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)
If you feel unsafe in your neighborhood, a new study shows you are more likely to smoke
University of Houston report indicates perceptions of powerlessness also make it harder to quit smoking
UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON
Research from the University of Houston indicates that more people smoke – and have trouble quitting – in neighborhoods where they feel unsafe. High crime rates, low police presence or trust, and a history of neglect in these neighborhoods result in heightened neighborhood vigilance among residents to protect against personal harm.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the neighborhoods people live in have a major impact on their health and well-being, making them key non-medical drivers of care. Although non-medical drivers have increasingly been understood as clinically important factors in the onset, maintenance and relapse of substance use behavior, little research has evaluated neighborhood vigilance in terms of smoking.
"High levels of neighborhood threat shape perceptions of powerlessness among residents, amplifying a general sense of mistrust, that can promote maladaptive coping behavior like smoking,” reports Michael J. Zvolensky, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, in the journal Substance Use & Misuse.
Zvolensky examined the role of neighborhood vigilance in terms of smoking abstinence expectancies and severity of problems when trying to quit among adults who smoke. Abstinence expectancies pertain to the expected personal consequences of refraining from smoking.
“Neighborhood vigilance was also associated with more severe problems when trying to quit smoking. The current findings suggest neighborhood vigilance represents an important contextual factor involved in certain negative beliefs about abstinence and challenges in quitting.”
Participants in this analysis included 93 adult smokers who were seeking cessation treatment. Of the group 64.5% identified as Black or African American, 30.1% identified as White, 3.2% identified as Other and 2.2% identified as Asian. The group answered questions about their own socio-demographic characteristics and their neighborhoods.
“Generally consistent with prediction, greater levels of neighborhood vigilance were associated with negative abstinence smoking expectancies, including negative mood and harmful consequences,” said Zvolensky.
Zvolensky said the study indicates a need to continue building theoretical knowledge and clinical intervention programming for smoking cessation that more directly focuses on social context factors like neighborhood vigilance. His team includes Bryce K. Clausen, Justin M. Shepherd and Brooke Y. Redmond, all from UH.
JOURNAL
Substance Use & Misuse
ARTICLE TITLE
Neighborhood Vigilance in Terms of Abstinence Expectancies for Smoking and Severity of Problems When Quitting
UK‘Victory will be short-lived unless Labour fixes broken services with proper funding and public ownership’
Cat Hobbs 14th June, 2024
The country is broken. NHS waiting lists spiralling out of control. Energy bills rising so fast they’ve sparked an inflation crisis. Rivers and seas full of sewage. Letters undelivered for days. Buses and trains that never turn up. Essential public services and natural monopolies working for a handful of mostly overseas investors.
Since 2010, we’ve lost at least 200 museums, 244 courts and tribunals, 279 school playing fields, 451 homeless services, 600 police stations, 673 public toilets, 750 youth centres, 793 playgrounds, 800 libraries, 926 football pitches, 1086 swimming pools, 1416 SureStart children’s centres, 8000 bus routes and 25,000 NHS beds. And now, our councils are declaring themselves bankrupt.
Labour’s manifesto says it wants to “turn the page decisively on the Conservative ideas that have caused the chaos”. Promisingly, it suggests a “final and total rejection of the toxic idea that economic growth is gifted from the few to the many”. But then weakly it concludes that the Conservatives have failed to “face the future”.
Here’s what has happened. Conservative asset stripping, which began 40 years ago, has been turbocharged in the past 14 years of criminal cuts and privatisation. They have sold off and destroyed precious public institutions, handing out crony contracts while ordinary people suffered. Austerity has killed hundreds of thousands. From backdoor PPE deals to allowing record energy profits, government stole from the people it should have served.
There has never been a better time for Labour to tell the truth and set the stage for the next few terms of government. Alongside an honest political reckoning that gives Labour political space, what is needed is serious investment.
But despite that word being mentioned 59 times in the manifesto, very little is promised to reverse drastic cuts. The promise of a National Wealth Fund is good. But zero investment for taking back assets into public ownership, which would save huge amounts of money on shareholder dividends and debt.
Labour public ownership plans almost feel like an accident
The public ownership that Labour has committed to in this manifesto feels almost like an accident.
