, a review by a panel of judges or all the judges of a court.
Corporate Accountability
At the heart of that lawsuit is whether domestic corporations can be held accountable and liable for aiding and abetting human rights crimes committed abroad. The case could redefine the limits of corporate liability under the ATS, according to the blog Just Security.
The Trump administration tried to intervene in the case. Strangely, the acting solicitor general filed briefs on an issue none of the parties raised: whether aiding and abetting liability claims are ever permissible under the Alien Tort Statute.
"Child labor is unacceptable and goes against everything we stand for. Nestlé has explicit policies against it and is unwavering in our dedication to ending it. We remain committed to combatting child labor within the cocoa supply chain and addressing its root causes as part of the Nestlé Cocoa Plan and through collaborative efforts," a Nestlé spokesperson said. "This lawsuit does not advance the shared goal of ending child labor in the cocoa industry. Child labor is a complex, global problem. Tackling this issue is a shared responsibility. All stakeholders – including governments, NGOs, the communities and the broader cocoa industry – need to continue to address its root causes to have an impact."
Some candy companies have made public efforts to at least make seem like they are trying to make changes – putting band-aids on a cancerous practice. MARS launched an endeavor in 2018 to "reshape the cocoa industry," noting the child labor and forced labor practices of the cocoa farms, for example. That effort is backed by what the company says is $1 billion.
Since the cocoa industry's use of child labor has been on the world's radar for years, it clearly will require a large-scale public reckoning and massive revenue loss to see any real change.
We would love to tell you much more about this story from the perspective of the candy companies and the federal agencies that are supposed to seize as contraband imported products made with child labor and slave labor. The problem? Calls to Hershey's, MARS and the Customs Border Patrol were not returned. Only Nestlé responded, as noted above.
Mexican president pressures Canadian miner in simmering tax dispute
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican President \Manuel Lopez Obrador on Monday urged a Canadian mining company in the country to pay outstanding taxes, saying it was hiding behind the threat of international litigation to shirk its obligations
Mexico's President Lopez Obrador addresses to the nation on his second anniversary as President, at the National Palace in Mexico City
Questioned at a news conference about the tax burden on mining firms in Mexico, Lopez Obrador said there were Canadian companies that met all their fiscal obligations.
"However, this other company does not," Lopez Obrador said, describing the miner as operating in Tayoltita in the northern state of Durango, without disclosing its name.
He appeared to be referring to First Majestic Silver Corp, which operates the San Dimas silver and gold mine in Tayoltita, one of its three working mines in Mexico.
Reuters reported this month that the government planned to seek 11 billion pesos ($534 million) from First Majestic in delinquent taxes.
First Majestic declined to comment on Lopez Obrador's remarks.
The company said previously it would pursue all legal options, including under international law, if it could not reach an agreement with tax authorities.
Lopez Obrador said the company was attempting to use international tribunals to protect itself.
"It has to pay taxes and it doesn't want to pay taxes," he said, adding he hoped the Canadian Embassy would take note of what he was saying. "Hopefully the ambassador ... urges them to come to their senses, because this cannot be permitted."
A spokeswoman for the embassy said it could not comment on matters involving private companies but that the ambassador was aware of the issue.
Lopez Obrador previously called on the Canadian mining sector to bring itself up to date on taxes amid a government push to boost corporate tax collection.
(Reporting by Daina Beth Solomon; Additional reporting by Dave Graham in Mexico City and Jeff Lewis in Toronto; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Commons committee censures firearms association over inflammatory comments
OTTAWA — The National Firearms Association has been censured by a House of Commons committee for inflammatory comments about the Trudeau government's recent gun control legislation
The four Conservative committee members abstained.
Liberal MP Pam Damoff proposed the motion, citing a video podcast about the bill last week in which the group's president, Sheldon Clare, recounted a conversation with someone who suggested Canadians should "construct guillotines" in response to such government "tyranny."
Damoff said last month's riot at the U.S. Capitol shows what happens when "inflammatory words provoke insurrection and violence."
"Words matter," she told the committee, adding that "it's time to stop accepting these kinds of rhetoric and vague threats."
But Clare was unrepentant.
"I make no apology for any comments made during our NFA Talk podcast – like them or not – we have the right to free speech, at least for now. Nothing said advocated violence against anyone," he said in an email statement.
