Florida GOP bill would ban girls from talking about their periods in school

Ken Tran

USA TODAY

As local bills on gender, sexuality and diversity make their way through Florida’s state legislature, new legislation would ban any discussion of menstrual cycles in school before sixth grade.

That breaks from the advice of medical providers who recommend talking to children about puberty and changes in their bodies before they occur.

First periods typically start between ages 10 and 15, but can begin as young as 9 years old. That means a student could likely be in third grade up to tenth grade, or later, when a period begins.

During a subcommittee hearing in the Florida House on Wednesday, Republican state Rep. Stan McClain said his bill would include restrictions on girls talking about their menstrual cycles.

Related:The fight for African American studies in schools isn't getting easier, even after 50 years

Bill would ban discussion of periods before sixth grade

House Bill 1069 would only permit “instruction in acquired immune deficiency syndrome, sexually transmitted diseases, or health education” only in grades 6 through 12.

Democratic state Rep. Ashley Gantt noted that young girls could start their periods earlier than sixth grade and asked for clarification on whether the bill would ban those girls from talking about them.

“Does this bill prohibit conversations about menstrual cycles because we know that typically, the age is between 10 and 15,” Gantt asked. “So if little girls experience their menstrual cycle in fifth grade or fourth grade, would that prohibit conversations from them since they are in a grade lower than sixth grade?

McClain confirmed that the bill’s language would do exactly that: “It would” McClain responded.

Legislation against 'woke ideology'

The bill is one of the latest in a series of bills expected to be signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as he seeks to transform Florida’s education system in his fight against what he calls “woke ideology.”

'Shelves have been left barren':Florida teachers sue DeSantis' government over school library regulations

The legislation that DeSantis has signed so far has included barring transgender student athletes from participating in school sports and new restrictions on discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in school classrooms.

It's a strategy also being used by Republicans in Congress, with the House this week expected to vote on the "Parents Bill of Rights," a legislation effort in direct response to parents who sought more authority over their children's education during the pandemic.

In wake of Florida law, additional states

seek to restrict certain LGBTQ discussions

in schools


By Shawna Mizelle, CNN
Sat March 18, 2023

Revelers celebrate during the Tampa Pride Parade on March 26, 2022 in Tampa, Florida.Octavio Jones/Getty Images
WashingtonCNN —

Bills similar to Florida’s controversial legislation that bans certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in schools are being considered in at least 15 states, data compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union and reviewed by CNN shows.

Some of the bills go further than the Florida law, dubbed by its critics as “Don’t Say Gay,” which sparked a furious nationwide discussion about LGBTQ rights, education policy and parental involvement in the classroom.

The debate reflects the sensitive forces of LGBTQ rights becoming increasingly ascendant at a time when some parents are seeking greater input in their children’s education, especially in the wake of the tumult wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Republicans, arguing that discussions around gender identity and sexuality are inappropriate for young children, have used the banner of “parental rights” to push for a curtailment of such conversations in schools, even though opinions on the matter vary widely among parents. LGBTQ rights advocates see a conscious decision to stigmatize a vulnerable slice of American society and a potential chilling effect on what they believe to be urgently needed discussions.

“These bills are predicated on the belief that queer identities are a contagion while straight, cisgender identities are somehow more pure or correct,” Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist for the ACLU, told CNN. “In truth, every student has a right to have their own life stories reflected back at them and every student benefits from stories that serve as a window into the lives of people different from them. Censorship and homogeneity benefit no one while denying all students an equal chance to learn, grow and thrive.”

The ACLU has tracked a total of 61 bills across 26 states, though efforts in several states, including Mississippi and Montana, have already failed. Earlier this month, Arkansas approved restrictions against such discussions through the fourth grade.

Ultimately, it’s unclear how many of the bills will be enacted. A Human Rights Campaign report released in January said that of 315 bills that they viewed as anti-LGBTQ that were introduced nationwide last year, only 29 – less than 10% – became law.
Efforts resemble Florida law

Florida’s law, titled the “Parental Rights in Education” bill, prohibits classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade “or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” It also requires districts to notify a student’s parent if there’s a significant change in their mental or emotional well-being, which LGBTQ rights advocates argue could lead to some students being outed to their parents without the student’s knowledge or consent.

“We will continue to recognize that in the state of Florida, parents have a fundamental role in the education, health care and well-being of their children. We will not move from that,” Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said when he signed the bill in March 2022.