Yes, rail franchises will be brought into public ownership as they expire. Yes, buses in public control and ownership, following successful experiments in mayoral regions. Yes, Great British Energy will be a newly created publicly owned company. Yes, the manifesto is right to point out that the Conservative party is ideologically opposed to using the role of the state. But it doesn’t offer a coherent alternative plan from Labour.
“Energy prices have risen faster here than in any other country in Western Europe,” it says.
Because of privatisation. Labour could offer fairer and cheaper bills directly to households by buying back British Gas to provide the retail wing of Great British Energy, for around £1 billion. Publicly owned supply is normal in France, Germany, Italy and the US.
“The national grid has become the single biggest obstacle to the deployment of cheap, clean power generation,” it reads.
Because of privatisation. Even this Conservative government has been forced to quietly nationalise part of National Grid for net zero planning.
“Not a single reservoir has been built in the last 30 years.”
Because of privatisation. £78bn has flowed out of England to mostly overseas investors. Labour could bring the country’s largest water company, Thames Water into public hands for free, making it cheaper and quicker to solve the sewage crisis and putting river action groups on the company board.
“Labour will also explore new business and governance models for Royal Mail.”
Good, because privatisation has failed. Buying back 500-year-old Royal Mail would cost very little for huge economic benefits.
Will Labour still embark on a once-in-a-generation insourcing drive?
The manifesto doesn’t mention “the biggest wave of insourcing in a generation”, settling instead for an attack on “wasteful competitive bidding”, management consultants and clawing back pandemic profits.
And although Labour seems to draw a dividing line between insourcing of contracts (which Labour will sometimes promise) and buying back assets (which Starmer and Reeves don’t want to do) even this distinction is not applied consistently.
94% of private contracts in the NHS come up for renewal in what would be Labour’s first term of office. Yet Wes Streeting hasn’t committed to bringing these back into the NHS, despite the wastefulness of outsourcing and Oxford University linking this policy with unnecessary patient deaths.
Streeting insists on emphasising the role of the private sector, which has itself admitted it can’t fix the problem. Britain’s largest private hospital chain treats in a whole year the same number of patients the NHS treats in just 36 hours.
Meanwhile an NHS hospital in Ilford has just opened two new operating theatres for treating only waiting list patients – Labour should promise more of this instead.
The situation is too desperate for a middle-of-the-road offering
The situation is far too desperate for a manifesto intended as a middle-of-the-road offering. If Starmer wants Tony Blair-era levels of growth, with things only getting better, it will take direct investment into the public services that make people and communities healthy. And it won’t make sense to let shareholders keep raking in profits.
If all that requires taxing people with fortunes of £10 million or more, Labour should do it. Stick with wealth creation as a goal and call it a multimillionaire tax or decamill tax.
The country is broken. We know who broke it, who benefited, at whose expense. Country first is right. The issues on the doorstep won’t be solved with regulation, timid amounts of funding and legal tweaks. They require well-funded public services, accountable to the public, working for people not profit.
Otherwise, in 2029, voters in towns like Grimsby will be pointing to the same issues — NHS waiting lists, impossible energy bills, sewage in the rivers, the desperate state of the economy. And Labour’s victory will be short lived.
Socialist Health Association warns Labour under-funding risks NHS ‘decline’
James Moules 14th June, 2024,
Labour’s caution on tax hikes and borrowing “condemns the NHS to continued fragmentation and decline,”, the party’s affiliated health group has warned.
The Socialist Health Association (SHA) has also voiced concerns about a ‘lack of detail’ in the Labour manifesto on health, but praised some aspects of the policy document.
Labour’s manifesto pledges on health included doubling the number of cancer scanners, training thousands more GPs and midwives and 40,000 more appointments per week to cut waiting times.
Keir Starmer said in his speech launching the manifesto: “We don’t have a magic wand. But what we do have – what this manifesto represents, is a credible long-term plan.
“A plan built on stable foundations, with clear first steps, tough spending rules that will keep taxes and inflation low. NHS waiting times cut – with 40,000 extra appointments every week.”
But an SHA spokesperson said: “The NHS needs investment. There is no way around it. The refusal to raise taxes or borrow combined with the continued commitment to outsourcing condemns the NHS to continued fragmentation and decline.