Clare contended that previous Liberal gun control measures — which he referred to as "their tyrannical attack on the firearm, airsoft and air gun communities" — deserve to be challenged, as does the ban on assault-style weapons, which he called "a sweeping theft of people's lawfully obtained property."
"The NFA maintains that our strong Canadian firearms heritage and culture matters, and we shall continue to defend it with vigour." he said.
Damoff told the committee that Canada is not immune to the kind of violence that erupted in Washington.
She cited the example of heavily armed military reservist Corey Hurren, who rammed the gate at Rideau Hall last July in a bid to confront Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about, among other things, the ban on assault-style firearms.
Hurren pleaded guilty earlier this month to eight charges related to the incident.
Damoff also raised the issue of NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh being accosted last fall by a member of a fringe protest group calling itself the Canadian Revolution, which had set up camp across from the building that houses the Prime Minister's Office with the stated purpose of making citizens' arrests of politicians.
"I think we need to take a stand. We need to shut down this kind of language, this way of talking and thinking that's OK to talk about building guillotines and laughing about those kinds of comments in a public forum," Damoff said.
Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs said her party takes threats against politicians "extremely seriously," citing examples of threats she and her staff have received in the past.
But she suggested if the National Firearms Association president's comments constitute a threat, they should be investigated by the appropriate authorities and discussed only behind closed doors by committee members. She also suggested Clare's comments may have been taken out of context.
Liberal committee chair John McKay told Stubbs that the authorities have in fact been informed about Clare's comments.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 22, 2021.
Joan Bryden, The Canadian Press
Three longtime antibiotics could offer alternative to addictive opioid pain relievers
UT SOUTHWESTERN MEDICAL CENTER
Research News
IMAGE: THIS ILLUSTRATION SHOWS THE ATOMIC LEVEL RESOLUTION OF THE TETRACYCLINE ANTIBIOTIC BOUND TO THE EPHB1 RECEPTOR. view more
CREDIT: UT SOUTHWESTERN MEDICAL CENTER
DALLAS - Feb. 22, 2021 - Three decades-old antibiotics administered together can block a type of pain triggered by nerve damage in an animal model, UT Southwestern researchers report. The finding, published online today in PNAS, could offer an alternative to opioid-based painkillers, addictive prescription medications that are responsible for an epidemic of abuse in the U.S.
Over 100 million Americans are affected by chronic pain, and a quarter of these experience pain on a daily basis, a burden that costs an estimated $600 billion in lost wages and medical expenses each year. For many of these patients - those with cancer, diabetes, or trauma, for example - their pain is neuropathic, meaning it's caused by damage to pain-sensing nerves.
To treat chronic pain, prescriptions for opioid painkillers have increased exponentially since the late 1990s, leading to a rise in abuse and overdoses. Despite the desperate need for safer pain medications, development of a new prescription drug typically takes over a decade and more than $2 billion according to a study by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, explains study leader Enas S. Kandil, M.D., associate professor of anesthesiology and pain management at UTSW.
Seeking an alternative to opioids, Kandil and her UT Southwestern colleagues - including Hesham A. Sadek, M.D., Ph.D., professor of internal medicine, molecular biology, and biophysics; Mark Henkemeyer, Ph.D., professor of neuroscience; Mahmoud S. Ahmed, Ph.D., instructor of internal medicine; and Ping Wang, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher - explored the potential of drugs already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The team focused on EphB1, a protein found on the surface of nerve cells, which Henkemeyer and his colleagues discovered during his postdoctoral training nearly three decades ago. Research has shown that this protein is key for producing neuropathic pain. Mice genetically altered to remove all EphB1 don't feel neuropathic pain, he explains. Even mice with half the usual amount of this protein are resistant to neuropathic pain, suggesting EphB1's promise as a target for pain-relieving drugs. Unfortunately, no known drugs inactivate EphB1.
Exploring this angle further, Ahmed used computer modeling to scan a library of FDA-approved drugs, testing if their molecular structures had the right shape and chemistry to bind to EphB1. Their search turned up three tetracyclines, members of a family of antibiotics used since the 1970s. These drugs - demeclocycline, chlortetracycline, and minocycline - have a long history of safe use and minimal side effects, Ahmed says.
To investigate whether these drugs could bind to and inactivate EphB1, the team combined the protein and these drugs in petri dishes and measured EphB1's activity. Sure enough, each of these drugs inhibited the protein at relatively low doses. Using X-ray crystallography, Wang imaged the structure of EphB1 with chlortetracycline, showing that the drug fits neatly into a pocket in the protein's catalytic domain, a key portion necessary for EphB1 to function.