According to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank that advocates for issues including LGBTQ rights, Florida’s law was the catalyst for the bills currently under consideration in other states, which include:
An Iowa bill that passed the state House last week that would prohibit instruction about gender identity and sexual orientation from kindergarten through sixth grade.
A bill in Oregon that would prohibit any discussion on sexual identity for grades kindergarten through third grade without parental notification and consent.
Legislation in Alaska that would require parental notification two weeks prior to “any activity, class or program that includes content involving gender identity, human reproduction or sexual matters is provided to a child.”

Multiple bills in Florida that seek to double down on last year’s legislation, including one that requires instruction that “sex is determined by biology and reproductive function at birth” and another that prohibits requirements for employees to use pronouns that do not correspond with a student’s sex.

A recurring theme in the legislation is a requirement that school employees notify a parent if a child expresses a desire to be addressed by a pronoun that matches their gender identity if it differs from the one assigned at birth.

“We’re not saying that you can’t do this,” Washington Republican state Sen. Phil Fortunato, who introduced legislation that would limit instruction on gender and sexual identity for kindergarten through third grade, told CNN. “I mean, I disagree with it, but, you know, if the parents and the child agree with it, that is their decision. But they shouldn’t be doing it behind the parent’s back when their kid goes to school. And that’s the point of the bill.”

Missouri’s bill is uniquely far-reaching: no employee at a public or charter school would be allowed to “encourage a student under the age of eighteen years old to adopt a gender identity or sexual orientation,” though what the law means by “encourage” is not explained. School officials would be required to immediately notify parents if their child confides in them “discomfort or confusion” about their “official identity” and teachers would not be allowed to refer to a student by their preferred pronouns without first securing a parent’s approval.

The bill specifically calls for whistleblower protections for school employees who report violators, who would then face “charges seeking to suspend or revoke the teacher’s license to teach based upon charges of incompetence, immorality or neglect of duty.”

In a blog post entitled “Evil perpetrated on our children,” Missouri GOP state Sen. Mike Moon, who sponsored the legislation, called it a “lie that boys can be changed into girls and girls can be changed into boys.”

“One thing we must agree on, though, is that parents are responsible for the upbringing of their children,” he continued. “To that end, parents must be involved in the education of their children.”

Legal challenges likely

The measures are likely to face swift legal challenges if enacted, though at least two efforts to block Florida’s law have so far failed to take it off the books. One of those lawsuits, brought by a group of students, parents and teachers in Florida, was thrown out last month by US District Judge Allen Winsor, a Trump appointee, who said the challengers were unable to show that they’ve been harmed by the law.

“Plaintiffs have shown a strident disagreement with the new law, and they have alleged facts to show its very existence causes them deep hurt and disappointment,” Winsor wrote in his order. “But to invoke a federal court’s jurisdiction, they must allege more. Their failure to do so requires dismissal.”

At the heart of opponents’ concerns is the vagueness in the laws’ language as written. LGBTQ issues are not generally a formal part of public school curricula, they point out, leaving educators with the prospect of having to determine where legal fault lines are drawn with nothing less than their careers at stake.

“What counts as classroom discussion? As classroom instruction? Does it just include the curriculum for the class?” asked Alice O’Brien, the general counsel for the Alice O’Brien, in an interview with CNN. “For example, does it include teachers’ lesson plans, or does it sweep so broadly as to include classroom discussion? A teacher answering a student’s question, a teacher perhaps intervening in an incident where one student is bullying another student because of that student’s prestige, sexual orientation or gender identity? It’s very unclear what is prohibited and what is not prohibited.”

There are other concerns. Naomi G. Goldberg, the deputy director of MAP, worries about a “chilling effect on teachers themselves in terms of their ability to support students in the classroom as well as the students themselves in the classroom.”

A similar point was made in a CNN op-ed last year by Claire McCully, a trans mother who is outraged over Florida’s law.

“Like any other parent, I expect my family to be welcomed and accepted by others at the school,” McCully wrote. “And of course, this acceptance might be more likely if some of the children’s stories read in classrooms feature two dads, two moms or even a trans mom.”

Cathryn Oakley, the state legislative director and senior counsel of the Human Rights Campaign, told CNN that using a student’s preferred pronouns is harmless to other students but deeply meaningful to trans children themselves. She urged a cautious approach that recognizes the need for schools to be a safe space for vulnerable children, particularly if there is a risk that outing a child before they are ready could lead to “family rejection or even violence.”