“It seems from recent research that a high percentage of outsourcing and PFI contracts are due to end during the next five years. We need a commitment to bring this back in house.”
The SHA spoke more positively about many of the specific policies in the manifesto, including the pledges to bring down waiting lists, bring in new state-of-the-art scanners, and public health measures to stem rates of smoking, obesity and gambling.
However, other pledges were more luke-warmly received – such as recruiting 8,500 new staff over five years to treat mental health problems in children and adults, which was described as a “very modest proposal”.
They added: “The manifesto is not detailed and is, at times, unclear: is the NHS just a commissioning organisation or is it the provider of healthcare?
“If it buys services from private providers there will be less healthcare to go around because they will take a cut for shareholder profit and they will need to use largely NHS trained staff.
“And we know that the use of outsourced services deepens inequalities.”
Chief executive of The King’s Fund Sarah Woolnough also sounded a note of caution.
She said: “New stats released just this morning show the waiting list for planned NHS care has increased on the previous month and now stands at 7.6 million.
“Long waits for care have been brought down before, but it takes time. Labour’s aim to clear the backlog within five years will take real effort and absolute focus, and may mean the big, transformational reforms set out in this manifesto such as healthcare closer to home will be slower to realise.”
Labour was not immediately available for comment.
Thursday, June 13, 2024
CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M Segantii Case Moves to District Court, Hong Kong Judge Rules
Kiuyan Wong and Bei Hu Wed, Jun 12, 2024,
(Bloomberg) -- Segantii Capital Management’s insider trading case will move to a Hong Kong District Court that can hand out longer prison sentences, as details emerged about the hedge fund’s alleged transgressions at a hearing on Wednesday.
The prosecution’s request to transfer the case was granted at an Eastern Magistrates’ Court hearing. The next hearing is scheduled to take place on July 2 at the District Court, which can mete out as much as seven years’ jail time for insider dealing convictions. The plan to transfer to a higher level court was reported earlier by Bloomberg News.
Hedge fund firm Segantii, along with founder Simon Sadler and former long-time trader Daniel La Rocca, face accusations by Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission of acting on insider information prior to a block trade in 2017.
That block trade was the sale of a 10% stake in apparel retailer Esprit Holdings Ltd. on June 15 of that year by another hedge fund firm, Lone Pine Capital LLC, Bloomberg News reported this week.
Segantii allegedly received inside information from Tony Psarianos, who was identified as a person connected to Esprit in a court readout. Psarianos previously worked at Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch division, regulatory records showed.
The hedge fund sold about $1.14 million worth of Esprit shares on or about June 14, a day before the block trade, through Segantii’s account with UBS, according to the court summons. The trades included shares that Segantii already held as well as short sales and took place before Esprit’s block trade.
Esprit shares fell 25% over five trading sessions starting June 14, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
On Wednesday morning, Sadler, La Rocca and their lawyers sat in a packed courtroom alongside people who were charged with lesser offenses such as careless driving, importing alternative smoking products, and operating unlicensed restaurants. A few middle-aged individuals helped to reserve seats for Sadler and his entourage when they were delayed by traffic.
Sadler, who was represented by barrister Benson Tsoi, was accompanied by Segantii’s Chief Executive Officer Kurt Ersoy, who represented the investment firm. La Rocca, whose attorneys include Joseph Lee and Alan Linning, sat separately from his former bosses. Niral Maru, Segantii’s chief compliance officer, also attended the hearing. No plea was taken Wednesday.
Sadler and La Rocca’s bail terms were extended on the same conditions as before. The SFC was represented by its own counsel, Jenny Wai. The case will be handled by Hong Kong’s Department of Justice when it is heard before the District Court.
Segantii, which was founded in Hong Kong in late 2007, was one of Asia’s largest and best-performing hedge funds with $4.77 billion in assets under management at the end of April. It was a prized client of Wall Street banks and a big buyer of shares in public stock offerings as well as block trades, which are off-exchange sales of large chunks of shares.
Three weeks after the insider charges became public, Segantii came to an abrupt decision to wind down its hedge fund and return outside capital to its investors.