In three different mouse models of neuropathic pain, injections of these three drugs in combination significantly blunted reactions to painful stimuli such as heat or pressure, with the triplet achieving a greater effect at lower doses than each drug individually. When the researchers examined the brains and spinal cords of these animals, they confirmed that EphB1 on the cells of these tissues had been inactivated, the probable cause for their pain resistance. A combination of these drugs might be able to blunt pain in humans too, the next stage for this research, says Kandil.
"Unless we find alternatives to opioids for chronic pain, we will continue to see a spiral in the opioid epidemic," she says. "This study shows what can happen if you bring together scientists and physicians with different experience from different backgrounds. We're opening the window to something new."
###
Sadek holds the J. Fred Schoellkopf, Jr. Chair in Cardiology. Henkemeyer holds the Dick and Martha Brooks Professorship in Nerve Growth Research.
Other researchers who contributed to this study include Ngoc Uyen Nhi Nguyen, Yuji Nakada, Ivan Menendez-Montes, and Robert Bachoo, all of UTSW; Yuji Nakada of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Muhammad Ismail of The British University in Egypt.
UT Southwestern, one of the premier academic medical centers in the nation, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution's faculty has received six Nobel Prizes, and includes 23 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 17 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 2,500 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in about 80 specialties to more than 105,000 hospitalized patients, nearly 370,000 emergency room cases, and oversee approximately 3 million outpatient visits a year.
David Edwards February 22, 2021 Fox News/screen grab
Eric Trump asserted on Monday that President Joe Biden is literally "causing Texas to freeze" with policies implemented during his first month in office.
During an interview on Fox News, Eric Trump spoke about his father's future plans for the Republican Party.
"There's 75-80 million people who would follow my father to the end of the Earth," Trump bragged. "There's no question he will play a pivotal role in politics for a very long time to come. I really do believe he is the modern Republican Party."
The former president's son predicted that Republicans who supported impeachment are "going to get primaried."
Trump also previewed his father's upcoming speech at CPAC.
"I think every single day, Biden makes people miss Donald Trump more," he opined. "When you see some of these policies that are literally destroying jobs, that are destroying industries, that are causing Texas to freeze, that are cutting off our power to our energy grids and all these other nonsensical policies."
"Right now, the enthusiasm, it's better than it's ever been," Trump said.
As U.S. Covid-19 deaths have exceeded 500,000, an article in the Lancet lays much of the responsibility squarely on Donald Trump.
While much has been said about the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, the true scandal is how and why a psychologically dangerous person was allowed to preside over more American deaths in one year than those by all the terrorists and foreign enemies in one hundred years.
If impeachment for inciting violent insurrection was too slow, occurring a week after the event as he held onto full nuclear powers, for the deadliest assault that was killing thousands of Americans every day, impeachment did not even happen.
Ignoring the dangerous psychology and mental unfitness in a U.S. president has led to multiple disasters for the nation and the world.
Whereas Joe Biden has tackled the pandemic with admirable single-mindedness and speed, he may already have inherited an impossible mission. Herd immunity, or achieving immunity in 70% to 85% of the population, may be elusive for a problem that spiraled out of control for nearly a year. The Trump presidency was emblematic for ignoring the mounting problem, sabotaging public health efforts, and even threatening governors who tried to follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines. And now, rampant infection has allowed mutation into different variants, Donald Trump's "Project Warp Speed" itself was a hoax with an alarmingly slow start, and a mental health pandemic may hamper the vaccination of more than half of U.S. adults.
Ignoring the dangerous psychology and mental unfitness in a U.S. president has led to multiple disasters for the nation and the world. It remains conjecture whether we would even have a pandemic had Donald Trump's pathological envy of his predecessor not dismantled his highly-praised pandemic-preparedness systems, or his anti-science compulsion not bled the CDC dry, such that it needed to pull out its China team just months before the novel coronavirus outbreak.
Experts Blocked
Before a large portion of the population became "psychologically immune" to facts and sound advice, mental health professionals were making a breakthrough, raising the issue to the number one topic of national conversation and receiving invitations from all the major news programs. Then, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) stepped in to block us permanently from the major media.