“No one is suggesting that this is information that won’t be relevant to parents,” she said. “But what we are saying is that young folks should be able to have this conversation on their own terms with their parents and not have a third party be forced to broker a conversation that could put that child in danger.”

CNN’s Devan Cole contributed to this report.

Florida beaches could be dealt a one-two punch of red tide and giant seaweed blob


BY MANUEL BOJORQUEZ

MARCH 17, 2023 /  CBS NEWS

Some of Florida's most popular beaches could be in for a one-two punch of trouble as thousands of spring breakers flock to the Sunshine State.

A toxic algae bloom known as red tide is already killing fish along the Gulf Coast, causing a stench. Now, a massive blob of seaweed twice as wide as the United States is drifting across the Atlantic and could wash ashore in the coming weeks, creating an even bigger mess.

"It could be two problems turning into a bigger one," said Mike Parsons, a marine science professor at Florida Gulf Coast University.

The algae bloom has essentially choked some sea life, producing a foul smell as dead marine animals wash ashore.

It's not the only effect. The ocean breeze can carry a toxin released by the red tide algae ashore, which can cause health problems for people including coughing, irritated throat and itchy eyes, as well as difficulty breathing and asthma attacks.

The algae occurs naturally. But professor Parsons and a team from the water school at Florida Gulf Coast University are looking into whether pollution is making the blooms worse.

Bad red tides have occurred in the past, Parsons said, including in the 1940s, 50s and 60s.

"The big concern is: now that our coastlines are more developed and there's a lot more people in Florida than there used to be, how are we affecting water quality and how is that affecting red tide?" he said.

"There is evidence that we are influencing red tide through discharges," he said. "Any of the nutrients that get into our water bodies – Lake Okeechobee, Caloosahatchee, other rivers – those nutrients can come down into the coastal waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and they may be feeding red tide."

In other words, while pollution is "definitely" not the cause of the problem, according to Parsons, "it may be aggravating the problem."

Red tide originates dozens of miles offshore when there are high amounts of the algae known as Karenia brevis. Parsons said that based off of data his team has collected, the belief is that red tide sits in deep water, then rises to the surface after moving inshore, where it becomes concentrated and causes a traffic jam at the coastline.

Red tide can have an impact on tourism, as businesses along the Gulf Coast are still recovering from Hurricane Ian last year. But a lingering stench didn't stop some tourists recently, like Melanie Coulter of Wisconsin, whose vacation ended up including a snapshot of a dead horseshoe crab.

"As we were walking from our car, I thought, 'Oh what's that stench,' but then once you get on the beach the wind makes it not so bad," Coulter said.

Parsons advises beachgoers to leave a stretch of beach where they see dead fish, or start getting a scratchy nose or watery eyes.

"But the good news is that red tide is really patchy, so you can probably just move a couple miles down the beach and find a perfectly clean, safe area to be," he said.

Still, another problem now looms: a 5,000-mile-wide patchwork of seaweed clumps in the Atlantic that is making its way toward the Caribbean and Mexico – and Florida beaches.

The mass is known as sargassum, a brown seaweed that floats in large masses, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"There are really big blooms of sargassum out there right now," Parsons said. "They've been washing up on beaches in the Caribbean, in Miami, and it looks like it's our turn now. And that's not going to be a positive thing."

As the biomass degrades, it releases gases like hydrogen sulfide, which smells like rotten eggs and is harmful, he said.

Li Cohen and Caitlin O'Kane contributed to this article.

Third COVID anniversary: Docs say it’s not done damaging society

One of the lingering unwanted effects of the pandemic is that so many people are suffering from long COVID and people are still dying said medical experts

Len Gillis
Mar 16, 2023 

Photo by Markus Spiske from Pexels

On the third anniversary of the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ontario doctors said while we might think we are done with that disease, COVID-19 is not done with us.

That was one of the key messages from the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) which held an online news conference Wednesday.

Several physicians spoke to outline their concerns with COVID and the possibility of future pandemics and how society in general, and the medical community in particular, needs to be better prepared.

But the COVID problem persists, said Dr. Allison McGeer,  a professor of Laboratory Medicine and pathobiology at the clinician-scientist with the Sinai Health System in Toronto.

She said COVID persists in our society and as much as we would like to think the pandemic is over, it is not.

"And it's really nice to see things returning to normal," said McGeer. “But there are two sets of people we need to be worried about. And one of them is the people who are suffering from long COVID. There's a really large number of them, we need to be paying attention to that, we need to be making sure that we're delivering the care and support they need.

"The second thing is that there are still more people dying of COVID, than die of influenza in a regular year."