Its directors determined the risks associated with the legal action may adversely impact its ability to implement the investment strategy, according to a letter to investors seen by Bloomberg News.
(Updates with no plea was taken in ninth paragraph. An earlier version was corrected to say Segantii traded through its account with UBS per the summons in sixth paragraph.)
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
Corporate Media Push Conspiracy Theories to Discredit Student Protesters
New York Post graphic (4/26/24) alleging that Jewish billionaire George Soros is bankrolling “Israel hate camps.”
Across corporate media, journalists and pundits introduced conspiracy theories to discredit the pro-Palestine student protest movement, particularly that they are funded by foreign countries or “outside agitators.”
MSNBC‘s Joe Scarborough (5/9/24) went on a rant about the college students who have been staging the protests, suggesting to guest Hillary Clinton that they were influenced by China or Qatar:
I’m going to talk about radicalism on college campuses. The sort of radicalism that has mainstream students getting propaganda, whether it’s from their professors or whether it’s from Communist Chinese government through TikTok, calling the president of the United States “Genocide Joe.” Calling you and President Clinton war criminals.
Eventually, he called the students “extremists—I’m sorry—funded by Qatar.”
Clinton responded: “You raised things that need to be vented about.”
Scarborough’s claim that Qatar funds the students likely comes from a Jerusalem Post article (4/30/24), which called the protests “despicable.” The story reported, “Qatar has invested $5.6 billion in 81 American universities since 2007, including the most prestigious ones: Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Stanford.” Of course, funding universities is not the same as funding student protests; the university administrations that actually received the Qatari funding have often been quite hostile to the protesters.
‘Mr. Putin’s message’
House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) suggested on CNN’s State of the Union (1/28/24) that Russia has played a role in the protests:
And what we have to do is try to stop the suffering and gossip….. But for them to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin’s message…. I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some I think are connected to Russia.
CNN’s Dana Bash asked, “you think some of these protests are Russian plants?” Pelosi responded: “I don’t think they’re plants; I think some financing should be investigated.”
Like MSNBC, Fox News (5/2/24) has also pushed the narrative suggesting that China is behind the protests: “China may be playing a significant role in the anti-Israel protests by using TikTok to foment division on college campuses,” Alicia Warren wrote.
Gordon Chang, a senior fellow at the far-right, anti-Muslim Gatestone Institute, told Fox that “China is using the curation algorithm of TikTok to instigate protests.”
The presence of pro-Palestinian advocacy on TikTok has been cited by lawmakers as a justification for censoring the social media platform (FAIR.org, 5/8/24). But the messages on TikTok, which is popular among younger people, may simply reflect public opinion among that demographic. According to the Pew Research Center, “Younger adults are much less supportive of the US providing military aid to Israel than are older people.”
In a story headlined, “Campus Protests Give Russia, China and Iran Fuel to Exploit US Divide,” the New York Times (5/2/24) described “overt and covert efforts by the countries to amplify the protests.” The story included some speculation about foreign influence: “There is little evidence—at least so far—that the countries have provided material or organizational support to the protests,” Steven Lee Myers and Tiffany Hsu wrote. If there was any evidence, they did not present it.
The journalists blamed the protests for having “allowed” these “foreign influence campaigns…to shift their propaganda to focus on the Biden administration’s strong support for Israel.”
‘Professional outside agitators’
Beyond foreign influence, another conspiracy theory pushed by corporate media about student protesters is that they are influenced by “outside agitators.” While people who are not students have joined the protests, the term has long been used to delegitimize movements and portray them as led by nefarious actors.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams was an early source of this claim, announcing at a press conference (4/30/24) that Columbia students have “been co-opted by professional outside agitators.” He made a similar statement in mid-April as well (4/21/24).
On MSNBC (5/1/24), NYPD deputy police commissioner Kaz Daughtry defended the claim, holding up a bicycle lock with a substantial metal chain that police had found at Columbia. “This is not what students bring to school,” he said. In fact, Columbia sells the bike lock at a discount to students (FAIR.org, 5/9/24).
CNN‘s Anderson Cooper (4/29/24) asked the Anti Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt about the outside agitators, “How many of them are actually students?” “A lot of them are not students,” Greenblatt replied, adding unironically: “You can’t even tell who’s an outside agitator and who’s an actual student.”