In early 2017, when the APA changed its ethical guidelines to create a gag order on public figures, in time to shield Donald Trump from criticism, some of us estimated that, if he were not held accountable for mental unfitness—the number one emergency of the presidency and the cause of most other crises—then no other accountability would gain traction. Indeed, Congress members who depended on us to "educate the public medically so we can act politically" could no longer act, and the entire nation acculturated to a malignant normality that culminated with a largely preventable plague and a violent insurrection based on pure fabrication.
On the Comeback
Currently, after committing perhaps the greatest act of terror against one's own government this nation has seen, he has not only roamed free for almost two months but has practically announced that he will have another go at it. At least this is what can be extrapolated from his recent statements, interviews, and promise to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Since opportunities to contain him and his influence through Senate conviction were not taken, he seems emboldened to undermine the new administration and to reassert himself on the political scene. However, we are not helpless, and here is what the president can do:
First, prosecute Donald Trump. Whereas Biden does not have direct prosecutorial power, which is the domain of the Department of Justice or the states, he has considerable moral authority and influence as president. If he truly wishes "reconciliation" and "unity", he should heed the advice of mental health experts, who have long warned that the current situation is too far beyond normalcy to apply rational logic. With pathological personalities, the correct management consists of limit setting, containment, and full and speedy prosecution of Donald Trump and all who helped orchestrate his criminal acts. Biden should help reclaim what has been lost by emphasizing and affirming lawfulness, morality, and reality. The sooner this can happen, the sooner we will have the safe space to begin our national healing.
Second, stem Trumpism. One of the tragic effects of an uncontained and prolonged, highly pathological presidency has been a mental health pandemic, or "shared psychosis" at alarming levels, which has worsened our collective mental health and torn apart communities, families, and couples. As a result, we find ourselves living in different realities, sometimes in the same household, and mourning family members who are still living but lost to us. The personality cult Donald Trump has cultivated is not a formal cult of relatively small numbers isolated from the rest of society but indoctrinated from the very positions of president and mainstream "news". Rather, the isolation is psychological, in that vulnerable individuals are psychologically conditioned to reject facts and logic and to accept only a false, "authorized reality," without the need for physical insulation from the world. I outline a multi-step course in my Profile of a Nation: Trump's Mind, America's Soul, but the first step to recovery is to discredit and to keep Donald Trump out of public life.
Third, divest from corrupt associations. When the APA intervened to help entrench the Trump presidency, it denigrated its own field, reinforcing public misconceptions of psychiatry as mere speculation that anyone could do, yielding little knowledge without some mythical advantage of a private examination and being a stigmatized field that, unlike all others, the public should never hear from experts about. It deprived the American people of critical knowledge, just as those in power were employing psychological techniques for illegitimate control, and subsequently took funds and privileges from the Trump administration, with its affiliates receiving one windfall after another for their institutions in ways that are asymmetric from other institutions of science and medicine under the same administration. The Biden administration does not have to go along with a "mental health association" that has harmed public health by sidelining the field it purportedly represents, and should not appoint without an investigation Jeffrey Lieberman, the foremost enabler of the Trump presidency, to any position under Health and Human Services Secretary Nominee Xavier Becerra, whose confirmation is this week.
The World Mental Health Coalition, which formed in part to step in where the APA failed in its societal leadership, is forming a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to research how and why a mental health emergency went unaddressed under the Trump presidency. We are also available for consultation regarding fitness tests for presidential and vice-presidential candidates, the prevention of dangerous leadership, and the promotion of societal mental health.
How will our children know they face a crushing debt burden?
The question above may seem silly.
Of course, they will know because there are a number of well-funded policy shops that will be spewing out endless papers and columns telling them that they are facing a crushing debt burden.
Because these policy shops are well-funded and well-connected we can be sure that major media outlets, like The New York Times, The Washington Post and National Public Radio, will give their complaints plenty of space.
But let's imagine a world where our children weren't constantly being told that they face a crushing debt burden. How would they know?
Even with a higher tax burden due to the debt we are now building up, workers 10 years out should enjoy substantially higher living standards than they do today.
It might be hard if the latest budget projects are close to the mark. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just released new projections for the budget and the economy. Report Advertisement
They show that in 2031, the last year in their budget horizon, the interest burden on our debt will be 2.4% of Gross Domestic Product. That's up from current interest costs of 1.4% of GDP. That implies an increase in the debt burden, measured by interest costs, of 1.0 percentage point of GDP.
Side note 1: The true debt burden is actually somewhat less. Last year the Federal Reserve Board refunded $88 billion, roughly 0.4% of GDP, to the Treasury. This was based on interest that it had collected on the bonds it held. That leaves the actual interest burden at around 1% of GDP.