McGeer said large numbers of COVID patients are being admitted to hospital and are still dying in significant numbers.

"So even though we think it's over, there's still a very large number of hospitalizations and a much larger number of deaths than one would like. And so trying to keep us paying attention to the fact that we may be finished with COVID. But COVID is not finished with us," she said.

Another lingering effect of the pandemic, according to the OMA doctors, is long COVID which is a problem that is not going away and there is no cure at the moment.

Dr. Angela M. Cheung, a clinician-scientist at the University Health Network, a senior scientist at Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, and professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, said the long COVID problem is made worse by the fact not everyone believes it is real.

"The most common symptoms are fatigue, shortness of breath, palpitations, brain fog, and there are up to 200 symptoms that patients have complained of,” Cheung said. “What we do know is that it affects more women than men. And it's not only affecting health, it's affecting society.

"It's affecting our ability to work, and also relationships between family members and friends, because there's a lot of disbelief in terms of whether long COVID is real. In terms of treatment strategies, we really don't have a cure right now for long COVID. What we have been doing is using strategies to manage the symptoms." 

The issue of pandemic misinformation was also addressed during the news conference. 

In responding to a question from Sudbury.com about the spread of misinformation during a pandemic, McGeer said it was important for public health officials to have the trust of citizens at large. 

"And so what we need when we go into crises is an existing trust developed between physicians, other health care providers, public health systems, and the general population and making sure that we don't allow the current spread of misinformation on social media to erode that trust in our public health," said McGeer.

"I think it was a surprise to everybody that there was so much misinformation that spread so quickly on social media. And so it will take time for us to build the defenses against that and to understand how we can have people know where they're getting their information from, know what information to trust and believe in the system. So it's a long-term question," she added.

Len Gillis covers health care and mining for Sudbury.com.

How the Battle for Bakhmut Has Exposed Russia’s Fault Lines

By James Horncastle

Updated: 2 days ago

Ukrainian service members fire a howitzer M119 at a front line near the city of Bakhmut.

Oleksandr Ratushniak / Reuters


The fight for the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, which started in the summer of 2022, continues unabated. The battle has morphed from one of dubious immediate strategic benefit to Russia into one that has come to symbolize its war efforts. It also highlights the current deficiencies in Russia’s Armed Forces.

Symbolism is not new to warfare. The Battle of Stalingrad, although it had strategic calculations, was also important due to Hitler’s fixation on its symbolic value.

Furthermore, symbolic acts can have strategic impact beyond their immediate military concerns. The problem is when symbolism overtakes sensible strategy.

Bakhmut, from a strictly military standpoint, does not significantly change the war. For Ukraine, however, Bakhmut’s defense is aligned with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s arguments that he will accept nothing less than the full restoration of his country.

Russia, despite superior military capabilities, has so far failed to take the city.

Urban warfare favors defenders because they possess an intimate knowledge of the terrain that aggressors don’t. Furthermore, when an army relies on artillery and tactical bombing to the extent that the Russian army does, it risks creating new enemy defensive positions in the rubble of the others they’ve destroyed.

This is a lesson the Russian army has had to relearn multiple times, especially in Chechnya, and forgotten once more.

To overcome these problems, an army must rely upon its infantry and its officers’ initiative to carry the day. In the case of the Russian Armed Forces, with their centralized command system, plummeting morale, and abysmal equipment standards, this isn’t possible.

NEWS
Bakhmut's Capture Key to 'Further Offensive' in Ukraine – Russia

Nevertheless, Bakhmut has become the focus of Russia’s efforts.

Russia’s arguments for the war in Ukraine — including whether it actually considers the conflict a war at all — have shifted over time. A consistent thread, however, is that the invasion was aimed at protecting Ukraine’s ethnic Russian-speaking population.

Bakhmut is in what Russia considers the Donetsk People’s Republic, an area of Ukraine with a significant ethnic Russian population.

For Russia to claim victory, it must control the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk at the minimum. These two regions together make up the Donbas, a region that is of cultural significance to Russian identity. Soviet propaganda from the 1920s, in fact, identified the region as the heart of Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, as a result, cannot easily suffer setbacks in the region.

Studies on how the war is affecting Putin’s popularity are admittedly problematic. What is known, however, is that Putin relies on the support of Russian nationalists to maintain his position, and taking the Donbas is crucial for that base.

That’s why Russia continues its efforts in Bakhmut and the surrounding region despite Ukraine alleging that between 10,000-20,000 Russian troops have already died there.