CNN senior political commentator David Axelrod tweeted (4/30/24): “It will be interesting to learn how many of those arrested in Hamilton Hall at Columbia are actually students.”
Former president Donald Trump made a similar claim on Fox (4/30/24). “I really think you have a lot of paid agitators, professional agitators in here too, and I see it all over. And you know, when you see signs and they’re all identical, that means they’re being paid by a source,” he told Fox host Sean Hannity. He continued: “These are all signs that are identical. They’re made by the same printer.”
It’s worth noting that a political movement is not like an intercollegiate athletic competition, where it’s cheating for non-students to play on a college team; it’s not illegitimate for members of the broader community to join an on-campus protest, any more than it’s unethical for students to take part in demonstrations in their neighborhoods.
“If you’re a protester who’s planned it, you want all outsiders to join you,” Justin Hansford of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center told PolitiFact (5/6/24). “That’s why this is such a silly concept.”
That didn’t stop the New York Post (5/7/24) from publishing an op-ed by former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey headlined “Pursue Anti-Israel ‘Outside Agitators’ Disrupting Colleges—and End the Nonsense for Good.” McCaughey wrote, “Ray Kelly, former NYPD commissioner, nailed it Sunday when he said the nationwide turmoil ‘looks like a conspiracy.’” It looks like a conspiracy theory, anyway.
Tents situation
One key piece of evidence offered for the “outside agitators” claim was the uniformity of many of the encampments’ tents. When Fox 5 New York (4/23/24) invited two NYPD representatives to discuss the protests, NYPD’s Daughtry said: “Look at the tents. They all were the same color. They all were the same type of tents.” He continued: “To me, I think somebody’s funding this. Also, there are professional agitators in there that are just looking for something to be agitated about, which are the protests.”
“Somebody’s behind this, and we’re going to find out who it is,” Daughtry said.
That students might be observing the world and their role in it, and acting accordingly, was not considered.
Newsweek (4/23/24) quoted Daughtry’s claim with no rebuttal or attempt to evaluate its veracity, under the headline, “Police Investigating People ‘Behind’ Pro-Palestinian Protests.” Fox News anchor Bret Baier (4/23/24) also cited the tents as a smoking gun: “We do see, it is pretty organized. The tents all look the same. And it’s expanding.”
The problem with this conspiracy theory is that the look-alike tents at most encampments were not expensive at all. As HellGateNYC (4/24/24) pointed out, the two-person tents seen at Columbia cost $28 on Amazon (where they’re the first listing that comes up when you search “cheap camping tent”), and the ones at NYU were even cheaper, at $15. While many Columbia students receive financial aid, the basic cost of tuition, fees, room and board at the school is $85,000 a year. What’s another $15?
‘Soros paying student radicals’
And finally, some news outlets alleged that the student protesters are funded by financier George Soros. For example, Fox (4/26/24) reported that a group that funds National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) received a donation from an unnamed nonprofit that is funded by Soros. Fox was apparently referring to the Tides Foundation, a philanthropy that Soros has given money to; Tides gave $132,000 to WESPAC, a Westchester, N.Y., peace group that serves as a financial sponsor to NSJP in Palestine (PolitiFact, 5/2/24; Washington Post, 4/26/24). In standard conspiratorial reasoning, this three-times-removed connection means that, as Fox put it, protests attended by SJP members are “backed by dark money and liberal mega-donor George Soros.”
The New York Post (4/26/24) published a similar piece, headlined “George Soros Is Paying Student Radicals Who Are Fueling Nationwide Explosion of Israel-Hating Protests.”
On NewsNation (5/1/24), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) also suggested Soros may be connected, saying that the FBI should investigate:
I think the FBI needs to be all over this. I think they need to look at the root causes and find out if some of this was funded by—I don’t know—George Soros or overseas entities. There’s sort of a common theme and a common strategy that seems to be pursued on many of these campuses.
Soros is a billionaire philanthropist who survived the Holocaust. He has come to represent an antisemitic trope among right wingers of a puppet master controlling events behind the scenes (see FAIR.org, 3/7/22). To put it simply, these supposedly antisemitic protesters are now on the receiving end of antisemitism.