Will an interest burden of 2.4% of GDP crush our children?
On the face of it, the deficit hawks have a hard case here. The interest burden was over 3.0% of GDP for most of the early and mid-1990s. And for those who were not around or have forgotten, the 1990s, or at least the second half, was a very prosperous decade. It's a bit hard to see how an interest burden of 2.4% of GDP can be crushing if burdens of more than 3.0% of GDP were not a big problem. Imagining Even More Debt
But, the debt burden may be higher than the current projections show. After all, President Biden has proposed a $1.9 trillion pandemic rescue package. He also will have other spending initiatives. The CBO baseline includes tax increases in current law that may not actually go into effect.
CBO's latest projections put the debt (currently $22 trillion) at $35.3 trillion in 2031.
Let's assume that the rescue package and other issues raise the debt for that year by 10%, or $3.5 trillion. This brings the interest burden to 2.7% of GDP. That's still below the 1990s level.
Furthermore, insofar as the rescue package and other initiatives are successful in boosting growth, GDP, the denominator in this calculation, will be larger, which will at least partially offset the higher interest burden.
One point the deficit hawks add to this calculation is that interest rates are extraordinarily low at present.
CBO does project that interest rates will rise, But in 2031 they still project an interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds of just 3%. This is up from 1.1% at present, but still well below the rates we saw over the 40 years before the Great Recession. It certainly is not impossible that interest rates will rise to 4% or even 5%.
Higher Interest Rates
Higher rates will mean that the debt poses a greater interest burden. But there are a couple of important qualifications that need to be made. First, much of our debt is long-term. The 30-year bond issued in 2021 at a 2% interest rate doesn't have to be refinanced until 2051. That means that even if interest rates do rise substantially they will only gradually lead to a substantially higher interest burden.
The other point is that we have to ask about the reason interest rates are rising.
It is possible that interest rates will be rising even as the inflation rate remains more or less in line with CBO's latest projection of around 2%. In that case, higher interest rates mean a greater burden over time.
However, interest rates may also rise because we see higher than projected inflation. Suppose the inflation rate rises to 3%, roughly a percentage point higher than projected. If interest rates also rise by a percentage point, so that the interest rate on a 10-year Treasury bond in 2031 is 4%, instead of 3%, we would still be looking at the same real interest rate. In that case, the value of the bond would be eroded by an extra 1 percentage point annually, due to the impact of higher inflation.
In the case where higher inflation is the reason for higher interest rates, the actual burden of the debt does not change.
With nominal GDP growing more rapidly due to the higher inflation, the ratio of debt to GDP would be lower than in the case with lower inflation. This means that we only need to worry about a higher interest burden if interest rates rise without a corresponding increase in the rate of inflation.
Side Note 2: If the economy grows at a 2% real rate over the next decade, and the inflation rate averages 2%, then nominal GDP will be 48% larger in 2031 than it is today. If it grows at a 2% real rate and the inflation rate averages 3%, nominal GDP will be 63% larger in 2031 than it is today. With nominal GDP 10% larger in 2031 in the case with higher inflation than the case with lower inflation, the same amount of interest would imply a 10% lower burden, relative to GDP. Alternatively, to have the same burden relative to GDP, interest payments would have to be 10% higher.
What would adding a 1 percentage point interest burden look like?
Paying The Bill
At first glance, this higher interest burden implies that, if the economy is operating near its capacity, we would have to get by having the government spend roughly 1 percentage point less of GDP on various programs. This could mean, for example, cuts to spending on education and infrastructure, or the military. Alternatively, it would need to raise taxes by roughly 1 percentage point of GDP, or some combination in order to offset the additional interest payments on the debt.
In fact, the first glance story is likely to substantially overstate the impact of this debt burden. The reason we would need to cut spending and/or raise taxes is to keep the economy from overheating.
The interest burden increases this risk by increasing the income of bondholders, who then spend more money because of their higher income.
But the bondholders don't spend all of the interest income they receive, in fact, they might spend a relatively small share.
Bondholders Are Big Savers
Remember, the people who hold government bonds are disproportionately higher-income households. That's why it is possible to say there is a burden from interest payments. If the interest was paid out to all of us equally, then we would just be paying ourselves. As was the case with the pandemic checks, and there would be no burden.