These casualties are magnified by the divisions within Russia’s political establishment.

Putin succeeded in establishing a system where overlapping responsibilities mean that he ultimately acts as the arbiter of power. While that system is effective in maintaining Putin’s position in Russian politics, it has some severe disadvantages.

In Photos: Russian Forces Inch Forward in Bakhmut at Terrible Human Cost

This is most notably evident in the case of the Wagner Group, the country's main mercenary organization, which was created to allow Moscow to embark upon military action abroad while maintaining plausible deniability.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, however, the Wagner Group has become a de-facto branch of Russia’s regular Armed Forces.

Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, recognizes that the organization’s success will bring him personal power within Russia, and in order to achieve this goal, he has reduced a former highly trained force to one that relies on human wave tactics and employs former prisoners.

Human wave tactics involve an army sending large numbers of soldiers to overwhelm an opponent’s defense, and by their nature cause the attacker to suffer significant casualties.

The rapid increase in the Wagner Group’s size, however, means that it needs considerably more resources than in the past.

The Wagner Group’s need for supplies brings it into direct competition with the Russian army. Prigozhin has publicly condemned Russian army officials, alleging that they are not adequately supplying his forces. The Russian Armed Forces understandably resent this argument given their own supply problems.

The result of this competition is two nominally allied armies rapidly trying to achieve success in a battle that requires patience and precision.

One is liberally using explosives and the other soldiers’ lives to achieve victory. The lack of efficacy of both tactics has furthered the mutual loathing between the parties.

The Battle of Bakhmut, as a result, embodies Russia’s ill-planned adventure in Ukraine. Even if Russian forces succeed in taking Bakhmut, the losses they have suffered and the divisions they have created within the Armed Forces will hang like a specter over their efforts for the remainder of the war.

The views expressed in opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the position of The Moscow Times.

James Horncastle is an assistant professor in the Department of Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.

Mysterious streaks of light seen in the sky over California

This image from video provided by Jaime Hernandez shows streaks of light travelling across the sky over the Sacramento, Calif., area on Friday night, March 17, 2023. “Mainly, we were in shock, but amazed that we got to witness it,” Hernandez said. "None of us had ever seen anything like it." (Jaime Hernandez via AP)

Jennifer Mcdermott, The Associated Press
Published Saturday, March 18, 2023 

Mysterious streaks of light were seen in the sky in the Sacramento area Friday night, shocking St. Patrick's Day revelers who then posted videos on social media of the surprising sight.

Jaime Hernandez was behind the King Cong Brewing Company in Sacramento for a St. Patrick's Day celebration when some among the group noticed the lights. Hernandez quickly began filming. It was over in about 40 seconds, he said Saturday.

“Mainly, we were in shock, but amazed that we got to witness it,” Hernandez said in an email. “None of us had ever seen anything like it.”

The brewery owner posted Hernandez's video to Instagram, asking if anyone could solve the mystery.

Jonathan McDowell says he can. McDowell is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell said Saturday in an interview with The Associated Press that he's 99.9% confident the streaks of light were from burning space debris.

McDowell said that a Japanese communications package that relayed information from the International Space Station to a communications satellite and then back to Earth became obsolete in 2017 when the satellite was retired. The equipment, weighing 310 kilograms (683 pounds), was jettisoned from the space station in 2020 because it was taking up valuable space and would burn up completely upon reentry, McDowell added.

The flaming bits of wreckage created a “spectacular light show in the sky,” McDowell said. He estimated the debris was about 40 miles high, going thousands of miles per hour.

The U.S. Space Force confirmed the re-entry path over California for the Inter-Orbit Communication System, and the timing is consistent with what people saw in the sky, he added. The Space Force could not immediately be reached Saturday with questions.

McDermott reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

US banks want socialism for themselves - and capitalism for everyone else

When banks like Silicon Valley Bank collapse, money floods to bigger ones like JPMorgan. Clients know they’re ‘too big to fail’

Sun 19 Mar 2023
Robert Reich

Greg Becker, the former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, sold $3.6m of SBV shares on 27 February, just days before the bank disclosed a large loss that triggered its stock slide and collapse. Over the previous two years, Becker sold nearly $30m of stock.

But Becker won’t rake in the most from this mess. Jamie Dimon, chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the biggest Wall Street bank, will probably make much more.

That’s because depositors in small- and medium-sized banks are now fleeing to the safety of JPMorgan and other giant banks that have been deemed “too big to fail” because the government bailed them out in 2008.

Last Friday afternoon, the deputy treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, met with Dimon in New York and asked whether the failure of Silicon Valley Bank could spread to other banks. “There’s a potential,” Dimon responded.

Presumably, Dimon knew such contagion would mean vastly more business for JPMorgan. In a note to clients on Monday, bank analyst Mike Mayo wrote that JPMorgan is “battle-tested” in volatile markets and “epitomizes” how the largest US banks have shed risk since the 2008 financial crisis.

Recall that the 2008 financial crisis generated a gigantic shift of assets to the biggest Wall Street banks, with the result that JPMorgan and the other giants became far bigger. In the early 1990s, the five largest banks had accounted for only 12% of US bank deposits. After the crisis, they accounted for nearly half.

After this week, they’ll be even bigger.

Their giant size has already given them a huge but hidden effective federal subsidy estimated to be $83bn annually – a premium that investors and depositors willingly pay to these enormous banks, in the form of higher fees and lower returns, precisely because they’re considered too big to fail.

Some of this hidden federal subsidy goes into the pockets of bank executives. Last year alone, Dimon earned $34.5m.

Dimon was at the helm in 2008 when JPMorgan received $25bn from the federal government to help stem the financial crisis which had been brought on largely by the careless and fraudulent lending practices of JPMorgan and other big banks. Dimon earned $20m that year.

In March 2009 Barack Obama summoned Dimon and other top bank executives to the White House and warned them that “my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks”.

But the former president never publicly rebuked Dimon or the other big bankers. When asked about the generous pay Dimon and other Wall Street CEOs continued to rake in, Obama defended them as “very savvy businessmen” and said he didn’t “begrudge peoples’ success or wealth. That’s part of the free market system.”

What free market system? Taxpayers had just bailed out the banks, and the bank CEOs were still raking in fat paychecks. Yet 8.7 million Americans lost their jobs, causing the unemployment rate to soar to 10%. Total US household net worth dropped by $11.1tn. Housing prices dropped by a third nationwide from their 2006 peak, causing some 10 million people to lose their homes.

Rather than defend CEO paychecks, Obama might have demanded, as a condition of getting bailed out, that the banks help underwater homeowners on Main Street.

Another sensible proposal would have been to let bankruptcy judges restructure shaky home mortgages so that borrowers didn’t owe as much and could remain in their homes.

Yet the big banks, led by Dimon, opposed this. They thought they’d do better by squeezing as much possible out of distressed homeowners, and then collecting as much as they could on foreclosed homes.

In April 2008, Dimon and the banks succeeded: the Senate voted down a bill that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages to help distressed homeowners.

In the run-up to the 2020 election, Dimon warned against policies that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were then advocating, including Medicare for All, paid sick leave and free public higher education. Dimon said they amounted to “socialism”.

“Socialism,” he wrote, “inevitably produces stagnation, corruption and often worse – such as authoritarian government officials who often have an increasing ability to interfere with both the economy and individual lives – which they frequently do to maintain power,” adding that socialism would be “a disaster for our country”.

Dimon also warned against “over-regulation” of banking, cautioning that in the next financial crisis, big institutions like JPMorgan won’t be able to provide the lending they did during the last crisis.

“When the next real downturn begins,” he wrote, “banks will be constrained – both psychologically and by new regulations – from lending freely into the marketplace, as many of us did in 2008 and 2009. New regulations mean that banks will have to maintain more liquidity going into a downturn, be prepared for the impacts of even tougher stress tests and hold more capital.”

But, as demonstrated again this past week, American capitalism needs strict guardrails. Otherwise, it is subject to periodic crises that summon bailouts.

The result is socialism for the rich while everyone else is subject to harsh penalties: bankers get bailed out and the biggest banks and bankers do even better. Yet average people who cannot pay their mortgages lose their homes.

Meanwhile, almost 30 million Americans still lack health insurance, most workers who lose their job aren’t eligible for unemployment insurance, most have no paid sick leave, child labor is on the rise and nearly 51m households can’t afford basic monthly expenses such as housing, food, childcare and transportation.

Is it any wonder that many Americans see the system as rigged against them? Is it surprising that some become susceptible to dangerous snake-oil peddled by power-hungry demagogues?

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com

Paul Krugman: Three and a half myths about bank bailouts

The fallout from banking problems has made a murky economic situation even murkier.