With a large share of interest payments going to the wealthiest households, perhaps 70 cents on a dollar ends up being spent. This is what we have to offset with spending cuts or higher taxes. That means we need to come up with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases that will reduce demand in the economy by 0.7% of GDP.
If we did this on the spending side, we would need to cut an amount of spending roughly equal to this amount. In the current economy, 0.7% of GDP would come to around $150 billion in spending cuts, roughly a fifth of the military budget or twice the annual budget for Food Stamps.
On the tax side, we might be tempted to take it from the wealthy, but we then come back to the same issue, that the wealthy save much of their income. If we want to reduce the consumption of the wealthy by an amount equal to 0.7%, we may have to raise taxes on them by something close to twice this amount, or 1.4% of GDP.
Suppose this proves politically impossible, so we end up having to share the higher tax burden more or less evenly across households. This means a tax increase equal to roughly 0.7% of people's incomes. Is this a big deal?
Wages and Productivity Get Divorced
The figure above shows the impact of CBO's projected increase in productivity over the next decade on wages, assuming productivity growth is fully passed on in higher wages.
It also shows the 0.7 % hit from debt burden taxes. As can be seen, the projected wage gains from higher productivity growth are roughly twenty times the "crushing" burden of the debt calculated above.
This means that even with a higher tax burden due to the debt we are now building up, workers ten years out should enjoy substantially higher living standards than they do today.
There is the obvious issue that productivity growth does not automatically translate into higher wage growth.
While wage growth for the typical worker did track productivity growth from 1947 to 1973, that has not been the case since 1979. Average wage growth did not track productivity growth reasonably well in the last four decades. Most of the gains went to high-end workers, such as top-level corporate executives and Wall Street types. Typical workers saw little benefit.
This pattern of upward redistribution of before-tax income could continue for the next decade, which would mean that most workers cannot offset an increased tax burden with higher pay. That would be a very serious problem, but the problem would be the upward redistribution blocking wage growth, not the relatively minor tax increase they might see due to the debt.
Anyone generally concerned about the well-being of workers ten years out, or further in the future, should be focused on what is happening to before-tax income, not the relatively modest burden that taxes may pose due to the debt. Monopolies Impose 'A Private Tax'
This brings up a final issue about burdens. As I have often pointed out, direct spending is only one way the government pays for services. It also grants patent and copyright monopolies to provide incentives for innovation and creative work.
By my calculations, these monopolies add more than $1 trillion a year (4.8% of GDP) to the cost of a wide range of items, such as prescription drugs, medical equipment, and computer software. The higher prices charged by the companies that own these monopolies are effectively a private tax that the government allows them to impose in exchange for their work. No honest discussion of the burden of government debt can exclude the implicit debt that the government creates with these monopolies.
At the end of the day, we hand down a whole economy and society to future generations. Anyone seriously asking about the well-being of future generations must look at the education and training we have given our children, the physical and social infrastructure, and, of course, the state of the natural environment. The government debt is such a trivial part of this story that is hard to believe that would even be raised in the context of generational equity, if not for the big money folks who want to keep it front and center.
AND TONS OF POWDER SOAP FLAKES A man crosses Lemmon Avenue as a winter storm brings snow and freezing temperatures to North Texas on Sunday, February 14, 2021, in Dallas. - Smiley N. Pool/10053254P/TNS
The state of Texas is still dealing with the aftermath of a massive snow storm -- but many conspiracy theorists believe that it was all faked just to make the state look bad.
As The Independent reports, several viral videos on social media sites including TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook have been claiming that the storm that hit Texas was a hoax concocted by the federal government to undermine Texas's state sovereignty.
The conspiracy theorists have seized on the fact that snowballs they make do not instantly melt when they hold them up to cigarette lighters.
"This goes out to our government and Bill Gates," said one woman who filmed herself a lighter to a snowball. "Thank you Bill Gates for trying to f*cking trick us that this is real snow!"
However, as PolitiFact notes, snowballs do not simply melt when they come into contact with lighters.
"Ice and snow have distinct physical properties, which leads them to react to heat differently," the fact-checking website writes. "Snow consists of frozen water droplets that have fallen to Earth. When snow is compressed into snowballs, there's a lot of space between the crystals, making them soft and porous."
This means that taking a lighter to a snowball will, in fact, leave a black burn mark on it -- and it certainly doesn't mean that the snow is a synthetic compound generated by Bill Gates.
Watch a video debunking the "synthetic snow" conspiracy theory below.