(Jim Wilson | The New York Times) A line of clients outside the entrance to Silicon Valley Bank's headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., March 13, 2023. The FDIC and other entities will protect most people’s bank and brokerage balances; but it’s as good a time as any for consumers to create other backstops.

By Paul Krugman | The New York Times
| March 18, 2023

Last weekend, U.S. policymakers went all-in on bailing out two medium-size banks: Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.

And yes, they were bailouts. I wish the Biden administration weren’t trying to claim otherwise. Yes, stockholders were cleaned out. But legally, deposits are insured only up to $250,000; by choosing to make all depositors whole, the feds have done holders of big accounts a major favor.

It’s true that losses, if any — it’s not clear whether either bank was insolvent as opposed to simply lacking the ready cash to handle a bank run — won’t be made up with higher conventional taxes; the money is coming from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which will recover funds, if necessary, by imposing higher fees on banks. But these fees will be passed on to the public, so taxpayers are de facto on the hook.

But was it a bad decision? I’ve heard four basic kinds of criticism. One is ridiculous. Two are dubious. But the last one has me a bit worried, although I think it’s probably wrong.

Let’s start with the silly stuff. On the right side of the political spectrum, many have quickly rallied around the claim that SVB failed because it was excessively woke — which is only marginally less ludicrous than claiming that wokeness somehow causes train derailments.

For what it’s worth, no, SVB didn’t stand out from other banks in its concern for diversity, the environment and so on. And banks have been going bust for centuries, since long before human resources departments began including boilerplate language about social responsibility in their mission statements. So the talk about wokeness tells us nothing about bank failures — but a lot about the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the modern American right.

On to more serious criticism. There is a reasonable argument, one that I largely agree with, to the effect that the failure of SVB didn’t pose a systemic threat in the way that the failures of financial institutions beginning with Lehman Brothers did in 2008. So why rescue the depositors?

Well, one answer is that, like it or not, Silicon Valley Bank had come to play a key role in what you might call the financial ecosystem of the technology sector. Notably, if depositors had lost access to their money, even temporarily, this would apparently have left many technology companies unable to meet their payrolls and pay their bills — which might have done lasting damage. True, killing the crypto industry would be a public service, but there’s also a lot of good stuff that might get hurt.

In this sense, the bailout of SVB was something like the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009, which was also justified on the grounds that it would preserve a crucial piece of the economic ecosystem. And although the auto bailout was harshly criticized at the time, in retrospect, it looks like the right call, even though it ended up costing taxpayers billions.

A third criticism is the claim that the feds have now established the principle that all deposits are effectively insured without imposing correspondingly tighter regulation on what banks do with those deposits — creating an incentive for irresponsible risk-taking. But policymakers explicitly didn’t guarantee all deposits everywhere, and at least so far, we’re seeing an outflow of funds from smaller banks to more tightly regulated large banks. You may not like this; whatever else you may say about big financial institutions, they aren’t lovable. But on balance, we seem to be seeing the financial system move toward reduced, not increased, risk-taking.

Which brings me to the criticism I take seriously, although I think it’s probably wrong: claims that the bank failures will undermine efforts to control inflation.

It’s true that the bank blowups have caused investors to rethink the future course of Federal Reserve policy: A rate hike at the next Fed meeting, which seemed to be a done deal, now looks uncertain, with markets now pricing in the possibility of a rate cut and two-year interest rates (a good indicator of expected Fed policy over the near future) plunging. And some sensible people I talk to are now warning about financial dominance, in which the Fed puts a higher priority on protecting Wall Street than on stabilizing inflation.

But given the way the banking system is reacting to the SVB affair, there are actually good reasons for the Fed to limit rate hikes, at least for a while. The Fed has been trying to cool off the economy; well, banks’ increased sensitivity to risk and the shift of deposits to more tightly regulated banks will probably cool the economy even if the Fed doesn’t raise rates. Some financial newsletters are even predicting a recession. And market expectations of inflation have, if anything, declined.

The fallout from banking problems has made a murky economic situation even murkier, and it will be a while — maybe forever — before we know whether policymakers made the right call. But I’m hearing a lot of apocalyptic rhetoric right now, none of which seems justified by the available facts.

Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, is a columnist for The New York Times.

 ICYMI

Markings on the leg and butt bones of early riders indicate people started riding horses 5,000 years ago

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Ability to ride horses was likely a big factor in enabling the Yamnayans' continental-scale migration

CBC Radio · Posted: Mar 17, 2023 

Grave of a Yamnaya horse rider discovered in Strejnicu, Romania. The man, 30 to 40 years old at the time of death, displays skeletal traits typical of "horsemanship syndrome." (Alin Frînculeasa)

The bones of horseback riders from thousands of years ago are helping scientists to piece together the story of when and where people first started riding horses. 

"Bones are living tissue in your living person and they always react and remodel to handle stress demands, so you can read bones like biographies," said Martin Trautmann, a bioanthropologist from the University of Helsinki.

Trautmann said he wasn't expecting to find evidence of horse riding when he first started studying skeletal remains of Yamnayan people from Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

However, while looking at the femur of one particular individual, he saw a sign that he described as "very typical for horse riding." The more he looked, body part by body part, the more signs he saw. 

"When I found, later, another skeleton with the same symptoms and then one more and one more and one more, the plausibility that this could just be some random effects became smaller and smaller," Trautmann said. 

Early Yamnayans were not mounted warriors, but more like cowboys.- Martin Trautmann, University of Helsinki

Figuring out the skeletons of these people bore marks indicating they were horse riders lends strength to the idea that they were early domesticators of horses.

"This is the first time we've really proven that we had people who were habitual riders in 3,000 BC," said Trautmann's colleague David Anthony, an anthropologist from Harvard University and Hartwick College. 

The study describing these findings was published in the journal Science Advances.

Strenuous activity leaves traces on bone

Any time we regularly engage in an activity that requires specific muscles to do — swinging a tennis racquet, throwing a baseball, or riding a horse — the pull from the muscles creates rough patches on the part of the bone where the expanding muscles attach. 

"In this case, what you're talking about is an activity in which you're squeezing your thighs and your knees together while you're keeping your legs far apart and bouncing up and down on your tailbone," said Anthony, in an interview with Quirks & Quarks' host, Bob McDonald.

"There are very few activities that require all of that other than horseback riding." 

Some of the changes that can occur to the bones: indentation on the hip socket (A), wear on the pelvis where muscles attached (B, C), marks on the thigh bone where it attached to various muscles (D, E) and cross sections of the thigh bone that become more oblong in shape with regular horse riding (F). (M. Trautmann/University of Helsinki)

Most of the bone changes in habitual horse riders occur at the muscle, tendon and ligament attachment sites in the thigh bones and pelvis. Other changes can include: deformations in the diameter of the round thigh bones that tend to become oblong-shaped; imprints of thigh bones left behind in the hip sockets; signs of injury in the tailbone and degeneration in the vertebrae.

Detecting many of these characteristic signatures on bone helped the researchers conclude they belonged to horse horse riders. 

Putting together the story of horse domestication 

Before this new study, everything we knew about the origins of horseback riding came from the horses themselves. The strongest evidence could be found in horse vertebrae, but Anthony said they were rarely well preserved. 

So for the past 30 years, Anthony's been working to solve this mystery by studying bit wear left behind on the teeth of ancient horses. The oldest evidence he said he found came from a site in Botai, Kazakhstan, that dated back to sometime between 3,500 and 3,000 B.C. and belonged to the Yamnaya people.

The earliest Yamnayan sites are located in Russia and Ukraine, but they eventually spanned as far as the Mongolian Altai Mountains in the east, and to southeastern Europe in the west, where the human skeletons for this current study originated. 

From the human remains Trautmann studied in this work, he estimates that between 20 and 30 per cent of the Yamnayan population at that time were riding horses. 

Riding horses was as revolutionary to human civilization as the ability to make fire, the invention of the wheel and writing, according to Martin Trautmann. (Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images)

Horse riding was a game-changer 

Both Anthony and Trautmann agree that the ability to ride horses, and their eventual domestication, were huge turning points for human civilization. 

On horse, the Yamnaya people had the ability to carry more and travel farther than ever before. A 100-kilometre trek that once took 10 days to traverse on foot became a distance a horse rider could complete in a day.

Anthony said the Yamnayans migrated enormous distances east and west, which was partially made possible by horseback riding.

"That's a range of 5,000 kilometers, the equivalent of the Atlantic to the Pacific, the entire width of North America, that's how far these people migrated, and that was unprecedented at the time," explained Anthony. 

Riding horses was also revolutionary for herding animals. On horse, it became possible for the Yamnayans to herd three times as many animals, a factor that helped their economy grow. 

Using horses for warfare likely came later though because at that time, horses weren't fully domesticated. Anthony said that likely meant they were too skittish to trust in battle. 

Trautmann added, "Early Yamnayans were not mounted warriors, but more like cowboys."

Written by Sonya Buyting.